cubinator

The answer to that is yes. The engine nozzle is there to capture the kinetic energy from the exhaust, which in a chemical rocket combusts in the combustion chamber and then goes through the throat. Furthermore, if you really want to capture 100% of the energy, you need an infinitely long nozzle in space. Since the gains taper off with added length and eventually become a detriment, engineers calculate the bell length that gets the most energy while being light enough to accelerate as much as possible.

That's the one.

I'm in university studying to make rockets and spaceships. I help lead the liquid rocket team, which is currently not doing much.

Not that it's so hard to land on Deimos anyway...the real trick is keeping from flying off again.

Would you really want your gateway to another world to be named after a god of dread, though?

Yes. I think the larger part of the insect farming industry right now is for animal feed, as humans aren't accustomed culturally yet to it. In any case I want to reduce consumption of beef...in my case by eating more insects.

Ooh, yes, that's a good idea too. I dunno, though, Starship is pretty big. They might be able to fit just one, like a spare tire in a car. I'm sure they'll at least have a small stack of extra heat tiles, in case they find some broken en route to Mars.

What's the mass of a Raptor engine? I'm sure they're planning to be able to carry spare engines for astronauts to replace on Mars if needed.

If they had the slightest inkling of rapid reusability and cheap production they'd be putting launch facilities in the Caribbean, NE and NW US. I'm a lot more distrustful of spaceplanes than of 'stick' rockets, there's something elegant about the mechanical stability of a teardrop capsule reentering the atmosphere that makes me confident I'll get to the ground safely. A plane has to be piloted and maneuvered all the way down, while a capsule does all the work for you so long as you pop the chutes before you hit the ground. Besides, Virgin doesn't even get to 100 km.

Yes, Proxima has a confirmed planet. This one is in perhaps a more exciting configuration with respect to its suns, though. Here's a diagram from the article: The two main suns orbit each other every 30 years, so I'm sure they're both fairly bright in the planet's sky. The fact that the planet's not in planar alignment with the other stars is intriguing and raises the question of how the system developed. There are probably planets which orbit all three suns in a system like this, but they would be so dim they'd be impossible to see with our telescopes.

I agree, they sure don't fly that thing very often for a craft whose goal it is to fly as often as possible. Hope they can get that frequency up. And I hope the passengers don't have to spend hours waiting inside the capsule on the launch pad.

You can lock the thread but you can't stop the clicks.

I'm sure they do, but it's a lot of data to transmit back to get real-time video, and sometimes it's easier/better to forgo that in favor of more immediately useful telemetry during the flight. Then they can retrieve the recorded video after landing.

YES! This is looking really good for Starship.

Must be to power the expansion modules.

Will the James Webb telescope sit exactly in Earth's shadow? Or is Earth too small/orbit too wobbly for that?

I think they won't implement relativity or a speed barrier because most of the engines are meant to reach small fractions of the speed of light in normal operation, and relativity only starts being a big factor after 90% lightspeed. Kraken drives are always a possibility.

There's nothing stopping you from strapping 100 nuclear torch drives together, though.

Docking maneuvers to the tune of No Time For Caution. I've done a similar thing piped into an Arduino to control a laser light on a servo by playing notes on a MIDI keyboard.

I think that, like in KSP1, we'll be able to trust that our fuel mixtures are fine and our pre-valves and main valves are set up with the right flow rates and chamber pressures and bolts are screwed in tight. The science we'll have to deal with is: We won't know the exact mass and density of a planet until we get there. We can have a rough idea through prior observation, but if you launch your colony ship straight there you're going to have to improvise a little. Details like exact atmospheric conditions, geography, axial tilt and rate of rotation, and even small moons or rings would be impossible to pick out from Kerbol. You might have to analyze the world before designing your lander for it in space above.

The ISS orbits at about 400 kilometers altitude, and does periodic boost burns to keep itself at that height. Without that, it would eventually spiral into the atmosphere. If you were orbiting at about 120 kilometers, you might be able to go around at least a couple times depending on the aerodynamics of your ship. Obviously that's not very practical for a space station that's going to be up there for years and years. The lowest that we tend to put things in orbit is about 200 kilometers.

Woohoo! 90 minutes!

Yes - I recall that the Dragon currently docked to the station had the opportunity to hang around a few extra minutes near the station until the sun set - as it was blinding the cameras looking towards the station. Then they docked in the night.

Yeah there is also the possibility of slowly coating the panels in soot if your rocket has certain fuels, like RP-1. (That's why the James Webb telescope isn't planned to be repaired by another spaceship - it's simply not built to have other ships flying around it.) Those solar panels are ridiculously thin and light, there was an EVA once to repair one that tore as it was being deployed and they had to be extremely careful to not damage it any further or hurt themselves. Even little RCS puffs can blow on them pretty strongly if too close. I think there might be some videos of the Apollo puffs blowing on the Skylab sun shield and knocking it about quite a bit. On the ISS, there are always enough vessels docked for the crew to use as escape pods in case there is a need to immediately evacuate the space station. A situation where there might be more need for rescue missions might be translunar ships or more distant space stations.

What's the goal in 'intercepting'? To get a new batch of astronauts to the space station safely and comfortably so they can complete a mission? To destroy the space station from the ground? From a higher orbit? To attach a Space Kraken to it to eat the space station? I'm going to focus on the first option because I like it when people work together for constructive projects and don't try to solve their problems by hurting others. Right now the Progress and (I think) the Soyuz have pulled off rendezvous within a couple hours of launch, which lets the poor astronauts get some leg room quickly. Dragon could probably do the same with some planning. The fastest you could probably technically rendezvous would be 10-15 minutes, but that is unsafe for the station as they don't want vessels approaching at high speed and conducting large burns nearby. The difference between these methods of docking is entirely procedural - which second you launch at to put yourself a certain distance in front of or behind the station - this can be a very small distance if you don't mind blowing on the solar panels with rocket exhaust or potentially plowing through them at a hundred meters/second - and how far above/below the station you orbit so that you have a particular relative speed closing on it. Again, in some cases you could get a close approach which puts your periapsis inside the atmosphere or inside the Earth, but you'll have to perform a big rocket burn right next to the station to get out of that situation, and that puts the station at risk. In Kerbal we don't usually worry about such things and are happy to perform grazing high-speed maneuvers, but in real life we like to be far more careful with our prized ISS.