Ultimate Steve

As optimistic and enthusiastic as I am about BFR I can understand NASA/Congress's decision to ignore it for now at least... Considering Gateway is mid to late 2020's, as is a fully operational BFR it is getting a bit ridiculous, but I can still understand it. The thing is, if they accept BFR as existing for resupply contracts, the entire gateway is redundant. You might as well just use BFR as the gateway.

On my school issued Chromebook I sometimes get bored and look up space stuff, which involves googling, technical terms, and repeated googling of calculations as I don't have a calculator on hand. The result is that every 5-10 minutes while doing it I'll be stopped by a captcha. Basically Google thinks I'm a robot!

Well... Maybe, but the margins would be slim. A fully loaded Dragon is 10 tons and an empty Dragon is 4.2 tons according to Wikipedia. A fully reusable Falcon Heavy can do, what, 22 tons to orbit? Assuming the dry stage 2 is about 4 tons (random figure from google) then some math later... Falcon Heavy/CD can barely reach TLI with no payload from a Delta-V calculator. And we still need to have the fuel to get into NRHO where the Gateway will be. It looks like we have to go at least partially expendable for this.

The creator last visited on November 2, 2017 according to his profile, so I'm going to guess no, not by him at least.

So basically CRS for the Gateway?

If you have an image with the engine diagram and the rest of the booster in the same shot, you can tell them apart because the fuel ducts on the Atlas exterior are asymmetrical.

The thing is, since Falcon 1, the smallsat and cubesat market has exploded. Many of these companies already have several launches booked despite not having launched anything yet.

FH Reusable can get 23 tons to LEO, and that's with the second stage being expended. If you managed to attach three Falcon Heavies (9 cores!) symmetrically around the shuttle without second stages, and did some tricky throttling and maybe midair ignition of some cores (we don't have crossfeed) then you could probably reach orbit. But some cores would be expended because they are now in orbit... Maybe if you used 4 to 6 Falcon Heavies you could leave enough fuel in those cores to de-orbit and land, but at this point you're better off strapping the shuttle orbiter to the BFR or something, if BFR didn't already do everything the shuttle did.

Except if you were to use an off-the-shelf shuttle orbiter, it's like 68 tons, beyond the recovery threshold of FH, and you would have to swap out the RS-25's for Merlins, and all the associated plumbing.

Maybe the advantage to using a ship is that really large New-Glenn sized ships may be more plentiful and cheaper than New-Glenn sized barges.

Meanwhile, underneath a medieval weapons store in Germany: Meanwhile, at a rest area in France: Meanwhile, at an airport kiosk in Atlanta, Georgia, during my quest for ice cream:

IIRC they start at 100 and subtract points for anything they see or hear that is wrong, like out of step marching, wrong notes, sound quality, improperly worn uniforms, absence of roll-stepping, or phasing. EDIT: No specific information but here is a general overview: http://sunnyslope.guhsdaz.org/s_h_s_web_index/contact_us/faculty_directory/andrew_larusch/viking_pride_band/Frequently_asked_question/marching_band_scoring_explained

Related to a comment quite some time ago, way up the thread, 127 million to refurbish each SSME? Wow. I mean, I understand that we no longer have the assembly line to build the SSME, but first off, I've seen serious talk of restarting production, and various estimates I've seen online range from 40-50 million for each new one during the program. How does refurbishment get to be twice the cost of a new engine?

That is a lot of power! Keep us posted!

When I first started playing Kerbal Slideshow Program I built a four part rocket and went up, then down, then made a terrible rover that broke immediately. It took hours to do anything on that old brick... Eventually I got into orbit, and landed a probe on the Mun before abandoning the game until I got a computer that could run the game at 5fps instead of 1fps. EDIT: Later on, I moved to my dad's laptop which could run small craft with a green timer, and I was hogging his laptop so much that he bought me a really good desktop. Back when it was brand new, I could aerocapture a 500 ton stack of solid rocket boosters at Eve, at 4x time acceleration, with no lag.

Question - How exactly does the KCT compatibility work? Does it disable this mod's integration time, KCT's build time, or does it take elements from both?

I don't think we've gotten numbers on Block 5 yet, but at least with Block 4 it was so slim that the amount you could SSTO was greatly affected by how light you could make the nose cone.

So I'm already super busy with, what, four active mission reports and two semi-active ones? But I really want to try this... If I did this, I would also have to also implement development costs and set launch vehicles, and maybe start with unmanned before manned. And with the BARIS mod. But with a set goal, like Kerbals to the Mun or Duna, I don't want it to be open ended, I want an ending, that's something that my two major mission reports won't have for years and something that my two minor ones don't have, period.

Absolutely amazing weather today, little wind, clear skies, 60 degree temperature. Unfortunately the cornfield behind my house has not been harvested yet, but a friend and I drove out to my Church, which has plenty of empty fields surrounding it. We launched 3 things today, with one success, one failure, and one partial success, for a total of a 50% success rate... Which, unfortunately, seems to be my average success rate in general! The first rocket was fairly standard, and succeeded. I almost managed to catch it! The second one was a test of a cluster engine configuration (this time using two separate launch controllers, and elevated wires to give more ignition time as opposed to the first test which used a parallel setup with one launch controller) but like the first test of this rocket (named the X-3 Red Goblin) only one engine ignited, and because I was using low power A engines for testing, it only made it about 10 feet into the air. The third flight was a rocket designed for D and E engines, but flown on a C engine to test some systems prior to the next flight, which will use a *new* E engine. The previous two times we have tried to use E engines they have exploded, probably because someone may have dropped the engines at some point. Unfortunately due to a lack of tape and an oversight by me, the nose cone separated from the rocket (not supposed to happen, the parachute opening is further down the rocket) and the payload fell out... Luckily, the payload was an altimeter attached to the nose cone, which was purple. It stuck out fairly well in the light brown field and we were able to find it. Good news - on the fourth flight of this altimeter, we finally got it to work! All three launches with it onboard have either arced over due to payload overfilling or exploded on the pad. It registered 282 feet, which is pretty good. The rocket has an advertised maximum altitude of 1500 feet on an E engine, so that seems about right. When we do the E engine run we are going to reef the parachute, or use a smaller one, however. Wind was minimal today, for Iowa at least, and the rocket still drifted quite a ways. Video coming soon, remind me if it's not up in a week or so.

Wait... If there are hyper-advanced aliens out there they could mess with us by teleporting all of us to the Moon for an impossibly small fraction of a second and we would never know...

*dramatic spy movie music*

Tim Dodd's tour of the Electron factory. Well worth a watch, although most of his interview with Peter Beck is patron-only (although it will be made public at a later date).

If they held it back until 202X when it is scheduled to be launched, it would probably break again... A few more problems and it *might* be more effective to just redesign and build a new module.

I'm not saying it would increase the fun level, but it would increase the challenge level. It wouldn't be part of my normal mod set, for sure, but it would be interesting to play with for a little while.