Codraroll

The change of plans meant they weren't going to stay in space for long anyway. Might as well turn back early to avoid traffic on the return leg of the journey.

It was an unscheduled rapid disassembly of the rocket, which led to an impromptu test of the LES. Unfortunately, it happened to shorten the mission somewhat, skipping the "go to ISS" stage between "send astronauts to space" and "take astronauts back to Earth".

Any details on why he is sacked?

Shooting a beam of light at an object from many light-years away in a universe that has faster-than-light travel is also problematic in itself. When Obi-Wan and Rey saw that beam of light travelling across the sky, they would have had ample time to do something about it... after taking a vacation, finding Luke, chatting up about life on desert planets, doing a bachelor's degree, and learning to play the grand piano. The beam from Starkiller Base obviously travels slower than light (as its movement is visible across the sky), and if the galaxy is thousands of light-years across, it would take centuries for it to reach its targets. Obi-Wan and Rey could go on their merry adventures for a long while before hopping to the galactic capital in an afternoon (in Revenge of the Sith it is mentioned that Anakin goes from Coruscant to the Outer Rim in half a day), then warning them that a killer beam is threatening to destroy their planet in a barely shorter time frame than climate change. Maybe their grandkids should evacuate, or something.

If Scott Manley's last video is correct, the issue isn't that the tanks will corrode (that will also happen, but it'd take years), it's that the Hydrogen peroxide used as fuel will naturally decompose, reacting with itself, so the fuel loses potency over time.

I might need some help here: I haven't played KSP for a few months, but recently decided to pick it up again. I bought the Making History expansion and booted up CKAN. I was promptly met with a never-ending loading screen, as the CKAN install I had must have been several months out of date. A look at the mod folders in the GameData folder suggests I last played on January 28, as that's when they were last updated. So I downloaded CKAN fresh from the link in the first post here, opened it, and... it looks like I have no mods installed. At least none that CKAN recognizes. Moreover, I can't find any of them in the CKAN list either. I don't have many mods installed, so I can list them all here: Crowd Sourced Science Indicator Lights Interstellar Fuel Switch Kerbal Engineer (Redux, if my memory serves me correctly) MechJeb2 Final Frontier SpaceY Lifters SpaceY Expanded StationScience Kerbal Alarm Clock As far as I'm aware, those all worked fine back in January. So what has happened? Am I experiencing a CKAN issue (or feature?), or have all the mods stopped being updated (all of them?), or has there been some other big change to how things are done around here? Any general recommendations? EDIT: Changing the filter to "all" made all the mods show up. Seems like they indeed haven't received updates lately, but most appear to work as intended. I'll play around a bit and see what happens.

Frankly, anything else would worry me.

The water is not likely to reach you as a shock wave, but more as a rising tide that doesn't stop rising for a while. I'd try to walk calmly for the highest available floor of the building, and from then maybe onto the roof, depending on how bad things get. Airport buildings tend to be quite a bit taller than most tsunami surges. I suppose the plane could be a viable alternative too, of course. Tsunamis tend to involve a lot of debris flow, but that assumes there's debris around to be picked up. An airport on reclaimed land next to the sea would be a vast expanse of absolutely nothing, maybe a few signs and the odd towing truck, but not enough to form a sea of scrap massive enough to threaten the integrity of a passenger aircraft. Even bushes and small trees are cut down to keep birds away, and there wouldn't be boats docked in the water next to the airport either. The tsunami flowing into an airport would be relatively clear of debris, simply by virtue of there not being a lot of debris around. Then again, the aircraft might be dragged back to the sea when the tsunami recedes, so it's not a place to stay for long either.

Aha. I must have picked up the idea somewhere that Federation was actually quite far into development already. If that turns out to be wrong, the situation looks a little more balanced. Pie-in-the-sky capsule to be launched by pie-in-the-sky rocket. But just to clarify: This leaves Russia with only Soyuz as a man-rated launcher for the foreseeable future? Add Rokot, Angara 1 and Zenit for unmanned launchers too, after Proton is gone. Everything else than that are only plans, with various degrees of feasibility, with Angara A5 being the only one close to reality. Have I got it right?

Forgive my ignorance, but I tried to look through this entire thread before asking the question here: Which rocket are they planning to launch Federation on? As far as I understand, Federation is slated to have a launch mass of 17,000 kg and be ready for a first flight in 2022. However, this appears to leave it without a rocket in time for the maiden flight: Wikipedia, quoting ArsTechnica, says Angara was dropped since it was too expensive. Soyuz-5/Sunkar was chosen instead, but it still only exists on the planning board, and its chief designer recently retired from the company. Neither Soyuz nor Zenit are powerful enough. Proton is being retired at the moment, and Proton-Medium cancelled development. Energia was retired in 1987. So it appears to stand between Angara A5 or Soyuz-5, neither of which are in service or promise to be in service for years. It seems like both of them need to be human-rated before getting to fly Federation too, which takes even longer. Angara A5 is the most viable of the two, but will the costs be bearable? Or will the Federation program be scaled back so it doesn't finish until there is a rocket ready to launch it?

Geostorm. Half a minute into the film I stopped looking for scientific errors, and began looking for things they got right instead. Despite my best effort, I couldn't find anything. Anything. Oh, and that wasn't limited to science. The way people reacted to events, the way things were organized, the way things were designed, the way knowledge of pretty spectacular events was somehow cared about by a handful of individuals, and possibly the lousiest cryptography ever put to film. It's worse than Armageddon. Worse than After Earth. We're at Sharknado levels of stupid here, only that the film took itself seriously.

How general? I'd say most ordinary generators are somewhere in the neighbourhood of the principle you describe, just with a much smaller magnetic field.

Abundant solar energy and extremely abundant metals. Mercury is roughly 60 % iron by volume, and experienced a late heavy bombardment similar to Earth's, which means the metal should be relatively plentiful in the crust. Its short year also means short intervals between transfer windows to every planetary body in the solar system. At 0.4 g, its surface gravity is between that of Earth's and Mars'. Mercury could be a very plentiful source of raw materials, and has the energy available to refine them too. Why? Same reason we have rovers on Mars. To take a closer look at what's there. Maybe do some prospecting. Overall, to provide surface data from those very interesting bodies. And how? A Mars-style landing would be out of the picture (too little atmosphere), so the landing would be rather like the moon landings. Retrorockets and all that stuff. Getting there in the first place would be a matter of rocketry utilizing techniques that are fairly well-known at this point. Getting rovers to Mercury and the Jovian moons is not an impossible engineering challenge. If not, it would be a really interesting discovery. Until then, we'll probably keep trying.

From 2030 to 2100, you say? As a layman uneducated in the matters, I have some wild guesses that I try to keep sensible-sounding... We're going to land stuff on Mars. Not people quite yet, but stuff. I expect at least a sealed habitat, a container sent to test landing methods, and to see for how long/how successfully a potential habitat can be maintained without human presence. After all, a continuously manned human outpost on Mars would still be a bit away, but it would be nice if every new crew arriving there wouldn't have to start from scratch with the base building. At first there would be test habitats, then eventually a more permanent base resembling the Antarctic research bases. Or maybe more like the Antarctic whaling huts of yore, which were seasonally manned if not more sporadically, abandoned every winter, yet used by different crews for many years. Speaking of Mars, I also predict a few new communications satellites, maybe even a GPS, and further high-resolution mapping of the surface. Google Mars only has the highest-resolution imagery for a few tiny regions, like specks of dust on a basket ball, but overall it's rather blurry. Or at least, that's the case for the publically released imagery. Maybe NASA has it all mapped already, what do I know. Anyway, better mapping of other celestial objects (both the orbits of asteroids and the surfaces of planets) would be pretty safe bets too. Rover missions to other bodies would probably also happen in our lifetimes. I could see something like Curiosity landing on Mercury or the Jovian moons. And of course, more rovers to Mars too. One would possibly be used to dig into the surface, or possibly to erect a little structure. I believe any Mars base would be mostly constructed and up-and-running by robots before human explorers arrive there, but one has to take baby steps first and see where that leads. Not leaving Mars quite yet: Sooner or later, somebody will succeed with those Phobos missions that keep popping up from time to time. The Russians even launched one... then lost control of it in LEO and it burned up in the atmosphere a year later. Back closer to home, the ISS will get a successor one day. Hopefully it will be used to test artificial gravity. Another moon landing is also pretty much inevitable, to the extent that things can be in space exploration. I presume a private company would be a major sponsor of the event, which will be streamed live for the world to see in one of the biggest media happenings ever. Oh, and new/bigger/better space telescopes. I don't think we'll stop making those any time soon. If I may be allowed to entertain a little bit of politics here too... I think there will come some international space projects where nationality doesn't matter and the list of contributing nations reads like a phone directory. Either some space company will go multinational, or governments pool their money to get more out of a mission/to mend whatever diplomatic sores are open that day. It makes sense to cooperate for complex tasks, and space exploration is pretty darn complex. Lastly, I hope to see an African spaceport open by the end of the century. East Africa is pretty well positioned for equatorial launches, KSC-style. Right on the equator and plenty of water in the sensible directions of launch. Mogadishu, Mombasa or Dar es Salaam would be good candidate cities for Africa's space center, provided that a few politics mess-ups are sorted out.

So, Google Maps has updated with some pretty high-res images of the Gale Crater on Mars, where the Curiosity rover is currently rolling around. However, despite my best efforts, and a pretty good map that shows the exact route of the rover, I have been unable to locate the thing itself. My best guess is a shadow that seems to have roughly the right size, position, and shape, but without pareidolia goggles it looks a lot like a regular rock. Is it possible to check whether those images were taken before the rover even arrived (it makes perfect sense that pre-landing images were taken aplenty - they wouldn't send the rover there without plenty of things for it to have a closer look at), or if they are taken later, where its exact location is? It should be big enough to be clearly visible at that level of imagery, and be a pretty cool landmark to look at. Thanks in advance! Eventual imagery showing any of the other Mars landers would also be very welcome!

Just to steer the thread even more wildly off course... say that Musk finally manages to build his colonial transporter. 150 tons to Mars or whatnot, with options to return home as well. Wouldn't it make just as much sense to load up a couple of the things with an excavator and a small refinery, maybe some crew quarters if required, and make a beeline for the closest suitable* asteroid instead? Sure, you'd get less payload with you per launch on that trip, but the stuff you bring back home will hopefully be able to cover the cost of the extra launches. I mean, it's nice to have the capability to go to Mars and fund a colony there, but that capability isn't exclusively applicable to Mars. If you can take colony equipment there, you can take colony equipment almost anywhere. And, as has been extensively discussed in the last few pages of this thread, there isn't an awful lot of profitable things to do there that you can't do on Earth. By contrast, asteroids full of rare earth metals are like treasure chests littered across the abyss, if certain ideas are to be believed. I presume it's cheaper to do refinement on-site in the beginning, then carry only the refined products home (I guess somebody would pay well for the slag, ice and gravel too, but maybe not in the long term). Another benefit, you don't have to drag the goods out of a gravity well before taking them home to Earth. On the other hand, you'd have to leave a lot of really expensive mining/refining equipment tethered to the mined-out asteroid. *As for what counts as suitable, I think convenience of travel and presence of useful metals would be the biggest prequalifiers. You'd have to make sure the trip is worthwhile before going there. Finding a suitable asteroid would be a time-consuming matter, but developing the required technology for remote prospecting sounds like pocket change compared to "sustainable colony on Mars" amounts of money. Also, the prospector probes could presumably be launched on existing or near-future ships. Perhaps somebody will get on with that task within a few years?

So in other words, by pursuing the colonization of other worlds, we could be able to mitigate existential threats from outside Earth? Sounds like a good enough reason to pursue colonization to me. We might not get actual colonies out of it, but the side effects sound beneficial enough to be worth the hassle. Or vice versa, by working on ways to mitigate existential threats from outside Earth, we would go a long way towards being able to colonize other worlds. Might as well do the threats first, then, and go the extra step on to colonization afterwards. Either way, it seems like there would be some great value in this kind of research.

Unexpected applications? I wonder what that is? Transporting cargo very quickly between a complex on shore and a barge/ship/platform far out at sea, by way of the upper atmosphere?

Uh... just a silly question: could Aldrin Cyclers be a way to get a decent-ish Internet/communications connection to Mars? You'd need a few hundred of them, working as relay stations, sending the signal in a chain back and forth between Mars and Earth. Evenly spaced, there would only be a few gigameters between each one, and with every one having a fixed transmitter and receiver pointing at both of its neighbours, you could get a decent bandwidth throughout the entire chain. Signal delay would be atrocious, of course, even more so than a direct connection, but bandwidth and signal loss should be good enough. Or would a direct Mars-to-Earth connection be sufficient on its own?

Yes, maybe. I guess the "innovation" would be that the recovery spacecraft is launched with less payload than it lands with. Therefore, its launcher wouldn't have to be as powerful. It's launched mostly empty (save for some orbital maneuvering system and its fuel - which admittedly would weigh quite a bit), which could make it light enough to be able to push itself into orbit after first stage separation. Deorbiting wouldn't require that much fuel. And even if it had to be launched on its own expendable second stage, it would still be able to collect and reuse a half-dozen or so upper stages for each one discarded. That's almost close to resemble economics. Maybe it would be more useful as an orbital junkyard, as @kerbiloid suggested. Go up, collect upper stages or discarded satellites, retain them in orbit until some space shuttle-like spacecraft is developed so they can be brought down to Earth or dismantled or something. Basically a "waste bin" for potential space junk, keeping it all in a few boxes instead of floating all over the place. It would technically mean reusability, in a distant future where space travel is cheap and convenient enough to send somebody to pick them up. I'd like to see the economist who'd recommend this approach, though.

Yes, but I think that can be found out easier - well, everything is relative - by making a spinning station somewhere close to Earth. Or just in Mars orbit, if one is so adamant to make a colony there. You need roughly the same measures to survive on Mars as you need to survive in space (air tightness; radiation shielding; food production; recycling of everything organic, breathable, or drinkable; emergency contingency plans since Earth is months away at best...), and the only benefit offered by the planet surface is access to raw materials and water. Frankly, I think any eventual Mars colony would be situated in its orbit, in a large, spinning space station. It saves any supply ships and visitors from the hassle of landing and eventually getting back to orbit. There would be mining outposts on the surface, possibly some refineries too, but the bulk of the colony itself would enjoy 1 G and a dust-free environment high above it. Working on the surface would be like working on an oil platform today: Two weeks on site, four weeks off, the site only has quarters for temporary living, while the workers have their home and family on the orbital station. Same would go for Mercury and the Jovian moons. Except on Earth, life isn't any easier down the gravity well, so you might as well stay out of it.

And... if you can build these in the first place, why go to Mars with them? It's a dead rock with inconvenient gravity, icky dust getting everywhere, and which is just as complicated to carve out a living on as the vacuum of space itself. Might as well stay in your awesome, self-sustained space habitats until the robot colony has made the planet somewhat habitable.

May I ask a silly question about upper rocket stage reuse? ... oh shoot, gonna do it anyway. Would it be possible to recover upper stages in orbit instead of on the ground? As far as I've understood, reusability of rocket first stages is possible because the first stage neither goes particularly high up, not particularly fast - relatively speaking, of course. Reusing the second stages would be harder since they go a lot faster and a lot higher - meaning that they would have to go through almost a complete orbital reentry and somehow survive intact, as their secondary function. Their primary function, of course, is pushing a payload from the high-and-fast-but-not-too-high-and-fast position of first stage separation, and (almost?) to the desired payload orbit (unless a third stage takes care of that). But say that the second stage is given extra orbital capabilities instead of re-entry/landing capabilities. Enough to enter stable LEO, and do some basic maneuvering. The same as what they do today, basically, but a little more. Then the second part of the plan, where the thread tags begin to come into play. It would involve a... let's call it a "butterfly net". A spacious but empty cargo spacecraft launched in advance, which does a rendezvous with the upper stage in orbit, loads it up and straps it in. This craft would be on a fairly long mission, loading up multiple upper stages from different launches, then re-entering and landing in a fashion similar to a space shuttle once it's full. Not necessarily on a runway, but smooth enough to allow its cargo to be reused. It would eliminate the requirement for the upper stage to be able to re-enter and land. It would "only" need to have orbital maneuverability instead. However, it's not very hard to see all the other problems it would introduce. Most prominently, the act of snagging, stowing, and securing a spacecraft inside another. And landing the damn thing while full of cargo, I presume. One might need human astronauts to do these tasks, which means craft with crew and EVA capabilities would have to operate alongside it. Maybe the upper stages could be stored temporarily on the "butterfly net"'s exterior and then properly stowed and secured in a single manned operation once it has reached capacity (say, 4-6 upper stages). Not sure if the landing could be done remotely, but that would be preferable, that way you wouldn't have to have crew compartments on the "butterfly net" itself. It would just have to be a big box that can be launched, maneuver in orbit, reenter, and land. I can't imagine it would be a profitable venture, since the development costs of such a program would probably be vastly more expensive than the dozens (let's say hundreds in the best case - still not enough) of upper stages it would allow the reuse of. Orbital maneuvering with a few upper rocket stages in its belly is probably not cheap when it comes to fuel either, and adding a rendezvous to every mission profile probably wouldn't be less expensive than just throwing the second stage away. Maybe second-order effects would recoup some of the costs, though. But would it be feasible, if not economically profitable? It would require the crew and EVA capabilities of the Space Shuttle, also roughly the same landing capability, albeit split into two different craft. Orbital rendezvouz would, optimistically, be on the same order of magnitude of complexity as docking with the ISS. Alternately, the "butterfly net" could instead be swapped for a manned orbital warehouse/workshop where upper stages would be collected, outfitted with heat shields, parachutes, legs, and/or what-have-you, then sent on their merry way back to the ground. Or just disassembled for parts, I suppose. Takes away the need to be able to land the big craft, at the cost of a permanent manned space operation, which we all of course know is not expensive at all. I feel like I'm not getting any closer to a viable/economically feasible solution here, so might as well hand the microphone over to you guys. What do you think of the concept?

Why go all the way to the US? There are "Space Centers" for sounding rockets both in Norway, Sweden, the UK, or even on Svalbard. No need to haul the rocket all the way to New Mexico.

That stuff is all over Luna, or the Moon, depending on how formal you are. The Gagarin crater is 265 km in diameter and almost 5 km deep. 1772 Gagarin is also the name of an asteroid approximately 8 km in diameter. There is also an Apollo crater (also on the Moon), an Apollo asteroid (which later gave name to a class of asteriods commonly known as - you guessed it - the Apollo asteroids), and a variety of other craters named for the individual Apollo astronauts. I agree that these historical heroes ought to have places named after them, which is why somebody named places after them. But they can't claim the name of every geographical feature out there forever. We have a lot of other deserving candidates too.