Jonfliesgoats

There were serious proposals to make sub-orbital troop transports to move a QRF anywhere in the world in an hour. Here's one of many stories: https://warisboring.com/this-cold-war-concept-envisioned-space-marines-with-jetpacks-5a3ee398d42e#.q8zsd4sh3

Here is an interesting story related to informal observers: https://warisboring.com/skygazers-have-already-found-the-u-s-governments-new-spy-satellite-b766042a4810#.vkfy98ap3

"I think you are a spooky, irresponsible god!" "I think you are a vigilante thug!" "Let's fight stupidly!" "You Mom's name is Martha too? I guess we are pals now!" The movie ends with both of them teaching poodles how to use the Dewey Decimal System in an antiquated library.

Effectively we trade some censorship for politeness. Voluntary censorship always struck me as a form of intellectual cowardice, but, I have to say, we don't have online creaming matches that you see elsewhere. Still, does censorship have desired effects? In the U.K. there are well-meaning anti hate speech laws. An unfortunate side effect of those laws was the Rotherham sexual abuse scandal and inaction by local constabulary. I can't be that bothered by it because I spend my reserve assignments typing endlessly on here.

You guys are better at naming kids. I was really fond of Rotobetty. My BS aside, we like our Welsh names. I feel sorry for her when we try to teach her to spell it out, though.

Very few major airlines do all of their C or D checks in the US. Even the biggest names are shipping at least some of their planes overseas for major inspections.

It's easy to get pessimistic, but that really isn't warranted. Mankind will become a spacefaring species. We have already started this process. During the Apollo program NASA got fully 4% of America's discretionary budget. Now NASA gets ten percent of that. These funds also have to work through a mature, less expeditionary organization. It's unrealistic to think we can keep doing similar things with one tenth of the funds. However, as you point out, more and more start up companies are offering new pathways to orbit. Development of cis-lunar space continues apace and we are following moderate projections proposed as early as 1977. GPS, satellite commercial services and commercial GIS demands will sustain this trend. As history shows us, it takes warfare or commercial incentives to innovate quickly in aerospace. The Second World War and Cold War got us the great age of space exploration. Little was done to lower launch costs in those programs. The commercial incentives predominate now and our collective efforts are focused on lowering the cost per kilogram to LEO. Humans will return to deep space. The only question is what flag will be stenciled on the craft that goes there. Don't despair!

I am publicly stupid all the time! It's fun! We should eat cake and drink scotch now!

Its hard to disguise a launch and easy to disguise or hide a payload. The Urugan was launchable from something as small as a Zenit rocket which is eminently hideable/transportable. An X-37 or similar vehicle can live happily in a fairing. Amateur astronomers and spotters actually pose significant challenges because you can't make something, even a black something, entirely invisible.

Exoplanets are people. Now I have topped Huffington Post in saying the dumbest thing ever about exoplanets. Take THAT, journalists! Also, CHARIS will be really neat.

Here's a NASA document reviewing the costs and benefits of air-launching rockets: Its short, to the point and informative. https://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/20140003206.pdf

The Soviets knew about the energy problems with air launching spaceplanes and spaceplanes in general. Check out their proposed super/hypersonic mothership: http://www.buran.ru/htm/molniya3.htm For further reading, check out the proposed, manned Soviet space fighter: http://www.astronautix.com/u/uraganspaceinterceptor.html

for simplicity's sake, let's forget about drag and just look at kinetic energy. A ten ton object at 8km/s needs in excess of 320 Gigajoules of energy. An AN225 flies at about .85 Mach, so figure a release of 275 m/s. That gives the orbiter an energy advantage of roughly 378 Megajoules. Energetically, we save less than 0.2% via a subsonic air-launch. If we get generous with drag and gravity savings we are still talk talking less than 2% energy savings. What is much more appealing would be an X-37, X-20 or Spyral type of system, if you want a flying aircraft in space. It is much easier to get those things the energy they need by putting them in top of a rocket. Finally, MAKS and Spyral are very cool! If you are In Russia sometime, you should go check the Spyral on display! Stratolaunch is trying to cobble together a truely gargantuan mothership. They are actually trying to put together a couple 747s, and the project appears to be very complex from my uninformed position. It will be similar in mass to the 225, but carry more and fly hiher albeit at a lower speed. Here's the link: http://aerospace.vulcan.com/#stratolaunch As an aside: The Polish Air Force was one of the best performing and least appreciated air arms of WW2. Also, thank the Poles for radar. In America we joke about Polish engineering because we are uninformed. You guys make great planes and aviators!

The AN-225 with MAKS is certainly a good suggestion. Bear with me while I play the role of a naysayer. The Mriys was built to haul the Buran shuttle around on its back. Still, Buran itself is incapable of achieving orbit, and the payload is carried on the plane's roof, which has some inherent difficulties. Even an airplane the size of a 225 can only get about 250 tons of payload flying by the time you put a spash of TS-1 into it. So, even with an AN-225, by the time you put something like s MAKS system onto it, you are only getting s couple tons of payload to orbit via a very complex system with numerous points for catastrophic failure. Math to follow:

Rather than name my daughter after prominent scientists, aviators and engineers, I wanted to name her after concepts and objects themselves. My wife vetoed that decision and my daughter has a name that sounds "human" in the word of my wife. My last name is not Seversky, but I am using it for the sake of this exercise. My ideas: 1.) Cuberoot Tuft Seversky 2.) Stator Vane Seversky 3.) Kinetic Kerosene Seversky 4.) Lunahod Lightning Seversky 5.) RotoBetty Twirlygirl Seversky If you could rename the children of strangers, what names would you give them?

That's a really cool fact, Scotius!

I fear you are right. It's easy to let pessimism seep into our thinking. in the US, we have tremendous institutional inefficiency in DOD and, likely, NASA. I was convinced NASA is incapable of conducting manned spaceflight. The problem is that this pessimism doesn't change that institutional inertia and other dirty laundry that we all see in our various spheres of aerospace. An optimist may see an organization full of talent just waiting for the right management to reorganize and unleash their collective potential. Upsets and reorganizations only come with crisis, unfortunately.

Good science requires an open mind. This means we don't assume something can't work because of known physics, nor do we assume something does work based on preliminary observations. We need more testing to figure out what is going on. My earlier statement simply means that there is less mystery around acoustic levitation than there is around the EM drive.

So let's assume we have sufficient reception, processing and emission capabilities for my follow-on question. Would it be possible to use an adequate emitter to actively attenuate radar? Theoretically, a device could be constructed to significantly reduce the radar cross-section of non-stealthy objects. The device would have to receive incoming EM/RF, process and transmit at appropriate polarity. So our object wouldnt be truest stealthy, but it could get a lot closer to search radar before reflecting enough RF to be detectable. Is this technically possible?

These the challenges of aerospace. I can remember some times where we just took a wag at what we thought was causing a given problem on a platform. Our issues were relatively minor in comparison (signal interference between components installed in a plane v. catastrophic loss of the craft and payload) and we could troubleshoot them in flight. Still nailing down the exact cause of a problem takes time, takes cooperation between departments which may or may not exist and money. Chasing down the exact cause of a problem thoroughly can sometimes shut down an entire program permanently. These challenges are tough! That's why I relied on bigger brains than my own. YNM, makes a good point too. I can think of times where we let certain platforms go to their working site despite knowing there were significant problems which degraded capabilities. With a little more dedication to QA, especially early in a process, we could have fielded an exceptional product rather than a very good one. At the end of the day, it takes someone with access to proprietary knowledge at SpaceX to speak intelligently about this.

Spaceflight is inherently risky. Developing a system, that can sustain a high op tempo means taking on some of these risks.

Reuseability is certainly difficult, but it is the future. Similar discussions existed during the dawn of aviation. Wooden airframes would rot and wear out after just ten years of regular use. (We are all aware of hangared, flying museum pieces). The first major airline disaster (I am not including air mail or non-scheduled charters) in the US was due to wood rot. As engines became more reliable, we went from 50 hour overhaul periods on engines like the Hispano Suiza or Gnome Rotary to 1800 hours on Post-war reciprocating engines to 7500 hours on the PT-6 (I was trying to stick with smallish propeller engines). We got away from wooden trusses, learned to hangar airplanes, developed new aluminum alloys and got really good with semi-monocoque construction. Later we started using composites. Right now reuseability is very difficult. We will get there with better diagnostics and overhaul techniques. Unfortunately, we will learn what we need to learn through expensive losses. That is another lesson from the early days of aviation, sadly. Still, we will get there.

The more we explore, the more we learn our assumptions are wrong. Tiny pluto has an atmosphere and tectonics! A low gravity place like Titan has a thick atmosphere. So we can't really know what sort of atmosphere would exist around a super-earth. A lot depends on things which we can't predict by mass alone. Large bodies should have enough of a magnetic field to protect an atmosphere from being blasted away by solar radiation, but there are so many variables at play that we simply don't know. Would spaceflight be possible? Yes. It's just a matter of how much energy you need to pack into a given rocket. The engineering may be more challenging, but not impossible. If you think that is challenging, imagine being a sea-creature from the inside of Europa that wants to fly in space! Europa-squid could do it though. They'd have to work their way to the surface first.

Very well said! There is also a maritime tradition of meritocracy and innovation, but that is a discussion for another thread. For discussion's sake I would point out that this plane is on a long term contract to support US research stations in Antarctica. Volga-Dnepr, a Russian company has long-standing relationships with Kiev for spare parts. So this was not a last minute contract to rescue Buzz. This event highlights that the logistics to support Western research in Antarctica has transcended geopolitics for some time. I also bring this up because there is clearly a desire to reduce our dependency on the Russians for manned spaceflight. Russia for their part has occasionally cited our dependence on Soyuz capsules for the ISS when relations get tense. Politics and the ISS can get murkier than we'd like. Does human goodwill get us to work together or do economics and profits reaching the right pockets keep these programs running? In either case, it's nice to see this.

Me too. When it comes to humans and politics, I am generally pessimistic. Look at the opium wars, big tobacco, our initial response to the AIDS epidemic and climate change for just a few examples of human failure. With spaceflight, I am optimistic. It would be grand if we could have a joint American-Russo-Sino-European manned moon mission. Whether or not this is feasible is another matter.