KG3

I was wondering if this had ever been tried before and so I googled it before asking. I couldn't find it in the forums here and thought it was kind of interesting. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paper_plane_launched_from_space "Some 30[3] to 100[4] planes had been considered to make the descent, each gliding downward over what was expected to be the course of a week to several months. If one of the planes survived to Earth, it would have made the longest flight ever by a paper plane, traversing the 250 mi./400 km. vertical descent. In a test in Japan in February 2008, a prototype about 2.8 inches long and 2 inches wide survived Mach 7 speeds and temperatures reported to be 200°C in a hypersonic wind tunnel for 10 seconds. Materials designed for use in conventional reentry vehicles, including ceramic composites, withstand temperatures on the order of 2200°C.[5] The 30 cm planes were to have been made from heat-resistant paper treated with silicon." They were going to launch the planes from the ISS but decided not to because they couldn't track them to the surface. There is also a group in Germany called Project Space Planes that dropped 200 paper airplanes 37,339 meters from a weather balloon. It doesn't seem like they have any real good data on how far any of them went though. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Space_Planes

Hello, is there an efficient way to search through topics. According to the statistics there are already over three million posts (am I reading that correctly?)! Also, the night sky of Kerbin is quite beautiful! Does it have any named constellations or asterisms and how was it created?

Thanks! I've never heard of the Stackexchange before but this certainly does answer my question. "So if the light from a region arriving at your instruments is increased through the gravitational effects of something between you and the scrutinized region, so too will the gravitational waves be increased through the same partial focusing. In particular, you can no more burn space ants with gravitational waves through a gravitational lens than you can with light through a gravitational lens!" I'm looking forward to hearing about more discoveries from gravitational wave astronomy. Too bad about the space ants though.

Are Gravity waves effected by gravitational lensing the same way light is? Is it possible that LIGO could detect multiple signals from a single event if there were something massive enough along it's line of sight?

NASA says that Voyager 1 is "aiming toward the constellation Ophiuchus" but isn't it just now orbiting the center of the galaxy along a different path than our solar system? I mean you can't just point in the direction of Ophiuchus and expect to get there right? If Voyager 1 were being sent to Ophiuchus wouldn't it need to raise or lower it's periapsis and change it's orbital plane in respect to it's orbit around the galaxy and set up an intercept with Ophiuchus? It takes something like 225 million years to orbit the galaxy! Ever since playing KSP I'm beginning to realize that space travel is nothing like how they show it on TV. I guess I'd definitely want to bring a book on tape if I was making that trip.

Can't you just toss in some powdered aluminum and ignite it?

I have a question about traveling between objects orbiting as far away from the sun as the Oort cloud. If I were orbiting Kerbin and I was trying to rendezvous with another satellite I would line up our orbital planes and then raise or lower my periapsis to change my altitude and speed relative to my target. Would you need to do basically the same thing if the orbits were 50,000 A.U away from the sun?

How about the stall speed of a Cessna 206 on Titan?

So your reflector needs to be pointing towards the sun. Does that mean your engine will always point toward or away from the sun too? Is there a design that allows you to fire your engine prograde or retrograde in respect to your orbit around the sun or whichever direction you might need? How difficult will it be to keep such a large nebulous object pointed at the sun?

Hello, I've been wondering if large solar sail type objects could be spun to give them some rigidity via centripetal force. Also, could they be held taught somehow by using static electricity? I mean if there were objects imbedded in the sail that repelled each other via a strong static charge.