SunlitZelkova

The spittle and vocalizations of Homo sapiens individuals- whether they come from journalists or officials- have zero effect on the physical world. The world has “felt like it is coming apart” before. In fact, I have heard that exact phrase used to describe both the period between 1947-1950 and the events of 1968 before. Yet looking back, there is a recognition there was quite a bit of drama going around, and things were not nearly as bad as they appeared at the time. Contrary to the image conveyed by the media and officials, I don’t think this world is driven by the decisions of a few people in power, and I don’t think we are “doomed” or that the “end is nigh”. An official can shout and make whatever decisions he wants, but it won’t change the goodness in people’s hearts, nor their basic morals*. And Pompeii might explode and Hiroshima might be obliterated, but people will not give up on living. Even if a group is split, those new divisions will support themselves and continue living- separation is not the end. Humans are animals, but animals recognize basic norms and taboos necessary for survival. Even after seeing the most trashy of news feeds and headlines, I don’t see a burning planet. I don’t see savages ripping each other apart, fighting for the title of king of the hill, I see mishaps in what is otherwise a perfectly fine organism. Are there tribulations? Yes, but that’s how Earth works. An apex predator such as a shark can be completely dominant in his environment but will still face problems, some that to a human might seem life threatening or gargantuan, yet the shark overcomes it simply as a matter of course. Because I have heard “recognization of a lack of control” mentioned in the “emotional support” genre as being necessary to calm down, I will also say this. History reveals that on a grand scale, most events were preordained to a large extent*. A group of small men did not cause World War II, the attitude of all of humanity did. Of course, the present will soon be part of history too. Therefore as much as blame is thrown around and solutions are proposed with great imperative and spittle, it is likely all of what is happening is already determined and can not be changed. But history also shows humanity is resilient. Rome or the Qing might fall, but the peoples of those places are still here. As I said, individuals alone are not responsible for change. Just as it has its “problem children”, humanity has its “golden boys” doing the work that needs to be done to make sure everyone is safe and sound. You alone will not have a great impact on the course of history, and therefore do not need to be concerned to the extent that it burdens your emotional state**. *This does not come out of the traditional study of history. It is only when asking “what if?” that I have seen realization that things could not have changed. **I mean this in a factual way, not a belittlement or something. Also, if you happen to be the leader of some grand social movement, and are anonymously engaging in discussion in this here spaceflight game forum, such is not the case and you are doomed to stress and the emotional short stick.

Consider the viewers of this thread amazed too!

Military related questions seem to be allowed when they have to do with the engineering aspects of the equipment. Otherwise I would think they would belong on a military forum. This doesn’t have anything to do with cell phone technology itself so it may not be on topic. In the event it is… Jamming is a possibility. Also, the locations of cell phone towers are well known. Hitting them should not be hard.

https://www3.nhk.or.jp/nhkworld/en/news/20221218_02/ Hakuto-R is stable. Landing will take place in April. Image from the lander. That white dot is the F9 upper stage!

@Snark @adsii1970 There are some ChatGPT posts over here too. Can they be merged to avoid having two separate discussions? Whichever way is the standard policy (this with the other or the other with this).

Naw, someone has to revive the M5 Mars sample return proposal with its triple Proton launches within seconds of each other to earn that title. This is more comparable to Gemini 8.

This one might be used for further ground testing and then perhaps end up in a museum after awhile. I imagine refurbishment won’t be much more difficult than that of Dragon. The only thing that needs to be fully replaced is the heat shield. Note that Artemis II is also not an all up spacecraft (it lacks a docking port) and thus will also take more time for refurbishment when compared with Artemis III or IV. Orion’s reusability has been known for awhile. Here’s a space.com article from 2013 describing it- https://www.space.com/21541-nasa-orion-spacecraft-reusable.html Things are only uncertain if you don’t bother to look into them. @cubinator we might see the method @Brotoro describes for Artemis II and some of the earlier lunar landings, but I don’t think we will see such a recovery method used once they start doing month long missions in the future. It will eventually start to look more like ISS recoveries as missions become longer, assuming lunar gravity is relatively just as detrimental to human health as microgravity is.

I could see Boeing and BO doing a huge PR campaign comparing it to the N1 in an attempt to get Starship discarded in favor of SLS. I am skeptical he has been distracted because there is no direct evidence his “other venture” has had an impact on Starship. Orbital flight is tough. We would be in this situation even if he hadn’t begun all of those other ventures.

LOL. I disagree because technically the level of danger on the Ohka includes the transit to the launch era, in which the bomber was incredibly vulnerable to being shot down by radar directed fighters. Tim and Co. might be riding a potential bomb, but no one is shooting at them.

I don’t think Artemis I is meant to be refurbished. It is a boilerplate in many aspects.

It’s only a matter of time before we hear Dr. Bill Kerman being quoted somewhere.

Because if research doesn’t need a spaceplane, it doesn’t need a spaceplane, and if it does need a spaceplane, it needs a spaceplane. Do you expect every single experiment to be Earth bound no matter what? That the creation of new experiments requiring on-orbit exposure is impossible? https://www.af.mil/About-Us/Fact-Sheets/Display/Article/104539/x-37b-orbital-test-vehicle/ “The primary objectives of the X-37B are twofold; reusable spacecraft technologies for America’s future in space and operating experiments which can be returned to, and examined, on Earth.“ This is not emotions, and while saying “classified stuff” can be considered hand wavy, it is backed up by evidence like this quote above. We are only saying “never ever” because there is so much overwhelming evidence against the more extreme argument. I myself (and probably others) don’t really mind a 21st century equivalent of the Space Shuttle bomber theory. We don’t expect you to drop your theory, it is just that you are disregarding ours as being plausible (saying that the only possibility is that the X-37B is testing a space based nuclear weapon) that is causing the discussion to continue. I’m unaware of classified experiments already having been conducted on the ISS. Could you share some more info, with a source?

Thanks for this! I was actually thinking of asking around here for Dyson sphere level mega-engineering projects, so I’m glad to know about this now.

https://spacenews.com/china-seeks-new-partners-for-lunar-and-deep-space-exploration/ Russia may be out from ILRS. Also, I don't know why, but it took me this long to realize that ILRS is basically Chinese Artemis. It will be interesting to see if anyone else joins on. https://spacenews.com/china-outlines-pathway-for-lunar-and-deep-space-exploration/ Some interesting statements came out of the United Nations/China Global Partnership Workshop on Space Exploration and Innovation held on Hainan at the end of last month. According to the official, China is aiming for a crewed lunar landing prior to 2030. The LM-5DY is not scheduled to have its first flight until 2026 at the earliest, so combined with the Ars Technica estimate for Artemis III, we could theoretically see both Chinese and American crewed lunar landings in 2028. The official also said he thinks that 15 years from now, China should start preparing to send taikonauts to Mars. This is only the third official reference to planning for a crewed Mars mission to come out of China, based on my own tracking. It's all quite exciting, but the Moon landing goal comes from Long Lehao (I'll take @steve9728's advice in not taking what he says too seriously), while the crewed Mars landing is certainly aspirational. These statements might amount to nothing more than Elon Time with Chinese characteristics, but they are fun to hear considering how quiet it can be at times.

This reminds of me of Neil deGrasse Tyson’s “unhackable systems” comment. Worrying about the failure of rocket engines is ridiculous! Just build rocket engines that don’t fail! @sevenperforce runs a great science communication TikTok. He is just as qualified as Tim is to be on there. Tim Dodd is going btw, not “Matt” (I assume you are referring to Lowne). Have you heard the Perseverance Sea Shanty? I don’t know what exact view counts are, but I’d argue catchy 60 second TikTok videos are a better means of reaching a wider audience than 30-40 minute long YouTube videos, if Maezawa’s aim is to bring their experience back to people on Earth.

Yes. He goes over other options too (realistic alternatives exist to putting engines on the Moon). EDIT- This only for moving the Earth away from the Sun though. It would not be possible to move it to another solar system without killing everything on it and making it uninhabitable, at which point it might have made more sense to build ships and travel to a star system with a rocky planet (still living in domes, but less effort than moving the planet).

It is classified research. It doesn’t even matter if it is likely that other nations already have it, it is classified and can’t be revealed no matter what. Corona can not/could not expose materials to space. The materials are being brought back to see what happened to them. It’s a testing program, and has nothing to do with building “reusable satellites”. Why do you find our explanations weak? Ours are actually supported by evidence. In contrast, yours are pure speculation. I am not trying to be hostile in saying that. But your argument appears as though it is “this can’t be this and thus must be this” and no more. It is not convincing.

There are ground systems designed to detect nuclear explosions based on seismic data, radiation sensing, and also the very obvious loss of communication with the radar sites would alert them too. It would not be feasible and the radars themselves might detect the X-37s and manage to report them prior to destruction. Bureaucracies and government agencies don’t operate based on logic. The exact same logic was applied to the Shuttle- “there is no reason to use the Shuttle over expendable rockets, it must be a secret weapons system!”- yet contrived reasons for the use of the Shuttle existed within the US government.

Kinda wacky that the recovery ship, USS Portland, is equipped with a laser weapon system. It feels somewhat arrogant saying this when I’m only 21, but we are truly living in the future. Also lol at USS Portland (Oregon) having a Sasquatch team on board. OH MY GOODNESS. Don’t know if y’all continued watching after splashdown, but Bill Nelson just called Artemis III “Apollo III” in the post-event interview.

There are only two pads at Vandenberg. Two X-37Cs are not going to be an effective strike force compared to SLBMs or stealth bombers (if the goal is first strike). Grouped X-37Cs (launches successively, more than two on orbit), would also be useless, as they will be detected by radar just the same as an SLBM launched from short range, and can be tracked while in orbit. It is also incredibly public, and no one likes to make it known exactly what portions of their nuclear force are on alert and which are not. They are completely garbage as a second strike/retaliatory force. It’s hidden subs and hardened ICBMs vs. dinky electronic finned thingies that can be knocked out by high altitude nuclear detonations. Just because something happened or did not happen in the past does not mean it is happening now.

Good luck!

This is more or less the same logic used by the Soviets when they deduced that the Space Shuttle was a nuclear strike platform, and yet the Space Shuttle was not a nuclear strike platform, despite expendable rockets and cheap Spacelab derived, Salyut style stations being more useful for the type of science they wanted to do. As I said, our government is not that smart. They don’t play 4D chess moves on their adversaries by beginning development of a space nuclear strike system while simultaneously signing nuclear arms reduction treaties, they do things like saying they want to use Shuttle components to speed up the development of an SLHV, only for a much more economical SHLV to pop up by the time the government Shuttle derived one is ready. To put into perspective why we are so opposed to your theory, it is as though we said there are no reasons why Oryol and ROSS have been pushed so far into the future, and therefore Russia must have no intention to actually build Oryol and ROSS and therefore all plans and announcements related to it are lies. It is rather obvious the future Russian crewed space projects have issues and therefore suffer delays, and it is unthinkable that Russia would give up its piloted spaceflight capability and therefore announcements about ROSS and Oryol are not lies (at least not all of them). Likewise, placing materials and equipment in space and studying how they fare over a period of multiple years is a perfectly sound explanation from the USAF as to what the X-37B does, and it is unthinkable that the US would abandon the Outer Space Treaty, and therefore the X-37B is not a nuclear weapons test platform-cum-orbital strike system.

What would Mars need to be like, or what would have had to happen to it, for it to have an atmosphere “roughly 10% as dense as Earth’s”? That’s a direct quote from the Spaceflight History Blog, as I had no idea where to find the exact hypothetical numbers put forward prior to Mariner 4. I want to write an alternate history using the winged lander designs of the 50s and early 60s. I am wondering if the characteristics of Mars could be altered to realistically have the atmosphere needed for those designs, or if I would just need to hand wave it.

I think this should be renamed as the Science and Engineering News Thread.

Big enough for a brig?