SunlitZelkova

They are mainly legal and sociological. I myself was interested in this concept when thinking about it in relation to space colonization feasibility. Also, there may be issues in the strength and survivability of such structures against extreme events like storms and earthquakes, but I couldn’t find anything more about it.

@steve9728 Welcome back (to the forum)! Wow. About a year ago or so I said that China might beat the US to the first Mars sample return by a couple months or weeks because both came back in 2031. But the NASA-ESA schedule has slipped to 2033, so as long as no delays occur, China will bring the first ever samples back from Mars in 2031, a full two years ahead of the US. There are caveats of course. A cheaper private mission could be launched on expendable Starship, perhaps in the 2026 window. I say expendable because I don’t expect Starship to land on Mars before 2030, so long as it is taking ~two years or so to get to orbit and there won’t be any lunar flight until 2025 at the earliest. This private spacecraft could be big, and thus a 5M (Soviet MSR proposal with the N1) all-up style lander. A counter to this would be that the Starship community is mainly interested in human spaceflight, and I’m not sure of the willingness of a private organization to “steal the thunder” from NASA and ESA. I am not aware of any eccentric billionaires interested in funding their own MSR mission. China’s mission might slip. After all, Tianwen-1 was supposed to launch in 2018 originally I think. I think this would be a good thing though. The US will try to find scapegoats, and the easiest would be SLS- JPL and the private sector are pretty blameless. Those billions could have gone to MSR in 2031, yet it went into SLS. This would probably kick off a “Mars Race”- not a real Mars race, I wouldn’t expect a Chinese crewed Mars landing until the 2040s at the earliest- but initiated by the US to land the first humans on Mars, perhaps another “before this decade is out” type goal of landing before 2040. Artemis’ government built habs would probably be abandoned, Artemis would become a science program and facilitator of commercial activities on the Moon. NASA would send astronauts there still but primarily focus on Mars. Downside is crushed souls at NASA and ESA come June 2031. Oh, by the way, despite no real race, the initiation of a crewed American Mars program would definitely kick off a Chinese program, just with no necessity of beating the US. China won’t want to be left behind. Exciting! Nothing says “Happy Halloween!” like a core stage slowly decaying towards an unknown crashing point. Spooky! It is not intended for crew launches. That will remain the job of Long March 2F, Long March 7, and the future Long March 5 derived crewed variants. Tengyun might be intended for crewed missions, I don’t remember. It is more akin to the Soviet Spiral spaceplane, lofted by a hypersonic carrier aircraft and then separating and launching into orbit.

Fingers crossed the Artemis donut will return at Krispy Kreme! Oh, and I guess hopefully SLS launches successfully too.

It is not connected to the sample return lander per se, they are just going to drop it.

I decided to put this here instead of the JAXA thread because it involves the US too. Kanai Norishige was part of a NASA-JAXA team that did training with the old SEV prototypes. They drove around during the night to see what rover ops might be like in permanently shadowed craters. With Lunar Starship still in the design phase and SLS ridden with problems, astronaut training for Artemis is the coolest aspect of the program I think. A week ago or so NASA also shared pictures of what looked like surface sample collection training at the NBL.

Two Mandalorians and Hera Syndulla checked out the MMX Phobos rover at the IAC. The rover will be built by CNES and DLR. ESA is not involved.

Thanks for the reply, it was a nice little read! I have thought about my original question though and come to realize that those posts making fun of dinosaurs more or less make sense, so long as they are referring to the mere existence of such technology rather than its effectiveness. Even if an interstellar comet smacks into Europe five months from now, at least we can say we had asteroid redirection technology, right?

Asking here as well as other places to view a wide range of opinions: How does one go about making the Russian “р” sound? My Uhmairickuhn tongue won’t let me, nor has it ever let me do the “r’s” of other languages. Even the Japanese “r” was difficult until recently. I am aware of the thing with the q-tip. I am not necessarily asking for solutions, just general knowledge surrounding this issue. Curious for both replies from native Russian speakers and anyone who has tried to learn it as a ‘nth language. Witty replies are welcome too for morale purposes!

I don’t think it has to do with “society” at all. Effectively everywhere outside of Japan, people just couldn’t, and often still can’t really accept animation as being a medium to tell a story rather than “lowly” children’s entertainment. That’s a problem with the audience, not “society”. Understandably, the raunchiness prevalent throughout Japanese pop culture is a turn off to Japanese animation and that may trickle down to animation as a whole (although IMO I don’t find most of it any worse than the types of things often seen in Western live action works). So that doesn’t help either. There’s not much of a “solution” to this, because it is a valid opinion. I find reality television pretty ridiculous, but that doesn’t mean it is wrong. No one is going to convince me that Keeping Up With the Kardashians is good entertainment and likewise no one is going to convince someone uninterested in animation that animation is good entertainment (for adults). But that’s ok. We can like what we want to and dislike want we want to.

The K-Pg extinction event was celestial giants doing a planetary redirection test by chucking stones at the distant orbs. Hopefully they cancelled their program rather than simply delaying the next test.

First, a message to @intelliCom continued from the DART thread where we were told to stay on topic. You can learn about the presence of alien life on exoplanets on the KSP forum. The entire forum is dedicated to alien spaceflight! https://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/index.php?/forum/3-kerbal-space-program/ Second, a question not really related to DART so I put it here. I have seen a lot of comments in jest making fun of the terrestrial dinosaurs for not having a space program. But how logical are these statements? Based on human technological standards circa the 2020s, would the dinosaurs even have been able to detect the asteroid that hit Earth? Even if they had the means to stop it? Not much* is known about the origin of the asteroid that caused the K-Pg extinction event, for all we know it came from the Kuiper Belt and could not have been stopped. *I feel like I may have seen an article about this a year ago or so but I didn’t see anything in my saved links. I still could be wrong though

To be fair though this isn’t necessarily “NASA” as the group of scientists and engineers we know and love so much as it is concept artists with a huge free hand and their overseer PR officials who don’t care as long as it trends. They regularly get exhaust wrong for launches, also images of exhaust during Mars EDL in graphics is incorrect on their part too. I’m sure others have their own fair share of errors they have seen. But the people who review it are probably PR people, not actual engineers, so it passes. That doesn’t mean that “NASA” (the actual science people) consider a majority of asteroids to look that way in their personal view. I bet that those depictions come from fantastical pre-detailed space exploration (i.e. the age of telescopes and Mars canals, instead of probes and disappointing Venusian and Martian atmospheric pressure readings) that have simply remained in pop culture since then despite new discoveries, just as how films nowadays often depict Mars as having fantastic mesas and valleys despite the majority of it being something of a flat plain. When people eventually visit an asteroid and/or Mars those depictions will become more realistic, just as landing on the Moon in ‘69 made the equally grandiose and absurd lunar mesas and valleys go away (although the actual Moon, and thus Mars and asteroids, is/are spectacular in its/their own right, and those fantastical depictions are still nice as pure art so nothing is/will be lost ).

What is weather usually like in November at KSC? I’m curious about the likelihood of another scrub. Last time they tried to launch an SHLV in November (not counting Shuttle), it got struck by lightning twice. No Alan Bean onboard to save it this time around though.

Johns Hopkins APL released a graphic containing some of the results of the simulations of the impact.

They appear to have fixed the leak, but for all we know the stress from another rollback and rollout will cause another leak.

As of when I made that post, it was December 31st, 1969 for me. EDIT- Nope, still 12-31-69. Guess it is a time zone thing and you are probably correct.

Fun fact? Creepy fact? The oldest threads in this section of the forum are from 1969, or at least that is how it appears on mobile to me right now.

It sounds like this could be countered in certain situations. If a PL-15/R-37/AIM-260 is being fired at max range against a bomber doing conventional strike stuff in protected airspace, it would work. But in a deep penetration mission likely to be undertaken in a nuclear war, there isn’t much stopping the fighters from getting up close and personal and flying and firing outside of the gun arcs. What @sevenperforce said, but also a company can only charge so much for ad space as people will watch. The profitability of the Olympics is primarily driven by ad revenue because millions watch it, but if only a few thousand people watch a launch being live streamed and maybe a couple important executive people, the ad space isn’t worth anything. They may barely break even as a result of the extra work involved in painting the rocket, combined with the low viewership.

Was there ever a concrete assembly plan for Space Station Freedom? Based on what few documents I could find in the NASA NTRS and astronautix, I managed to put together a schedule of roughly 16 flights in total not including the dockyard for the LTV, but also including the ESA and NASDA/JAXA modules (which were not taken into consideration in the NASA documents). This seems low considering 27~ Shuttle missions were flown for the ISS. Was SSF just tiny in comparison or am I missing something? The configuration I am using is the SEI one.

Reading comments from both sides, I feel like this isn’t a problem with a magical fix. Both drivers and pedestrians just need to be more careful, urban planning and revising speed laws alone won’t eliminate traffic accidents.

I think this was what he meant, not using it against aircraft. On a separate note, assuming a large portion of a nation’s air defences are knocked out by ICBMs and SLBMs, the small number of surviving fighters resorting to guns isn’t too far fetched. Reading anecdotes from B-52 gunners, it seems like the existing detection arcs on their fire control radars (and presumably the Tu-95’s too) make an acquisition impossible against SAMs, and thus a missile fired from below by a fighter would not be trackable either. Even if the radar was extensively redesigned to cover a wider arc all around, the existing gun mounts would require another redesign to have more depression, another factor mentioned by B-52 gunners is that the tail gun wouldn’t depress low enough to target a SAM. Of course another option would be to reinstate belly and dorsal guns, which the Tu-95MS does not have and the B-52 never had. But then there would be another two CIWS mounts, with radars and all, with their weight. If the aircraft is flying at low altitude, the radars may have a hard time picking up the small AAMs. If the aircraft fly high, they will probably get salvoed by the long range SAM that is targeting it, which a single CIWS alone might not be able to handle. I’m not sure what fighters would carry in an air defence role, but if they have their max load out of some 6x or so AAMs they could launch a large salvo too. I would say no. 3x heavy CIWS mounts and a new constraint on the flight profile does not seem like a lot, when more ECM equipment and stand off cruise missiles could be fitted instead. I think only deep penetration missions (like trying to strike in a continental sized nation’s territory in a nuclear war) would require such a system anyways. The sorts of missions flown by bombers under normal circumstances (launching conventional ALCMs) would be flown within friendly airspace. It would not be worth it for a nuclear war scenario when ECM equipment and more room for ALCMs would be more useful in conventional scenarios. I have seen opinions that bombers aren’t even a key part of nuclear war strategy nowadays anyways, and exist for a pure psychological deterrence purposes (although of course they still have their aforementioned conventional role).

Is it known what Musk’s ICBM based Mars architecture was supposed to look like? Or was this merely an idea in his head that never got beyond the words “use retired ICBMs to get to Mars” before he found out he couldn’t buy them and decided to do SpaceX?

So the ROS would sit derelict for two more years?

Well, it is only “reused” to a certain extent. tater put it best in a post awhile back. It may as well be an entirely new rocket. I think it is really, really, dumb they didn’t just go with something akin Shuttle-C, which would have used identical ground infrastructure to the Shuttle. A different vehicle would have to be used for crew, although I think DIRECT showed that a side slung Orion would have been possible.

It’s not that there are problems, it’s that there are problems after a 5-6 year delay. SLS was supposed to launch in 2016 or 2017, then in 2018, then in 2021, now it has nearly been a year since then.