UmbralRaptor

Another space race risks ending like the first; a handful missions that are primarily flags and footprints, and the hardware thrown away. I would much prefer a path that leads to cheap and reliable access to space. Failing that, a long term science program that steadily builds on its successes within the budget and launcher limitations.

There is more to NASA than crewed spaceflight and designing launch systems. While the commercial cargo and crew systems have been nifty, there is a very real risk that they'll vanish when the ISS is deorbited. STS, Buran, Delta III, Commercial Titan, Klipper, X-33/Venturestar, Darkhorse, X-34, Constellation/Ares, Kistler...At least cool things are happening with NASA et al.'s telescopes and probes. edit: Walter Dornberger and a (German) government program that cost double the Manhattan Project are also important bits. VfR sort of ran out of money well before they got to anything V-2 sized.

This again? http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/132553-Nemesis-Sol-s-evil-twin http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/128698-Large-Planet-Outside-Pluto-s-Orbit http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/107655-Nemesis-Tyche-and-or-the-Hills-Cloud-Super-Earths-Real-or-unreal A red dwarf orbiting the sun would likely be bright enough to have a decent chance of being found in the 19th century. Certainly by the early 20th. (A minimum mass one would likely run around magnitude 7-12 in the V-band) Something the range of Mars to Neptune (depending on distance) is possible with current data, though.

"The Class I SDV was again found to be the best solution. It was estimated it could deliver payload to orbit at a cost of $4400/kg, as opposed to $1720 for the Delta II, $ 1800 for the Titan IV, or $ 3400 for the shuttle."[circa 1988 dollars] This confused me also.

I've missed something -- wasn't SLS strongly derived from DIRECT? And from what little I've read, apparently a Shuttle-C would have been more expensive in $/kg than a normal Shuttle.

I'm afraid I don't know enough about cluster physics (especially hot intracluster gas) to say many useful things. It is interesting that this seems to have been done entirely with archival data. Ah, SDSS. So useful yet so infuriating...

VASIMIR is the propulsion technology of the future, and like aerospikes, Stirling generators, and fusion that seems to permanently be the case. (Most recently because the ISS test was cancelled) On the up side, the most recent versions are apparently demonstrating better N/W than HiPEP did in 2003-4. (Though I think HiPEP still has 2x the Isp) Or, I like ion engines in general, but find VASIMIR in particular remarkably meh.

Going with the standard expert on these things (James Oberg), some cosmonauts (and even some deaths) were covered up. Mind, you this is things like being expelled from the program for bad behavior, or dieing in a fire during a ground test. There is no reason to believe that the standard accounts are inaccurate. http://www.jamesoberg.com/phantoms.html http://www.jamesoberg.com/usd10.html

Apparently Seyfert 1 galaxies count as quasars now?

1024x768, aside from a handful of screenshots. I should check again to see if I can go lower rez without messing up UI elements...

Well, yes. But throw in IRAF, 2MASS, and Akari...

The endless releases about water on Mars, extrasolar Earth twins, etc. get annoying after a while though. And they distract from the cool weird things we find.

Pluto is just as much a planet (or not) as Ceres, Eris, Haumea, and Makemake. (and practically speaking, the IAU will need to add several more bodies to the official dwarf planet list in the future).

Gas clouds glow. Radio surveys of cold gas work with various emission lines (notably the 21 cm atomic hydrogen line), and emission lines give you convenient velocities. Gas clouds observed around other galaxies follow the weird rotation curve of the stars out beyond any substantial stellar light. Hot x-ray emitting gas is another source. IIRC, the amount and temperature of gas we find in various large clusters (eg: Coma) is such that it should leak out without a great deal of additional mass. And then there are cases of colliding clusters where we can see majority of the mass is not located where the majority of the baryons are.

Well, this is disappointing. Even within pure research humans don't seem to be of much value. I just want to point out that the STEM shortage seems to be a myth (if anything there are more graduates in the various subfields than new jobs).

If there is enough funding and/or launches are cheap enough, this is a silly question. Just see the benefits of satellite servicing (notably Hubble, but also LDEF), and the geology (selenology?) done in the later Apollo missions. But there is not enough funding, nor any reason to expect there to be enough in the future. NASA's overall budget has been flat for years, though at the year to year level there has been a great deal of uncertainty. Successive administrations revising goals also doesn't help. (Mars! SSTO RLV! Apollo on steroids! Bring a NEO to EML-2!) Even if the budget were stable, can SLS/Orion get people anywhere before being cancelled for the next big thing? Servicing/recovery missions are (well, were) more tractable, but only seem worthwhile for the most expensive craft. Hubble ($2.5+ billion) was justified, but many were too low budget to even be considered. eg: Shuttle launches ran somewhere between $500 million and $2 billion depending on accounting, while WISE will be $300-350 million, including the Delta II, NEOWISE, and MaxWISE. Pick intermediate cost missions as desired, but keep in mind that something like JWST or Spitzer would require I'm comparatively unclear on the research that was/is done on Skylab, the various Salyuts, MIR, and the ISS. The telescopes on the oldest stations seem to have been there to be manually operated, but because vibrations that seemed to end in the 1970s. AMS is just attached to the ISS for the large solar panels. The biological experiments are intriguing, but seem very-much applied research for a use case that requires a sharp reduction in launch costs. (See also why I don't trust that SLS/Orion will result in a Moon/Mars landing. Or asteroid rendezvous.) Finally, using a crewed vehicle to launch probes is silly. See launching Galileo on the Shuttle for the canonical example.

The launcher is very broken. If you have the store version, login and redownload. (Incidentally, you can also run KSP by using the executable directly)

Grats, I think.

Maybe (I'm trying to push a 2008 P&S into roles normally reserved for mid-level DSLRs), but wikiality suggests that the environment at that time would have been best with an EV of 9-11. I have the JPEGs at maximum size/quality (no noise reduction options), so compression seems unlikely. Would selecting a lower resolution result in binning? (Alternatively, should I install something like GIMP and shoot RAW? Write off exposures that aren't full daylight?)

There's literally no color temperature setting, though there is a "Daylight" one, so that should work in the future. I've more or less ignored Sunny 16/Looney 11 because I'm more or less stuck with f/2.8 to 4.9. Maybe with some digging up of conversion factors? And yes, I'm still not clear on the huge amount of grain in that image (ISO 80, f/4.9, 1/40 s). If anything, it looks better on mobile screens. o_O

In terms of books I already know a bit about, I'd lean towards Griffiths and/or Lorraine and Corson for E&M, but good options for mechanics and thermodynamics seem less clear. At a more specialized level, Carroll and Ostlie for astronomy/astrophysics and Fundamentals of Astrodynamics for, er, astrodynamics.

My options appear to be: Auto, Day Light, Cloudy, Tungsten, Fluorescent, Fluorescent H, Custom. (Custom and Auto take cues from some feature of current lighting) The moon seems much like last night. Venus was unresolvable, but the sunset was nice. Also, it looks like I have to be careful to get enough light even at ISO 80 to avoid excessive grain?

Okay, let's see what can be resolved with a Canon SD1100 IS while the Moon is full. Lots of Maria, though many craters (eg: Aristarchus, Tycho) are many showing up through brightness contrast, rather than being resolvable. (Note also the lack of Copernicus, Clavius, and Plato) How about trying out digital zoom? Nope. On a related note, any advice on white-balance settings?

Uh, since Feynman was mentioned, may as well link the free version of the lectures: http://www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu/ (I'm hesitant to recommend current textbooks because they tend to be hugely expensive.) It looks like all English language additions are still under copyright?

You'd be surprised. I've seen 80 mm refractors used as telephoto lenses for wildlife images, and an array of prosumer telephoto lenses used as a professional telescope.