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Kryten

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Everything posted by Kryten

  1. Kryten
    No more or less than any other crewed spacecraft. There's no payload bay, if that's what you mean.
  2. Kryten
    How is that an advantage?
  3. Kryten
    Does an announcement of an announcement really justify six exclamation marks?
  4. Kryten
    We know the direction it's being launched in due to the keep-out zones; and we have a launch timeline: but if anything they make it more mysterious. It's not a low orbit, but it doesn't match any GTO, or direct launch to GEO.
  5. Kryten
    At 21:45 UCT today (eighteen hours after the timestamp in this post, for whatever timezone you're in), ULA will launch the CLIO spacecraft for the US government; a live broadcast will be available here. So what exactly is CLIO? Nobody knows. We don't even know what government agency this is for, or what orbit it's going into. LM had said it's based on one of their existing commercial satellite buses, so it can't be anything extremely exotic, but there are still plenty of possible missions and payloads. Anyone have a good guess?
  6. Kryten
    That's not how '1.5 contract awards' works. I'll put in a bet for Boeing and SX. SNC has Kistler 2.0 written all over them.
  7. Kryten
    Plugging in the ISP for the SSME (452s) into the same equation, you 'only' need about 380 metric tons of fuel for shuttle orbiter to LLO and back. Add a fueled Apollo LM (15 tons), and you need about 550.
  8. Kryten
    The shuttle orbiter has a mass of 70 tons empty, and the OMS has an ISP of 316 seconds. The delta-v required to enter lunar orbit and back is about 8.2km/s. Plug these into the rocket equation, and you come out needing about 1000 tons of fuel.
  9. Kryten
    The admins must have some liking for it, as we now have a dedicated [coub] function in the BBcode.
  10. Kryten
    What does that have to do with anything? How will that stop them from gutting it for it's IP like they did lionhead and rare?
  11. Kryten
    Selection is apparently due tomorrow, 10-11am EDT
  12. Kryten
    Pyrophoric=ignites in contact with air. Useful for starting engines on the ground, not so much in space.
  13. Kryten
    The phrase 'less evolved' is meaningless enough already, without applying it to something that didn't evolve in the first place.
  14. Kryten
    Microsoft's history with acquisitions isn't stellar. Anyone remember rare? EDIT: Just noticed something in the report on the acquisition; so they expect to make $2.5 billion from Mojang in one year. Either they have something incredibly devious nearly ready, or whoever planned this deal is insane.
  15. Kryten
    It cost more than it's launch, yes, but that includes development costs. With development done, and a number of spare parts ready to use, a second one would have been significantly cheaper.
  16. Kryten
    For this phobos cubesat, how do you intend to do communications? DSN time isn't exactly cheap.
  17. Kryten
    At this rate they'd be stuck doing updates for minecraft forever anyway; I can't imagine that being terribly fulfilling. Their games since MC have either been cancelled or faded into obscurity.
  18. Kryten
    The SOI model doesn't work too well at the best of times; around a body with as irregular a shape and subjected to as high tidal forces as Phobos, it's pretty much useless.
  19. Kryten
    A full set of RCS thrusters would likely fill the entire mass budget, not taking into account anything else.
  20. Kryten
    There are plenty of constraints that technology won't solve. Just how is this cubesat supposed to communicate, for example? You won't exactly get a large antennae on a cubesat bus.
  21. Kryten
    Computer failure. What's you point? A phobos cubesat would have to perform complex tasks with extremely limited mass, space, data, and power budgets. Combine that with the radiation environment and limited budget for testing, and there's no reason to expect it to do any better. EDIT: The launch was entirely successful. The upper stage only failed because it was a modified version without it's own flight computer-the probe's own computer failed and doomed it.
  22. Kryten
    Then you didn't check wikipedia very well. They made Phobos 1 and 2.
  23. Kryten
    Lavochkin have done a lot more than 4 or 5 missions, and they couldn't hack it. They weren't trying to use such a constrained form-factor either.
  24. Kryten
    Yes. It's far more likely we'd be the fourth to fail to land there.
  25. Kryten
    That's a map of Cs-137 alone, so none of what you just said is relevant to it.
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