Kryten

Really? Like the X-32 and X-35 'test vehicles'? They've also had the X-11 and X-12, which were prototype Atlas missiles, and the X-20, which was explicitly intended to be an operational vehicle.

Originally that came from a forum post. Googling that phrase gives me...the same forum post and some stuff about pipes. Digging a bit deeper, this document gives a centre-of-gravity range for the finished vehicle of 2.5% body length, which comes out to about 30 inches, so it seems to be about right.

Normal spysats do that all the time; all that requires is a good amount of manoeuvring fuel. Yes, they're unable to be refuelled, but the lack of need to re-enter makes up for it. ...and then watch the X-37 burn up on re-entry due to a misaligned CoM. The shuttle's CoM had to stay in a volume of 36x2x2 inches; scale that to the X-37, and you're talking millimetre precision.

Spysats are the NROs responsibility. Pretty much anything else military in space is in USAAF's remit, including GPS. Leaving aside that that would break multiple international treaties, returning a satellite would require a cradle that'd have to be custom-built for each model; if you knew enough about an enemy sat's characteristics to do it you wouldn't have to capture one.

Even? Even? If you think Tito is an unbiased source in this, you're even worse than I thought. Block I can put about 20 metric tons on this trajectory, which just so happens to be the same weight range as Orion. Even without the service module, the ECLSS studies put it on the knife of edge of theoretically possible. Add in that the heat shield isn't intended for those kind of return velocities and would have to be reinforced, and you're looking at a no-go. Polyakov is irrelevant. The issue isn't the space environment, it's simply keeping them alive. Oxygen is probably the most pressing issue, given nobody's been able to produce an O2 system better than the enormously inefficent electrolytic production/emergency oxygen candle system on Mir/ISS.

Yes, the ECLSS for Orion. The hab you're proposing for this would need an ECLSS of it's own developing, along with, you know, every single other thing. You're also assuming Block II/Ib availability to actually launch this thing; I'm not seeing any quotes from propulsion engineers saying that can be rushed. Much more importantly, I'm not seeing any hint of how much any of these would cost. Congress has extended their support for pork. SLS keeps the shuttle workforce employed, the shuttle workforce elects congresspersons, therefore the SLS survives. That's why smaller science projects aren't seeing anything similar to this. I never said it wasn't. The problem is you need it to be massively ahead of schedule, thanks to requiring block II; compared to the current roadmap, you're trying to bring it forward by eleven years. Where's the money supposed to come from for that?

Why? You still haven't given a single factor that'd differ between a mars flyby and just keeping the same craft in a medium or high earth orbit, excepting of course the cost. I'm sorry, but if you want to ignore all of the real difficulties and issues with this, then you chose the wrong option when creating this thread. You wanted [sci Fi Theory].

If be 'we' you mean the US, nothing.

Let's ignore that the planetary budget wouldn't cover even a fraction of that for now, and pretend your proposal could come to fruition. So, we've got the very first flight of a new rocket model, with at least one entirely unflown engine, lofting a hastily-developed hab module and a spacecraft that has never flown crewed before on a mission of a duration no closed eclss system has ever acheived, so some astronauts can see Mars out of a window for maybe an hour. And for that all that's been lost are all of the Mars probes returning real science that'd be likely to be operational at that point. Does that really seem like a good idea to you?

If it's 2021, you're looking at block I SLS. Forget hab modules; it'd barely be able to put Orion alone on a flyby trajectory.

You're missing the point. We're talking a real test of long-term life-support here; it's not like there's something forcing us to send up replenishment flights if the craft is close enough to do so. The only real difference in that scenario was if something went wrong with the life-support system, people wouldn't inevitably die. Missions don't run on proclamations of support. There's little inclination in congress of anyone being willing to actually fund such a mission. You can't just 'pick up' or 'drop off' something from a flyby trajectory. We're talking relative velocities in the multiple km/second range here.

Why would that be any different from a system designed to keep people alive in MEO?

What engineering value? You could learn exactly as much by leaving the spacecraft in earth orbit for the same length of time. Even the radiation would be pretty much the same if it was at sufficient altitude.

This isn't even an announcement, it's one guy in congress. There's very little support in congress, there's none from the president, and there's not even real support in NASA. It's close to a miracle it didn't drop completely off of everybody's radar the moment Tito realised he hadn't got a chance doing it privately.

A completely meaningless figure. Many of the people that flew on the shuttle were not NASA astronauts, and many of those that did flew more than once.

For a government organisation, politically-oriented decisions are mission oriented. Politics is the only reason there are any missions at all.

Bull. Given there were 135 shuttle flights alone, that'd make at least 26 flights with fatalities.

No. It didn't have any capability to hold fuel for the main engines, and there's no way the OMS engines would have had enough thrust. The soviets managed to achieve horizontal takeoff with their enterprise-equivalent for Buran, but only by strapping jet engines to it.

These points invalidate each other. The antimatter annihilates on the sail, providing forward thrust.

I think you'll find the human impact was over tens of thousands of years; our effect on the environment didn't just start the moment we invented the steam engine. Huge numbers of organisms were able to face the much less intense pressure of prehistoric humanity, but they didn't 'adapt quickly'-they died. The only ones that didn't were ones already able to survive in the human-effected environment (mostly small, rapidly-growing generalists ), or ones that were domesticated.

COSPAR isn't a UN body, and their requirements are not relevant to UN treaties.

Nobodies talking about human influence as in humans being generally super or whatever, people are talking about human influence as in the whole wiping out millions of species thing. Just look at what, say, australia was lie before and after humans showed up.

It's not going to be possible to just replace oxygen with something else in a process as complex as respiration; the only known animal that's been able to develop an anaerobic metabolism has it end after what is just the first step in the aerobic version, yielding roughly 1/16th the energy. You're going to run into this kind of problem a lot if you focus speculation on more derived organisms; the more complex and differentiated something is biologically, the more constrained it is. EDIT: In other words, basically what Awaras said...

Have you considered it's actually a 'fundamental limitation' of the question? As it is it's meaningless, for all the reasons people have already given.

In that case 'speculate the current stage of evolution' might be a better question, given the effects of humans on fauna pretty much everywhere on the planet.