Kryten

Do you know what the line is? If it's yours, it's self awakening. If it's somebody elses it's indoctrination. That's it. The fact that no Rosicrusian order revealed themselves. We just had a few more of the masonic-type men-who-still-like-playing-dress-up-and-forming-secret-clubs.

You realise there never was a Christian Rosenkreuz, and the manifestos are proven forgeries, right? Most 'rosicruxian' groups have only the maifestos in common and have nothing to do with each other, there's very little consistency.

How could a projectile at anything like that speed hitting anything possibly not simply vapourise on impact?

How exactly is something the size of a space shuttle going to be able to carry nuclear engines (never mind all the other stuff) and still have room for essentially any fuel? And what the heck is an 'electrical charge blast'?

Isn't that likely a stylistic choice in at least some of those? Especially Blade Runner; sleek, thin screens might have been a good prediction, but they simply wouldn't have looked right in that context.

Zenits stopped being launched immediately after the soviets demonstrated digital return at high enough resolution. The only reason they were launched that frequently was the limited amount of film onboard, and quite limited orbital lifespans. I simply don't see how X-37 could carry a camera with military useful resolution, especially as the current definition of military useful apparently requires KH-11s the size of space station modules.

Russian engines still use fuel as the coolant, oxygen would eat straight through even their piping at those kind of temperatures. You frequently have 'film cooling' in addition to regenerative, where fuel is injected between the chamber wall and the actual area of combustion; this also leaves layers of protective soot on the wall. Film cooling has actually been shown to work with oxygen; a semi-amateur rocket group (think it was AA) made an engine, did some test firings which worked properly, then discovered it'd been plumbed to the test stand incorrectly...

X-37 is almost certainly intended as a testbed; stick some instruments on you want to use on the next satellite, give them a space soak and see how they do. There's no real need or desire for re-usable spy satellites, especially with the kind of resolution of instruments that could physically fit in the X-37. You already have a strategy to put a satellite in any position you want in a short period of time; waiting. That's the whole point of having multiple polar-orbiting sats, after all.

Anyone able to calculate the amount of antimatter needed to accelerate a starship of reasonable size to what is apparently well higher than 40% of C, and the theoretical limits of antimatter production efficiency. You can't just pull energy out of nowhere.

How could that much antimatter possibly be produced?

This, very much. But there's another factor; spaceflight costs involve a heck of a lot more than launch. Satellite operators operate (very roughly) on the 'rule of fifths'; a fifth of the budget for the satellite bus, a fifth for the rocket, a fifth for ground systems, a fifth for the payload, and the rest for various systems work (e.g. integration). If you somehow reduce launch costs to nothing at all, you've introduced the world to the clearly revolutionary potential of four-fifths current cost spaceflight.

And you think manned spaceflight for the sake of manned spaceflight is going to be anything other than an expensive jobs program? At this rate you're going to turn into Roscosmos.

It's being produced in quantities best measured in parts per billion, even close to the sources. Not really useful for a space program.

There is no interest budget. Look at Apollo; you had your precious PR, your footprints and flags, and the budget got cut to the bone.

Manned space flight is killing your agency. Congesspeople vote for the budgets they think are cost-effective, and putting people on Mars is pretty much universally agreed by them to not be. You've effectively fallen into the trap of becoming dependent on ridiculously expensive missions that either won't, or in the worst case shouldn't, ever happen. You've already had to cut out your actual PR, and actual planetary science is about to be completely gutted. NASA isn't going to produce anything other than debt if you keep this up.

They also insist on coming back. Bunch of moaners I say.

Are you suggesting that space projects that are already happening could actually come in ahead of schedule? Has that ever happened?

Yes, because working towards the latter goal ensures no missions will happen at all, and probably with good reason considering the enormity of the costs that would be involved. Might as well get some science out of it.

They can also not get launched. What you people seem to be missing is that the lower overall cost of the robotic missions means they can actually happen. Nobody is going to pay for another apollo without very good reasons that have absolutely nothing to do with scientific return, never mind a mars landing.

Because it had to test that everything was working properly. We're not in a hurry here. That article uses some pretty misleading comparisons. The most glaring example is that it compares an apollo-esque mission to mars with a single robotic sample return mission, saying that the crewed mission would bring back a lot more rocks. Except if you throw the same amount of actual money at it, you'd return a heck of a lot more rocks with robotic missions, due to not having to bring the squishy humans along. That's the main issue here. It might be somewhat more efficent for the moon I grant you that, but the advantages of not having life support or having to have abort options increase exponentially as you move further out.

That was derek sorry, misremembered. Still, at least he gave something quantifiable. A rover 'works' at one ten-thousandth the rate of a human, according to who? How is 'work' defined? What are you assuming the humans doing? It's not like they can continually take stereo images or hold APXS' still for a few weeks.

Why are you assuming the slow pace of rovers is due to them working slower, rather than simply scrutinising every tiny thing they come across? After all, Lunokhod 2 went further than Opportunity has in about a tenth of the time, by the metrics you seem to be using that means it was a better rover.

What's the point in being able to 'reassess' a sample return mission to something other than sample return? That'd require a failure in your return system, which means humans could only 'reassess' into one thing; a catastrophe. That's the other issue here, you can send robotic missions with a 30% failure chance and nobody cares, but humans have to have much less than that. It drives up cost even more than having to lug around life support, much larger return capsule, et.c. already do.

Because that'll be what the entire rover'd be built around doing. It's the entire point of the mission; identify an area with samples you want, send a lander, and select them very carefully. Not like there needs to be any hurry about it.

The sabatier reaction, combining hydrogen and carbon dioxide to get methane and water (which you then electrolyse and put back through the reactor). The hydrogen can either come from martian ice, or simply be sent (as it provides only a small proportion of the mass of the produced fuel).