Kryten

That wouldn't be an issue with a high-altitude craft, but then you run into the issue of working out how the heck you make something float when it's already in the lightest possible gas at low pressure.

http://www.redbullstratos.com/live/ myself

He's already jumped, there's a 3 or 4 minute lag.

It's going to take a heck of a long time to develop, though. India have had a program to produce thorium reactors running since the 60's, and they don't expect to be making full use of them by 2040-at least. These are basically standard reactors with throium instead of plutonium or uranium as well, turning it into an LFTR would take even longer.

Why do you assume we're talking about the US here? Look around you; what countries do you think would actually launch one of these things? The three major candidates are Russia, China and the US, all pushing forward in both space and nuclear power. The US is clearly a no-go for this tech, due to typical nuclear hysteria. China are very optimistic about nuclear power, just look at the rate they're building plants (26 right now); but even in their vaguest predictions they have no aims in space beyond simply going to the Moon, rendering the technology essentially a waste of money. Russia are also very optimistic about nuclear power, they're planning on building eleven in the near future, and are also moving forward rapidly in space, thanks to all of the oil money that's been rolling in for the past decade, and they have big plans; they are the only nation with real Mars plan, for example. They're also the nation with eleven reactors identical to the one at Chernobyl still running, the one building insanely vulnerable floating power plants, and the one that's already splattered a country with lethally radioactive debris from a de-orbiting nuclear reactor.

Space reactors can't really be compared to land based power plants in that manner, for a number of reasons. One of the major lessons learnt from those incidents was the need for proper containment, in these case meaning 3+ metres of reinforced concrete; something which clearly can't be used on a spaceborne reactor. The same is true for most other safety improvements, like redundant cooling system or most automatic shutdown systems; and then there's the fact that a land-based power plant is unlikely to have to handle re-entry, something which has happened to actual space-based reactors three times already, and would have had serious consequences with the higher powered reactor needed for an NTR. The reactor itself also wouldn't be particularly comparable to a power station either, due to the massive power density required; it would be better compared to the reactors on submarines, which have a habit of failing spectacularly and fatally.

One of the major issues with NTRs is restriction on weapons-grade material; to make a reactor small but powerful enough to be useful in space, you need fuel more highly refined than most nuclear weapon cores. Plus there's the pretty big problem where no rocket big enough to launch one and a reasonable payload for it has existed for 40 years.

Jet streams are restricted to pretty narrow bands, there aren't (or shouldn't be) any that far south at this time of year. Apparently we are probably looking at a retry on Thursday.

Isn't lithium deuteride the stuff they've been using for fusion bombs for the past 50 years? EDIT: Yep, would have been in the news around when a certain mr. Roddenberry was thinking of ideas for a TV show. Funny that... On topic, on closer inspection this does seem to basically be a continuously detonating fusion bomb. Powerful certainly, but I'm not sure how safe it could ever be.

They do have more flights with the Merlin-C engines planned, because some customers were a bit antsy about the concept of their payloads being lifted on essentially untested engines.

Oh heck, I thought the launch was on Tuesday for some reason. Thanks for this thread, I nearly missed history in the making.

Are any of the parts that you'd made for the next versions of Probodobodyne and SE 2 ready to release?

The hardest part\'s going to be the walk. The Kerbal\'s Munwalk doesn\'t look like their normal walk slowed down, it looks like...a salamander trying to walk bipedally or something.

As was predicted, the Chinese are winning by a big margin, with nine golds compared with the US\' five, and the three of the next competitors. Rather unexpectedly though, North Korea is beating basically everyone after those two, including Russia and the host nation (well, that last one\'s not too surprising).

Am I the only one who finds the early battles much, much more fun than late tier stuff?

It does, though it\'s a bit out of scale now. You can paste rescaleFactor = 2.5 into all of the part.cfgs to bring it to the right size, though all of the values would need adjusting.

He might have responded badly because you regurgitated some arguments you clearly don\'t understand from a creationist website somewhere.

There is actually a bit of that, but it\'s just due simple genetics. People of the same race are likely to be more similar to each other genetically than they would be to people of a different race (not too much, but enough to factor into something like this), which means higher chance of matching organs.

It doesn\'t really say \'cruise liner\' to me to be honest, there\'s almost no windows, very few balconies, and essentially no outside space.

Bear in mind that he\'s in northern ireland. The laws about explosives aren\'t really going to be anything like american ones.

The difference between high explosives (like semtex) and other explosives (like gunpowder) can basically be summed up as this; if you put a low explosive into a tube with one end open, the pressure produced will just come out of the tube (and you\'ve got a rocket). If you put a high explosive into a tube, open ended or not, it\'ll explode.

Maybe. If it isn\'t massively light polluted where you are.

Thermite doesn\'t produce much gas, just heat. You\'d end up with a pool of molten metal, still firmly placed on the launch pad.

Right, it\'s back up. When you get on, would everyone please go into their profile, go to modify profile; personal messaging, and turn off the email notifications, because they might well be the root cause of this.

I think so? I got 74, and he didn\'t say anything about me just scraping in or anything like that.