Jump to content

Kryten

Members
 View Profile  See their activity

  • Posts

    5,249

  • Joined

  • Last visited

 Content Type 

Everything posted by Kryten

  1. Kryten
    LEO also isn't too fair a comparison; DIVH was designed and is typically used for high-energy orbits like direct GEO insertion, at which it would handily outperform F9.
  2. Kryten
    NASA is buying crew launches as a service, they're not likely to decree no reuse. They're already allowing Dragon pressure vessel reuse for CRS.
  3. Kryten
    SpaceX's own figures for near-future savings from reuse are 30%, you've got it at 90%.
  4. Kryten
    Nope. It's clearly a long exposure/contrast-stretched/both, just look how many stars there are and how bright the background colour is.
  5. Kryten
    Has SpaceX ever done anything at the time they initially announced they would?
  6. Kryten
    It means they do have to set up separate ullage thruster systems. Plus, the start-up sequence for the original engines is pretty slow (as you can see at liftoff), they'd lose quite a lot of velocity if they tried to do it after staging.
  7. Kryten
    I'm not talking about them, for the third bloody time. That's use of sulphate as terminal electron acceptor, I'm talking about sulphur-oxidising bacteria that use oxygen as terminal electron acceptor. Look, here's a fully open-access and pretty clearly-written article on exactly how the relationship between giant tubeworms and their symbiotes works. Please at least try to read it before asking more questions.
  8. Kryten
    I could, but then you'd find a whole bunch of other 'problems' and it'd be a waste of my time. You realise I'm describing real animals here? You're acting like giant tubewroms and co. and the basis for their metabolism cannot exist, when they demonstrably do. This is not a hypothetical scenario that I need to defend, and there's plenty of literature available on how they work.
  9. Kryten
    And for the second bloody time, I'm not talking about sulphur as an electron acceptor, but as an energy source. The organisms I'm talking about still use oxygen as the final electron acceptor.
  10. Kryten
    It's irrelevant if you're looking at the wrong chemical processes, which you are.
  11. Kryten
    I've snipped the rest of this post because it's based on this premise, which is fundamentally wrong. I'm not talking about hydrogen sulphide as a replacement for oxygen as an electron acceptor, or hydrogen sulphide as a solvent, just hydrogen sulphide as an energy source.
  12. Kryten
    That's true for most deep-sea areas, but hydrogen sulfide-rich vents provide a pretty comfortable habitat for chemosynthetic micro-organisms, to the extent they have macro-scale symbionts, like the famous geothermal tube worms or yeti crabs. You get similar results at sites where hydrocarbon reservoirs are leak into the ocean (cold seeps), except with the chemosynthetic organisms using methane.
  13. Kryten
    SpaceNews has some more details about the agreement; http://spacenews.com/spacex-announces-plans-for-dragon-mission-to-mars/ notably there's a post-mission review just 60 days after landing. That should answer how this thing is intended to survive on Mars long term; it isn't.
  14. Kryten
    Unfunded space act agreement in other words. Be interesting to see if the milestones for that reach the public.
  15. Kryten
    That's not how interplanetary is usually defined. There is some argument over whether moon missions count, but nobody says e.g. New Horizons or Hayabusa aren't interplanetary.
  16. Kryten
    Depends how you define 'interplanetary', Luxspace have already done a lunar flyby and should have a lunar orbiter by the time this flies.
  17. Kryten
    That'd require an actual miracle in life-support technology. Humans aren't kerbals.
  18. Kryten
    Nobody has for most of the history of that thread, though. It'd be easier to just rename it to 'SpaceX general thread' or somesuch.
  19. Kryten
    'Cleared it's orbit' doesn't mean something has literally cleared out everything in it's orbit, it means it's the dominant object in the dyamics of it's part of the solar system. So no, trojan planets would not count under IAU rules, and the planets shepherding the trojans would definitely count. As for the rest of it, 'counter-planets' of similar masses would be inherently unstable, and it's not likely you could fit anything close to earth's mass in an earth-like orbit.
  20. Kryten
    SpaceX have optimised their rockets for lowest dry mass, in order for the reusability modifications to produce lower effects on performance. A side effect of that is they can have more structural margin before they get significant performance hits.
  21. Kryten
    There's nothing wrong with the treaty, at least this part of it; it's no different than having ships be registered to nations and having those nations be legally responsible for them. The regulatory issue is entirely on the US side.
  22. Kryten
    It's doubtful they could get this running as soon as the test launch. There's no legal framework in place for it right now; no government agency has the authority to authorise or supervise activity by a commercial entity beyond earth orbit, as would be required by the outer space treaty.
  23. Kryten
    That'd be 10g/cubic centimetre, they'd have to be only slightly less dense than solid lead.
  24. Kryten
    Cubesast units are between 1 and 1.33kg.
  25. Kryten
    They were also paid to develop Dragon 1 and F9 through COTS, and they got funding to develop Falcon 1 through the DARPA FALCON programme.
×
×
  • Create New...