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Kryten

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  1. Kryten
    Also, consider what would happen if launches to the ISS were similar to your example, with intercept at initial apogee; if they lost control of the vehicle at separation, as happened to Progress not too long ago, the station would be in considerable danger. Current procedures allow for vehicles to be thoroughly checked tested on orbit well before they're on any kind of intercept course, considerably reducing this kind of risk.
  2. Kryten
    It's not as if fog is that unusual in coastal southern california, ice buildup just hasn't been a major constraint for previous rockets.
  3. Kryten
    Probably scavengers. I know there are plenty of Buran heat shield tiles that keep cropping up on Ebay with questionable provenance.
  4. Kryten
    I think that's mostly bird crap.
  5. Kryten
    Was a monopropellant mix of acetylene and nitrous oxide.
  6. Kryten
    That's not 'fine for most LEO applications', that's 'fine for a subset of crewed LEO applications'; a tiny niche. Even X-37 stays up too long for it to be a practical combination.
  7. Kryten
    They want to do it eventually, but it's not really a plan as such right now. More of an aspiration.
  8. Kryten
    SpaceX have stated F9 can do full GEO missions, and the Soviets demonstrated loiter times of over a week for their similar Blok D stage in the 60s.
  9. Kryten
    The announcement has started; http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/nasatv/#media EDIT: Triple reward; OrbATK, SNC, SpaceX. At least six missions each.
  10. Kryten
    Which is a tiny, tiny niche. It's not really worth developing a whole propulsion technology for.
  11. Kryten
    Andy Pasztor at WSJ is reporting that SNC have part of the contract award. The article is behind a paywall, but if you google the title and access it through there you can bypass it.
  12. Kryten
    Americaspace are generally unreliable, their writing is sloppy at best.
  13. Kryten
    With no official confirmation with one day to go, looks like this isn't happening yet. Maybe next week.
  14. Kryten
    Peroxide/Kerosene is used on the upper stage of CZ-6; presumably as they didn't want to deal with LOX on a relatively small orbital adjustment stage, and for synergy with CZ-6's peroxide roll thrusters and SAST's work on peroxide/kerosene upper stages.
  15. Kryten
    Induced radioactivity is mostly from neutrons, which aren't a significant component of solar or cosmic radiation. There's no reason to expect martian soil to be much more radioactive than earth soil.
  16. Kryten
    Again, this matches the second stage, not the Fregat third stage. Even if it was from Fregat, the fuels are pretty volatile and would be unlikely to survive re-entry.
  17. Kryten
    Can somebody just make an 'air habitats at Venus thread' so AngelLestat can stop derailing every thread with a vague link to the inner solar system?
  18. Kryten
    Small tanks like this regularly survive re-entry, and there are no failed launches which are anything like plausible matches. The location and time matches with the re-entry of the Zenit second stage from the Elektro-L launch last month, as does sighting of a re-entry from Thailand not long before these were found.
  19. Kryten
    Well, for a start space co-operation as the Chinese are trying to go for is not remotely comparable to purchasing rides from a commercial american entity; they want to share the costs to get a more ambitious programme, not spend money to replicate capability they already have. Same applies for most other agencies. For another thing, there is no way Bigelow would make any kind of deal with China. This is a man who genuinely thinks China is going to claim the moon, and that this would be, and this is a direct quote, 'something the United States would not recover from for hundreds of years'. This isn't just a minor detail, he gives this is a big reason he funds space activites.
  20. Kryten
    The soviets had low reliability, so generally sent two identical spacecraft (sometimes three) per window; and they had a policy of launching every window. For the 60s and 70s there's not much difference in pace between venus, mars and lunar efforts (e.g. 4 mars mission launches in 1973, more than any venus window), but by the eighties they'd settled into mostly venus due to a combination of better historical reliability and their not having many 'firsts' to gain from mars after the success of the viking programme.
  21. Kryten
    They're not switching to kerolox for soyuz-5 because RG-1 is running out, they're switching because that lets them switch to autogenous pressurisation (for lower complexity of operations, so lower cost), full-flow staged combustion engines (so higher performance), and delivers the maximum possible payload weight relative to GLOW (so can loft large payloads within weight limits of existing soyuz pads).
  22. Kryten
    RD-180, NK-33, and RD-181 have all burned both RP-1 and RG-1 without modification, we can safely assume they're practically identical.
  23. Kryten
    Blue were building their own engines well before the SLS program started. They were flying a vehicle with them nearly ten years ago.
  24. Kryten
    There's already an LC-39C . Leaving that aside, NASA is very unlikely to get funding for a second LC-39A/B class pad any time soon, even with an accident; there's just no compelling case for it. They only need it every 18 months or so anyway, and don't need to beat the russians with it this time.
  25. Kryten
    Manual dockings and re-dockings have been pretty common for Soyuz and Progress (the latter through the remote control TORU unit), as the automated docking system isn't all that reliable. Most infamously, Mir was hit by a Progress during a test of the TORU unit, and one of the modules permanently depressurised.
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