sneakeypete

Pretty cost effective for what your doing (and what most companies can do once they\'re up there. We all use satellites. a lot) gotta love one quote from that site Its a firetrucking rumor buddy... not proof. Seriously, i put odds that this won\'t happen.

You sound like you\'d like the numbers part of letters and numbers

They\'d probably hand it to most cars on a track though, just due to the rigid chassis and stiff suspension (guess you\'d want the upper spec version though). They might not have straight line speed, so yeah they\'re not a great car for rolling starts at 80k\'s, but the fact that they can hold so much speed through corners gives them a huge advantage. Oh and someones Honda just clocked up 1 million km supposedly.

So we should kill everyone who rices up their civic...? i could live with that... Not that civics are in any way crap cars to start with.

ding ding ding, we have a winner! on the topic of space based solar panels... i honestly can\'t see it being particularly feasible for a while yet. The cost of getting them into orbit and the cost+losses of beaming energy back means that ground based panels have a lot of advantage. Not to mention they\'re easier to service. And the whole microwave transmission fear that people will have.

that 'article' isn\'t what i\'d have expected from RPS....pure and utter bile.

Had to laugh at someone today on a news outlet suggesting using the X37 space plane to deliver cargo to the ISS. almost as if he was saying, 'yes there\'s Russian and European methods of getting cargo up there... and this carries a fraction of their payload... but its made in the USA!' Also, to throw a cat amongst the pigeons: will we have a SSTO space plane this century?

Then do it for a stable orbit then if you want a challange

One of their more recent single stage rockets has hit 840 feet, and they plan to add boosters. pretty neat stuff.

I haven\'t heard any space agency say that, just some small groups. Can\'t see anyone ever getting funding for that.

Hopefully someone in engineering has done some calculations for this... ;P Still, its the sort of technology that will be needed if we ever want to go to mars. We always hear lots about getting to mars, but as yet i\'ve not seen any proposal of how to return to earth. In the end your going to need to be able to land a rocket upright at the least (and then refuel it on planet) or even land a rocket that\'s fully capable of escaping the martian atmosphere, to get home.

Most of what you mention are bugs, not features. bugs that are fixed in 1.9 Honestly i\'m of the opposite opinion, if people weren\'t whining for a new update as much maybe he wouldn\'t need to release them with half finished features (yes that\'s probably a reality of making a commercial game of course)

Doesn\'t matter how you get there, so yes! (though i suppose you could be silly and thrust upto 100000m/s or something) My best so far is 38400m, transfering in to a 39000m orbit from 4.2Mm orbit. Not trying anymore until we get time compression.

Actually i\'d argue that 10km/s is quite a challenge for normal parts.

Probably is ;P

Well that's what we're talking about here, what i've been reading are saying 100-130ish for the SLS. Yes, if you choose 25-50 it becomes quite economical, due to the fact there is demand for that payload. However again, we were never talking about that. My point is, why the SLS instead of say, two falcon heavies?

Yes. and you can thrust on your way back in before you hit the 70000m limit aswell to get yourself even more speed if you like. I might have another go at this thisarvo and aim for a 50000m pass from 600000m Edit: Aimed for a transfer orbit of 45000m from an altitude of 516000. Made it back into space from 44000m this time, though once it was below the 50000m mark speed was starting to bleed off while still descending. Will see what happens on the next time around with this flight.

Um, can you point out to me the 100t+ to orbit large rockets which actually have realized the cheap cost per kg? Like i said, politics and bureaucracy gets in the way of engineering all the time, gotta learn to deal with it though.

Now that we've got a more gradual atmosphere and new aerodynamics model is much more possible to not actually be drawn in as you pass through, so i propose this challange: Without any thrusting below an altitude of 70000m (which is near the new atmospheric boundary supposedly), how low can you have your command pod (or rocket, so long as its not thrusting) get to the ground but still have enough energy to return to that 70000m mark? Starting off with my first attempt, from a circular orbit of 300000 i set a transfer to ~57500. Lowest altitude was at And i managed to easily get back to the edge of the atmosphere, and keep on going, enough infact to return to a distance of ~282000m before going in for another go (ongoing) I think that getting down to 50000 from an orbit of 600000-700000 and getting back up again would probably be possible, and with gratuitous amounts of thrusting before the 70000 limit you'd probably be able to get even lower. Second pass through from 280000 got down to 56870. Get the impression that this could take 5-6 goes to finally get stuck.

I wasn't being particularly serious with that comment

How long was the turn around times on the shuttle pre accident era?

Which we don't, and I still wouldn't yet put good money on this rocket ever getting to the pad (but would be pleasantly surprised if it did) And, sure, a single large rocket, rocket vs rocket, might be the way to go, but I think once you take all the bureaucracy and politics into it (and, unfortunately, those are things that always need to be taken into account), maybe not Oh well just tether up a few of those resupply pods to it, add some boosters and away she goes ;P

On that point, what is with the focus on Single rocket to the moon/mars etc? Why can't NASA just use say, one of the regular heavy lift rockets to assemble a craft in orbit (say at the ISS) then use a soyuz (or spacex if they get that far) to ferry the astronaughts up. Heck, you could even make the craft a reusable one minus the crew reentry pod.. Wait, why don't we just send the ISS to mars?

The internet in general is a large place, but the subset who hangs around indie games like this, and minecraft (to an extent) is pretty small.

Well, they may choose to use the existing engines while they develop new ones to try get the launches happening earlier, perhaps. News here mentioned something about a testing program, they're not launching the full sized thing in 2017, though i didn't catch what bits they'd cut out at first.