Chewy62

awww... weather hold.

working here, 3min to launch.

SpaceX hasn't done any planetary exploration yet because nobody has contracted them to do it yet, and Elon didn't have the spare funds and launch vehicle to do it himself until now. SpaceX has had quite a bit of success designing and building rockets that have better performance per dollar than the competition. ULA and Arianespace are scrambling around trying to figure out what to do once they have been priced out of the commercial market. DoD is drooling over the size of spy sat they will be able to launch with FH. Customers are already asking to be to be the first to launch on a reused F9, probably sometime this fall. BFR will be revealed in September. And the great thing is that NASA will be able to spend more on science once they arent shelling out hundreds of millions for ULA flights. ULA and Arianespace will survive as guaranteed access to space for their governments, but they will have a hard time convincing commercial customers to pay their prices.

You're about to get hit by a ton of rounds.

If we're going back to ancient times using a manned pilot is probably going to be easier than making a computer that's able to pilot the rocket while also being light weight.

You could get Ancient Greeks to build a rocket, but you would have to bring back so much technology and build so much infrastructure it would make their technology level that of at least WWII era industrial countries.

Are we allowed to take anything back with us?

The Venture Star from Avatar is probably one of the most realistic interstellar ships ive ever seen, film or otherwise. Laser power out, antimatter to slow down at the destination. Antimatter back out, lasers to slow down at home. Having said that, the rest of that movie made no damn sense.

This is the saddest hype train thread i've ever read. Not one sentence in all caps.

If this is the only game that that pc will be playing, you just threw a lot of money out the window.

The arc reactor is basically a free energy device, so the whole thing is really impossible. A gundam-sized suit would actually be easier to make.

If mars is incapable of sustaining life, then all of the above are equally unsuitable. Melting the polar caps on mars could at least theoretically give you at least about a third of Earth's atmospheric surface pressure, but almost entirely CO2. Genetically engineered plants and extremophiles could potentially thrive as well as produce oxygen for colonists and to further increase the atmospheric pressure. Titan is way too cold. Wiki says the surface temp is 94K, which is basically cryogenic. It just wont be realistic unless you literally move it closer to the Sun.

I wonder what the best way to get the material back to earth would be. We wont have any sort of orbital construction advanced enough to make rocket components for a very long time. I'm thinking of nuclear/ion shuttles that would position decent sized chunks into LEO, where they would receive a disposable propulsion module and heatshield for deorbiting/reentry. This assumes that we can deorbit these things without them breaking up. Figure your "landing" site is in someplace like Nevada where it can fall harmlessly and be picked up by truck to be taken to a processing facility. Whats the biggest "chunk" of material this would be possible with?

Who's gonna pay to have all of the world's ports raised to accommodate rising sea levels? What will happen when all of our coral reefs die off? Who's going to take in all the refugees from the Persian Gulf when its constantly 125 degrees in the summer? What about possible loss of strength in the gulf stream, leading to the cooling of Europe? Just kidding! This is of little importance when we can grow crops in Siberia!

Gotta be careful not to flood the market with your newfound metals. Falling prices on precious metals could put you out of business quickly. Its already happening right now. http://www.infomine.com/investment/precious-metals/

ITT : in this thread WTC : World trade center. Skyscrapers are very safe buildings. A cavern on mars could be lined with "concrete" and layers of plastic for an airtight seal. radiation will be nearly nonexistent save for naturally occuring isotopes in the soil. At the 50km range the base is deep inside the cloud deck, where acid concentrations are much higher than the atmosphere by itself. Constant exposure to the clouds will require the exterior to be made of nonreactive material. Visibility will be very bad, so landing will need to be handled by robots. Horizontal landing seems like it might be your best bet, but needs a big runway or arresting gear to happen. Ideally i think that an electric helicopter setup is going to be the safest way to land in as small of an area as possible, while also being able to save itself in the event of a go-around. the bad part will be that a capsule with a huge battery and rotor is going to be heavy.

ITT: people try to convince you that a airship the size of an aircraft carrier is safer than a building. Especially comparing it to the WTC, which was hit by a freaking plane and still did not collapse immediately. How will you solve the problem of sulfuric acid? I'm assuming things coming through the airlock will need to be washed down before they can come inside, and the exterior will need to be free of anything that is reactive with it. The landing craft will need to have serious crossrange in case the platform drifts in the wind. Nevermind the fact you only get one try to land, otherwise you will fall to your death. Or a failure of the arresting cable.