icefire

I still don\'t see the point in a fully powered landing on Earth, with its thick atmosphere you would think having a parachute as well as retro rockets would be more efficient, like the Soyuz landings. Only softer...

Just 150km and 7700 m/s more and he would have gotten into a stable orbit!

<stupid ai core reference here>

This award winning design was greatly praised by Kerbal engineers worldwide for its cheap price and simplicity. It was only after they had built it and carted it to the launch pad that they realized the rocket would require fuel to actually go anywhere.

The final mission to the HST would have been to bring it back to Earth actually, it was planned right up until Bush canceled the shuttle program. That\'s implying that both programs had the money to fund such vehicles Protip: They didn\'t.

Even with unlimited funding I doubt the shuttle would have been taken out of LEO. Wings are only good for one thing: entry and landing. Hauling all that extra weight outside of Earth orbit seems impractical to me. But even if you ignore that fact you\'re faced with another one, It has only one landing option: horizontal flight. Meaning the Moon is out, as well as Mars, the atmosphere is too thin for any sane landing speeds. That leaves Venus and Titan, and that\'s not even putting into account on how to get BACK. Combine that with the shuttles pretty much zilch delta V budget once in orbit and a limited flight time (16 days or something like that) and you have a ship that is only good for one thing; Earth orbit. Not entirely true, it proved itself a great station builder. It\'s large payload capacity and crew size allowed you to send up a module and any specialists required to install it. The ISS would probably have been much more difficult to build (and possibly much smaller) had the shuttle never existed. It\'s capability to bring payloads BACK from orbit was also a unique feature of the shuttle, albeit one that was never fully taken advantage of. The servicing missions such as those done on the hubble telescope would also have been impossible without it. And the reusable space plane concept in general provides far more advantages than disadvantages if done correctly. I just think NASA aimed too high with the Shuttle, if they had gone in a more modest direction, perhaps something like the Star Clipper, it might have proved more successful.

And both of them caused by the parallel staging system it uses. And though plenty of people will try to argue that the Shuttle borders on insanity for lacking an escape mechanism, they fail to take note that in both accidents such a system would have proven useless given the situation anyway. Still, to this day it remains the deadliest spacecraft to ever fly due to its large crew size.

Pluto is a dwarf planet, not a planetoid, and YES the terms ARE different.

until recently >_>

This isn\'t just some isolated incident from a random experiment, they\'ve been working on it for 3 years. That\'s three years with the same results, and an error margin of only 10 billionths of a second. Consistently. 'When you get such a result you want to make sure you made no mistakes, that there are no nasty things going on you didn\'t think of. We spent months and months doing checks and we have not been able to find any errors.' They haven\'t claimed anything so far, and have already organized experiments at T2K and MINOS to try and replicate the results, so we\'ll wait and see.

http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/09/22/us-science-light-idUSTRE78L4FH20110922 Not sure how I feel about this...

Depends on solar activity but yeah pretty much.

Second attempt, 90,249

http://i.imgur.com/4PXI3.png Ended up landing in the desert north of the launchpad. There were no survivors.

lol with an sma of 8600km and ecc of .2 you can bet that thing is going to be up there for a looooong time

Remember to bring your baseball mit! http://www.n2yo.com/?s=21701

The camera looks like it has its exposure shot through the roof, the dark side of a planet is not that bright to the human eye no matter how you look at it. That being said I'm also not sure if the glow would be that visible...

Politics

I think he was speaking with a crewed launch in mind...

Would you really need all the science modules the ISS has to go to mars? Sounds like a whole lot of dead weight to me...

I would love to see you list out some pros and cons (perhaps comparatively) of rockets like the Proton, Atlas, or Titan rockets.

Why are they using the RS-25's for the first stage? Better off just modifying an RS-68 to make it man rated. Twice the thrust with half the complexity. Could probably ditch the SRB's too if they did...

Space Shuttle: Pros: It's manned and reusable Cons: Everything else Saturn V: Pros: Payload capacity Cons: Price Soyuz: Pros: Its dependable Cons: It's not dependable anymore lolol Shenzhou: Pros: It's a Soyuz ripoff Cons: It's a Soyuz ripoff N1: Pros: It's big Cons: It has a 100% failure rate.

why are you still lking onyou must not haveathingtodo