DerekL1963

That's the thing - it's a rare thing that you actually need to shut them off. Generally, just stopping them from providing net thrust is sufficient - and while that's non-trivial, it's old tech. The real reason why solids are considered unsafe (by professionals) isn't that you can't neatly shut them off, it's that they pretty much have only one failure mode - BOOM! Worse yet, almost never do they give any indication that they're about to self disassemble.

A friend of mine, a practicing aerospace engineer working on the ISS at the time, once estimated that modern electrical and electronics systems alone would shave almost 20% off the dry mass of the CSM. (And no, I don't recall offhand encountering anything on the FDAI. And yes, most of what most people 'know' about Apollo is wrong (and it's worse when it comes to the Shuttle).)

Which is not the same thing as being able to fly unmanned. No, they couldn't - the limiting factor was the supply of reactants for the fuel cells, and there's no way to replenish those on orbit. The big problem was the OMS pods, their heaters had to kept powered on to prevent the fuel from freezing in order to maintain RCS capability (for rescue rendezvous). When you actually read the report (as I have), rather than selectively quoting the parts that agree with you... here wasn't a Shuttle close to ready. There was a shuttle that with great effort and exceptional luck might have been able to be made ready. You'll also find that rescue options required very early detection of the extent of the damage and virtually no problems, interruptions, or issues in the launch preparations, countdown, and flight. I.E., as has been the case all along, you're oversimplifying to the point of absolute absurdity. ("F6.4-2 If Program managers were able to unequivocally determine before Flight Day Seven that there was potentially catastrophic damage to the left wing, accelerated processing of Atlantis might have provided a window in which Atlantis could rendezvous with Columbia before Columbiaʼs limited consumables ran out." - right on the next page of the report.) Nobody knowledgeable takes the paragraph you quote without the grain of salt encapsulated in that "might".

Go into Joolian orbit, raise your apoapsis to near Val, circularize, then do a Hohmann transfer to Val.

He didn't beat you to anything - because neither of you have shown the current version is capable of flying unmanned. And even if it were, there simply aren't laying around to conduct a rescue. And even if there were, Columbia didn't have a docking system. (Nor did Columbia have enough EVA suits.) On a side note, yes. At an elementary school level, a Progress is a Soyuz capsule without a heatshield. In reality, the two are *very* different. That one can do it unmanned says nothing about the ability of the other to do it. Give it up.

If you're harnessing the output of the F-1 directly, I'd do it in several stages... MHD, then maybe a gas turbine, then possibly a high temp/pressure heat exhanger (Sodium), then a low pressure one... But I doubt you'd ever be able to recover the full (theoretical) energy. Plus, will the overall reaction yield net power given the energy required to produce the LOX?

It's only consequence free if you have a magic method of transporting the materials.... otherwise, one of the consequences varies with the launch method. Rockets don't produce much pollution per annum - but a fair proportion of what they do produce gets dumped into the upper atmosphere, particularly the ozone layer.

Frankly, I'm not aware of any. (Partly because I quit reading 'introductory' level material twenty plus years ago.)

Apollo was essentially cancelled when the budget was gutted and hardware production capped - in 1965/67. Few people realize that by 1969 Apollo was already running on fumes. (Fewer people realize the contracts for the final round of studies for the Shuttle, the ones that would solidify the configuration chosen in 1972, were signed while Apollo 11 was en-route to the Moon.) And those who complain of politics and fickle public opinion destroyed Apollo should remember that politics and fickle public opinion created Apollo in the first place. There's a school of thought among space historians that holds, not without some merit based on available documentation, that we really really owe the Apollo program we got not to Kennedy - but to Oswald. Kennedy was already thinking of ways to scale back the expensive beast and to move towards cooperation in space rather than competition - but those plans died with him in Dallas. Instead LBJ seized on the opportunity to push Apollo as Kennedy's monument.

Where do you get this stuff? Let's count the ways you're wrong: - Soyuz has three seats, but requires two (trained) crew. You do the math on how many passenger seats that leaves available per Soyuz flight. - Soyuz isn't Progress, any more than Progress is Soyuz. Soyuz has no ability to fly unmanned.

There were a whole raftload of alternative plans - but in the end, LOR was chosen because it was the cheapest and most technically feasible.

Let's add up the ways your wrong... - Soyuz can't reach the orbit the Columbia was in without dropping spent stages on China. (That's why ISS is in the insane high inclination orbit it's in.) The crew would be long dead before China let *that* happen. - Columbia didn't carry a docking module. - Soyuz can only carry one passenger... and they're built pretty much on demand. The crew would be long dead before a seventh Soyuz could arrive.

Well, not really. Doing it that way doubles the programmatic risk because you now have twice as many launches. It also considerably increases the cost because you have twice as many launches and two different launchers. (Remember the Shuttle only costs about $150-200 million to launch.*) It also has major impacts on payload design, mostly increasing dead weight because they now how to provide their own maneuvering, support, and control systems. It impacts scheduling because now you have to have two launches salvoed in close order so as to deliver the assembly crew to the payload. Etc... etc... TANSTAAFL. Well, no. You're comparing apples-to-oranges here... A notional Shuttle type/derived launcher without downmass capacity won't put 100 tons into ISS orbit - more like 35 to 45. The ISS is in a high inclination orbit, which eats heavily into your cargo capacity. * That's the cost to add a flight to the manifest.

For certain very small values of "SOME". Last time I did some BOTE figuring, the "Reality Show In Space" show would have to be a hit on the level of... well pretty much no TV show ever to raise even a small fraction of the cost. You'd have to produce the equivalent of an Avatar or a Titanic every year for the better part of a decade to pay for the mission, and TV shows don't gross nearly that much.

No, we could not have reasonably launched a rescue mission - there was no Shuttle even close to ready. Nor could it have gone to ISS. Umm... it's not quite so simple as that. People seem to forget that Morton Thiokol had been telling NASA for years that the O-ring was safe. (Despite ongoing problems caused by joint rotation which arose from a faulty joint design. O-ring failure was a symptom, not the cause.) NASA was understandably confused when they changed their tune and recommended against launching - but couldn't actually provide a rationale for the change. You couldn't be more wrong if you tried. While the military requirements did set the final dimensions of the wing, the Shuttle had already more-or-less reached a configuration not too far from the one actually flown. Not only did wings feature in the design from very early on, NASA kept pushing for increasing cross range because it opened up launch abort opportunities and widened the landing windows. What screwed up the Shuttle wasn't the military, it was mission creep. The Shuttle was originally intended to shuttle - shuttling crew and light cargo back and forth between the ground and a Saturn V launched space station. When that station was cancelled, the Shuttle began it's inexorable transformation into an all-in-one space truck... because otherwise it had no justification for existing. That transformation vastly increased it's complexity and cost - leading to NASA pleading with the DoD for support to avert cancellation.

The only way to get even relatively clean is an airburst high enough that no material from the ground is sucked up into the fireball. The problem there is that you give up a lot of your damage potential that way. (I.E. hard targets are out of the question.)

Hard to diagnose the problem without knowing you MechJeb version and a picture or a .craft file of the rocket in question.

That's a combination of old and new data caused by the terrain update in .21, so you need to clear out the old. Go into your mapsat settings (under Kerbalpedia) and make sure the option to update hilo.dat is enabled, then quit out of the game and go into the plugin data folder (ISA/Plugin/PluginData/ISA_Mapsat) and delete hilo.dat and any existing map files (the .PNG files). Restart the game and your maps should be normal.

Which brings you right up against the chicken-and-egg issue in my earlier reply. How are you going to hit those economies of scale when you're going broke (in the beginning, repeatedly) competing with cheap transport and existing mining capacity from earth? "Economy of scale" isn't (as it is often used in these discussions) a magic spell or a cargo cult phrase that can be invoked to bring any desired outcome into being. It's a real phenomena with necessary pre conditions. Eventually, yes - but first you have to get past the "and here magic happens" step.

No, wrong.

What the issue is should be easily discernible. Note the position of the lander and the targeted landing position. Note the speed displayed on the eight ball, which indicates that the vehicles is landed. And remember that once you land, the landing selection is cleared, Or to put it in text: Mechjeb's landing autopilot is borked (and has been since .20). I selected a target, hit "land at target", and it landed me 21km from the commanded landing location. What it does on Duna is even worse.

In other words, they're not profitable to mine and you're just waffling. No, I didn't forget it - because it's well covered by both of my previous statements. Or I'll just say it now, there is no processed material you wouldn't go stone broke hauling back to Earth. The "what happens if it stays on orbit" part is already adequately covered. And ecat, folks have been publishing those charts since the 1960's - we've been supposed to have run out of all kinds of materials a dozen times or more since I was a kid in the 70's.

Seriously... autolanding, even in the latest dev build, is borked beyond belief.

Mining what? There's not one single naturally occurring material on Earth that you wouldn't go stone broke mining in space and returning to Earth. And selling it to who? By the time you've got enough space infrastructure generating enough economic activity to start thinking about buying stuff mined in space... your notional space miners are competing against cheap transport from the surface. (Because without cheap transport, you'll never have that extensive infrastructure in the first place.) No, the problem is, people don't do the math and don't think about the economics. They just repeat cargo cult phrases.

A few hundred pounds out of what is probably tens of tons or more is not significant. Nope, it's an apt one because it illustrates the principle that "as light as possible does not mean featherweight". It's apt because the same principle applies even though it's as far from a spacecraft as possible. The mind boggles that you type such a statement with a straight face - you honestly think a 16m diameter centrifuge mounting tons of equipment would be featherweight because it never deals with launch stresses? Did it never occur to you that tons of equipment at one G are going to tear a featherweight structure apart? I give up.