DerekL1963

An average human being would have problems with that because placing one foot in precisely front of another is an unnatural act (yet, tightrope walkers do it all the time). In the same way, carrying a wide load is an unnatural act, made more difficult by all the joints involved and the flexibility of the human torso (yet people do it all the time). Seriously, apples and oranges.

I'm not entirely sure I buy that... It's a dedicated set of rails between the assembly building and the pad, so there's no obstructions that have to be cleared. So long as the load is balanced, sticking out a meter or so on each side shouldn't be a particular problem.

For a certain narrowly limited meaning of the words "get really good". My advice is to ignore the people who try to tell you how to play your game. It's your game. If mods rock your world, feel free. Don't let anyone else dictate your fun.

It's not that simple. Only one of the four failures can be directly tied to an engine failure - the second, in which a turbopump exploded. The first was a failure due to POGO, the third was a failure of the KORD control system (but the booster was likely already doomed even without KORD's intervention), the fourth could go either way... You could blame the fire caused by water hammer bursting pipes or the explosion of engine #4 (which may or may not have been caused by the water hammer). To be fair, and grossly off-topic, the B-52 is still flying because once (or more accurately, each time) the USAF decided on a replacement, it turned out to be too expensive/low performance/whatever to actually replace the B-52 and as a result was either cancelled or at best produced in limited numbers. And kind of back on topic, it's not clear to me how much of the current B-52's is actually original.... Between upgrades, modifications, overhauls, repairs, and routine maintenance, and awful lot has been replaced on any given aircraft.

I was just logging in to say that I'd found the correct quote to find you seem to have known it by heart. https://what-if.xkcd.com/141/

Reminds me of one of my favorite quotes from https://what-if.xkcd.com/ involving a human body being exposed to some massive amount electromagnetic energy..... Something like "At this level of exposure, you'll die. Not from anything in particular, you'll simply cease to exist as a collection of stable molecules".

That's a true statement, but obscures the fact that the current Soyuz rocket differs greatly from the original R-7 ICBM. The engines have been upgraded, the electronics have been upgraded, unlike the R-7 the Soyuz has a second stage, etc... etc... I does look kinda like the original if you squint and tilt your head just right, but that doesn't make it the original. Myself, I don't care to obscure facts. YMMV. The Soyuz launcher isn't an R-7, and the Russians aren't flying a fifty year old design. Those are the facts. You want to play semantic games, feel free. Having introduced the facts I have no further interest in games.

Honestly, I kept finding conflict problems with MFT (particularly with MJ)... and so I switched to Configurable Containers.

No, an SSTO isn't theoretically impossible. Just very, very difficult to accomplish affordably and with a useful payload in the real world (which is rather messier, more complicated, and less cooperative than the theoretical world).

Keep in mind that the current Soyuz launcher is a descendant of the R-7... The engine (among other things) has already been upgraded, multiple times. Or, to put it another way, the belief widely held in the space fandom community that "the Russians have flown the same design for over fifty years" is nonsense.

That's kind of my point. Thanks to Musk and Bezos we've gotten used to billionaires accomplishing amazing things by defying received wisdom and common sense. But what most folks may not realize is that no matter how much it seems so, neither has actually tried to defy the laws of physics. (Or economics and GAAP.) Allen is trying all three, at once.

0.o Stratolaunch *is* Paul Allen. And that's not what the article says, it says they're "considering" developing such a vehicle. Which I read as putting pressure on an as yet unknown potential partner - "if you don't do it, you'll miss out because we'll do it ourselves". Either that or Allen actually has finally lost it completely. On top of that, the notional specs of the proposed vehicle are (to put it mildly) mind boggling (and not in a good way). An unmanned space shuttle sized vehicle that's all but an SSTO capable of reaching ISS?

I'm not surprised at all. That capability comes at a steep cost, in the form of a very expensive one-of-a-kind aircraft. Amortizing that expense (including servicing the debt) significantly increases your launch costs... On top of that, total system performance is sharply limited by the carrying capacity of the aircraft. On top of that it's still not clear that there's a lot of demand for that kind of launch capability, in terms of throw-weight (which isn't impressive) or lack of limits. On the contrary - you're very tightly limited in geographical launch areas. They have to be within range of an airfield that can handle the aircraft and which will allow for the handling of several tons of low explosives (in the form of solid fuel). Plus you need the ability to support the payload, or the payloads have to be self supporting or require little-to-no support. It's not nearly as simple, or cheap, as people would like to think.

I was more thinking I'd like to see him try it on hard surface... ground is easy because it gives a little and spreads the weight out.

SLS/Orion is essentially exactly what Shuttle detractors spent decades insisting the Shuttle should immediately be replaced with - a capsule based crew system and a seperate heavy lift cargo system. Essentially an Apollo CSM and a Saturn V class vehicle. On a modest tangent though, I get so weary of the insistence that everything be "revolutionary". This isn't consumer market stuff to impress your friends. The isn't the latest iShiny that'll be replaced in eighteen months. This is millions and billions of dollars worth of workaday vehicle. Evolutionary works.

You suspect wrongly. Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo all had destruct systems installed on the booster. At one point the USAF (responsible for range safety) even wanted destruct systems on the Apollo Service Module since it was a powered stage... (They proposed using liquid explosives, the system would have been "safed" by simply opening valves and allowing the explosives to simply drain away into space.) I don't think the destruct and launched systems were tied together though. Shuttle had destruct systems on the ET and SRB's, but (IIRC) the ET systems were eventually deleted.

It's not "pulling itself" into anything... It's using the wheel and pipes as gears, and a driven gear (the pipes) will always spin the reverse direction from the driving gear (the wheel).

I'd say he's one crewmember - noticeably different from the rest of the crew, and who didn't really get along with and wasn't trusted by the rest of the crew. Or, in other words, pretty much proving my point.

I doubt Starfleet would even have one person with a diagnosed mental disorder. It might (or might not) have a significant percentage of self diagnosed individuals, but I doubt it. That is, what most people think of as Aspergers or ADHD are actually people who have diagnosed themselves with the syndrome of the moment. Having served in the Submarine Service... Comparing actual crew to said self-diagnosed individuals, the latter come off wanting by a wide margin.

How much fallout/kt of yield is generated depends on the exact design of the device. Fusion in theory generates less, fusion weapons in reality can be as dirty or even much dirtier. That being said, if you're using nuclear weapons to move dirt you're going to generate fallout regardless of the device used. 1) Depends on the yield of the weapon, the size of the pool, etc... etc... 2) No.

If you want a supply of cheap platinum, then why are you proposing a method that will only obtain expensive platinum? Besides which, unless you're sharply limiting the amount of cheap platinum goods you produce... Everyone else will simply buy your goods and mine them for platinum.

The big worry for JWST isn't vision problems - it's the Rube Goldbergeque deployment sequence. There's a lot of moving parts that have to precisely function to bring it to life. Even if we could get at it, it's not at all clear that anything could be done as so many of said parts are buried deep inside the vehicle.

Either way, this is just a study contract. NASA generates study contracts the way you or I generate dead skin cells - constantly and without conscious action. They don't represent policy, they don't represent plans, they don't represent anything NASA "wants" to do. One in a million goes beyond filing the completed study in the same warehouse the government keeps the Ark of the Covenant.

Which sure sounds impressive. But it's not actually all that impressive once you're cognizant of the facts.... which is that with few exceptions, modern engines fail very rarely. Falcon 9 has nine engines because when the Falcon 1 flopped in the market and SpaceX was nearly broke - they didn't have the budget or the time to develop a proper engine. (Which also resulted in Falcon 9 initially being on the underpowered side given market trends.) All that guff about engine out capability is taking water and adding fake lemon flavor to turn it into lemonade and marketing copy.

My understanding, from usually reliable sources, is that certain DOD/TLA payloads require a long coast phase - and that yesterday's coast was a demonstration of FH's capability to meet those requirements. (If you haven't figured it out yet - that's FH's raison d'être. Gaining SpaceX solid entry into the National Security Payload business.)