DerekL1963

In theory, any practical ICBM can serve as an orbital launcher. (And the existence proof of this theory is abundant.)

Ah - so damage to the mechanical connections holding the battery in the aircraft will show up as power/capacity loss? As will physical damage to the case? No, they won't. There's a lot more to maintaining and managing swappable batteries than managing and maintaining disposable (dry cell or rechargeables) or fixed installation (everything from your phone to the Model 3) batteries. There's a lot more to it than just examining the power and capacity curves. And that's where a good chunk of the increased labor costs come from. Plus managing the inventory. Plus operating and maintaining all the relevant handling and recharging equipment.

Computers are not magic. In this particular instance, you can't calculate a solution to any greater degree of accuracy than allowed by the accuracy of the input data. We don't know the weight and aerodynamics of the station to any degree of precision - and it's tumbling. (Which means drag varies over time, independent of speed and altitude.) We can calculate an average drag value and ballistic coefficient, but there will be errors... Not only due to the imprecise values of weight and aerodynamics, but also the inherent errors in using an average. Worse yet, drag varies with speed and altitude... and the tumble will be affected by drag. In this case, that means a small error in near term calculations propagate forward and become increasingly large errors in longer term calculations. An error in drag leads to an error in predicting speed and altitude, which causes a further error in predicting drag, which increases the error in speed and altitude... lather, rinse, repeat. Even very small starting errors can grow into significant errors over time due to this feedback loop. And that's without dragging in any errors in current knowledge of or predicting future atmospheric conditions... So calculating when to any degree of accuracy at this point is nothing but a crapshoot. You might as well use a Ouija board. And then, on top of all that, an error as small as fifteen minutes (an infinitesimal error given the thousands of hours to even the earliest likely re-entry) moves the debris eclipse by thousands of miles. That makes predicting where essentially impossible at this point.

Not won't, more like can't. It's simply the nature of the beast.

I understand why, but still gives me a sad because it's long been one of my favorite parts packs.

Once they're at cruising altitude, yes. Down lower, not so much. And don't forget the drag added by the intakes needed to access that cold air.

No more than absolutely necessary. A plane on the ground is a plane not earning money - and margins are extraordinarily thin in the airline industry. Net revenue can be as little $3/passenger/flight. Things are always simple seen from the armchair. The labor costs alone make this a nonstarter.

"It's not the fall that kills you, it's the sudden stop at the end." I.E. they still hit the surface at a considerable speed, and still end up submerged in highly corrosive seawater.

Wrong on both counts according to the Antipodes Map website. The antipode point for the Graveyard is (roughly) near the Caspian Sea: Japan's antipode point is off the Atlantic coast of South America:

That site is... Not exactly a reliable source. It takes the information from DANFS, which is mostly a very high level summary, and then supplements it from crew input. They don't seem to do any QA either. (The entry for my submarine contains multiple errors - including crew service dates in the 1940's, for a boat no built until the 1960's!)

Webb's political savvy was important (especially during NASA's early days), but Apollo politics don't map onto Soviet politics and losing Webb won't hurt the the Apollo program in the same way as losing Korolev hurt the Soviet program. If you want to badly damage the Apollo program, you've got to move down a tier and get the Center and technical managers - von Braun, Gilruth, Low. (If you really want to get the Apollo program... Your better targets are Oswald and LBJ.)

Same answer. Friction just makes it stop faster. Taking energy out of the system by hooking it to a generator... faster still.

Gravity would pull on objects on both sides of the wheel equally. Those objects on one side would try to turn it clockwise. Those on the other, counterclockwise. Net motion - zero. If it were unbalanced, the energy added by gravitational attraction as the heavy side rotated downwards would be subtracted by gravitational attraction as the heavy side rotated upwards. Even in a vacuum, with a totally frictionless bearing, it would be nothing but a pendulum.

This gets reprinted every couple of years... and as Nibb says, the actual debris field is huge and the chunks of debris small. If you have that kind of money, you're better off spending it directly on space related R&D.

The displays for the big screen (which could come from a variety of sources), the displays on the consoles (which had data from a variety of sources), the little screens (TV monitor system, again a variety of sources), plus routing the commands etc... from the consoles out to the computers and the rest of the world. (Oh, and the simulation system too. And then there's the various trainers/simulators outside of MOCR that it could be hooked up to.) It's actually pretty sophisticated system for it's day, and not all of it computerized. (Though it would be today.) And it's not just that computers were bigger (and slower)... with numerous data sources and destinations, the physical terminations and interconnection hardware would have taken up a fair chunk of room.

The equipment behind the "Batcave" isn't just about the big screen, it also drives the displays down in the MOCR and in the SSR's and Recovery Room as well as the projection display in the Recovery Room. And there's actually two rooms, the one to the right ("Display and Timing") was part of the same complex.

Polar orbits are rarely about looking at the poles. They're usually about a ground track that repeats at short intervals and covers a large percentage of the earth's surface. That's why polar and near polar orbits are popular with spy satellites and earth observation birds.

"Accurate within 10%" is equivalent to not being accurate at all. You might as well pick numbers out of a hat at that point rather than pretending that your math has any validity. And it's not just about tank mass, it's also about engine mass, and structural mass (the thrust web and interstages) - the last in particular doesn't scale in any easily predictable way.

SpaceX jumped from Falcon 1 to Falcon 9 because there was no market for the Falcon 1 - GEO is where the money is. The Falcon 5 was cancelled for the same reason, insufficient payload to GEO.

Correct. Mariner 4 had neither the onboard processing power nor the bandwidth to send images in real-time. In fact, the whole system was so slow that it only took 22(!) images during the entire flyby.

It was a television camera. The analog signal was converted to digital and transmitted to Earth via radio.

The lander and rover teams who had to build insulation and heating into their vehicles to prevent them from freezing would be surprised to learn that.

Both of these are eternal truths. By my version was close enough for the purpose of correcting the people working backwards from a conclusion rather than forwards from the data.

0.o I wouldn't claim a ship that flooded and sunk subsequent to a huge internal explosion as being sunk due to flooding either. In fact, it's actually quite common to describe accidents in terms of their cause (skidded on ice) rather than effect (hit a light pole). Well, common except when people are twisting definitions in order to reach a preordained conclusion. But the problem with that pre-ordained conclusion is that it doesn't jive with the numbers. If heat was the cause, the Columbia would have been destroyed on her first flight. If heat was the cause, then Shuttle wouldn't (all by itself) represent such a high percentage of successful landings. In this case, the cause of the accident wasn't due to higher peak heating - it was damage to the heat shield. A capsule with a damaged or flawed heat shielding would suffer the same fate.

Given that safe space plane reentries account for 40% of all manned flights to date... the claim that spaceplane re-entries pose some especial danger due to heating seems unsupportable. (Especially given that the one unsuccessful re-entry wasn't due to heat.)