WestAir

Funny you say "that won't fly" because in the aviation industry, some countries use meters (Hint: not milimeters) for altitude while the rest of the world uses feet. It's safe to say that we get more precise altitude separation then them. Do you have a retort for the extra precision using Fahrenheit temperature? Disclaimer: This is tongue in cheek. I whole-hardheartedly expect your response to make us both laugh.

The thing I like about using the imperial system is I get a little more precision out of it because the numbers are usually larger. 3,000 meters is about 10,000 feet. With feet that gives you around 200% more quanta to express any given value. The same for temperature: The range from body temp to freezing in C s 37 to 0 (37 units), or in F it's 98 to 32 (66 units). It's not as simple to remember, but you get more precision. Signed, Devils Advocate.

Is it cheaper to have a reusable vehicle that weighs that much, or cheaper to send a lot more cargo into orbit in a lightweight cargo bay with a small return capsule attached?

That's actually pretty impressive. I couldn't botch formatting that badly if I tried.

At my company we use 300s and 200s for airbuses (N313NV for instance), 900s for our 752s, and 400/800s for our DC-9-80s. The registrations were changed upon delivery. Most our planes came from Europe where the registration was different, so they're really more like license plates than registration numbers -- Compared to the VIN # on a car that actually doesn't change. I'll have to take a look at one of our planes documents, maybe the airworthiness cert, to see if there is a permanent registration number for planes as well.

If the target is in Geo and you launch straight up at it with your Pe the altitude of the station I don't see why it wouldn't smack you in the face at the speed the Earth's surface rotation would be at that altitude. Straight up =/= rotational velocity. Eventually you'll need to add a little horizontal velocity. Edit: I can't imagine this would work for a space elevator either.

I am not privy to the prerequisites it takes to become a career astronaut. However, I do have some strong recommendations for you to undergo before you set out on this (decades-long) investment of time and energy and effort: 1. Go ahead and get the most extensive medical evaluation you can schedule. At the least, I would recommend shooting for a 1st Class Medical Certificate by an FAA examiner - but that's the bare minimum examination I would recommend. You do not want to get all the way to applying for NASA or Virgin Galactic only to be told the seizure you had in 1st grade disqualifies you. 2. Take care of your finances. As mind-blowing as it sounds, you're not going to get a job (anywhere respectable, really) if you have $5,000 in credit card debt and unpaid student loans. Any Government organization like NASA will screen for stable finances and now is the perfect time to get your bank account in order before investing the time. If you can't readily survive the pre-approval for a home, you probably won't survive the pre-screening for this type of work. 3. Study habits. I know a lot of pilots and I know a lot of wannabe pilots who never made it. Being intelligent and being knowledgeable are two different things, and frankly the guy who has good study habits will always outplay the guy who is naturally good but only studied 2 hours a night instead of 6. I got a job flying MD-80's in Oct 2014 and about 30% of the guys in my class failed because they didn't study - and all of them were already ATP rated pilots with thousands of hours and had been flying commercial for years. Experience and talent only get you so far. I'm absolutely 100% serious - learn good study habits now if you haven't already. This will be the make it or break it part of your endeavor. You've been warned. 4. Last but not least, if all the above work for you, just make sure you have good team support. Your family and friends have to be in it with you. No one makes it to the top alone. Get the people around you interested in your success. I say this because people can fail at reaching their dreams when their significant other or their friends just aren't there for them. For instance, if you know you have to study for a test but your girlfriend is more interested in bothering you about re-modeling the living room, you have to make it clear where your heart is. The people around you can distract you from your goals if you let them. All that said, I wish you the best of luck. If this is what you truly want then you'll figure out a way to make it happen. Have fun up there!

Can I claim semantics on this one? I meant "more bodies of orbiting mass"

I thought there were more rocks past Pluto than in the main belt? Edit: I'm hoping I'm right - otherwise I might as well be one of those kids in your class.

I imagine it would have something to do with stem cells, or however biologists plan to fix limb loss in humans by growing new limbs for them. I will say that I am not a specialist in biology - in fact - I'd have a hard time out-debating a 1st grader in matters of biology, but from what I've come across on the internet, there are a variety of ways to overcome DNA degradation.

That's actually a really interesting line of thought. I hadn't considered that immortality could be a detriment to survival of the fittest.

Pretty straightforward. So genetic traits mutate over time and the organism with the best traits survives. Since survival of the fittest is the name of the game, then the most long-living organism should have a fairly obvious advantage. Why hasn't organism immortality become a popular trait among complex organisms? I imagine the whole cause of the hayflick limit can naturally be prevented if the proper genetic mutation were to occur. (How hard can it be to replace telomers?) We've had billions of years to overcome senescence and reap the benefits of biological immortality - so why hasn't this happened? It seems pretty straightforward that a species that doesn't have to contend with age-death would have a better chance of survival.

I'm sure it's possoble to have vessels in opposing orbits dock if the orbital speed is ridiculously low.

If I was really dead-set on spacing somebody in Hollywood fashion, could I bypass all of the safety features by docking my ship, making sure both doors were open, then undocking so the sudden vacuum launches my victim out the airlock like a scene from Star Trek?

Well, the chart suggests it loses 4km / month. That's a little less than 50km / year. Assuming the lowest altitude it can complete 1 orbit without re-entry is 150km, and assuming it started at 400km, it should remain up there for ~5 years. EDIT: Extremely rough math, though.

Isn't there geometry that shows a body in orbit is always moving in a straight & direct line towards the CoM?

To be fair, the age of transhumanism is arguably less than one lifetime away. With designer babies and genetic modifications so close to our future, I don't see how natural humanity will survive. Two hundred years from now parents will nit-picking every one of their off-springs attributes, from eye color to what type of cool new organs / features they'd like on their child. I can't imagine what will be on Earth in 100,000,000 years but by then it won't be human.

I don't use a transfer to get my Kerbal from an EVA back to the ISS. Just because two things are in orbit of the same body doesn't mean you need to transfer.

That would be hilarious if it turned out to have 95% of all the Solar Systems H2O.

The only way the crew would have survived would have been to return to field moment trim issues were apparent. There was nothing at all in their checklists or in memory items that suggested this, which ultimately means there wasn't a single pilot flying in that era that would have saved this aircraft with the procedures at play. Four or so months ago an MD-80 leaving Las Vegas had an elevator jammed in the up position. The aircraft pitched up on its own at about 120 knots. The crew aborted the take-off and the jam was promptly discovered as the result of a nut falling off the assembly. Had the elevator been jammed in a position where it wasn't noticed until after they committed to a take-off, there would be an MD-83 lying in pieces at the end of the Vegas strip. Sometimes you just get lucky because not all problems are survivable.

That made me lol. To the topic at hand, this crash has always hit me in the feels. This crew fought all the way down. Two seconds before impact he was still making calls to his coworker to try and save them. I really, really wish they would have made it out of this one.

Isn't a plasma just ionized gas? The beam should look like a punctured steam vent - rapidly expanding and rising once out the nozzle.

Title is pretty straight forward. Is it possible to have a suit of armor that is capable of flying? What type of propulsion could such a suit even use? While we're here let's discuss that hand-canon that shoots kamehameha's: What the heck does it fire? Magic?

I fly a lot, and over the big open desert on the way to Las Vegas there are several spots where there are no lights in the visible horizon in any direction. When it's a moonless night and the lighting inside the plane is at a minimum, it almost has the illusion of you being in space. I wish my cell phone could really capture the feeling - but it doesn't.

[quote name='fredinno']Technically launching on a rocket IS flying.[/QUOTE] I imagine a rocket commercial aimed at glider pilots going something like: "Lift got you down? Don't despair: Keep flying with [B]unnecessarily overwhelming amounts of thrust![/B] Let your inner Sith Lord out and scream [B][I]UNLIMITED POWAAH![/I][/B] as you take the four forces of flight by the horns! Buy a rocket today!" :D