sojourner

Obviously, you'd have to make the soil viable to plant life, just as you would for anything you plan to grow there. Really? Have you seen how discerning wine aficionados can be about different vintages? Where the grapes are grown. what the weather was like ina given season, When they were picked in the season? Let's go with another example. Cuban cigars. How many have tried to replicate the cuban cigar and yet, the originals (as portrayed in media) are still the most prized in the world. That's why you go with luxury goods, because they can't be exactly reproduced elsewhere.

Luxury goods would be the only real export and that would take a very mature colony to begin with. Imagine a Martian vintage of wine grown in vines cultivated in the martian soil. Or exotic wood grown under 1/3 gravity. Things that can't be reproduced elsewhere.

Yeah, it even has those in the know at nasaspaceflight's forum scratching there heads.

SpaceX was just awarded $55 million by the Airforce to develop a "raptor engine for upperstage use on F9 and FH". Take that as you will.

Try this one:

Why bother? When you can fit entire solar systems inside your rounding distance, yeah. Not really any mysterious coincidences here. Your just massaging numbers to create a pattern.

But they're not 1 light year intervals. You applied simple rounding to make it look like they are.

Single Stage To Orbit? it's been done. Heck, Falcon 9 first stage can do that. There's even a thread on this forum about it. Single Stage To Orbit, reusable? Possible, not demonstrated yet. Single Stage To Orbit, reusable and with a useful payload capability? Ah, there's the hard part. No one has been able to do it yet. Skylon thinks it has a way, but they have a lot of work to do to prove it.

Wouldn't do much good to add a "partially built shell" to the ISS.

The truth is, like in real life, there is no easy answer. You build a transport that deploys drones and your enemy will eventually learn to try and target that transport before it can deploy. Which leads you to develop a defensive system for the transport, which in turn leads the enemy to develop a counter to that and so on and so on and so on..... We see it now with contemporary warfare. Someone is always coming up with a better stick. Escalation happens. It's the reason we no longer build castles for defense, or fight in scirmish lines. Advances in tactics and technology keep coming. So you can't really say "this is how war will be in the future". You can only present a snapshot of what you think war will be like with a certain set of capabilities at a certain point in the future. And most likely you'll be right to some degree and wrong to some degree depending on which of those technologies actually manage to mature (or not) at the same point as you predicted.

A centrifuge system is a whole order of magnitude harder/expensive to build than a deepspace hab.

Yep, by the time you reach the insertion burn that second stage is mostly dead weight you don't want to have to spend Delta/V on.

Yes, we'll conquer the stars. We'll just be smart enough to send robotic craft to go do the fighting while we stay well away from the front with our delicate manned craft.

It boils down to one thing. One size does not fit all.

It makes it's final burn long before coasting into lunar orbit.

I could have sworn I saw somewhere an image showing New Shepard as the upper stage of an orbital rocket system. Obviously, to make that work it would need some additional capabilities. (heatshield most notably) And, of course, the development of the first stage to mount it on.

They still do.

Nope. http://www.bloomberg.com/visual-data/best-and-worst//oldest-fleets-airlines

No. It wasn't The original Falcon 5 was going to use the same tankage as the Falcon 9 only with less fuel load and less engines on the first stage. http://www.spacelaunchreport.com/falcon9.html

Again. Falcon 5 is a Falcon 9, just with less first stage engines. So if you're recovering the first stage anyway, why bother?

Waiting to use it in conjunction with some other announcement?

Falcon 5 was just Falcon 9 with only 5 first stage engines instead of nine. Not much point building it if you can reuse the first stage in any case.

"The only way we'll get more Delta V is to build a Delta V!"

The lox tank doesn't go to the top of the interstage. Because: it's an interstage.

Looks like only the bottom middle engine has had the inner side of the bell cleaned.