Ralathon

Man now they're just showing off! Doing a little pirouette and then deploying the solar panels in front of the camera of S2.

There is one. But they'll want to reserve footage on that incase things blow up. If they manage to land it I expect they'll post it ASAP to flaunt their success.

Looks good on the weather.

Sadly, it was tails when I flipped it.

Done! ... now what?

I think the reentry itself is a lot more damaging than the salt water to be honest. I think the outer shell will be toast either way, and it's not like the inside will be exposed to salt water.

Dammit weather! This ........ is why we're trying to get off this place... This would never happen if we were launching from a moon colony.

Man that cloud in the background does not look friendly...

Ah, but Saturn's rings aren't rigid. They're just the result of millions of small rocks, each in their own orbit.

They use a balloon to lift the rocket out of the atmosphere, then use a 2 stage rocket to push into orbit. So they don't need ridiculous chamber pressures.

The reason is physics and aesthetics. Kerbin is 1/10th the size of earth (roughly). Because of that you only need 1/sqrt(10) of the dV to get into orbit. If you would use normal Isp and twr ratios you'd end up with very overpowered rockets. Pretty much everything would be SSTO. So they're compensating for that by nerfed Isp's and ridiculously heavy parts. Also, note that the SLS boosters in real life are much larger than the ones in game. In game they have a diameter of 1.25m and IRL they're a whopping 3.7 meters

Nope, you are completely correct in the case of a 2D planet. You won't have polar coverage though. Best way to fix that is to add another 3 satellites in a polar orbit. This is a well known relation for equilateral triangles. The distance from the center to one of the corners is twice the radius of an inscribed circle.

First of all, Necro! Second of all. No, it wouldn't work. The problem is the levitation bit. The electric field above that plate won't be uniform, it will point slightly away from the center. So unless you have a infinitely large plate the charge will accelerate away from the plate's center. Second of all, the levitation system would be horribly unstable. The electric field of a very large charged plate does not drop with distance (Assuming your test point stays reasonably close to the surface). So there would be no natural feedback mechanism in your rig. If your voltage on the plate is slightly too high your droplet flies off into infinity, slightly to low and it falls. A second problem is the "Droplet in a vacuum" thing. A droplet in a vacuum very rapidly stops being a droplet. If you manage to find some other means of levitation and dump the vacuum, sure it'd work. Since you don't need your setup to last long you could heat the plate to a few hundred degrees and abuse the leidenfrost effect. Not as accurate as pure levitation, but good enough for demonstration purposes.

Just check when it's supposed to pass on Skychart (Don't forget to pick your location). Don't need a telescope or anything, during dusk or dawn it is easily visible to the naked sky. It looks like a rapidly moving star.

Don't nix the SLS, we need a big payload rocket for heavier probes and long distance missions (Uranus, Neptune etc). But Orion really has no destination in its current state. It can't land on the moon without lander. It can't get to the NE asteroids without some kind of hab. It can't get to Mars without a giant mothership. On it's own it can't really do anything other orbiting the moon. Either give it some kind of purpose with other parts or stop wasting resources on it... Preferably the former, since it is almost done and I am fully in favor of manned spaceflight. But as is it's the shuttle program all over again: A spaceship robbed of its destination.

You know what's even more efficient? Just having the probe put the rock in small container with a heat shield and a chute so we can study it on earth! The entire point behind these missions was to have humans do something cool outside LEO. Rendezvousing with a small pebble and going back home is rather pointless. Congress should give NASA some proper budget so they can do something useful with Orion: Develop the Altair lander, do a full sized asteroid capture, develop a hab and send humans to a near earth asteroid or something along those lines. Alternatively, I'm leaning towards scrapping the whole Orion program and using those resources for more probes.

Every second legolas accumulates about 10*mass(L) of downward momentum. So he needs to dump at least that much momentum into the rocks. This depends on how fast legolas can kick rocks and how heavy those rocks are. If v(kick)*mass® = 10*mass(L) legolas will remain stationary. This is the part where it becomes iffy. Legolas is an elf and elfs are pretty goddamn light. Just look at Fellowship of the Ring while they're trying the Caradhras mountain pass in a snowstorm. Legolas can walk on the snow without sinking away in it. So the ratio mass®/mass(L) will be very high. Therefore v(kick) can be pretty small without Legolas falling. One additional point of consideration is that the rocks Legolas uses have an initial velocity that his feet need to match before they can transfer the momentum. Assuming a vacuum those rocks will fall at v=10*sqrt(d/5) where d is the distance from the initial bridge deck. Looks like Legolas is about 2 meters below the collapsing bridge deck, so that gives 6.3 m/s + v(kick) for legolas' feet velocity. If Legolas is sufficiently light and sufficiently fast it could work...

Sorry to go off on a tangent here. But nuclear thermal rockets only hit high ISP values because their exhaust gasses are so light. It is true that you get roughly 1k ISP when you use liquid hydrogen, but this comes at a price. Reaction mass like Liquid hydrogen and ammonia are so ridiculously low density that you need very large tanks to get good dV. Very large tanks means a lot of added structural mass and insulation mass. This means that the increase in dV from switching to nuclear thermal is much less than you'd expect. ISP goes up, but mass fraction goes down. Try it out in KSP for yourself. If you install the Realfuels mod you'll notice that the NERVA is not nearly as OP as it is in stock. It is only better in some limited situations, and then only marginally.

Because the Opportunity design does not have a lot of spare power to spend on science. It's pretty pointless to pepper the martian surface in machines that simply can't run the experiments we want to run. Opportunity had about 0.6 kwh a day while the Curiosity has 2.5 kwh. Weight is also a problem. Some scientific experiments are just too heavy for the Mars Exploration Rover design. The EDL sequence would fail with them on board.

You're fundamentally misunderstanding how the universe works. The scientists in the article that you referenced are trying to constrain the topology of the universe.They're trying to see if the universe is curved positive (like a sphere), flat (like a plane) or negative (Like a saddle point). Their data constrained the positive curvature to a radius of more than 24 Gpc. This does not mean that there's some kind of border between universe and not!universe once you go further than that. Look at the expanding balloon example again. Say the balloon has a radius of 1 meter. This does not mean that an ant living on the surface encounters a barrier or an end to balloon if he walks more than 1 meter. If we inflate or deflate the universe the radius increases or decreases. But the ant won't be able to point at any point on the surface and say "It is inflating/deflating from this specific point!", the true center of inflation is in the 3rd dimension after all, something inaccessible to our 2 dimensional ant. in much the same way our 3d universe does not have a point from which it expands. All we know is that if the universe is curved, it has a radius of at least 24Gpc. There is no special point from which the big bang happened, it happened everywhere at once, it's just that the radius of the universe was 0 at that point.

Exactly, you can't prove them wrong. But that does not mean you have to believe them. If we had to believe everything everyone said just because "we can't prove you wrong" then we'd never get anywhere. There is literally an infinite number of ideas that we cannot prove wrong. So if we want to figure out how the world actually works we are going to need a bit more than "you can't prove me wrong". You need to provide evidence or logic to show how the world works: Electrons get deflected in a magnetic field because this experiment shows it. e^pi*i = -1 because this mathematical proof shows it. Gravity decreases by the square of the distance because the orbits of the planets show that. An idea without evidence is completely useless. Show how you arrived at your number. Tell us what theories you used as basis for your calculations. show your work. Speculation is step 1, and you shouldn't get numbers and conclusions from it. Math is reasoning. If your underlying theories are sound and your math shows how you get to your conclusions from those premises then I will believe you. Then why are you giving us conclusions like "Your velocity, would need to be equal to [approximations used] 3.328 x 10^68... Quintillion C! [three point three two eight, times ten to the sixty eight Quintillionth C]"? Did you just pull that number out of your ass or something?

Pretty much the exact opposite of reality. Life can exist only by producing more entropy. Entropy would increase slower if there was no life on this planet. So unless some lifeform figures out how to reverse entropy, life is only accelerating heat death. And 1 E-Coli bacterium will reproduce every 30 minutes or so. Run the maths and you come to the conclusion that the entire earth will be converted into E-Coli after 64.5 hours and after 163.5 hours the entire visible universe will be filled with e-coli. Needless to say, looking at current birthrates and extrapolating is not a very accurate model. wat.jpg

This is nonsense reasoning. Ideas are a dime a dozen: What if there are planets that speak english? If you go 20 times the speed of sound and hit a bird, the bird will recite shakespeare but you can't hear it over the sonic boom. Water has memory and it remembers all the dinosaurs that drank it. If you have a rotating black hole that spins fast enough the event horizon will be donut shaped and if you fly through the center you will hit your own spaceship. What matters is not the ideas, it is the reasoning behind those ideas and the evidence that supports them. If you have neither then it is completely pointless to discuss it. In much the same vein "Prove me wrong" is horrible reasoning. You go and try to prove me wrong on those 4 nonsense ideas I just posted, good luck with that. If you want to convince us of your idea, give reasoning and evidence. You say you have numbers, show them! If you just want a soapbox to shout random ideas into the world, a board dedicated to science is pretty much the worst possible place for it.

Yea, a small 3d stage for the circularization burn would've been better for the payload fraction. But I guess the extra development time and complexity wasn't worth it.

Not really. GTO is pretty expensive on the dV budget. You need 2.4km/s to get into a GTO from LEO and then another 1.5km/s for circularization. It is cheaper to hit the moon than it is to get in GEO. So you really need a beefy stage to do it. Why would it matter anyway? What's the benefit to keeping the second stage in LEO?