Nibb31

If militarization of space is the only way to boost exploration, then the price is probably too high to pay. I don't particularly want to live in a world where orbital weapons are flying over our heads at all times. But your premise is wrong. The USAF already has a Space Wing. The US DoD has plenty of military satellites, including offensive ones. SpaceX is probably launching one in the next couple of weeks. None of that has any relationship with exploration. You seem to be confusing exploration with exploitation. Exploration is going strong for no other motivation than science. Exploitation can only really be done by the private sector because governments aren't there to make a profit.

Why would it be moneyless ? It's going to cost a lot of money just to stay alive. Even if you believe in the half million dollar ticket price annouced by Musk (which everybody agrees is even more unrealistic than his timeline), the basic ECLSS, ISRU and habitation infrastructure is going to cost much much more than that.

Also rich people usually can't afford to take a 2 year vacation. That's not how you get rich. They can probably afford a week-long trip to the Moon, but Mars is too much of an expedition, too dangerous and too boring.

The design hasn't changed lately. It's silver now.

For their airliners, Airbus usually build one or two preproduction aircraft. These aren't actual "prototypes", but are used for certification and developing flight procedures. The first is usually highly instrumented and progressively submitted to high stresses (flutter tests, brake tests, tail strike, wing stress, etc...) during the test campaign, which makes it unfit for being sold. They usually keep it around for testing. The lists here show the entire production runs, including static test airframes and preproduction aircraft for most manufacturers: http://www.abcdlist.nl/a350f/a350f.html For the A380, there were two prototype airframes that weren't flown, but only used for ground stress testing and were broken up. The preproduction aircraft 001 was retained by Airbus as a test platforms. The 002 is in a museum. The 003 was the first production aircraft and sold to Singapour Airlines.

What anyone believes is irrelevant.

Would you want to live in that ?

Put your sensitive machinery inside a shelter. Problem solved, and easier than digging un underground complex.

The Apollo LM Ascent Propulsion System. If it doesn't work, bang it with a hammer until it does.

Weather is negligeable on Mars. Don't believe everythin you saw on The Martian. An underground complex would shield from radiation. However, it requires heavy machinery. Heavy engineering isn't something that's easy to develop for space and is an area where we have zero experience. Maintenance, lubricants, radiators, filters, power, hydraulics, etc... all need to be especially developed for a very specific environment. We also know very little about Mars geology under the surface, the toxicity of the regolith, mining in low gravity, etc... Also, what's the point of going to Mars if you're going to spend the rest of your life underground. You could do that on Earth.

That's not enough to calculate drag, and remember that the station is tumbling, so you don't know the attitude. But the main unknown is the atmosphere. For the same reason we can't do weather predictions beyond a few days, we can't predict the density of the upper atmosphere, for which our models are much more basic, several weeks in advance, and around the entire globe. Any approximation early on produces uncertainty that gets bigger in the future, to the point where the prediction is meaningless. Remember that the station covers 400km in one minute, so any meaningful prediction would have to be precise to at least a minute or two. It's simply impossible to get to that level of precision several weeks in advance. I'll bite. Climate change isn't a prediction, it's an observation. Most of the predictions have seriously underestimated the problem because climate is complex and chaotic and computational models are always simplified. Also climate is not weather.

Only if you live between 42.8° latitude N and S. It's also much smaller than Skylab, so there is less chance of it reaching the ground.

Musk wants to skip the exploration phase and go directly to the colonization phase. This, IMO, is the biggest fundamental flaw in his plan. We currently know zero about long duration stays on another planetary body. We know nothing about the toxicity of Mars, the physiological or psychological implications of partial gravity, cosmic radiation, including reproduction. We have not experimented with ISRU, closed loop ECLSS, or off-world mining, agriculture, power production or construction. And we have no idea how to make any of this economically or socially sustainable. Yet musk is handwaving all of these problems away, either relying on someone else to figure them out, or dramatically underestimating their importance and difficulty. Sending "colonists" without going through those baby steps first is simply not going to end well.

Uncontrolled reeentries are typically unpredictable, even for NORAD. We usually only get a vague notice of where it's going to fall a couple of hours beforehand. It depends on atmospheric density , which varies with a lot of variables, and drag, which will depend on the shape and attitude of the spacecraft. Predicting a date is extremely difficult. They can sometimes get it down to range of several days and refine it once they get into that range. The landing area is pretty much anywhere downrange of the orbital path. Since the spacecraft typically covers 16 orbits per day, it can impact anywhere in the inclination latitude range.

I doub't you would find much there. That is the point that they aim for for reentry. Not necessarily where the stuff splashdowns. The actual debris field is probably bigger than Texas. Locating any debris there would be like finding the wreckage of MH370, and anything that you could recover would hardly have much value.

Actually the Saturn V guidance computer was part of the instrument unit that was on the S-IVB stage, so most of them crashed into the Moon or burned up in Earth's atmosphere. A couple of them are floating around in heliocentric orbit, so it might be fun to charter a BFS to go visit them one day... You might even be able to bring one back !

Some of the early lunar probes used analog cameras, a complex chemical photo developing system, and a scanner. There were no camera CCDs in those days.

Mars' regolith is pretty toxic. You're not going to be walking on it, breathing air that's in contact with it, or eating food that uses it as a substrate. It needs to be refined and the perchlorate salts removed.

Yes, that's one of the big problems with SpaceX's plan. I think that BFS landings on unprepared surfaces are going to be presumed as one-way cargo flights. After the first few flights, they will have prepared surfaces. At least the IAC 2017 sits a bit higher above the ground. Last year's version had the engine bells a few inches above the surface. There is no way that would have been survivable.

Or he's just full of fecal matter. This is reddit we are talking about after all.

Have you ever tried skiing ? The two flaps are very similar to the way you control your trajectory on skis by pushing your heels.

I think ZUMA could be a followup for PAN and CLIO, which were both codenames for top-secret launches with an unknown payload. They ended up being identified as Nemesis-1 and Nemesis-2, which are SIGINT birds that are supposed to shadow other countries' satellites to intercept their comms. This could be Nemesis-3 or a followup program.

The plan is to add parachutes and just fish them out.

Interesting that they still have a Shuttle mockup in the back of that facility.

Salyut is dead. There are no DOS hulls left and the last FGB module is Nauka, which has been delayed mostly because of aging problems (cracks and contamination). Russia has no production lines for building new modules. The tooling and supply chains are gone. Building a new Salyut would be like building a new Skylab. You would be better off starting from scratch. 'Tis a silly idea.