Nibb31

First of all, it would probably outgas, losing most of its water. It would probably freeze too, so it would end up tasting like dehydrated frozen cheese, whatever that tastes like.

Private companies need some sort of financial incentive to invest money into major projects. There is no financial incentive in sending people to Mars. The burden of proof is on the positive claim, not the negative one, so it would be up to the proponents of private Mars exploration to prove that there is some sort of profitability.

It didn't get into that level of detail. The DRM reference designs are conceptual only with no actual engineering behind them so they shouldn't really be taken at face value. You don't necessarily need big engines to do the RV manoeuvers. Soyuz or Dragon use RCS only. So did Apollo or Gemini. The main engines were only for deorbit. All you need is an avionics bay, RCS tanks and thrusters. Docking would have been autonomous. Berthing like on the ISS doesn't make much sense when you have two similar spacecraft of similar mass. You still need to precisely RV and station-keep with the target, so you might as well go straight in and dock. Some sort of large docking ring would have had to be developed, because both CBM and NDS would be inappropriate. As for fuel transfer, Progress and ATV have special valves in the docking collar. All you need is some sort of fluid connector integrated into the docking mechanism. It's not unsurmountable and it's already done for other fluids.

The commercial satellite market only exists because it was heavily subsidized. Most of the launchers were developed, at least partially, on government funds. NASA and other government agencies are the ones doing the pioneering.

There was a project of a militarized Soyuz known as Soyuz VI. It carried Pu-powered RTGs instead of solar panels, which saved weight, increased operational capability and reliability, and provided more power for the military equipment. As you can see on this diagram, the RTGs were on the outside, on extended arms, and angled to minimize radiation on the crew module. The Soviets obviously thought that the risk of irradiating the crew justified the additional complexity that design, so I don't really think it is that benign.

Are you running the Kerbal Joint Reinforcement mod? I found that any spacecraft that docks with that mod is screwed. If you undock it afterwards, with or without the mod, it'll blow up.

SpaceX is a private contractor just like all the others. They only do what people pay them to do. If SpaceX ever goes to Mars, it will be because NASA, or someone else, buys them tickets to go there. As long as there is no business case for building a Mars transportation infrastructure, nobody is going to build one. MarsOne is bogus, and everybody knows it. - - - Updated - - - Capitalism and bureaucracy are not mutually exclusive. I've worked at some really bureaucratic private corporations and there are some strong bureaucracies that are driven by profit. SpaceX rides the bureaucracy wave as well as any other government contractor. Falcon and Dragon development were co-funded by NASA. The Merlin engine is based on a NASA design. Without taxpayer money, SpaceX would not exist. Capitalism only does something when there is a clear ROI. The biggest engineering projects would never have seen the light of day if they had been driven by profit, including Apollo. If there ever is a manned expedition to Mars, it will be government-funded, with government money going to private contractors to artificially create jobs and to make the business sustainable. That's how it works and SpaceX is no different. There is no private space sector.

Some folks might say that they want to do it, but nobody is *seriously* is in any position to do it.

Apollo 12, because of the pinpoint landing, and how cool it is to land so close to another spacecraft and to bring stuff back. Apollo 17, because the J missions were starting to get really in swing with the long duration EVAs, the SIM bay experiments, and the rovers.

Which is irrelevant because nobody has any intentions of doing offworld colonies.

Morpheus was a test platform for testing landing, throttling, and diversion techniques. The rocket part was pretty mundane, and not really the focus of the development project.

FM radio as a safety measure on a cellphone is only useful: - If you are in an area with FM radio coverage, which is less and less likely as FM is being slowly phased out for digital radio, and FM radio typically has poor coverage. - If all FM radio stations are equipped to deal with public service announcements. Most of them are private, with no links to the government, and not all of them have secured power supplies for disaster situations. - If the radio station actually has any important information to provide. If it's just "keep calm and stay at home", then there isn't much point. - If you have earphones because cell phones need to have the earphones plugged in as an antenna. - If you are actually listening to your FM radio when the public service announcement is made. That is a lot of ifs. There are more efficient ways of providing disaster information. In fact, cell phone networks have a priority broadcast service built in just for this purpose. In disaster situations, they switch into a special mode where emergency service and broadcast information get a higher priority and public cell service is switched off.

True. The problem for that is that the payloads should be in the pipeline now if they want to be available for SLS in the 2022 or 2024. But they aren't. Science institutions simply don't have the budget to build >70t payloads. Even if they did, they can't really commit to that size because SLS is the only rocket that can launch them, and SLS's future is too uncertain. They risk building a several-billion dollar mission and losing their ride. It's much safer to them to stick to put their eggs into the 10-20t payload size where they can easily switch to another rocket if necessary. The lack of missions is what makes SLS unsustainable. NASA can't afford to maintain a launch site and logistics infrastructure for a launcher that only flies every 2 years, which is the intended flight rate. With no payloads or missions actually planned or funded at this stage, they will have to struggle to achieve a rate of 1 flight every 4 or 5 years. My guess is that somebody will finally realize this and put Congress in front their responsabilities, and SLS will be cancelled after 2 flights. - - - Updated - - - Anything within its specifications, which are: maintain 4 crew members alive for 21-days. The question is, what can you do in space in 21-days without any additional mission hardware? Except fly around the Moon, not much.

It used to be standard, but it is indeed being pushed out by phone companies who want people to pay for streaming services over their 4G networks. Most new phones don't have an FM radio any more.

I guess we're going to have to agree to disagree on this. You might not appreciate the engineering and science that goes into something like Curiosity, Galileo, or New Horizons, but I find robotic space exploration exciting. For me, actually achieving something like that is so much more awe-inspiring than doing DRMs, CGI clips, and Powerpoints, which is, whether we like it or not, the closest we will get to a manned Mars expedition for the next 30 years. Again, you need to have a better justification for spending $100 billion than just inspire the kids and make media headlines for a week or two. The technologies that you talk about (ISRU, closed-loop life support, etc...) will have to be developed, whether we go to Mars or not. It's a matter of survival here on Earth. Going to Mars does not change anything, because we need to have those technologies prior to going to Mars. If we don't develop them, nobody is going to care about going to Mars because we will have bigger problems on our hands. We don't go to Mars just because it makes good entertainment. That's what movies, sports, and TV shows are for. Even a trip to Mars will be boring to most people. The first foot on the surface will be on CNN for a day or two, but there is no reason to believe that the 6 month journey and 3 month stay on the surface won't be just as boring as the ISS is to the general public. The fact is, we simply don't have a good enough justification at this point to send humans to Mars. You can throw around buzzwords like "inspiration" and "excitement" all you want, but it doesn't change the fact that the cost outweighs any potential benefit, and huge investments like that need to have some sort of measurement ROI.

There are no android FM radio apps on the play store because FM radio depends on a proprietary chip on the phone. The only app that works for FM radio is the one that called on the phone, if there is an FM radio. If there is no app, there is no FM radio chip.

They still have some milestones that were funded by the early phases of the CCDev program, a couple of drop tests I think. They still need to do those. Beyond that, the project is pretty much stalled. No customer means no money to launch it. It still needs an Atlas V to be of any use.

Do you know the effect of microgravity on a developing embryo? If you do, then you should publish a paper, because scientists have no idea at this point.

The MCT is at least a decade away, and only if somebody wants to pay for it. The SLS will fly in 2018. It probably won't fly much before it's cancelled (they only have enough refurbished SSMEs for 3 or 4 launches anyway, and only EM-1 and EM-2 are manifested), but I'm pretty sure at this point that it will fly.

What's the point? The negative effects of microgravity are on the human organism, which your magnets do nothing to alleviate. The floating around bit is fun and actually beneficial when it comes to living in a small volume because you can all of the space above and below and you can move heavy loads without too much effort.

Did Apollo change the way we think and live ? Maybe for some of us. Most of the public got bored after Apollo 12 and switched to SuperBowl and the Vietnam War. Today, the public's attention span is even shorter. We have a freaking space station up there doing amazing stuff, yet most people don't even know it exists. Something like a Mars landing would have the entertainment value of the Olympic Games or a blockbuster movie. After a week, most people will have moved on to the latest Kanye scandal or the next newsworthy headline the media throws at them. It's a sad state of affairs, I agree, but the inspirational value simply isn't worth the billions of dollars that you need to throw at it. Living more efficiently is going to be a necessity, whether we go to Mars or not. It makes no difference. If we don't, there will be no Mars because we will have much bigger problems on our hands. A human can also drive right by a great discovery, especially if he is focused on driving, navigating, and staying alive at the same time. A rover scans every square inch of the terrain that it covers with all sorts of sensors and has a team of scientists looking at every detail. As for quick decisions, they are important when you're on an EVA with a 2-hour air supply. A rover has all the time in the world, so it doesn't need to make quick decisions. Compare the cost of landing a 100-ton Mars habitat with the cost of attaching a multi-purpose arm to your rover to give it a kick. heck, for a fraction of the cost, you could land a couple of teleoperated robonauts to maintain your rovers, do an oil change and even swap tires when needed. The limits of rovers are dictated by their size and mass. If you had the funding to send 100-ton payloads to Mars surface, you would still get more science from a fleet of robots than from a bunch of squishy humanoids, because most of that mass will be just to prevent those humanoids from dying. Again, who cares about faster? Mars isn't going anywhere. There is no rush. And the results are only as meaningful as the science package that you send there. There is no technical limit to the science that can be automated. Just about every manned experiment can be replicated by a machine if you design it to. Sending a dozen people to Mars won't solve overpopulation. Neither will sending a few million for that matter. To solve overpopulation, you need to spend the money on education and contraceptives, not rockets. Rushing things has never been a good way to build a foundation. A foundation needs a broad and solid structure that you can build upon. It means taking time to do things right. It means building a sustainable infrastructure. Apollo was not sustainable. It was a rushed crash program, and therefore was a crappy foundation to build upon. If we want to inspire, we need to aim for goals that are reachable now and to achieve them successfully. We shouldn't focus on long term goals that we can't reach. Plans for a Mars landing in another 20 or 30 years will just get cancelled as soon as the political wind changes and people get bored with it. The "rush" comes from people who want everything now, or at least during their lifetime. It's a trait of our modern culture. I was born too late to witness the Moon landings, and probably too early to witness Mars landings, but I am still living interesting times. If you step back and look at the big picture, the Earth and Mars are billions of years old. We are only 200000 years old, and yet we have already accomplished a lot. In the grand scheme of things, it doesn't matter whether people land on Mars during my lifetime or my descendants' in 100, 1000 or 10000 years, because that short period is a tiny drop in the timescale of Humanity.

This one is particularly funny: I love how the UFO-conspiracy folks get all up in arms about it, and how the astronauts are intentionally ignoring the UFOs in their commentary. Of course, what we are looking at in this video is drops of condensation running on the windows.

It looks to me like a reflection on the window.

Until proven otherwise, FTL is science fiction at this point. We might as well be debating teleportation and time travel.

How much are you willing to pay for morale and inspiration? How much are your fellow taxpayers willing to pay? I suspect most people would be happier with free beer, cable TV, and football games as a morale and inspiration booster... That would cost a lot less than sending people to Mars. In the case of spaceflight, human's decision-making is trumped by human's need to rest, sleep, eat, breath, stay out of danger, and get back home. The slight advantage of not having to wait 10 minutes for a round-trip of orders-responses from mission control on Earth is tiny compared to the huge disadvantage of having to ship 100 tons of equipment just to keep the human alive so that he can EVA a couple of hours per day. I've already said this, but for the cost of sending a single manned expedition to do a 3 month survey over a small radius around the landing site, you can have a fleet of hundreds of rovers to survey a much wider area for several years. You will actually get orders of magnitude more science over long-duration studies of a wider area than spending several weeks in the same spot. The only science that really benefits from sending humans to Mars is studying how we can send humans to Mars. Anything else can be done by robots for a fraction of the cost. We haven't been blown away in the last 200 000 years. The chances that we get blown away during the next 1000 years is infinitesimal. There is no rush. There isn't much that can happen to us on Earth where we wouldn't have at least few million survivors. I can't think of a single scenario where having a few thousand people on Mars would make any difference. SLS is flying in 2017, at about the same time Dragon v2 will start carrying people to the ISS. There is no antagonism between NASA and SpaceX. SpaceX is a contractor for NASA, just like Boeing, ULA, and others. SpaceX only exists because NASA is paying for it.