Nibb31

Space medicine isn't about treating injuries and illnesses in space.

Nobody is saying that Russian scientists were idiots. They are saying that the space program was disorganized and under contradictory political pressure. That sort of environment makes you do stupid things, even when you have the smartest people. Case in point: SLS.

After using it for over a year, I can confirm that the Windows 8 user interface is crap. Its usability is all over the place and the concept of a schizophrenic UI was, by pretty much everybody's standards, a bad idea to begin with. As a result, it was a failure in terms of sales, especially in the Enterprise market where nobody has any use of with touch screens. The underlying OS is great though, probably the best version of Windows for years, but most people were (quite rightly) put off by the broken UI.

That blog post has been removed. But what has Morpheus got to do with Big Dumb Boosters ?

Poland already participates in ESA, so Poland already has its Ariane rocket. The development cost of Ariane 6 is planned to be 4 billion euros spread over several years (in all likeliness it will be double that when it finally flies), but it is based on existing technology and infrastructure that has gone through decades of spending. ESA's budget is about 4 billion euros per year, with Poland contribution 38 million (0,9%). So if the Polish government wanted to fund its own space program, they would probably have to multiply their current space budget by 100. The problem is that Poland doesn't have much of an aerospace industry, so most of that money would need to be used to develop the technical knowledge, train the engineers, and build the infrastructure to build space hardware. It would take decades to catch up.

How exactly do you connect "UFOs" with "intelligent life out there" ? If UFOs are really unidentifed, what makes one irrational hypothesis (aliens) more likely than any other irrational hypothesis (ghosts, gods, time travellers, communists, leprechauns...)? Surely if you have identified them as extraterrestrial objects, then they are no longer unidentified, right?

Back to the OP's question, there are several reasons why SLS takes so long to build is because of the lack of money. First of all, the lack of money: Resources are spread much thinner than during the days of Apollo. During Apollo, the Saturn program had nearly unlimited funds, so to solve a problem, you would just throw more people and resources at it. Secondly, contrary to what many people think, engineering tasks today take longer than they did in the 60's. Today, we have computers, CAD/CAM, fast prototyping and all sorts of technological aids, but on the other hand, everything is much more complex. We have a much deeper understanding of how things work, and as our systems become more complex, a lot of design work has to go into the interfaces and interactions between various systems. An example is computers. In the 60's, the Apollo CM computer was very basic. It only had a keypad input system and a few interfaces with various other systems. It had a tiny processor and the software was only a few kilobytes of assembler code. It probably took a small team a couple of years to build it from scratch. Testing was easy, because it was so simple. By comparison, the computer system on Orion will be a network of several specialized calculators connected together through several layers of networking protocols, built on decades of experience in computer networks. Each sensor will have it's own interface controlled by hardware and firmware. Software is written in object-oriented languages, running on a real-time operating system, with specialized libraries, and all built on several layers of abstraction before you get down to adressing the actual hardware registers. It's several of orders of magnitude more complex than old systems. There is also the decision making process. During the Saturn V design, if a team had a question, they would go see Von Braun, run the numbers with him, and they would have their answer the same day. No single person is in charge of a design any more. Each design decision has to go through meetings, reviews, approvals with teams from various systems. Nowadays, everything is "designed by committee" and has to follow "quality control principle". The result is, in principle, a more rational design. The main aim of quality control is to create accountability and traceability to ensure that procedures are followed. The role of quality procedures is to ensure "customer satisfaction", which means adherence to requirement specifications. So yes, a lot of the testing is done by computers nowadays, but designing those tests typically takes as much effort as designing the system under test. The test systems need to go through their own reviews and validation processes to make sure that they are testing the proper parameters. So yes, people will complain about bureaucracy and red-tape, but most of that overhead is a simple necessity. If you cut the red-tape, you start introducing risks that can be very expensive to fix later.

The 200 m/s number is what you gain when launching from an equatorial location to an equatorial orbit compared to a higher inclination location to a higher inclination orbit. I am not disputing that number, but it really depends on what you are launching and where you are putting the payload. A launch site can only launch into an inclination that is higher than its latitude. For example, a launch site at 45° N can only launch into an orbital inclination from 90° (polar) to 45°. Only a site on the equator can launch directly into an equatorial orbit. If a launch site is above (or below) the equator and wants to launch into an equatorial orbit, then the launcher or spacecraft must perform a plane change, which costs a lot of dV, and this is where you can potentially gain much more when launching close to the equator. Once you take into account the necessary dog-legging required to reach an equatorial orbit from a high inclination launch site, then the benefit is more like 500 m/s, and you might be right about a 30% increase in payload to GTO. I never disputed that, and it is put into practice by Ariane and Soyuz on every GTO launch they fly from Kourou, which is the closest permanent launch site to the equator. Also, don't forget that launching from the equator to a high inclination orbit gets you less benefit, because in this case, the high inclination launch site doesn't have a dog-legging handicap. In practice, launches from Kourou to the ISS gain less from the equatorial boost than launches from Kourou to GTO. In this case, the gain will potentially be less than 200 m/s. Launches to a polar orbit gain nothing. What I am disputing is your claim to a significant increase in payload from launching from a mountain top. In this case, the benefit in terms of altitude gains you less than 5 m/s, not 200 m/s. 8 km altitude is negligeable compared to a typical GTO apogee of 36000 km, and even though atmospheric pressure is too low for us to breath, the aerodynamic loads are pretty much the same as at sea level. If you are getting a 30% payload difference between launching from 8000m compared to launching from sea level, then there is something wrong with your simulation, and those 5 m/s are not worth the trouble of hauling your rockets to the top of a mountain, building fuel production factories up there, paying higher wages for extreme working conditions, and the risk of having your launch site confiscated by a foreign country.

I agree, an extended female docking cone that could be used on other spacecraft would be a great addition. It could even be part of an ASTP docking module.

Or just use robots.

In real-life, horizontal acceleration starts as soon as the rocket clears the tower. They don't "launch to 10000m and then start their gravity turn". It starts (gently) at 0m. Unless your mountain launch site actually has the rocket sitting on a pad at an angle, your ascent profile will actually start at a higher altitude, ie: when a rocket launched from sea-level will be at 1 or 2 degrees at 5000m, your mountain-rocket will still be pointing straight up. That claim doesn't match the math, which points to your simulation being wrong. What makes you think that those plugins are realistic? They are more realistic than stock KSP, but they are still approximations. For one thing, launch profiles in RL take into account aerodynamic loads, which KSP doesn't. Point your supersonic rocket only a single degree off of its vector, and it will break up. This doesn't happen in KSP, where rockets can easily flip around and retro burn while flying at Mach 10. There is also the throttle and restart issue, which isn't simulated in KSP (real rocket engines don't throttle down, and when they do, it's never any lower that 70%). Also, the mass and tankage numbers for the hardware is very approximative, because many of those figures are not public. Sources such as Wikipedia or Astronautix are usually all over the place.

Yeah, wake me up when corporations start planning beyond the next few quarters.

Which is why nations will probably never venture into 17th Century colonialization again. It was a stupid strategy that hardly ended well for any of the colonizing countries. Why would the US Government (or any other national entity) fund self-sufficient colonies on another planet, when those colonies would eventually end-up claiming independance ? It's a no-win situation and would be strategically idiotic.

There really is no point in doing trial and error test in a game with fantasy physics, when 5 minutes of Google-Fu answers your question: http://www.wired.com/2011/07/space-shuttle-launch-equator-vs-mountains/ People have been doing the math for decades. The benefit of launching from the equator is real, but mainly for equatorial inclinations. It's one of the reasons why Ariane is such a good rocket for GTO launches. Launching from Kourou to an equatorial orbit provides an advantage of 200m/s compared to, for example, KSC. However, the biggest benefit is that it minimizes "dog-legging" when launching from a higher inclination. To launch from KSC to an equatorial orbit, you need to do a significant plane change of several hundred m/s of dV, which is not necessary when launching from the equator. The reason why the US or Russia launch from higher inclinations is because at the time they built their launch sites, there wasn't really much point in launching to an equatorial orbit. Also, the logisitics and the strategic importance, meant that the site had to be part of the mainland, accessible with train lines or deep sea ports, with room for fuel production and storage facilities. Launching from a mountain, on the other hand, is a silly idea. The benefit is insignificant and the logistics and political problems heavily outweigh the couple of m/s that you might gain.

I have a TV, but I use it mainly with my Plex server for downloaded movies and VOD service. I hardly ever use the tuner. I wouldn't want to watch a 2-hour movie on a computer or a tablet.

Use Orbiter if you want a realistic simulation. KSP is simply not up to the task, even with mods.

ESA launches from Kourou, which is a French territory. No dealings with foreign countries, close to the equator, a location close to the sea so that rockets and payloads can be conveniently transported with cargo ships.

Parachutes and the systems to make them work are heavier than the little extra fuel needed to land. They are also labor intensive and must of the system can't be easily reused (cords, pyros, covers, etc...). Engines are already there and don't need any extra systems or consumables to work. Just refuel and go (gross oversimplification, but you get the idea).

Of course, the effect is exagerated in KSP, so you can't really use it as an accurate simulation. In RL, the difference in atmospheric pressure is much less significant, and the altitude gains you nothing, because getting to orbit is not about altitude anyway, but about speed. You'd be lucky to 200m/s in dV. You need 9500m/s to reach orbital speed, so the gain is less than 0.5%.

Why would they do that ? Space agencies are only made by nations to advance national interests, to subsidize national space industry and to develop national proprietary technology. An international space agency has no such purpose, therefore nobody has any interest in funding one.

The tiny amount of fuel you save with those 200m/s (out of 9500 m/s required to get to orbital speed) is totally offset by: - The cost of building a launch complex on top of a mountain. - The cost of paying people to work in a remote location. - The cost of transporting the rocket to the top of the mountain. - The insecurity of building a strategic asset in a foreign country. It's a stupid idea that has been debunked repeatedly ever since people started launching rockets in the late 1940's.

Please read the forum before posting. You are the third person to post this. The thread about it is only 10 lines below yours.

We produce 20000 tons of nuclear waste per year. That represents approximately 200 SLS launches every year, or 400Falcon Heavy launches, just to get the stuff to LEO. The cost would be prohibitive.

A planet is a big place and there are only two rovers. Plus, probes tend to explore very different areas instead of landing close to each other. It's like asking if there is someone in China who can come repair you dishwasher in Europe.

Platinum is used for two things right now: jewellery and catalytic converters for cars. I don't imagine that we will still be driving gas guzzlers in 50 years, so there goes most of the demand for platinum. As for jewellery, the volume is low and its value is related to it's rarity, so if you dump hundreds of tons on the market, the price collapses.