Nibb31

Agreed, it's quite embarrassing that the President of an international space agency is such a poor English-speaker.

Docking with a rotating object is not easy.

My data is on a NAS. My computers typically run a tiny SSD drive only with the OS and whatever I'm currently messing with. Anything in My Documents is backup up to OwnCloud running on the NAS. A NAS is cheap, and well worth the investment. I have an HP Proliant N54L microserver (which can be bought at a bargain price these days) with 2 x 1TB drives in RAID1, which runs OpenMediaVault, ownCloud, and a Plex media server.

1. It would be huge, expensive, and vulnerable. There is no point when there are already air bases, carrier ships, drones, and inflight refueling. 2. Until proven otherwise, the EmDrive produces zero thrust. Zero multiplied by 1000 is still zero. 3. Aerospikes are not "more efficient", they have constant efficiency from sea-level to vacuum.

There was really no need to necro a year-old conspiracy thread just to say hello. And nobody with an IQ over 10 is "uncertain about the Apollo program's history". It was one of the most documented projects in History. There are literally terabytes of recorded data on the internet that is freely accessible if you just bother to look elsewhere than Youtube.

Why on earth did you use an evaluation version for important stuff ? It's for evaluation, not to trust with your actual work. You should never test an OS without having a backup-restore strategy. Backup your files and reinstall the machine with a permanent OS.

I got 3 and gave 2 away. The other expired. I don't think they are actually giving them away any more. It seems they have switched to a 'pre-order' strategy these days.

That argument is a fallacy. By definition, a semiautonomous base could not survive autonomously. It would have to a 100% self-sufficient colony, which is currently beyond our technology. However, if we ever are capable of building 100% self sufficience colonies on Mars, then we are also capable of building them on Earth. A scorched Earth will always be easier for us to survive on than Mars or Titan. And even if a nuclear war or a big asteroid wipes out 99.9% of humanity, there will still be millions of survivors, equivalent to the entire World population during the Middle Ages, which is much more than any self-sufficient off-world colony could ever sustain.

Computers on the ISS need to be certified for spaceflight. This is a rather long and expensive process, which means that the hardware will have to be used and supported for several years. This is why they typically use Lenovo (ex-IBM) Thinkpads. They also need to run linux, because that's what most of the control software is written for. Tablets are consumer devices with a shelf-life of 1 or 2 years, after which they are no longer supported. They aren't particularly robust and they typically run flavors of Android or iOS, which are closed source (I know, AOSP is open-source, but the Google apps and bloatware manufacturers put into the devices are closed source).

I don't really think you can see the difference in pixels between 1080p and 4K on a 5.5" screen. I have the OnePlus One, which is pretty much the fastest phone on the market right now. It has a 1080p screen, and I can't see individual pixels. On the other hand, 4x resolution means 4x processing power, so with all things equal, a higher resolution means slower performance, for very little benefit. Technology keeps on advancing, so you can always wait for the next best thing that is just around the corner. By doing that though, you will never buy anything. At one point, you just have to pull the trigger and buy what's best on the market right now, knowing that whatever you buy, it will always be obsolete next year.

The stripes and checker patterns are to allow visual monitoring of roll.

I was talking about the actual Orion spacecraft. EFT-1 is just a test flight with a partially completed CM on an interim launcher. I know what you mean. There are vague plans for a Deep Space Habitat that would loiter at EML-2, but there is no funding. The elephant in the room is that Congress has not given SLS and Orion a clear mission yet, therefore no mission-specific hardware is being developed.

No it doesn't. It looks like the pilots were "ejected" when the aircraft broke up around them. It must have been terrifying experience. Also, crew is replaceable ? WTF ?

[snip] But it doesn't change the fact many voices in the industry have been warning Scaled Composite and Virgin Galactic that this new engine hasn't been properly tested on the ground, that hybrid engines are fundamentally flawed, and that the current test flight schedule was wreckless. Pointing that out is stating the truth, not being insensitive.

Congratulations for being the 100th person to post the same bad joke.

I really don't see them continuing after this. This is the last nail in the coffin for the hybrid engine. They would need to rebuild a new aircraft and develop a new engine, while they were already over schedule and over budget. Many people in the industry have been warning that Scaled and VG were taking huge risks and that SS2 was a dead end. It's extremely sad that there has had to be yet another fatality to prove them right.

No there isn't. Orion is equivalent to the Apollo CSM.

It's a replica of the Russian Zond missions to test the reentry capsule from lunar orbit. The capsule is the same that will be used for the sample return mission, a subscale Shenzhou descent module.

The rocket exploded.

The press release for the CRS contracts states "At the time of award, NASA has ordered eight flights valued at about $1.9 billion from Orbital and 12 flights valued at about $1.6 billion from SpaceX.", which means that NASA pays around $240 million for each Cygnus flight and $133 million for each Dragon flight. This isn't the "cost per launch", which would include a whole lot of fixed costs, including infrastructure and development, which are confidential corporate information. So it's pretty much impossible to estimate the "cost per launch" from the outside. I'm guessing that NASA pays for the cargo (the snacks, clean underwear, and science experiments). Governments usually insure themselves (meaning that they are not insured), so anything that was on-board is a write off. Probably less than a couple million dollars here. Orbital provides the service of delivering the cargo. In this case, the service wasn't provided, si I'm guessing that the contract says that they owe NASA another flight. The rocket and spacecraft belong to them, so either they were insured and the cost of the vehicle is paid back, or they weren't and it's a loss for them. Hopefully, this sort of contigency was provisioned. As for the infrastructure damage, Wallops Island facilities belong to NASA and are leased to the launch provider. I'm not sure who pays for the damage here, but it's probably Orbital's insurance. All in all, I don't think this failure is a huge financial disaster for anyone. It's a relatively inexpensive rocket carrying a relatively inexpensive cargo and the structural damage is minor. The actual inquiry will probably cost more than the failure itself.

I don't understand what is newsworthy about fighter jets making a sonic boom. They do it all the time, although they usually have regulatory limitations for routine flights. The picture attached to the article, as usual, is a stock photo that is totally unrelated to the incident. The vapor cone phenomenon is due to condensation at transonic speeds but isn't necessarily related to breaking Mach 1.

Probably rocket fuel. They do seem a bit close to the launchpad.

Dragon 2 has Super Draco thrusters that can be used EITHER as a powered landing system OR a launch abort system. Aborts will always be over the ocean, so in case of a launch abort it splashes down with parachutes because it no longer has enough propellant to ensure a powered splashdown. A powered splashdown is useless anyway, because history has shown that a parachute splashdown is perfectly survivable, compared to a parachute landing, which needs something to cushion the landing (airbags or rockets). If you want it to do both abort and powered splashdown, then it has to carry roughly twice as much propellant, which means less cargo on each flight for no proper reason. The SD engines on Dragon 2 are justified only because the same system serves two purposes. Remove the LAS requirement and powered landing becomes a superfluous luxury that eats into your payload. Remove the powered landing and you are better off jettisonning the LAS as soon as you no longer need. If Dragon 2 was unmanned, you would need neither, thus Dragon 1 still exists for cargo because it can carry more payload. But again, cargo is cheap, most of it is groceries and fresh clothes, so there really is no point in spending huge amounts of money on preserving it.

If it's as valuable as a human, then stick it on a human-rated spacecraft. The whole point of a robot, like any other hardware, is that it's expendable and can be rebuilt if necessary. You only lose money, but that's what insurance is for. But we're not there yet. It's better to use a cheap launcher to launch cheap stuff.

Cygnus weighs something like 5 tons, including 2 tons of underwear, groceries, and science experiments. A launch escape system for something like Cygnus would weigh well over 2 tons, meaning that you would save the Cygnus, but it wouldn't be carrying any payload. Even if it did have an escape rocket, Cygnus isn't designed to land intact, so it would be destroyed by the splashdown or land impact. If you really wanted to save it, you would need a much larger rocket, parachutes, and some sort of landing device, but then you go against the whole point of having a small cheap cargo launcher. It would also be more complex, and introduce more risk of failure: what if your LES fails to separate, or blows up the rocket? Supplies are cheap and experiments can be rebuilt. Expensive stuff is insured. It really is no big deal.