Nibb31

I'm not sure why you are posting this here and not on a PC hardware forum.

This is also how I understood the OP question. During Apollo, there were all sorts of procedures that the astronauts had to follow before a burn. Different engines with different propellants were used for different burns, so each engine had different procedures. They had to stir tanks, enable various safeguards, disable others, check consumable levels and pressures.... For the whole detail, you should have a look at the Apollo Operations Handbook which describes all the procedures. You'll understand why Apollo astronauts required several years of training to get the hang of all the systems. The Apollo LM engine was probably the simplest engine because it used hypergolics, meaning that the fuel and oxydizer ignite spontaneously on contact. They used this because it's the most reliable type of engine and uses the less amount of moving parts. And yes, it did have a big yellow START button. Of course, there were safeguards: you had to enable several circuit breakers and activate some safety valves before you could start the engine. However, most burns on Apollo were controlled by the Apollo PGNCS computer. They would input the parameters of the burn (basically the XYZ orientation of the spacecraft, start time, and duration), and the computer would count down, point the spacecraft into the correct direction, and start and stop the burn accordingly. There was no throttle (there rarely is a throttle on rocket engines), so the duration of the burn controlled the dV that was imparted. Nowadays, modern spacecraft work pretty much in the same way. Burns are controlled by a computer. The role of the astronauts is to monitor the systems and input the burn parameters into the computer. Flying a spacecraft is much closer to using MechJeb than flying an aircraft with a stick and throttle.

Hermes was cancelled well before actual development of Ariane 5 started. Ariane was "sized" for Hermes, but none of the actual design is currently man-rated. It would need a major redesign, which is not going to happen at this stage in the Ariane lifecycle. You would also need to invest in new facilities in Kourou for crew operations, heavy launch pad modifications, and expansion of the airbase and naval facilities for S&R operations in case of an abort... And why would it need a fairing? DreamChaser doesn't use a fairing for Atlas V launches. It could only cause more problems in case of an abort.

It's a test module, and they have been launching test modules since 2006. They are no closer now than they were then to having an actual paying customer. If the ISS ends in 2020, that's only 3 years of commercial crew flights. With 2 providers and 1 flight every 6 months, they'll only get 3 flights each. After all this malarkey, I certainly hope for them that the ISS is extended until 2024 at least! And they do this to develop a domestic R&D capability. Why would they buy a ticket from a US supplier when they are developing their own spacecraft and launcher family? No they don't. The UKSA hardly has enough funding to keep itself running. They don't have enough budget to have a domestic space program, let alone a manned space program. A UKSA that is not member of ESA would also not be a part of the ISS arrangements. They would not have access to the ESA facility on the ISS or any barter arrangement for NASA flights. In fact, a UK astronaut would have nowhere to go. But if they did want to go alone, why would they buy a separate ticket from a US supplier? Again, like any other national space agency, the point of an independent UKSA would be to promote domestic R&D by subsidizing domestic aerospace companies, not buying off-the-shelf launch services from US providers. Anything is possible. But a lot of all that is highly improbable.

ESA might charter one or two flights from SNC to send up European crew members on the existing DreamChaser/Atlas but I don't think anyone in ESA is seriously thinking about putting a DreamChaser on top of an Ariane 5. That would require a major investment (including redesigning the Ariane 5 for manned flights and building manned operation facilities in Kourou), which would be prohibitive.

There was lunar plan in the 70's that involved the STS back in the days when they thought that it would be cheap to fly. They would have sent up an Apollo capsule and a LM on one Shuttle and a Centaur on a second Shuttle, docked the two in LEO, and flown to the Moon from there.

Bigelow doesn't have any customers either. What other wealthy countries? ESA and JAXA are committed to the ISS until at least 2024 and China is building its own space station. Maybe after that, Bigelow might be able to find someone to pay for his station, but how does SpaceX keep Dragon V2 operational for a decade without anywhere to go? Even if he brings the cost of a manned launch down to the crazy optimistic figure of $60 million, that's still $10 million per passenger. And that is a totally unrealistic reduction compared to the current CCtCap prices. European space agencies exist to subsidize domestic R&D, not to buy off-the-shelf launch services from US corporations for the sake of it. The UK is part of ESA and their current funding is symbolic at best. The only way for the UKSA to get their own space program is to withdraw from ESA and increase their budget tenfold, which is not going to happen. No European country has the will or the budget to fund their own independent manned spaceflight program, even with the commercial crew vehicles.

Minecraft is way past it's peak potential. Those who would have bought the game already have it and it's old by gaming standards. No way can Microsoft milk another $2.5 billion out of the franchise at this stage, unless they go for a "Minecraft 2", which will probably be a flop. These megadeals in the computer industry really make me cringe. It's similar to the Facebook -Whatsapp deal from last year. They paid $6.5 billion for a 20-person startup with no viable business model. That is more than the valuation of real companies like Alsthom or Thales, which have an industrial base, patents, assets, customers, high-tech products, and a highly-qualified workforce of thousands of people... It's totally crazy!

I don't really see how. There is no customer base for Dragon V2 other than NASA. I can see it doing a couple of test flights, maybe one with Elon on board, but tourists aren't exactly queuing up for $10 million tickets to LEO and I haven't seen any institutional buyers other than the US Government. There might be a few foreign governments willing to pay to have their first astronaut, but that doesn't provide enough flights to justify a reusable spacecraft. Musk wants to go to Mars, but there's a huge technological, industrial, and even societal gap between what SpaceX can do today and building a colony on Mars, even if Dragon V2 does fly next year. It's a gap that is decades and billions of dollars wide, so how does Musk keep SpaceX afloat while he bridges that gap if he doesn't get CCtCap ? NASA is the only way for SpaceX to acquire experience in manned spaceflight. Without the commercial crew contract, it's back to launching commercial comsats to GEO and a couple of DoD launches. They can improve the F9 rocket, and they might even go for BFR if SLS is cancelled, but Dragon V2 is dead in the water with no demand. At least DC has seen some interest from ESA and JAXA. They might be able to charter a flight or two from them, but they're pretty much in the same boat as SpaceX if they get cut out.

The requirement to return equipment is covered by Cargo Dragon, which is the only vehicle that can return an ISPR module. Most experiments are designed to withstand launch and reentry and are packaged in ISPR racks, which are too big to fit through LIDS/NDS port that the crewed vehicles use. So the low-G capability of DreamChaser, while nice to have, is not a hard requirement and is counterbalanced by DreamChaser's unproven abort modes and lower survivability ratings.

First of all, there is no such thing as 'above the atmosphere'. It is no hard limit to the atmosphere because it rarifies progressively. Even the ISS flies through the (very rarified) atmosphere as it requires constant reboosts to counter atmospheric drag. As an arbitrary value, NASA and other space organisations use the Karman line as the "boundary for space", which is arbitrarily set at 100 Km. They could have chosen 95.7 Km or 113 Km, but they chose 100 Km because it's a nice round metric value. The USAF on the other hand sets its limit to space at "50 miles", their own nice round value, which happens to be equivalent 80.46 Km. The X-15 program employed pilots from the USAF, the US Navy, and NASA. The X-15 exceeded the "50 mile" USAF limit 13 times and the USAF awarded the "astronaut wings" medal to the USAF pilots of those X-15 flights, but not to those who weren't USAF. However, the X-15 only exceeded the international "100 Km" line twice, both times with Joseph A Walker, who was a NASA test pilot (not an astronaut). Therefore Walker was the only X-15 pilot to have flown in "space" as recognized by international space organizations. However, because he was a NASA test pilot and not a member of the NASA Astronaut Corps, he was not awarded the NASA astronaut wings, because the NASA didn't have that distinction at the time. You were either a selected astronaut or not. Walker was killed in 1966 (his F-104 collided with the XB-70 causing a horrific crash) and was awarded the NASA astronaut wings in 2005 posthumously.

Yes, but a robot (and even a human in EVA) can only service parts that are designed to be serviceable, ie. you know in advance that the parts have a limited lifecycle, either because they will wear out (stuff like CMGs), or they have planned obsolescence. You can't predict that a future technology will be available in 10 years to the point where you can design your system to be compatible with that technology because satellite components are usually highly integrated. You could overengineer your other components to cope with a higher performance or larger capabilities that might be available in the future, but that would just make it much more expensive. As for mechanical wear, that's what redundancy is for, and you design your system so that all parts have a similar MTBF. There is no point in adding more propellant than necessary for the lifetime of other parts of the spacecraft, or in overengineering CMGs that will outlive the rest of the system. All in all, the uses for actual on-orbit servicing are quite limited. We have Hubble as an example to demonstrate that orbital repairs are expensive and hazardous. It would have been cheaper to launch an improved Hubble 2 than to perform all those maintenance flights. That's not how it works. You have to relate the cost of the servicing with the cost of the mission spacecraft. If your satellite costs 200 million to design and 200 million to build and launch, and your servicing mission costs 100 million, then you're better off launching a copy of your original satellite than messing with servicing, especially if you can save 100 million by not adding serviceability requirements to your design. And your servicing spacecraft could do much more servicing if it is expendable than if it isn't. For a constant launch cost, a 10 ton spaceplane only has a few hundred kilos of mission payload (spare parts, refueling consumables, robotic equipment), whereas a 10 ton expendable servicing spacecraft could carry several tons of mission payload and be able to do a lot more work. The wings, fuselage, wheels, TPS, hydraulics are all just wasted payload, because your spaceplane isn't going to bring back anything of much value.

Surely you mean anaglyph. An anagram is something else.

MSO Building = Manned Space Operations Building, now known as the Operations and Checkout Building. That's where the crew was prepared, suits were stored and maintained, and all the preflight medical checks were performed.

There will be no point in increasing productivity with robots if there is nobody around to buy the stuff that the robots produce. If we get to a point where robots do all the work, we'll also have to find a way for people to have enough money to buy stuff without working. Or we can just do away with money altogether...

What's with this personality thing ? Do you think that people put on personalities like they put on shirts ? Seriously man, nobody cares about your personalities. If you have personality issues, go get some help. Or stop being childish.

Here you have the Apollo prelaunch checklist: http://nassp.sourceforge.net/wiki/Prelaunch_checklist_%28Virtual_AGC%29 It says that the backup crew starts checklist procedures at -3:00 hours. This is where they basically switch on the spacecraft systems. The prime crew ingress and cabin closeout occurs at -1:40. Before that, of course, they have been donning their suits, pre-breathing and have spent several days in quarantine doing medical exams.

They are experimental vehicles designed to study new fundamental technologies. Those techologies might or might not one day lead to economically viable applications. Most spacecraft are expendable, because making them recoverable only adds to the weight and complexity. You only design them to reenter if they are carrying something valuable enough to justify the extra cost of making the vehicle capable of reentry, such as humans, scientific samples, or very expensive engines. Cheap stuff like tankage, computers, solar panels, or insulation materials don't justify that expense and are therefore expendable. Building a reusable spacecraft whose only justification for being recoverable is the cost of the equipment that makes it reusable doesn't make any sense. A reusable tanker that is only going to return an empty tank simply doesn't make any sense at all. Vehicles like X37B or IXV (or PRIDE) are not reusable rockets. You still need a full-size expendable rocket to put them into space. They are very expensive reusable payload fairings that take up most of the expendable launcher's payload capacity, which is why they make no sense economically.

No it isn't. IXV's purpose is to study advanced reentry technologies as part of the FLPP program. Reentry has nothing to do with servicing satellites, nor has the FLPP got anything to do with servicing satellites. A servicing spacecraft will have to be much simpler and cheaper than the mission satellite that it is supposed to service, otherwise you might as well just relaunch a new mission satellite and forget about the servicing. It will basically be a tanker, a manoeuvering system and a docking mechanism. Once it's done, it's just an empty tank. There is no point in bringing it back. You will be better off giving it a larger tank to allow it to service more satellites rather than to add wings, a TPS, hydraulics and all sorts of expensive hardware to bring it back.

Huh? IXV has nothing to do with refueling or repairing. It's a suborbital reentry research vehicle.

He didn't downplay anything. The US government was perfectly aware of his past.

Scratch is kind of a modern day equivalent of Basic. It's designed to get kids into the concepts of programming. I still think Basic is great for that, and probably offers more flexibility that Scratch does. 10 Print "Endless Loop" 20 Goto 10

No warpship is entering production any time soon.

Comsats are already transitioning to high-Isp electrical propulsion. They are already built to run for about 20 years. How much longer do you thing you would want to extend their life if you could? You would be able to upgrade some stuff, but the chassis and the basic components will not be replaceable. To go back to the PC analogy, even if you replace the video card and RAM every 2 years, you would still be stuck with a 20 year old motherboard and PSU. Most of the parts will be obsolete, the technology no longer useful. Actually, in 20 years, we probably won't be using GEO comsats any more... Repairable and refuelable satellites have to designed with that in mind, meaning that the hundreds of GEO comsats that are operating today will never be repairable. How much does the extra hardware for docking and refueling weigh compared to adding a few kg of extra xenon in the first place? As for hardware replacement, that's even heavier, because it requires doors, rack-mounts, base plates, special connectors... (cf Hubble) everything has to be modular and easily accessible from the outside. You are better off using higher grade components, thicker shielding, and add more fuel, if you are interested in squeezing more life out of a satellite. And if you really have to replace all those parts, you're probably better off just sending up a new sat, with all the latest technology and materials. It will probably be lighter, more optimized, and purpose built for the new communication technologies that you want it to handle over the next 20 years.

There isn't much to reuse except a 2 year old inflatable hab that's run out of supplies and full of trash. You would need a lot of propellant to brake it into LEO from a Mars return trajectory, and you would have to carry all that propellant all the way to Mars and back, which would weigh much more than an Orion. Not worth it.