Nibb31

I don't know where this rant comes from, since I've never seen anyone claim that we don't deserve to go space. There is no merit or destiny or good or evil. Humans are a migrating species, but we need a reason to move. We follow the bison and populate the fertile land. We flee wars and famine. We naturally go where we will improve the safety, comfort, or wealth of ourselves or our families. That's how we work. If one day, living in space offers better living conditions than on Earth, we will find a way to populate it.

I'm afraid that buying a Windows RT device was a mistake. Selling them as Windows devices, when they certainly were not, was voluntarily misleading and should have got them charged for fraud. These are so crippled that you really would have been better off with a cheaper Android tablet.

An impact driver converts the force of a big heavy hammer blow into rotational torque. As long as the Phillips grooves on the head of the screw are ok, all you have to do is to hold the impact driver upright over the screw while you bang the screwdriver. No rotational force is required on your part.

yes, I'd say use an impact driver. However, if the screw heads are damaged or worn, then the impact driver won't work. In that case, you will have to drill them out, with a super hard metal bit. If the screws are large enough, then drill a hole into the screw head and use an easyout to remove the screw. Beware, easyouts are very hard metal and easily break. If it does break, then all is lost.

The old Mercury-Atlas was practically an SSTO. It only dropped 2 engines but kept the rest of the rocket in one piece all the way to orbit. On paper, the Titan II first stage with nothing on top of it is also said to have had enough dV to reach orbit. It was never flown this way because it would have needed the additional weight of a guidance system and a fairing, which probably would have made it too heavy, and also because the engines were not throttlable. Nowadays, a similar design to the these old rockets, with more efficient throttlable engines and modern avionics, could in theory make it as an SSTO, albeit with a very small payload. The thing is, what's the point? SSTO alone achieves nothing and will always carry a much lower payload fraction than an MSTO launcher. If it's reusability you want, it can be done with or without SSTO, and all the gear and extra mass (structure, wings, TPS, landing gear, extra fuel...) required to return and land the vehicle only eats even more into the performance margin and the already insignificant payload fraction of an SSTO vehicle, making the whole exercice pointless.

You're welcome. Unless you're freelancing as a consultant or working alone in your garage for your own company, you never get freedom from external control or influence in engineering. There are always laws, regulations, standards, procedures, and requirements to follow. In most large companies, you don't get to choose your own tools or processes. You will always be working as part of team under management and trying to juggle with (usually conflicting) requirements from customers, marketing departments, legal departments, financial controllers, regulation authorities, and other engineering groups. If you want to be an engineer to be free to create things, then you are setting yourself up for disappointment.

I don't see any difference really. Engineering is about meeting requirements, which is more about compromise than creativity. If it's creativity you're after, you should join an art school, not go into engineering.

At any rate, a launch cost for a commercial sat is not the same as a manned flight to the ISS. A commercial launch doesn't include the spacecraft and only a few of hours of mission control. A manned mission requires a spacecraft, crew training, crew processing facilities, mission control for the duration of the flight up until recovery and reentry. If a commercial satellite launch costs $60 million, double that number for a manned flight seems in the ballpark, and even a bargain.

You claimed that it "might be" something else. RAW data always needs to be processed. Images from Viking were also processed. That article you linked to is about pictures from MGS back in 1998, that he has also processed, reprocessed and tampered in all sorts of ways in order to come up with his PROOF THAT THE CYDONIA FACE ON MARS IS ARTIFICIAL. Well, the "proof" must have been less than substantial, because not a single scientist in the world has taken this up and published the evidence in a peer-reviewed paper. Why would that be ? This compares the Viking images with the MGS images using the same processing: The info at the JPL regarding image processing does not correlate with the link that you provided. All the processing steps and raw data are available directly: http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/mro/mgs/msss/camera/images/4_6_face_release/index.html The latest high resolution 3D images and elevation data produced by MRO in 2010 fail to show any artificial features, even though the HiRise camera has a high enough resolution to actually see Opportunity or Spirit from orbit. You can even see by yourself with Google Earth: You are insulting the entire science community. And you need to do some actual research from the actual sources instead of trusting 12 year-old conspiracy websites.

What do you mean by autonomy? Engineering and technical work always requires being part of a very integrated team. If by "autonomy" you mean freedom to pick and choose what you are going to work on and how you are going to do it, then it doesn't exist in any aerospace company, especially as young graduate fresh out of school.

I agree that the SpaceX's claimed price doesn't necessarily reflect the actual price, which is usually confidential in this sort of contract, and SpaceX is also heavily subsidized (but then so are ULA and Arianespace). However, that article is full of crap, comparing Minotaur and Falcon, suggesting that NASA would have saved money by launching SMAP on a Minotaur when it was way too big and was launched on Delta II, not F9, and mixing up the prices for commercial satellite launches with the price for manned Dragon flights to the ISS.

I haven't found anything that can't be replaced by something better from the Play Store. However, there is a whole category of users that never downloads anything from the Play Store and relies only on stuff that came preloaded with the phone, including the default ringtone or wallpaper.

Let's ask NASA to send a billion dollar robot just to be sure !

It's good scientific method to validate another organization's findings. It's called peer review. It also makes sense to do your own homework when you are going to invest in a new toy, rather than to blindly trust the sales pitch. Although I'm not immensely optimistic about Skylon, it isn't surprising that some funding is coming from DoD or DARPA instead of the UK government or ESA. Note that due to ITAR regulations, it would not be possible for a European government or company to invest in US space technology in the same manner. Europe is way too laxist in allowing strategic technologies to be bought up by foreign entities.

Here: There is simply no indication that it might be artificial. Landing locations are dictated by science goals, which are driven by the people doing actual research. Current research is focused on exploring the places where we might find the chemical building blocks for life, not places that have pretty shadows under certain lighting conditions. The erosion process that caused the formation of those Cydonia mesas is pretty well understood and we wouldn't learn much by sending a robot there compared to other places.

If you're short on cash, building a purpose-built space tug will be cheaper than turning a spaceplane into a space tug.

Nothing lives forever. Humanity as we know it will one day go extinct, whether we like it or not. It might be supplanted by something better suited to the environment, or it might evolve and branch out into something totally unrecognizable to us. Nature doesn't care if it's good or bad. Life will go on for better or worse after we are gone. We are just a species among billions of others on a tiny planet among billions of others. We have only existed for a few thousand years. We are nothing more than a sudden rash on Earth's skin. We aren't special snowflakes with any special rights or special destiny. Our insignificance is unfathomable, and there's nothing wrong with that. Overpopulation is a real problem. You simply can't have infinite growth with finite resources. Technology can improve the efficiency with which we extract those resources, but the fact remains that the reserves are finite. The easiest way to fight overpopulation is simply make less babies. The balance between human population and resources will reestablish itself naturally sooner or later. Either we do it voluntarily over a few generations or we let nature take care of it and it won't be pretty. For the moment, it's pointless to envision fighting overpopulation by sending people off-world. You would need to send billions of people if your goal is to reduce the strain on our resources, but the expenditure of energy required to do so, and to keep them alive out there, would ruin the world for the billions who would stay here. It would put more strain, not less, on our resources. And really, there is no other place for us to go. The laws of physics say that we are stuck here for the foreseeable future. Life and human reproduction might not ever be possible beyond our atmosphere and gravity well. And even if we make Earth a giant wasteland, the planet we evolved to live on will always be more habitable for us than Mars or the Moon. In fact, if we can survive in self-sustaining colonies on Mars, then we could also survive in self-sustaining colonies on a scorched Earth.

If reusability is your goal, then who cares if it's SSTO or MSTO. Multiple stages will give you a much higher payload and potentially allow a single launch instead of "lots". On paper, if it had worked as designed, VentureStar was to have a LEO payload capability of ~20 tons. The vehicle itself would have weighed around 100 tons, and it would have carried 900 tons of propellant. This means that your second VentureStar would need to fly at least 45 refueling missions to fill up the first VentureStar. In reality, these 45 launches would have to be done over a period of a few days because of propellant boiloff, or you would need even more launches to compensate for lost propellant, which makes the whole thing unfeasible. VentureStar was designed for LEO missions and not for interplanetary missions. It would need extensive modifications to turn it into a decent MTV, including a whole new power source and supplies for expendables. These modifications would seriously cut into the 20 ton payload capacity. And once it arrives at Mars, what next? It wouldn't have enough dV to also do an orbital insertion, so it would have to go for a direct reentry and somehow refuel on Mars, but wings designed for Earth's atmosphere don't work too well on Mars, so it would also need to do a propulsive landing, which requires even more modifications. In the end, you are better off designing a vehicle built for the purpose rather than sticking floats on a Land Rover to get it to cross the Atlantic. Purpose built means that you would have your reusable LEO taxi (SSTO or MSTO, who cares?) with high-thrust engines, your reusable MTV with low-thrust/high ISP vacuum engines (SEP or NTR) for the interplanetary transfer, and your reusable MAV for shuttling between LMO and the base.

It's possible to build an SSTO, but the payload fraction is useless. But what is the point of building an SSTO to take 7 tons to Mars if it isn't coming back? It would be expended anyway, so you're just building a heavier rocket and wasting a lot of payload and expensive reusable hardware that isn't needed. It would take two launches and be more expensive than using a conventional multi-stage rocket.

Going to Mars isn't just about dV. You can't just take a Soyuz or a Space Shuttle and send it to Mars. You also need supplies, power, durability, and radiation shielding. First of all, the X-33 was never meant to be manned, or even orbital. It was a suborbital test demonstrator for VentureStar. VentureStar was to have similar capabilities to the Space Shuttle. This means that it would have been able to stay in orbit for a week or so. After that, all systems would be dead. It couldn't carry the supplies, the fuel, the solar arrays, the shielding, and the habitation volume for a Mars trip. In real-life, SSTO has a terrible payload fraction. You wouldn't want to explore the jungle in a Mini, and a Range Rover isn't the best vehicle for your grocery runs. Building deep-space exploration spacecraft and a LEO taxi are two different things. This is why NASA is building Orion and running the CCDev program at the same time, because Orion would be too expensive as a LEO taxi, and Dragon/CST-100/DreamChaser would be crap for deep space exploration. Different vehicles for different purposes.

What evidence is there of it being artificial, other than Hoagland's claims? OMG! Faces on Earth! Pareidolia is a thing.

Bigelow has zero paying customers too. An unmanned F9 launch has a claimed price tag of $50 million. Even if they cut it by 20% by reusing the first stage (which is highly optimistic), it's still $40 million. 7 seats, minus 2 pilots, spreads the cost over 5 paying customers. Add the cost of the Dragon, the training, catering, and ground ops for the duration of the flight, and you will be way above $10 million for a tourist ticket to space. There simply isn't a big enough market to justify the cost.

Wasn't this about Cameron's UK? We're talking about the most capitalistic country in Europe.

A space agency doesn't run companies. It drives a space program and buys stuff from private companies.

And what would be the viable business model for a private Dragon and a SpaceX space station other than as a money sink for Elon's billions? Besides, SpaceX had never claimed any interest in building a space station. Without customers, private space companies are going nowhere. And the only paying customers at this point are NASA, DoD, and a handful of private billionaires.