Nibb31

Orbiter Vehicle is the proper nomenclature used by NASA. They were known as OV-102, OV-099, OV-0103, OV-104, and OV-105. NASA hardly ever referred to them as spaceplanes. I've never seen Soyuz or Shenzhou referred to as orbiters, but as spacecraft. As for IXV, I don't see why you would want to call in an orbiter as it isn't going to orbit.

Buran was a space shuttle, not a Space Shuttle. The official name of what people call the US Space Shuttle was actually Space Transportation System. Columbia, Challenger, etc were not space shuttles, they were orbiters (or Orbiter Vehicles). The Space Shuttle was made up of an OV, an ET, and two SRBs. As for which orbiter was "best", define "best". If it's in terms of payload capability, Endeavor (OV-105) could carry the most (or go higher) because her lighter construction benefited from the experience from the other orbiters. Columbia (OV-102) was the heaviest because she had additional instrumentation for the test flights and structural reinforcements for the ejection seat hatches. Also Columbia was never fitted with the APAS docking module, so she couldn't be used for ISS missions.

Most people's most valuable files are their personal pictures and videos. They contain family, friends, vacations, parties, and important moments of their lives.. Those are pretty much the only files that would be unreplaceable if I lost them, which is why they are duplicated on a RAID NAS and backed up to the cloud.

Why is that ? We went to the Moon for the last time 40 years ago, and nobody is planning to return there in the next 20 years, let alone go to Mars. The technological leap between interplanetary travel to interstellar travel is tremendous and might not even be possible at all.

The counter argument has been covered amply elsewhere in the forum several times. If you want to discuss Skylon, then please go ahead and reply to this post: http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/84583-Space-economies-and-economics?p=1241640&viewfull=1#post1241640

Not if their average lifespan is 5000 years.

How do you know it's BS ? There are only so many replacement parts and parts like the SARJ joints are vital and hard to fix. NASA no longer has the capability to send up a new SARJ or a new SAW. Some of the parts on the ISS are older than MIR was when it was deorbited. MIR had become obsolete and unsafe. Could it have been possible to extend its life? Yes. Was it worth it? No. There isn't one single item that is going to get stuck (if only because things are designed to be redundant), but it's just going to get more and more complicated to fix more and more things that are going to degrade or break down.

I've never heard of 2013 as an end-of-life date for the ISS. I think the first date was supposed to be 2014, but that was years ago before construction was delayed by the Columbia accident. After that, it was 2020 based on the aging of Zarya and Zvezda. The Russians now reckon they can keep it running until 2024. The Solar Array Wings have a lifespan of 20 years, during which power output will degrade progressively (they lose 1 to 2% per year). They are not replaceable and scheduled to fail to produce enough power around 2028, plus or minus 5 years. By then, most of the electronics and life-support will also be worn out and obsolete and most of the science objectives will be done anyway. It's always a matter of how much you want to spend to keep it running compared to the benefits. You can keep on driving your car for 50 years if you want to, but in the end, parts are going to get obsolete and harder to replace and it will eventually cost more than buying a new car. And in comparison, a new car will probably be faster, safer, more comfortable, and cheaper to run. Of course, spacecraft are more expensive to repair than a car, because it takes more effort to produce and ship up the parts, the actual repairs are more complicated in an extreme environment, and the whole thing is permanently powered up and manned. It's like replacing an engine in a 747 while it's flying. There are no plans to replace the ISS. If they ever get a budget for it, NASA wants to build a mini-station located at EML-2 (the "Exploration Gateway") which would give Orion somewhere to go. Russia has plans to build OPSEK based on some modules that will be assembled at the ISS before its ended. And China, of course, wants to assemble Tiangong-3.

Or carbon nanotubes might turn out being super expensive. And it's not 80 miles, it's 22400 miles (x2 for the counterweight). That's a damn heavy spool of fiber, whatever the material you use. Why "almost free" ? Do you know how much energy would be required to power multi-ton climbers at high speeds over such huge distances ? or how much it would cost to build the damn thing ? How can you anticipate launch prices so far in the future ? And if we had those sorts of advanced materials, why couldn't we use them to build reusable SSTO rockets instead, which would decrease launch costs, increase flexibility, and make a space elevator less competitive. No it won't.

But nobody wants to keep it that long. NASA and the other countries eventually want to move on with other projects. They can't do that if their budget is tied up in ISS maintenance.

Or maybe we don't.

Technology advances, but the laws of physics stay the same. Which is why, although technology has advanced a lot in the last 50 years, we are still using cars, planes, and rockets that have the same basic architecture. We are a bit blinded by the huge change that computers have brought us, which has brought a much deeper transformation of our world and society than the "space age" or the "atomic age" of our parents and grandparents. Scientific progress doesn't have to be linear or exponential. There have been times where it has slowed down or even stopped. A lot of our scientific advance has been due to computer science opening up new horizons in modelization and processing large amounts of data. However, I think that the age of computers is more of a transformation phase than part of an ongoing advancement process. Once the transformation is over, I have the feeling that scientific progress might reach a plateau. Civilization is going to go through some hard times, with overpopulation, resource issues, climate change... leading to corruption, obscurantism, and war. These are potentially much bigger and diffuse problems than we've ever had to deal with. Looking back at our history as a species, I'm not very optimistic about those problems being solved intelligently and peacefully. So where will we be going in 100 years? My hunch is that we won't be going anywhere. We will lose interest in physical travel after we have replaced it with safer and cheaper virtual travel. Maybe there will be a manned expedition on Mars by then, but space travel is so inherently hard that I think we will just use probes to build a 3D model of other planets so that we can experience living there without leaving our Oculus Rim VR pods.

The programmed end of life for the ISS is 2024. By then, it will have lots of wear and tear. Seals, gaskets, filters, fluids will need replacing. Systems will be obsolete and some will be failing. The solar arrays will be producing less power. There will be MMOD damage. Insulation sheets will have degraded. Rotating joints will be stuck. It will get to a point where the crew will be spending more time on repairs and maintenance than on science activities. 1. Only possible option. 2. Why? End of life means that it's too old to be maintained. 3. Not possible, and again, why? If it's too old to be maintained in LEO why would it suddenly be fit to go anywhere else? 4. Why bother? And what would you do with the old parts? The Russian plan is to separate their newest modules to serve as a core for their new OPSEK station. Of course, the oldest ones (Zarya and Zvezda) are part of the backbone of the station, so they will remain attached to the ISS. Then, a Progress docks to Zvezda and performs the deorbit burn.

Permission, documentation, full cooperation, and access to the Deep Space Network. I wouldn't call that piracy.

Reminding about reality isn't "raining on the parade". If all you want to do is speculate about invented pseudo-scientific technobabble, then go to a Star Trek forum.

When you're planning a multi-billion dollar space mission, the last thing you want is drama. (Unless you're the producer of Defying Gravity)

How does an 80-mile-high tower lower the cost of reaching orbit ? Also, the sheer mass of the tower would crush itself.

This link: http://lmgtfy.com/?q=how+to+calculate+gravity

That's always been the conceptual plan for building a space elevator, except that it's 36000km, not 390km. Do you have any idea how much a 36000km spool of graphene or carbon nanotube wire weighs? Oh, and actually, you need twice that weight, because as you unspool the tether downward, you need to unspool a counterweight tether in the other direction to keep the center of mass at constant GEO altitude.

If the SLS fails, it would be pretty high-profile and because NASA's main purpose is to be a showcase of national prestig, they will do everything possible to launch successfully again. Then after 2 or 3 launches it will get cancelled because there are no payloads for it.

The Z-2 suit is a technology demonstrator for planetary exploration. The suitport on the back means that it stays on the outside of the spacecraft and astronauts climb inside the suit instead of using an airlock. It's also too heavy and bulky to be carried around inside a capsule. This makes it unsuitable for in-flight activities and Orion EVAs which will be conducted by depressurizing the capsule and egressing the capsule through a relatively small hatch. What Orion needs is a single suit that can be reconfigurable for flight, EVA and surface operations. There was one planned for Constellation, but it was cancelled along with the rest of the program. So NASA is looking at improving the orange ACES suits that were used on the Shuttle. These were designed for emergency scenarios, so they need to modify them to make them suitable for longer EVAs. http://www.gizmag.com/orion-space-suit/30130/ The actual suits will probably be white instead of orange due to thermal requirements. The high-visibility orange was in case the astronauts had to bail out over the ocean, which isn't a contingency mode in Orion.

There were all sorts of shady deals involved with OTRAG too, as well as some unfortunate launch site decisions (Zaire in the 70's and Libya in the 80's weren't the most stable places to invest in). The risk of technology proliferation, in addition to it going against Ariane, caused European governments to shut it down. The idea of mass production of cheap elements rather than reusability of complex elements still has merits. The reusability camp won in the 70's with the Shuttle, but we all know how that turned out.