Nibb31

Same here. Never stopped using it. I get my kicks designing spacecraft and flying missions. Doing all the low-level manoeuvering and is just tedious monkey-work.

Leonardo Da Vinci

You could always despin the ship for manoeuvers, but that would cost propellant. Or you could use Canfield joint thrusters like in this video:

An NTR would only be fired in orbit anyway. It would not be used to get to orbit, because that would mean firing in the atmosphere. There is no need for extra hardware. You would just launch it exactly as the Russians and Americans launch payloads that contain RTGs: - Any radioactive material is contained in a high-impact shielded compartment - The launch trajectory would go over the ocean so if it fails, the payload ends at the bottom of the ocean where it can do no harm.

It's probably more convienient to have the entire ship spin and only the antennas and light fixed stuff on a rotating joint rather than having the entire ship fixed with a heavy rotating ring. It would avoid a lot of complexity in that rotating joint.

Can mods merge this with one of the existing Orion threads? It was fun the first time around, but it starts to get annoying to have to go through the whole discussion for the 15th time.

Lunar orbits are unstable, which makes the Moon a poor place for a space station. You need to put it at a Lagrange point or on the surface.

There is a lineage actually. The Russian prototype is BOR-4, which flew as an unmanned prototype for the Russian Spiral program. It would have ended up operationally as the MiG-105. DreamChaser is based on NASA's HL-20 reference design from the 1990s, which was a combination of the HL-10 and X-24 lifting bodies of the sixties, with input from the Spiral program results. HL-20 was cancelled, but the aerodynamic studies continued as part of the X-38 CRV program, which was a joint design from NASA and ESA, also with input from Spiral. The unique thing about BOR-4/MiG-105 was that it acted like a lifting body during reentry and then the wings folded down to provide better lift at lower speed.

Before the Shuttle got wings, most of the research, both in the USSR and the USA, was on lifting body designs.

Solar panel technology is improving. Companies are working on ultra-thin, flexible, and transparent solar panels. I've seen prototypes of cell-phone screens that include a transparent solar film, and there are plans to make car paint that acts as a solar cell to recharge your batteries. It is quite probable that we will see ultralight solar film pretty soon.

Germany indeed has a space program through ESA, and lots of expertise in building high tech space hardware. The Columbus Control Center is in Oberpfaffenhofen and the ATV is designed and assembled at EADS Astrium (now called Airbus Space) in Bremen. What Germany doesn't have is a rocket program. There are 2 main reasons for a country to build rockets: - To increase national prestige - To gain ICBM technology You've got to understand that after WWI and WWII, notions like "nationalism" and "patriotism" became dirty words. Germany was completely wiped out after WWII. Its population was beaten, humiliated, and most of all traumatically ashamed by what it had caused. In the wake of WWII, the last thing the German people (and the Allied occupation forces) wanted was to hear about national pride. As a consequence, West Germany took a low profile on international affairs and concentrated on rebuilding the country and the economy. Because of this, and also because the Allies imposed weapon restrictions, West Germany had no incentive to build nuclear weapons. In fact, because the country was traumatised by the destruction and casualties of two World Wars, the German population is mostly pacifist and opposed to nuclear power, which explains why the Green movement originated there. No nuclear weapons means no need for ICBMs. Finally, there's probably two smaller practical factors. First, Germany is densely populated and has no ex-colonial overseas territories near the equator like the UK or France, so it doesn't have access to any decent launch locations. Second, most of Germany's rocketry assets were captured by the Allies after WWII and its rocket scientists ended up working for the USA or the USSR.

I don't think so. It was barely capable of getting a single man on the Moon and back, and it cut a lot of corners to get there (no proper docking, EVA to transfer to the LK, no living space...). The Soviet lunar program was a bit of a desperate stunt with much tighter margins and less capability than Apollo.

Search the forum. There's a thread on it.

Just open a flap at the top to let the hot air out and you go down.

Apples and oranges. Ares-V was to always fly unmanned. Orion was only to fly on Ares-I. Separation of crew and cargo makes sense. The reason to build Ares-I instead of going with Atlas V was to make Ares-V economically viable by sharing common components that you launch more frequently. Namely, this was beneficial for ATK-Thiokol which did some huge lobbying behind the scenes. Remove Ares-I and Ares-V was no longer viable (just like SLS is not viable). The 4-segment booster wasn't powerful enough to put a LEO taxi Orion on orbit, which is why they opted for a 5-segment booster. By this time, the development cost of the whole new SRB, plus the J2X upper stage, plus all the dampening and vibration mitigation effort, made the whole thing way more expensive than man-rating the Atlas V or Delta IV. It was obvious that the program was going to be cancelled.

Why would you think that? The USA isn't even 250 years old. That's 1/200,000,000th of the Earth's entire existence. Brought down to the scale of an average human lifetime of 80 years, the USA has only existed for less than 2 minutes. What makes you think the USA will last thousands, let alone billions of years? Can you name a single political or cultural entity that has survived more than 500 years in a recognisable form? You don't seem to have much of a grasp of the time scale of things that you are talking about. Gravity will be the smallest of our problems if we plan to still be around in the next thousand years. We have much harder problems to tackle before we start thinking about our Sun going supernova.

And in the end, Atlas V is being man-rated now for DreamChaser and CST-100, and it will be used to launch Orion unmanned for EFT-1.

Orion was (and still is) overweight because it isn't just a LEO taxi. Its requirements were (and still are) to be capable of keeping 4 people alive for 21 days, performing contingency EVA, and reentering from a lunar trajectory. Soyuz can't do any of that, and neither can Dragon, CST-100, or DreamChaser. In the days of Constellation, it also had to land on solid ground with airbags and be reusable. Ares-I would probably have been capable of launching a Block-1 LEO version of Orion, which had a cut-down SM. It was underpowered for launching the full-blown lunar Orion.

Benchmarks are one thing. Real-life applications are another. Speaking from experience here. The main benefit to performance comes from multi-threading, not 64-bit. In practice, the rewriting of code that is required to switch to a 64-bit architecture is also usually accompanied with an effort to incorporate multi-threading, which is why there is often a benefit on multi-core systems, but the two are unrelated. When you build a 64-bit version of an application, the only point is to allow it to allocate more memory. It the end, you gain in performance because you can work on larger data sets, so instead of cutting your data into manageable chunks to process 10 x 1Gb of data you can process 10Gb in one pass. This is marginally quicker, because you save the swapping and file read/write time. However, it also means that where you used to optimise your data for 1Gb blocks, you now just throw larger amounts of data to the CPU without caring about memory limits, so the perceived performance is often slower. It terms of gaming, this means that your CPU can theoretically handle larger game levels, not that it will handle those game levels any faster.

Of course, but in turn that thrust had to be dialed back so as not to shake the entire vehicle apart. I'm not saying that NASA engineers didn't do their homework. Just that the 5-segment would have been a whole new booster and that adding a segment to the old Shuttle SRB did not necessarily imply a huge increase in performance. The original reason for the Ares-I to exist was that it kept ATK Thiokol building 4-segment Shuttle-derived SRBs while Ares-V was being developed, which made Constellation look cheaper than a clean-sheet design. However, as the 4-segment SRB was quickly found to be underpowered, requiring a totally new 5-segment SRB, and because Ares-V no longer used SSME's, there was nothing "Shuttle-derived" about Constellation at all. In the end, even with a 5-segment SRB, the Ares-I was underpowered and Orion was overweight. The result was that Ares-I was going nowhere. Without Ares-I, the economics of Ares-V made no sense either, so the whole thing was rightly canned.

I can read all of the captions pretty easily. It's 2000x6000 resolution, so it should print quite nicely. Try looking at it in a graphics program. I agree, it's quite an amazing illustration, very detailed, yet very layman-oriented. Nice find!

The Earth is 5 billion years old. Humanity is 200000 years old, and most of that time was spent hunting mamouths and eating roots and berries. Civilization is less than 10000 years old. If any of our descendants are still around in 5 billion years, they will be so different from what we are now that you probably wouldn't recognize them as human. And the Earth will be as vastly a different planet to us as it was 5 billion years ago. At these timescales, we are talking about aliens living on a different planet, not our descendants. People from 300 years ago would not be able to comprehend our modern world. Air travel, satellite TV, modern medicine or the Internet would be completely alien to them, like magic. Speculating about where humanity might be in a few hundred years, let alone several billion is pretty much meaningless. Do you seriously think that "America" will still have any meaning in 5 billion years? Plate tectonics will have completely remodeled the planet by then anyway. Humanity is a diverse group. Wherever it goes, it will bring its conflicts with it. There are no signs of life on Mars. If there is life, it will only be at a macrobiotic level.

The only benefit of 64-bit software is that it allows to address more memory and therefore it can handle larger volumes of data. It's not about being inherently faster. On the contrary, loading the CPU with more data slows it down. For games, most of the data processing happens on the graphics card, which is limited by its own memory, so there is very little benefit.

It still had performance issues. SRBs are heavy beasts and it required a lot of heavy dampening and mitigation hardware so that it wouldn't shake apart. A 5-segment SRB burns longer than a 4-segment SRB, but the thrust is the same and it weighs 25% more. In KSP, adding more fuel to an underperforming rocket is a mistake that most newbies make.

Get a NAS, with two mirrored disks in RAID. Disk drives fail, and losing all your files suck.