Nibb31

64-bit doesn't make a game faster.

"Sales as a business function" refers to having a "sales" department as a traditional branch of a company. What he is suggesting is that marketing and sales should be pervasive throughout the entire organisation. I think that it really depends on what you are selling, who you are selling it to, and what your sales channels are.

No it isn't. Wings look stupid on a spacecraft. No because: - The heatshield isn't designed to handle reentry from lunar velocities. - The life support system is only for 3 days. - It has those silly wings and hydraulics and wheels that serve no purpose in space.

First of all, EM-2 (the 1st manned flight of SLS-Orion) is scheduled for 2021. The robotic SEP plastic bag part of the ARM mission is supposed to take 3 years, which means it should launch in 2018 to be ready for EM-2. It takes about 5 to 10 years to design and build something like this, so it's pretty much impossible for EM-2. Let's be optimistic and imagine that Congress gives it a green light in 2015, which means it might be ready for launch in 2020, with an ARM in 2023 at the earliest. This means that EM-2 in 2021 can only be a lunar flyby (which is probably a much safer alternative for a first test run of the ECLSS). With the ARM being EM-3 in 2023. No way is SLS going to survive a launch rate of 3 flights from 2017 to 2023. The whole plan is unworkable.

A budget increase isn't enough. You also need time to develop any meaningful mission hardware. For example, something like a lunar lander would require 7 to 10 years to develop. That is 7 to 10 years of watching the SLS sitting around gathering dust and burning dollar billions of dollars for nothing.

The LM was 15 tons. The CSM was 30 tons. To get all that mass to Moon, the stack needed a S-IVB that was 115 tons. 1) Sounds easy on paper. In reality, the tiles had to expand and retract as they heated and cooled. The space between the tiles was necessary. Larger tiles means they would have cracked. 2) That was done multiple times. The late glass cockpit was state of the art. 3) To make things modular, you need more interfaces, more connectors, and much more extensive testing for each use case. Modularity = mass. 4) Well yeah. I'm not sure how that would have fit in the Shuttle program. Competition has its negative factors too and doesn't always reduce costs. 5) A detachable cabin like the F-111 would have had a huge mass penalty. Say goodbye to any meaningful payload. These things also killed pilots as much as they saved them (See the XB-70).

To send a LM to the moon, the Space Shuttle would still have needed a Saturn-IVB and a CSM, in addition to the LM. The S-IVB weighed 115 tons, so you would need at least 4 launches to get an equivalent vehicle to orbit, another launch for the CSM and another for the LM. So you might be able build an STS-based Moon mission in 6 launches. Of course, this all requires a very fast turnover between launches, because LH2 boils off in space. Hydrogen molecules are small, so it's realy hard to build a durable container for the stuff. If you leave your EDS in LEO for a month, it'll be empty by the time you're ready to use it. So basically, it really wouldn't have been practical at all.

The reason for the shape is because it's designed for a suit port. The entire back of the suit is actually a door that docks to the vehicle. The astronaut climbs through the door into and out of the suit while the suit stays outside. This means that you no longer need an airlock on the vehicle and it prevents contamination and dust issues.

You won't be flying a U-2 any more. http://news.usni.org/2014/02/25/pentagon-retiring-air-forces-u-2-10-warthog-latest-budget-deal

If the question is "would this be possible", then no. - There is no such thing as a "surplus Orion LES" or surplus CM. Orion MPCV will never be mass produced with the envisioned flight rates. - There are no available NTRs, nor does anyone have any plans of building one. - An NTR would be designed to contain any radioactive material in case of a crash, so it wouldn't differ from any other upper stage. I really don't understand what you're getting at here.

Actually, Constellation was a presidential initiative from the Bush administration with pretty Powerpoint slides but no funding from the start. Obama appointed the Augustine Commission to audit the project. The commission found that it simply wasn't possible to return to the Moon with current funding levels, so Obama cancelled Constellation and put an end to any lunar spending. The idea behind SLS and Orion was to build an infrastructure which would enable exploration missions in the future, but again, without providing any funding for those missions. It didn't have the performance to put Orion into LEO, which led to Orion being gutted from most of its BEO capability. It also had that infamous "thrust oscillation" problem, which required adding heavy dampers and other dead weight just so that it would shake the astronauts to death. Of course, that extra weight added to the performance problem. It was simply unworkable.

Constellation was an actual program, with a goal and multiple vehicles being developed simultaneously with a specific purpose in mind. SLS is a rocket with no mission and no payloads. Of course it's cheaper. Constellation wasn't over budget. There wasn't a budget to begin with. Constellation was a presidential initiative for which Congress never actually voted the budget increase that it required. So it was canned.

It's a clever idea, but why put the shield on the end of an arm? You could give it it's own propulsion and avionics system so that it could move around with the ship without the complications of being physically attached. At that point, you could actually let it move away from the ship and towards any incoming projectile. And instead of making it out of some sort of fantasy shield material, just make it light and expendable and pack dozens of them. Oops, your mobile shield has just turned into an anti-missile missile.

I know, but the tiles had nothing to do with the loss of either shuttle. The Shuttle's TPS was made of 3 different materials, depending on the area: - Thermal blankets (on the upper sections and less exposed areas) - Ceramic tiles (white or black, depending on the thermal requirements) - Reinforced-Carbon-Carbon panels (on the wing edges and nose). Columbia was lost due to a foam strike on an RCC panel, not on the ceramic tiles. That was my point answering Rakaydos's comment on "foamed glass tiles", whatever that meant.

What's the point of ground-based testing if you are designing stuff to look cool rather than actually simulating Martian conditions? Visibility plays a large part in the ergonomics that they are trying to reproduce.

The multispectral sensor only works on planets/moons which have biomes. In 0.23, that means only Kerbin, Mun, and Minmus.

I did, in post #4 of this thread. But you are forgiven

The foam had nothing to do with the thermal tiles, which were ceramic. The foam was tank insulation to prevent LH2 boil-off. The ceramic TPS tiles never failed, even though they were pretty beat up on some missions, so it was a pretty robust system really. The Columbia accident was due to a foam strike agains the RCC panels, which were on the leading edge of the wing and again, had nothing to do with the thermal tiles. The Challenger accident was totally unrelated to the TPS, so I don't understand what you mean by "two different shuttles".

An operational space-suit is either for flight or EVA or training. The color of a flight suit should be bright orange or day-glo yellow to increase visibility in case of a bailout. The color of an EVA suit should be white for thermal reflection. The color and material of a training or test suit should be the same as an operational suit. Black/dark grey with battery-powered leds for "ground-based testing" (whatever that is) is just silly PR that serves no functional purpose.

Things are very wrong when space suit color is decided by NASA-sponsored crowd-sourcing instead of by thermal engineering and practical requirements. This sort of thing really makes me doubt that all NASA's exploration policy is serious at all. I think they are aware at this point that all they will ever produce are pretty 3D renderings and powerpoint slides. The only Mars landing we will see in our lifetimes will be a 2 minute YouTube clip in CGI.

A space plane on Mars is a silly idea. Why would you waste mass on wings and hydraulics and tires when the atmosphere is too thin to provide any significant lift ? Why waste precious colony resources on building a beefy runway several kilometers long that can withstand the weight of a 200 ton spaceplane ? There's nothing wrong with having fast-turnaround shuttle-like reusable thermal tiles on a VTVL vehicle. This is science-fiction after all, and VTVL is more realistic for a mars ascent vehicle.

Do a google image search for "Mars Ascent Vehicle". You'll find boatloads of MSTO and SSTO concept designs.

I'm confused as to what the purpose of this thread is.

Species from millions of years ago were made for a very different ecosystem. The air they breathed was different, the plants or animals that they fed on were different, the bacteria were different. The Earth was pretty much a different planet then, a planet that would probably be considered uninhabitable to humans. Chances are that if you brought back a species from that era, they would not be fit to survive in our world. Did you know that our gut flora is made of trillions of complex micro-organisms that live inside us, of hundreds of different species. Each human is host to more than 10 times more micro-organisms than the number of cells in our whole body. We have an osmotic relationship with them, because we need those specific bacteria for our metabolism to function, and they need us to survive. They evolved with us, and if we were to go extinct, so would they. So bringing back an extinct species is much harder than just making a foetus by reconstructing its ADN. You would also need to recreate its biome and all the species (including bacteria) that were vital for it to survive.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravitational_shielding