Nibb31

It doesn't go to the ISS. It goes to a parking orbit where a tug meets with it and brings the payload to the ISS. I understand it would be cheap, but what I don't get is the payload. It's only 1 ton. Even at a very low price, delivering consumables ton by ton doesn't make much sense. Any sort of fuel depot would need dozens of launches to refill between two missions, so to deliver 20 tons of propellant your rocket would have to be 20 times cheaper than a Proton or an Ariane V. It will also take ages (and a lot of delta-v) for the tug to do all the hauling and rendez-vous stuff for those 20 supply runs. It's likely that the tug would have to spend more than 1 ton of propellant just to go and bring the payload to the ISS or fuel depot. Also, a toroidal tank around the engine seems like a strange place to put it and also like a hard place to rendez-vous with, potentially dirty with burn residue and ablated debris from the nozzle. Not the most appropriate place to put a docking ring or a fuel transfer valve.

Soyuz is the jeep of space. The Shuttle was the semi-trailer truck of space with a sleeper cabin. Sometimes you need a jeep, sometimes you need a semi-trailer, but you can't say that one is better than the other. (Orion is going to be the Hummer of space and the CCDev vehicles will be the yellow cabs of space)

The asteroid belt is really sparse. If you were sitting on any one of those rocks, you couldn't see another one with the naked eye.

A Counter Earth at L3 is a pretty classic sci-fi plot device. It's not entirely plausible, but as science-fiction goes, suspension of disbelief works as long as the story is good enough.

Well, Soyuz-11 was pretty much bad luck. The jolt caused by the explosive bolts on separation of the service module caused a pressure valve to malfunction. There was nothing the crew could do. It was fundamentally a design oversight, which is human error, but it's probably the only space accident that fits in the "shiit happens" category, because you can't really point any fingers. The other casualties were all due to launch pressure and overconfidence. On Columbia, the foam issue was well known, but no mitigation plan was ever put in place.

Oh and one other thing: Spaceships don't kill people. People kill people. Apollo 1, STS-51-L, STS-107, Soyuz-1, Soyuz-11 all have one thing in common: human overconfidence.

That is actually one more fundamental flaw of reusable spacecraft: It's harder and more expensive to retrofit and upgrade a reusable vehicle than to continuously improve a series production design like soyuz. Although they were refitted several times with modern electronics, the Shuttle was stuck with a lot of 1970's technology. With Soyuz, there is practically no part that is identical between the original Soyuz 7K-OK and the modern Soyuz TMA.

Airliners already fly just below Mach 1, because that is the optimal speed. If you go beyond Mach 1, you need a whole different flight envelope and things get way more complicated, and expensive. Going at Mach 1.01 is pointless, because you get very little benefit for a much higher cost.

It's much more complicated than that. The Concorde was an extremely complex aircraft, way in advance of its time, with all sorts of unique solutions to all of the problems of covering subsonic, transonic, and supersonic flight envelopes. For example, it had a super complicated fuel ballast transfer system in order to reconfigure the center-of-mass during flight: Do you think they added all that stuff just for fun? Simply modifying a subsonic airframe by adding reinforcements would just add extra take-off weight to the plane. It wouldn't be efficient at all.

And French M51 SLBMs have been launched off the coast south of Bordeaux at the Centre d'Essai des Landes.

Since there is no operational Orion drive in service, nobody has any plans to build one, and the economical and political simply doesn't make sense, then Orion is sci-fi too. Now, let's quit the Orion talk please. Can a mod intervene here? The incessant trolling about Orion is getting really annoying.

It still involves atmospheric nuclear blasts, which have been banned since the 60's. Nobody is going to terminate or amend the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty because it would open the door to all sorts of rogue countries blasting EMPs and spreading plutonium clouds into the stratosphere. It won't happen. Can we please stop turning each and every thread into yet another debate about Orion?

Here we go again

Me too, it kind of ruins it for me...

Because that's what it was designed to do. The main goal of the Space Shuttle (where it failed spectacularly) was to provide cheap access to space. The only way to reduce costs is to increase launch rates. Therefore, NASA and USAF envisioned that STS would replace all their other launchers. The US didn't have many other options in the early 80's. The Saturn family had retired, the Titan and Atlas families were getting old, extremely expensive, and were never extremely reliable. They weren't being replaced because the plan was for STS to do all NASA and USAF launches. The USAF had to wait until the 90's to get the EELV program (Delta IV and Atlas V) after realizing that the Shuttle would never be economical.

Does every thread here have to devolve into an argument about Orion ?

Rosetta has a pair of 4MP cameras, so at full resolution, we should be getting something like 2240x1680 pictures. Philae has five 1MP cameras set at various wavelengths, so pictures from the surface will be low-resolution. I don't think they will pointing the cameras at Earth. Why would they? It would be a waste of resources. All you would see at that distance is a dot, similar to what can be seen from Cassini pictures. ESA typically doesn't do pretty pictures like NASA. They tend to put a higher priority on scientific data than on PR.

There isn't anything useful you could put on a cube sat. You couldn't put enough batteries or even an antenna big enough to stay in contact with Earth.

No it isn't. A colony is a self sufficient settlement with hundreds of people who emigrate permanently, have kids, and die there. It's pure science fiction because it's technically and economically as out of reach as warp drives or teleportation. A scientific outpost, with maybe a dozen crew members that would stay for 6 months to two year rotations, is not a "colony" by anyone's definition.

Talk of colonies, mining, etc... belongs in the science fiction area, not here. We should build a semi-permanent lunar outpost, similar to the research stations in Antarctica. There would need to be supply runs and crew rotations, which means that we would use SLS to build a robust logistics infrastructure. We could use Orion as a ferry between a fuel depot in LEO and a couple of reusable lunar landers. If anything goes wrong, you're only 3 days from home The purpose of the station would be: - Develop and demonstrate ISRU capabilities and closed loop life support. - Observe biological effects of long term exposure to cosmic radiation, develop and demonstrate mitigation solutions. - Observe biological effects of long term exposure to partial gravity, develop and demonstrate mitigation solutions. - Develop and demonstrate EVA and surface exploration techniques for long duration stays (rovers, suitports, drones, etc...). A manned mission would not be feasible before learning about these areas first. It's too early for a manned Mars expedition, because most of this technology is TRL<5. We need proper designs, demonstrators, and long duration tests to raise the TRL before we can risk human lives on the expedition. One mission that SLS could do is a Mars Sample Return. This would be a demonstrator for landing a heavy payload on Mars, which is something that can't do yet. It would be great if we could also include some biological samples to examine how they cope with the journey and the Martian environment, but that would probably not be allowed because of the risk of contamination.

No. The ISS is a bad environment for astronomy: - First of all, it's pretty dirty. The ISS is surrounded by a cloud of pollution such as paint and insulation flakes, fuel particles, dust, and lots of other microdebris that have accumulated over 16 years. - Second, there is a whole lot of machinery on board the ISS, that causes constant vibration. - In LEO, the Earth blocks the view half of the time, which means that you can only observe an area for half of an orbit (~45 minutes) before it's blocked out. Lagrange points are much better for astronomy, because they are in constant line of sight with the Earth, far enough to avoid interference and pollution, and constantly pointed at the sky. Sun-Earth L2 is the most popular for astronomy. Gaia just arrived at L2 and JWST, Euclid, and WFIRST are going there too.

You should revisit your history lessons. The reasoning behind the Apollo program was "what can we do to screw the Russians peacefully with our current technology?". All the studies were done during the Eisenhower administration actually. They sat down around a table, with a bunch of experts and went through a whole lot of different options, until they figured that landing a man on the moon was feasible. The program was well under way before Kennedy's famous speech. You're right, I'm pretty sure it will happen. Not in the next 20 years though. I wouldn't be so sure of that. Interstellar travel might never be practical. Maybe it will. We simply don't know yet. I disagree. Just because we can dream up something doesn't make it possible. There are hard limits to physics.

Actually, CAM was built by JAXA, although I don't know how the exact funding went. It was probably part of a barter agreement. There was a lot of shuffling around after the Columbia accident. Flights were suspended, there were delays, budget overruns, and it became clear that some modules wouldn't fly. Sometimes you have to accept to cut off a leg to save the patient. The CAM module and the USOS habitation module took the hit. It was a tough decision, but which module of the ISS would you have sacrificed? The prioritization of ISS science payloads is usually done by international science committees who have to work within a given budget and given launch slots. It's not a single "suit at NASA". But yes, I agree that the cancelling of CAM was very unfortunate, because we know very little about partial gravity and its possible benefits.

I think the most Kerbal accident was last year's Proton crash. After take-off, the inverted polarity on the connector of an attitude control gyro caused the flight control computer to think that the rocket was upside down, which it promptly tried to correct by turning around. The cause of the inverted polarity was Kerbalesque: A Russian technician had decided to fit the sensor by plugging the connector the wrong way round. Instead of thinking "hey this doesn't fit, I must be doing something wrong", his first thought was "hey this doesn't fit, where's my hammer?". The banged-up connector, which had been forced in the wrong way round, was found in the wreckage.

Sure, the centrifuge module would have been a great addition. One was even planned and partially built: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centrifuge_Accommodations_Module However, it was cancelled for budgetary reasons in 2005 and the ISS has moved on. Designing and building a new one, ground testing, launch, etc... would take a decade. The ISS will be deorbited before then. Even if you could accelerate the development to 7 or 8 years, you wouldn't have time to get much science out of it before the end of the program. I'm all for pushing boundaries within the limits of reality. Government agencies, research organizations, and the aerospace industry actually push those boundaries every day. Because their progress isn't as spectacular as in the movies doesn't mean it isn't real.