Nibb31

I don't see why it would be primarily a Bigelow project. Some of its components are evidently inflatables, but something as big as that would need to be contracted out to multiple companies. Bigelow has no experience in propulsion, avionics, life support or anything else really. It's a NASA concept, and just about every NASA spacecraft was always built by private companies, so I don't see why this would get launched "regardless of NASA funding" more than any other NASA project. Other than GEO comsats, there is no ROI for private enterprise in space. Government agencies are footing the bill for all space exploration and research, and that won't be changing any time soon.

The first private resupply mission was SpaceX CRS-1 in 2012.

a) Making history by earning a Darwin award isn't exactly something to be proud of. So it would really all depend on the context. If you're plan is to go to Mars and die there 6 months later just to be the first, then you will be portrayed in history books as an idiot. Not a very appealing idea, but your hypothesis is too broad. You would probably only have a 1% chance of the cryo and wake-up systems even surviving the trip anyway. We're probably not capable of building any complex machinery that can survive thousands of years. c) Nope. There's a principle called human rights. For the same reason, it would be unethical to breed humans to serve only as organ donors or cannon fodder. If you start ignoring those principes, you end up pretty quickly in an inhumane society.

1960's manufacturing was very labor intensive. It wouldn't make sense to bring out 50 year-old mills and molds to make new F-1 engines because the cost of hand-welding and milling with 1960's tools would be prohibitive. Many of the parts were welded or forged by hand. Modern manufacturing would use mostly CNC-machined parts or 3D-printing, which means that each part has to be redrawn on 3D CAD/CAM systems anyway. Since you'd be making new digital plans with modern techniques, you'll want to optimize the design and reduce the number of parts by combining them together into more complex shapes instead of welding lots of individual parts together like they used to. The materials for CNC milling as opposed to casting are different, and so are the mechanical constraints on the parts. The alloys available today use different thermal and mechanical constraints. All this means that every part needs to be individually redesigned with modern techniques and materials. Which is exactly what they are doing with the F-1B. The result is that where the old F-1 had 5000 parts, the new F-1B only uses 100 parts.

Yes. GEO slots and frequencies are regulated by the International Telecommunication Union. Before getting a slot, your satellite needs to have end-of-life provisions, including moving to a graveyard orbit.

They're not gone. They're just irrelevant. Many of the manufacturing techniques and materials are simply no longer available. You couldn't simply take those plans and rebuild an F1 like they did in the 60's. This is why they are developing the F1B based on the old F1 but with modern technology.

I know that two Gemini spacecraft never docked, but I'm trying to get them to, and they are bouncing off of each other. They are magnetized, but they just don't stick. Is this normal ?

Who cares about reentry of the ET ? It wouldn't be cheap at all. There is no economical reason to bring an unmanned spacecraft back. It just reduces your payload. Why launch an unmanned 80t orbiter with a 20t payload on board when you could simply launch a 100t payload on the same rocket (or launch your 20t payload on a cheap expendable rocket)? And as I said, rocket braking instead of aerobraking requires massive amounts of propellant that you would need to carry up with you, which massively reduces your payload. Think about it: Braking from orbital speed to 0 requires the same amount of delta-v as for going from 0 to orbit, i.e. you need the same amount of propellant as you had on the launch pad. The Orbiter's OMS engines only had 300m/s of delta-v with ~4.5 tons of MMH fuel and ~8 tons of oxidizer. If your "manageable speed" is to hit the atmosphere at Mach 6 for example, you would need to 6000m/s of delta-v, meaning that you would need more than 20 times more OMS propellant: 90 tons of fuel and 140 tons of oxydizer. As a comparison, the entire TPS (including tiles, thermal blankets, and RCC panels) only weighed 8.5 tons.

Exactly. The problem with this is that raising the standard of living 1 billion Africans, 1.5 billion Indians and 1.3 billion Chinese is going to require resources. The planet simply can't support 8 billion people living like Americans or Europeans. There are really only two ways for us to keep on sharing the pie: either reduce the number of guests or reduce the size of each piece. Nobody wants a smaller piece of pie.

Braking (not breaking) before reentry requires propellant, which would be heavier than the tiles. Then what's the point of returning home? What you describe is basically the expendable Shuttle-C concept. Shuttle-C was a concept that actually made a lot of sense in parallel with the manned Shuttle. It would have had a cargo capacity of 70 to 80 tons, a rather low development cost, and easy integration in the VAB using existing Shuttle fixtures and procedures. The SLS is basically an inline version of this. The reason SRBs were in several segments was to be able to transport them by rail from the ATK manufacturing plant in Utah to KSC in Florida. Their size was defined by the railway tunnels on the way. To make them in one piece would require building a whole new SRB factory nearby KSC. More propellant for the OMS engines means a heavier orbiter and less payload. If you put the engines on the ET, you would be in a configuration similar to Energia-Buran. Reusing the core would be a big engineering challenge. Propulsive landing requires deep throttling which the SSMEs can't do, so you would have two options: stick huge wings on the core and it would be too heavy, or splash down in seawater, which would destroy the engines. The whole point of the STS was to reuse the SSMEs, so putting them on the core pretty much negates the whole point of having a heavy reusable orbiter in the first place.

Both OpenOffice and LibreOffice have a database program. Between the two, it's a matter of preference. http://www.libreoffice.org/ http://www.openoffice.org But again, depending on what you want to do, a simple spreadsheet might be enough.

The links I provided kind of answered that already. Yes, we can in theory. But the fact that people are starving proves that there are practical limits to that theory because there are always inefficiencies in every system. It also doesn't mean that we can sustain that kind of production for a durable period. As I said already, we are currently consuming 150% of what the Earth can provide durably. It's also a question of quality of life. What is the point of being 7 or 8 or 9 billion if we have to ration ourselves to 2700 calories/day or if 80% of that population has no hope of ever living decently. What about enjoying food, variety, pleasure? And it's not just about food. The global footprint problem is also about energy. If the 7 billion humans on Earth all had the same quality of life as the 250 million Americans, the Earth would be exhausted in a couple of months. These billions of people would love to have a car, air-conditioning, health care... Do we really have the resources to provide all of that to everybody? Is it really worth having 9 billion people living in extreme imbalance when we could limit ourselves to say 5 billion (the World's population in the 1980's) and share the wealth more decently.

The issue isnt' running an n-body simulation in real-time. It's being able to rapidly predict the orbital parameters of each body at any moment in the future. When you warp in KSP, everything is put on rails. The physics are no longer computed, but it's easy to compute the position of each body when the time warp is stopped, because the orbital parameters are effectively the same as when the time warp was started. With n-body physics, orbital parameters change all the time as each body is affected by each other body.

Drag from the solar arrays would have more effect than tidal pull.

If it's a single table, or only 2 or 3 tables, then Excel or another spreadsheet program should be enough. You'd be amazed at some of the things Excel is capable of.

More specifically, without station-keeping, it would simply tumble out of control. After a while, the various forces induced by the erratic spinning, mass imbalance, drag, fluid leaks, and gravitational pull, will cause stress, fatigue and structural failures.

There was no adapter. The Shuttle was equipped with an APAS docking port in the cargo bay. These were fitted during the Shuttle-Mir program and required a protruding APAS port on the station side (which is why the Shuttle Docking Module was added to Mir). The result was that the Shuttle could only dock to the two PMA adapters on the ISS. Ironically, Columbia was the only Orbiter that didn't have an APAS because she was overweight compared to the other Orbiters. Due to being the first orbiter, Columbia had a heavier structure with reinforcements for ejection seats and extra sensors and flight recorders. The result was that Columbia was only ever used for freeflying Spacelab missions and couldn't be used for ISS operations. In the end, there would not have been enough clearance to dock two shuttles to the ISS. You need to take into account physical clearance, obviously, but also thruster plume clearance so as not to damage the other spacecraft during docking manoeuvers. I also don't think that Houston MCC could support flying two Shuttle missions simultaneously other than in the contingency STS-400 situation. It would be a big no-go for shuttle operations.

That web site is a scam. If you look at the "Donate" page, the organization behind it is called "Population Research Institute", which is a para-religious lobby group whose agenda is to ban abortion, contraceptives and family planning. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_Research_Institute http://www.interacademies.net/10878/19191.aspx http://www.guttmacher.org/pubs/journals/3503909.html http://www.unep.org/geo/pdfs/geo5/GEO5_report_full_en.pdf Overpopulation is a reality. It is simply ludicrous to believe that we can simultaneously maintain infinite population growth and infinite economic growth on a planet where resources are finite. We can increase productivity and distribution, but those are on logarithmic curves. There are dimishing returns, like wringing water out of a soaked towel: there will always be some water left in it, but the more you squeeze out of it, the more energy you need to spend. With efficiency increasing on a logarithmic curve, and population growing on an exponential curve (or at best a linear curve if you are optimistic), we are in for trouble. At some point, demand exceeds production. We are already eating up our reserves. Humanity's ecological footprint is around 1.5 planet Earths, which means that we use resources 1.5 times faster than Earth can renew them. This can only last for so long: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecological_footprint

The ISS is designed for low earth orbit, which is a totally different environment to lunar orbit. It would be like converting a Mini Cooper for off-roading. You could do it, but you would have to do so much conversion and redesign work that you would be better off buying a Land Rover directly. As for raising the ISS for future generations, it's also a silly idea. You can't simply power it down. Without station-keeping, gravitational forces would end up pulling it apart. Pieces would break off. Paint and insulation will flake. It will just end up becoming a cloud of debris and a hazard for any future space missions.

What you are describing is the abandoned CAM module, which is now rotting on a parking lot in Japan: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centrifuge_Accommodations_Module One of the problems with fitting a centrifuge to the ISS is that the vibrations disturb any other microgravity experiments that might be going on. Another problem is safety and attitude control. The ISS would have to compensate the momentum of the centrifuge by spinning up its CMGs. In my opinion, CAM was the most drastic and unfortunate cut to the ISS program. Most ISS experiments could be performed on a mini station, but this was one of the only experiments that really benefits from being on a large orbital platform. We know practically nothing about partial gravity, centripetal-induced artifical gravity or the effect of Coriolis forces on living organisms or materials. These are things that we need to learn about before testing larger scale centrifuge modules for BEO spacecraft and before planning long-duration expeditions to Mars or the Moon. Without this small-scale testing of artificial gravity, there's no point in even thinking about designing a centrifuge into an exploration vehicle, because we simply have no idea whether it is beneficial or not, or how much gravity is needed for it to be beneficial. The Nautilus-X concept is really just a concept. There is no money behind it and no plans to actually build it. However, NASA is seriously pondering the DSH (Deep Space Habitat) made of 2 ISS modules, which would be combined to Orion, a SEP tug or a cryo upper stage, and maybe the MMSEV. This would give you most of the capability of a manned deep space exploration vehicle: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_Space_Habitat

The ISO standard, which should be the international reference, says YYYY-MM-DD. It's the easiest format to use for automatic sorting, and it also goes from the more general to the more precise, which makes sense. The reason it uses "-" instead of "/" as a separator is for use in file names.

- The Ariane 5 maiden-flight failure was due to a software failure in a calculator that was reused from Ariane 4. They omitted to modify the software to take into account the different flight parameters. It's widely documented: http://esamultimedia.esa.int/docs/esa-x-1819eng.pdf - The A380 delays were mainly due to an underestimation of the wiring work because of a mismatch between the seat configurations that Airbus thought the airlines would want and the actual seat configurations that were ordered. I couldn't find any evidence of your statement, so again "citation needed".

Wow! I got an actual response out of you. Your usual MO is to dump some inflammatory one-liner and when you get contradicted, you run off to do the same thing in another thread. I must have pressed the right buttons here. So you have anecdotal evidence. That's cool, but I'm afraid it doesn't equate to actual statistical evidence. First, don't call me kid. You have no idea who I am. I've worked in private companies for the last 25 years, and I've met my share of slackers and pork there too. I've also been close to some civil servants who were among the most dedicated and professional that I've ever met. There are thousands of government employees who respond 24/7 to emergencies or don't count their time because they know that their service is essential. I happen to live in a country where public service still means something to them. My anecdotal evidence is just as valuable as yours. It also happens that over the last 60 years of space exploration, 100% of it has been funded by governments and 0% by private enterprise. You can criticize bureaucracy and administration, but the truth is that if you want to see something done in space other than comsats, then taxpayer money is the only show in town. So until you can tell us what your magical vision for a space program is, I suggest that you refrain from criticism without preparing some material to back it up.

This is something that always baffles me. Surely if you identify a UFO as an alien spaceship, then it is no longer an unidentified flying object. The reason you identify it as "aliens" is cultural bias. If you were brought up in some other cultural environment, you might have thought of ghost or your local deity. There is absolutly no reason to believe that a UFO is of extraterrestrial origin rather than a time-machine from the future, Elvis or Jesus Christ returning, incursions from a parallel universe or pink unicorns from hollow earth...

You can trash Norton, it's useless. Windows 8.1 is a nice step up from Windows 8, but it still lacks a proper start menu.