Nibb31

You seem to have some sort of tea-party/fox news obsession with bureaucracy and government-funded activities, but like most tea-party crackpots and fox news reporters, you never actually back your criticism with any concrete evidence or propose anything positive or even informative. Let's be clear here: nobody here cares about your political one-liners. I really wonder why the admins here are still tolerating your constant trolling.

I am French. There is no more double meaning to the term "trou noir" in French, than there is to "black hole" in English. Whoever wrote that book is talking out of his arse.

I agree with this, the ISO paper formats are beautiful. Take a standard A4 sheet of paper, fold it in two, and you get a standard A5 format, with exactly the same proportions. Two A4 sheets form an A3 sheet, also with the same proportion. You can't do this with US paper formats.

86.73% of statistics are pulled out of someone's ass.

Probably a typo. Nobody's perfect.

Of course, that's the theory. However, there is still a lot of engineering in making those close-off valves safe and reliable, avoid having residual fuel or droplets around the rocket when you fire the separation pyrotechnics, making the turbopumps transition safely from cross-feed to core mode without hiccups, managing the fuel balance and the inertia of the fuel flow and lots of other tiny technical problems that would crop up during development. It adds complexity and lots of failure modes to deal with.

I doubt that there are no Chinese or other asian communities in Poland.

-The base unit already is the gram. -It's quite practical to have the liter as a base unit of measure for everyday use. -How is it simpler than 1 ton = 1 cubic meter of water and 1 liter = 1 kg ? If 1 gram = 1 ton, then your average groceries will be measured in milligrams and nanograms. Medicine would have to use scientific notation. -The French tried that in 1793, but it didn't catch on: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Republican_Calendar -Who says the meter is too long? It's a silly idea. The current system works well.

Yes, but you reduce the criticity of a single thing going wrong. An engine out on a Falcon 9 core doesn't necessarily result in a loss of mission. The other engines can compensate by burning longer. An engine out on an Ariane 5 however...

A liter (of water) has an equivalence in cubic meters, not meters. 1 ton = 1 cubic meter = 1000 liters is great for estimating ballpark values and is the biggest advantage of the metric system. It's also really handy in the kitchen for measuring ingredients when you have a measuring glass and no scales (or vice versa) to know that 10cl ~ 100g. You simply can't visualize equivalences like that in imperial units. The 360 degree circle (from which our time system derives) was invented by the babylonians who used base 60 mathematics for the above mentioned reasons. The babylonians were aware of the specific relationship of the hexagon with the circle, therefore it was quite natural to divide the circle in 6*60 = 360 degrees.

The French Revolution attempted to impose a rational calendar called the Republican Calendar. It was used officially for 12 years before being abandoned and it included decimal time with 10 hour days and 100 minutes per hour. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Republican_Calendar

Citation needed. I was unable to find any evidence about him supporting conspiracy theories. Actually, I found a couple of YouTube clips where he shoots them down. I have seen him theorize about the existence of extraterrestrial life, which is a widely accepted statistical probability, but he's also said that it was unlikely that we were ever visited.

Exactly what Tiberion said. I couldn't have phrased it better.

None of the N1 failures can be attributed to the sheer number of engines. They were more due to poor manufacturing processes and lack of testing, which were inherent to the industrial site more than anything else. The causes were: - A broken pipe caused by vibrations. - A loose bolt ingested by a turbopump causing it to explode. - Attitude control failure. - Pogo oscillation caused engine starvation and cutoff. These are things that can happen to a single engine rocket if you don't test it properly. The problem was that the rocket had to be assembled at Baikonur, which had rather rudimentary industrial facilities and insufficient tooling (this is also why the N1 used spherical tanks instead of cylindrical ones). It wasn't equipped with proper test facilities, so there was no way to properly test each individual stage other than launching it. Anyway, SpaceX is currently working on a bigger engine called Raptor: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raptor_%28rocket_engine%29

You're confusing Soyuz the launcher and Soyuz the spacecraft. The Soyuz launcher is still competitive on the commercial launch market, which is why ESA invested in a Soyuz launch facility in Kourou and it is part of the Arianespace commercial lineup: http://www.arianespace.com/launch-services/launch-services-overview.asp

Yes, but it doesn't work that way. A rocket needs to be designed for a specific purpose. If you don't have a purpose *yet* then you lose focus on why the rocket is being designed. I'm looking at you, SLS.

Sure, but Soyuz has very little chance of ever damaging its heatshield, because it's only exposed in the last minutes before reentry. The Shuttle's exposed heatshield and large surface area was its main vulnerability and the side-mounted configuration can be considered a fundamental flaw. It had several near burn-throughs with damaged tiles until Columbia finally pushed the limits too far. The side-mount configuration was chosen because the purpose of the Shuttle was to bring back the engines and because an inline configuration wouldn't have fit inside the VAB. A smaller, inline shuttle like Hermes or DreamChaser, for crew only or smaller cargo, would have avoided those problems. However, it still wouldn't have brought back its main engines, and there is very little point in actually adding wings, hydraulics and landing gear just to reuse the crew compartment. So yeah, it's the whole "wings in space" idea that is wrong. For ferrying crew up and down, a capsule designed for cost and safety constraints is just vastly superior.

Yeah, but there's no such thing as an asteroid mining industry, and there won't be before a very long time. NASA won't be allowed to use a private rocket if they have SLS.

Got any details? I don't think any NERVA engines ever exploded, intentionally or not. The USA, USSR, and France all did simulations of crashing nuclear warheads, but those aren't related to spaceflight.

What an ignorant thing to say. If people were that limited, then we never could have done any of those great things. Becoming a scientist or an engineer requires reading books (lots of them, and with lots of pages!), not just relying on tweets and YouTube videos. You've got a lot of nerve to go from "I didn't know the fundamental thing about the stuff I've been discussin" in one post to "please look up the details for me" in another post, and then "OMG wall of text" in the last one when someone actually bothers writing up a very good summary to educate you.

Skylon is still 15 years away, at least, with no guarantees that it will work. LOLWUT? Launch loops are a no go. Space elevators are way too far in the future. The treaties on atmospheric testing are still in place. Science fiction. There's no money (and no real purpose) for any of this. So basically, you would have to suspend all current operations, push thousands of workers into unemployment, and potentially lose decades of experience of actually flying spacecraft, just to fuel your pipe dreams of nuclear rockets.

Soyuz was designed as a LEO taxi for ferrying crew from Baikonur to Salyut, Mir, and ISS. Gemini was designed as a 2-seat trainer for experimenting new spaceflight techniques. Apollo was designed for lunar expeditions. Shuttle was designed as space truck for orbital construction, a launch vehicle, a work platform, and a small space station. You can't really compare Soyuz and Shuttle. They were designed for different purposes, and it turned out that most of the design requirements for the Shuttle weren't needed. A better comparison would be between Soyuz and CST-100, DreamChaser, Dragon.

There were several near misses. Apollo 13 was extremely lucky. If NASA had operated the Saturn as they operated the Shuttle in the 80's, there would have been more incidents. One of the reasons they abandoned the Apollo program was that they knew they were stretching their luck. Statistically, it was only a matter of time before another major incident happened.

That's wrong. Although the Shuttle stuck could put the 80 ton Orbiter into orbit, its actual payload was only 20t. The weight of the Orbiter was wasted energy. There are many other launchers in 20t class: Delta IV, Atlas V, Proton, Ariane 5, etc The only useful operational capabilities that the Shuttle had were: - it could bring back heavy stuff. - it looked awesome. Not comparable. The Saturn V was abandoned and to restart production would be akin to redesigning a whole new rocket. Soyuz has evolved over the years, so even though it looks the same on the outside, it is state of the art. And of course, proven systems are often more reliable. An old Land Rover might not look as cool as the latest Corvette, but I know which one I'd rather have if I broke down in the middle of the desert.

It's not that it can't be done, but it adds lots of complexity. And when there is complexity, there is added risk of failure. The increased risk isn't worth the rather small gain in efficiency compared to conventional parallel staging.