Nibb31

An oil baron's wet dream: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lakes_of_Titan

I think the list is rather what would qualify you. It's a highly selective process for a very small number of positions, so to qualify as an astronaut, you really just have to be the best candidate among hundreds of other really really smart people. It also depends on the organization. NASA doesn't necessarily have the same criteria as ESA or other space agencies.

That's just because it was designed in 1950's when nobody thought about orbital rendez-vous and orbital assembly. It was an era when cars, planes, nukes, buildings, bridges, just seemed to get bigger and more powerful every year. Nothing could stop progress. Nobody thought that there would be a practical or economical limit to the size of rocket launchers. This was a time when very serious engineers thought that it would be a good idea to dig artificial lakes or strip mines with nukes. It was a time when US Army generals proposed blowing up the Moon with nukes just as show of power to the commies. It was also a time when experts thought that a woman's place was in the kitchen, that blacks should have the back seat on the bus, that smoking was healthy, or that jello could be served in a salad. It was a totally crazy period, with crazy ideas everywhere. Bringing back Orion as a space propulsion system would be just as idiotic as bringing back the Ford Nucleon or mind control weapons. It was just another of those wacky ideas from the 1950's that we laugh about today.

There isn't much point in installing a realism mod like FAR if you're going to build an unrealistic rocket with modules sticking out off the sides. Do you have MechJeb? Is your command pod the right way up?

Plus the potential reward of getting a free PlayStation or smartphone...

Actually, one of the big problems with Ares-I was thrust oscillation in the SRB first stage, which is akin to pogo although with a different cause. It was more of a resonance vibration effect, but it required lots of heavy acoustic dampening that hurt the performance of the rocket.

Old rockets like the V2 didn't have gimballed engines, so they needed fins. There is a bit of a controversy about why the Saturn V had fins AND gimballed engines. Some are of the opinion that Van Braun wanted them because they looked cool, but they quite probably allowed to take some stress out of the thrust vector system or to provide some level of redundancy. They also probably allowed to maintain stabilization during staging when the engines were throttled down. In KSP you're right, on a properly designed rocket with gimballed engines, fins shouldn't be needed.

Rockets don't usually need wings. Stabilisation and guidance is done by thrust vectoring: the engine nozzles are on gimball joints with mechanical actuators. By directing the nozzles in the proper direction, you can control roll and attitude.

A rear-entry hatch doesn't mean that it works with a suit-port. The Russian Orlan suits are also rear-entry, but they still need to be donned in an airlock. A suit-port is a hatch from which the suit hangs outside the vehicle. It never comes inside, except for contingency situations or for repairs and inspections. The main advantages of a suit-port are: - You don't need to decompress-recompress an airlock or the vehicle cabin. This saves consumables and facilitates operations on smaller vehicles like the SEV for example. - You avoid bringing dust contamination from the outside into the vehicle. This avoids breathing potentially toxic material and keeps things clean. The Apollo LM was filthy after the lunar EVAs.

Many electric sports cars have sound generators that play into the speakers to give sense of speed/power.

Orion is a non-starter, for so many reasons, but there is no reason we couldn't send a probe with chemical or NTR propulsion, although it would take a very long time to get there and it would probably be dead before it ever reaches its destination. The biggest problem would be to design a power source that can last for centuries without refueling or maintenance and still have enough power to transmit data back to Earth.

They certainly look very similar. The main difference is that the Z-1 suit is designed to attach to a suit-port, which minimizes dust contamination and removes the need for an airlock.

The lander stage is a common design that will be used for future Chang'e rover and sample return missions. This mirrors the Russian Luna program, where all the probe landers used the same Fregat-based landing stage. They just swapped the payloads depending on whether it was a fixed probe, a rover, or a sample return module. It simply makes sense to use a common design when you've got one that works. The layout and general design might be scaled up for a manned mission, but as is, it's way too small. Scaling it up means that they would need a bigger rocket to launch it.

My understanding is that they plan to start releasing this service in large US cities, which I don't personally consider civilized in the matter. And as suggested, you could probably down them with an RC quadcopter or a reprogrammed captured delivery drone. Never underestimate the power of nuisance. When there's a will, there's a way. It's pretty evident that a parcel delivered by a drone is more prone to being stolen or lost than a parcel delivered by a real person.

The new Z-1 suit is also called the "Buzz Lightyear suit" because of the green highlights. They are based on the orange ACES suits that were used on the Shuttle. I wonder how they managed to shield them enough for EVA jobs.

Actually, a lot of that "bureaucracy" is because of the outsourcing. People often preset outsourcing as a way to save money, but it's usually the opposite. You need tons of regulations and procedures to control how public money is spent and how procurement contracts are handled. Because people don't want the government to waste taxpayer money on useless projects, they introduce commissions and studies to make sure that the rules are properly followed. Then you need people to do all the paperwork that is required to ensure that the regulations are enforced and that the commissions are properly informed. In the end, the actual work still needs to be done by the same people, only now they work for a private company, which charges more than the government would have spent by doing the work in-house, because the stockholders need to take their share. So the best way for the government to save money would be to actually hire more government employees to do the work instead of pay the private sector for juicy outsourcing contracts that only make the stockholders richer.

Or something like this:

That's still a pretty small minority when compared to the billions of other people on Earth who have different priorities. If you ran an interplanetary poll, you would probably find that building colonies on Mars would be pretty low on the list of priorities, way behind things like improving life expectancy, fighting diseases, reducing emissions, more efficient use of resources, spiritual enlightenment, respecting nature, improving education, justice, work conditions, and so on... My point was that we can't project our own dreams on the entire human race and expect them to be accepted as universal goals. Every culture, every group, every individual has their own dreams. Not everyone dreams of a future like Star Trek. I'm not against it. I'm actually pretty sure that we will get there one day, in it's own sweet time. I don't see the urgency. However, I do see the urgency in some other pressing issues, and if we don't fix those near-term problems, then we might not get a chance to enjoy a long-term future. I'm actually pretty enthusiastic about space exploration, but we've only done baby steps. We still need to learn to walk before we can run. These things take time and aiming for goals that are unrealistic is just going to set us up for failure when what we direly need right now are some short term successes. We've been shown plans for "Colonies on Mars in 20 years" for 80 years now, so I'm sorry if I don't believe them any more. I'm more impressed with China landing a rover on the Moon than on yet more "artist's impressions" of future interplanetary cruisers. I'm more enthusiastic about using the capabilities that we have right now than about heavy launchers that we might have in 10 years or warp drives that we might get in 50 years. I find more amazement in looking at current technology and achievements than in dreaming about a science fiction future.

They started earlier.

There was this little event in the late 80's you might have heard of... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dissolution_of_the_Soviet_Union

Funny how blowing up civilians in foreign countries is money well spent, but schools, roads, food stamps, healthcare or public transport are seen as frivolities for the entitled.

It takes more than one person to build a civilization.

1) For the moment, there aren't hundreds of them flying around cities, but hobbyist RC quadcopters that are available today do crash quite often. It's part of the fun. These things run on batteries. Batteries run out. Bugs happen. Data connections fail. Interference occurs. Wind blows. Sensors fail. Things crash. If they are carrying valuable stuff, then the stuff is lost. Simply finding a place to safely drop the parcel is going to be hard in an urban area. How does it know which window or balcony is yours? How does it know that it's safe to leave the parcel there? Does it drop the parcel on your doorstep so anyone can pick it up? How does it detect obstacles, vehicles, people? What if a dog pounces on it while it's on the ground? What happens if it gets lost? Developing reliable software is going to be a huge challenge for things like this. It's much more complex than it seems. 2) You're lucky if you live in a city where 100% of the people are "normal". Of course people will be shooting these things down. Or catching them with nets or wires. Or hacking them to land where they want. The temptation of getting a day one iPhone or Xbox will be too high, especially in a country with guns freely available everywhere. And what's stopping anyone from grabbing one when it lands and reprogramming it or taking it apart to sell the parts? And I won't even get into the pure vandalism "because we can". People are stupid and making these things stupid-proof is going to be even harder than making the software reliable.

You're getting all worked up again. Time to sit back and look at the real world instead of watching Star Trek. From all your messages, the feeling I get is that your goal in life is to live a science fiction adventure in your lifetime. That's nice, but you've got to remember that science fiction universes are pure fiction, in exactly the same way the Hobbit universe does not reflect real medieval times. It's entertainment, not a prophecy. You are just a kid that has been raised on sci-fi movies and TV shows in one of the richest countries in the world. Your fantasy goal does not reflect the aspirations of all 8 billion of us on Earth. Humanity is a diverse group with many backgrounds, cultures, religions, and desires. You can ask Native Americans, Indigenous Australians, Africans, Indians, Philipinos, Lost amazonian tribes, Tibetan monks, Christians, Buddhists, Jews, Muslims, Atheists, Scientists, Criminals, Artists, etc... All of these groups have different ideas of what the goal of Humanity is, and none knows better than the other, because there simply is no universal goal or destiny that unites all Humanity. It is nobody's goal to build a spacefaring civilization. There is no political party on Earth, no organization, no government agency, not even a cult, that has that goal. It is just your fantasy, which I suspect only comes from watching too much Star Trek. Building colonies on other planets or emigrating off-world is in nobody's interest. It might be a romantic idea and an entertaining background for a good book, but it's not going to happen that way, and not now. Our goal, if there is one, is to expand human knowledge and - I guess - to survive as a species. That's it, and neither of those goals require space colonies and interstellar empires.

I don't see Amazon or Domino's doing drone deliveries any time soon. - They are prone to crash and cause damage or casualties. - They are easy to shoot down or hijack or vandalize.