Nibb31

Actually, it doesn't make sense at all. Stealing enemy satellites from orbit was just another of the totally unrealistic promises of the Space Shuttle program. The ability to bring back a satellite from orbit was demonstrated only a handful of times, with satellites that were specifically designed for being retrieved by the Shuttle. The mass and configuration of those satellites were well known, and their orbits were lowered to facilite the recovery. The shuttle carried custom built cradles in its payload bay with all the properly located attachment points, designed to properly maintain center-of-mass requirements for the re-entry. To capture an uncooperative hostile military satellite would be totally different. You would need to have extremely detailed information about its center of mass and any fixation points, good enough to custom-build a cradle to fit that specific satellite inside the Shuttle. A small mistake in the mass or balance of your payload, and you risk re-entering with the wrong angle of attack and you burn up. A small mistake in the size and shape and it might not fit in the payload bay. You have to assume that the satellite will be cooperative and won't perform active evasion or collision manoeuvers, because that would make rendez-vous impossible or even dangerous. You would also have to assume that there are no anti-tampering devices or countermeasures on the sat, which would be an unrealistic expectation on a military satellite. You don't want your captured satellite to blow shrapnel through the wings of your Shuttle or to puncture your astronaut's EVA suit. In fact it's so trivial to prevent a satellite from being captured that trying to capture a hostile satellite with a valuable manned spacecraft wouldn't be worth the risk.

You've got to understand that being skeptical of the Moon landings is like being skeptical of WWII extermination camps or 9/11. There were thousands of people involved in those historical events, and you are basically calling all the very smart and competent people who worked on Apollo liars. There is no way so many people could keep a lie, or a government could bribe or pressure people into keeping such a huge secret. Whenever more than 3 or 4 people are involved in a conspiracy, someone always ends up spilling the beans. Thousands of people were involved in the Apollo program, including NASA employees and private subcontractors and consultants who worked at various NASA facilities, planning mission details, monitoring the telemetry data, analyzing the data. There were also folks from the international science community as well as foreign military and intelligence organizations who were watching the program very closely, including monitoring the spacecraft from launch to splashdown, intercepting communications from the Moon, and analyzing moon rocks. There are tons of documentation, from blueprints, to meal recipes, to flown artefacts, to procurement contracts for the slightest screw on the Saturn V rocket. The laser reflectors that were left on the surface have been used routinely by astronomers to measure the distance between the Earth and the Moon for decades. There is a lot more data than the handful of photographs that you have seen. All this information is freely available and has been under scrutiny of historians and space geeks from all over the World for decades, yet no credible scientist or organization has ever had any reason the question the authenticity of any of the data. There are also pictures of the landing sites taken by the LRO probe that has been orbiting the Moon since 2009, in which you can clearly see the actual LM descent stage, the rover, and even the tracks left by the astronauts walking and driving around, which also happen to match the maps that were included with the Apollo debriefing material 45 years ago. Do you mean that the hundreds of folks who currently work on LRO data at GSFC are still actively faking photographs from LRO today? To fake the actual landing sites as can be seen today with modern satellites, NASA would have needed to land robots that could deploy flags, ALSEP modules and miles of fake footprints and rover tracks that nobody would have been able to see with the technology of the time, and then return Moon rocks automatically. Do you realize that with 1960's technology, that would have been harder than actually flying men to lunar surface and back? If they were capable of that, why would they fake footage of engine plumes underneath the LM if they could have simply filmed the same footage with their radio-controlled LM. To keep something as big as fake Moon landings would be harder than actually doing them. You would basically have to spend billions to design everything to make a mission that would be believable by the entire scientific community, and then above that, you would need to add a huge effort to coverup the truth, including bribing and threatening hundreds of people over 50 years, including foreign citizens, intelligence agencies, and politicians from opposing sides. And you really think that none of those people would have spilt the beans after all these years? No whistleblower? No Deep Throat? No KGB? No congressman taking a jab at the administration of the time? No trace or evidence whatsoever? Even on their deathbeds or with the assurance that they would make millions from writing a book about the whole story or selling it to the press? Coming from an administration that can't even cover up things like Watergate or the Monica Lewinsky affair, which only involved a dozen people or less, I really find it hard to believe. It would have been much harder than actually landing men on the Moon. It also implies that they would have faked the Apollo 13 failure, the inquiries and the expensive delays that came afterwards, and the reworking of Apollo 14. That would have been a particularly far-fetched and stupid thing to do. No you are not applying logic. Applying logic would be using Occam's Razor. Among these two options, which one is more likely: - You are misinterpreting the pictures due to your lack of knowledge. - NASA faked a Moon landing program that involved thousands of people all over the World and has kept the secret for nearly 45 years with all the implications mentioned above. Think about it.

That's not what happened. There was no leak or other defect on the SRB. The parts were compliant with NASA's specification requirements. The problem was that NASA was working outside of the limits of the specification. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_Challenger_disaster The O-rings (the gasket that fits between the steel casing segments of the SRB) were certified for a specific operation temperature range. Notably, they should not be exposed to temperatures below 4°C. The pre-launch conditions were colder than usual, and the temperature during the night went below -8°C. NASA knew that it was operating outside of the temperature range limits, but the Shuttle program was under a lot of pressure, the launch rates were high, and everyone was a bit too confident. As a result, NASA underestimated the risk and decided to launch anyway. If you go through History, there is not a single transportation accident that isn't avoidable. The problem is anticipating everything that could go wrong... and when spaceflight is involved, there is a lot that can go wrong. It's hard to anticipate all the failure modes.

Below average != stupid

SSTO means Single Stage To Orbit. Orbit is not about vertical altitude, it's about horizontal speed.

Then there goes your affordable business case. Nobody is going to build an entire space factory just for the small part of the manufacturing process that would benefit from microgravity. A large facility would also necessarily suffer from the same problems as the ISS: vibration, a dirty environment (orbiting alongside the ISS is a cloud of various small debris, paint/insulation flakes, and vaporized fluids), and the cost of maintenance, resupply. This is all a non-starter because it would cost billions and corporations are driven by ROI figures. The only solution in the foreseeable future is to only send up the equipment to do the portion of the job that benefits from microgravity as a standalone package on a small retrievable spacecraft, like a DragonLab or the X-37B. But I'm still waiting to find out what the actual application might be...

At one point, the Columbus module was going to be a free-flyer that would attach and detach from the ISS so that it could perform experiments in isolation from the vibrations of the station, but it was cancelled like the centrifuge and other essential science stuff. The ISS is no good for an actual manufacturing facility (production manufacturing would probably be on a highly-automated dedicated spacecraft anyway), but it should be sufficient for experimentation and R&D or as a place to deploy and retrieve experiments.

There were quite a few studies concerning potential manufacturing techniques in microgravity, especially during the Shuttle/Spacelab period. However, there wasn't much interest from the private sector. If you are looking for papers, then you should search for the actual techniques, like crystal growing, zero-g welding. The Wikipedia article has some interesting stuff: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_manufacturing It's quite rare that you have to propose a service out of the blue for major industries. Usually, when a need for something like this comes up, they find a way. The companies that would be potentially interested (big pharma or semi-conductor manufacturers) employ some of the bigger brains in the world, definitely smarter than you and me. These are people who are quite aware of the possibilities of microgravity, so if they haven't expressed any interest then there probably isn't a need in a need in the first place. If there was, then they would be asking for studies and getting experiments on the ISS.

A CNC machine can still only transform blocks of metal into complex metal parts. It's only a small part of the process of building a spacecraft. You can't use it to make the actual raw material that it needs for new parts, metal sheets, tanks or large strutures, tubing or wiring, fabric, electronic components and semiconductors, paints and chemicals, fuel and consumables. And that super-versatile and fully-reconfigurable chemical plant is going to need refilling and cleaning with all sorts of hard to obtain consumables, which themselves will need their own mining and production facility. I have no doubt that it is possible to construct a theoretical model where this is all possible, but to build a near-self-sufficient asteroid mining/spacecraft production facility is going to require a level of complexity, experience, and sheer mass that is pretty much beyond our techological capability or practical in the foreseeable future (30 years or more). What is possible right now, and is necessary to kickstart interest in space manufacturing, is a self-contained orbit-and-return package that can fit onboard a retreivable spacecraft as part of a useful manufacturing process. Is there a practical application where this might be economically profitable in the near future? I don't know, but I suspect that if there was, the private sector would be showing interest in it.

You can't swap Unity, Zarya, Zvezda (which are the oldest components of the station and the first ones likely to fail) or any of the truss elements without taking the whole ISS offline. And without the Shuttle, there is no way to bring up replacements for the solar arrays for example. It's not a Lego set. After years of construction, it's now a fully integrated system with power and data cabling, hydraulics and coolant loops, as well as all the mechanical connections. Just monitoring the vibration harmonics to prevent the station from shaking itself apart is a huge job. If you disconnect some of the core components, you lose power, thermal and attitude control and the whole thing falls apart. We just have to accept that like all things, the ISS will reach the end of its useful life. Zarya today has spent more time in space than Mir had when it was deorbited. When it gets too old to maintain, it has to be properly decommissioned. Just like a ship on Earth, you don't just leave it at sea to become a wreck. You either break it up properly (which is not practical in this case) or sink it so that it doesn't become a hazard.

After decades of corporate-sponsorded studies on SpaceLab and ISS missions, there aren't really many killer applications for micrigravity manufacturing that would be worth the expense. However, if one does pop up, the rational way of integrating it into a manufacturing process would be to isolate the part of the process that requires microgravity and only send to orbit the specialized automated equipment to do that part of the job. Anything that doesn't require microgravity will still be performed on the ground. I envision something like the X-37B or DragonLab for this. Launch it to orbit with your automated cristal-growing or zero-g-welding package on-board and retrieve it after landing 3 months later. If the product has the market value to justify the expense, then you might have a business case. But even at 50 million dollars a batch, it is going to be a hard sell. As for manufacturing finished products from asteroid mining, people don't seem to realize how complex the manufacturing of finished products and how integrated an economy needs to be. To build a spacecraft, the iron you can extract from an asteroid isn't that useful. You could produce ingots of minerals, but to make anything useful out of them, you would need all sorts of minerals, chemical consumables, and equipment that is simply too complex to produce from a single asteroid. You might need some iron, but most parts will need specific tensile, mass or temperature propertires that will require titanium, glass, aluminium, copper or various alloys or plastics or composites. Some of these things might not be obtainable on any of the accessible asteroids. And how would you build something as simple as a printed circuit board, or a connector cable, or a rubber seal in space? Think about everything that a simple screw factory needs to outsource, from lubricants, filters and seals for the machines to chemicals for cleaning and finishing the parts. These are things that are cheap and easy to source on Earth, because you can order each component and consumable from specialized suppliers all over the world, but to make any complex products from scratch on an asteroid would require so much specialized equipment and tons of consumables that it simply isn't feasible in the foreseeable future.

Where did the coal miners go in the 70s? And the US automobile industry workers? Industrial reconversions happen all the time, it's part of the game. Sure, there were social issues and individual dramas in those cases, but nothing that isn't insurmountable for a modern society.

Once you've powered it down, it's dead. After a few years without maintenance, it will start leaking and venting. With no attitude control, it will start tumbling. The combination of gravitational forces, drag, and venting will put the connections under stress until cracks start appearing. After that, it will break into a couple pieces and become a hazard. You wouldn't be preserving it, you would be abandoning it to become a wreck.

Not possible. Without active attitude control, the station would tumble out if control and eventually break up.

Yeah, total speculation, I admit. But the point is, we can probably support a higher population, but the problems we have now will only get worse and there will be sacrifices to be made. The question is, is it worth sacrifying comfort and quality of life just to allow more people on Earth, and what is the point of encouraging population to grow even more ? Economical growth is limited, because resources themselves are inherently limited. If you see wealth as a cake, then more people means a smaller slice for everyone. The cake is not growing any bigger, or at least not at the same rate as the number of people who all want a slice. There are only so many solutions: either we accept to all have a smaller slice, or we accept that some people will be left with only smaller and smaller crumbs. Either way, the tensions will get higher and someone is going to end up smashing the cake so that nobody gets any. The only way to make sure everyone gets a decent piece of cake is to only allow the right number of people into the party.

You might think that the "bureaucratic" overhead work is useless, but certification, quality audits, risk assessment, studies and so on are all jobs that need to be done. The private sector does those things too. It's part of the cost of doing business. If NASA didn't do it, they would have to outsource those jobs to private companies, who would probably charge them more for the same (or less) work done in China.

Economies of scale apply as soon as you decide to build more than one unit of a standardized design. Of course, in the space business, it's more about small series production runs than actual mass production, but the idea is that it will be cheaper to produce 28 (near-)identical Merlin engines for a Falcon Heavy than 3 RS-25s, 2 SRBs and a couple of RL-10s for an SLS every 2 years. If all goes well, SpaceX plans to produce those Merlins at a rate of 400 per year. Even at 200 per year, the unit cost will come down substantially compared to other rocket engines. In terms of space hardware, that is mass production. (Incidentally, this is also the reason I'm a bit skeptical about the usefulness of a reusable Falcon. At current launch rates, reusability flies in the face of economies of scale.) Add in the infrastructure costs, which will be spread over at least a dozen launches per year, compared to SLS which will have to maintain the VAB, the crawlers, the MCC and LC-39 for one launch every 2 years. My point is that a launching 3 Falcon Heavies with 53mt to LEO each is going to cost way less than a single 100mt SLS (I doubt the Block II well ever be funded). Of course, this is based on optimistic estimates for SpaceX, but the same is true to a lesser extent for ULA launchers. You could probably afford 4 or 5 Delta Heavies or more for the cost of a single SLS.

I can't wait for the Fustek SEV. I'm a big fan of Fustek and a big fan of the SEV concept. Are you going to have the side docking ports ? I was thinking that you could have the forward pod module with the windows, the interchangeable rear modules, and an optional docking module with nodes for side-mounted IACBMs that would go between the two. Is this how you plan to do it?

I haven't seen it yet (it's only coming out at the end of october here), and don't want to be spoiled, but here are some of Neil DeGrasse Tyson's comments on the movie: http://gawker.com/neil-degrasse-tyson-thinks-gravity-is-scientifically-i-1441842497 All in all, he seems to have liked it. The inaccuracies seem pretty minor to me.

You don't need to go all China on people. You just need to remove the incentives for having children and implement sex education campaigns, it shouldn't be impossible to bring growth rates down to a level where the 3-child family is an exception, abortion is socially acceptable, and there is less social pressure to have kids. Remember, it has to be a worldwide effort. Western countries have low-enough natality rates. The problem is mainly in Asia and Africa. If we can bring their natality rate down to an average of 2 children per family, it would be a huge progress.

That website is funded by the Population Research Institute, an organization that has a clear agenda. They advocate population growth, reducing funding for family planning and are actively against abortion and contraception. Their stance on overpopulation is just a disguise for their religious agenda. http://www.overpopulationawareness.org/india/en/videos/overpopulation/population-research-institute-misleading-videos-to-further-their-religious-agenda_3212.html Yes, we could probably feed 70 billion people if we really had to. It would probably involve highly optimized nutritional food pills, extreme industrialization of the entire food chain, rationing, reliance on a monopolistic agro-industrial complex, cultivating every arable square meter of land on Earth, and using all our resources to do so. Just about every element in our lives would be oriented towards producing food, instead of entertainment, tourism, science, education and all the other fun stuff that makes life worth living. Would you really want to live in that sort of world though ? What point is there to having 70 billion people instead of just 7 ? Wouldn't it just be easier to simply stop population growth and maintain a decent quality of life for those 7 billion. Technological advancements and efficiency gains would then allow us to optimize quality of life instead of having to catch up with population growth.

+1 for overpopulation. It is the elephant in the room that is either the root cause or the biggest contributor to all of our other problems. Yet none of our politicians wants to address or even acknowledge the problem, mostly because the actual solutions (including worldwide birth control and sex education campaigns) go against "family values" and religious dogma.

There is no point in asking people to stick to factual information and then spew off misinformation and stuff that you've read about Justin Bieber.

SpaceX is mainly funded by NASA and based on a lot of proven technology and past experience. Skylon has no significant funding, uses unproven techniques for just about every part of the vehicle, and all of Elon's fortune wouldn't be enough to build it. It is promising for dropping the cost of launch hardware. That is only a very small portion of the total cost of a launch.

To build all that space infrastructure, you're still going to need some heavy-lifting to get all that manufacturing hardware into space. The effort would eat up all NASA's space budget for the next 30 years at least (if it somehow managed to survive more that 6 administrations without being cancelled or derailed). That would be 30 years without any space exploration at all, because you would argue that there's no point in launching stuff from Earth. It's simply not realistic as a short or medium term goal. I'd rather we work on goals that are actually achievable rather than fuel pipe dreams that have zero chance of ever happening. If you are convinced that our "destiny" is to explore and expand (I personally don't believe in "destiny"), then what difference does it make if we achieve that goal in 2000 years rather than in 50 years. There is no rush, Humanity has been around for hundreds of thousands of years, so a couple of centuries more or less doesn't make a difference. Let's do what we can do, and not try to run and leap when we hardly have any experience standing on two feet.