Nibb31

I doubt they were at a stage where they had picked the landing sites. Chances are they would have had similar criteria to the americans for choosing their first landing site: equatorial, illuminated, on the near-side, and as flat as possible. If you look at the Moon, there aren't that many candidate sites actually. They would probably have gone for the Sea of Tranquility or the Ocean of Storms like Apollo 11 and 12. Incidentally, Luna 9 and 13 also landed in the Ocean of Storms area. That's rubbish. There are plenty of figures, diagrams, and pictures on the web. The Soviet moon program is well documented these days and most of the actual flight articles can be seen up close in museums. Just google "LK Lander".

Why? As an Australian, you should feel closer to China than to Europe. We are all the same species anyway.

This really isn't something that you could safely pull off on your own as a simple science fair event. Maybe you could do a lecture about rocket propellants and it by launching a model rocket.

How would you know? As for the TV show, sure us space geeks would watch it (if it isn't too crappy), but that doesn't mean that they would get the level of popular audience that they need. In an interview, one of the Mars One folks stated that they were basing their revenue plan on the worldwide ratings of the Olympic Games. Good luck in sustaining that every week for several years all over the world! Besides, the sort of people that would be selected to make interesting reality TV are not the ones who would make good astronauts. comes to mind... and look at the ratings that had. Good for you, necroing a typo that happened on page 8 of 28 page thread.

Please use the Search function. There are already a couple of threads discussing Skylon, so there's no point in starting yet another one where people will say the same things.

Based on what evidence ?

I really really like it! It needs a bit of polishing, but it's really nice ! However, there are a couple of illogical things with the design. - I'm not getting the point of having a heatshield on the ascent pod. Surely it has to dock with some sort of Duna Transfer Vessel to get back to Kerbin, - I'm not sure how practical it is to have the docking port on the side, at 45°. - It really only needs one ladder. - I'd rather have the docking port on top, and the parachutes hidden in the aeroshell of the pod (as in the picture below) Oh, and a cargo version !

Yes, even if the camera could be restarted, a relatively low rez picture of a starry sky would be useless.

I can't comment on the advantages of microgravity in superconductor production, because I'm not too familiar with that field. I wonder how desirable a larger wafer-size actually is or if the industry is really interested in making bigger chips when the trend is to make devices smaller and more integrated. However, it is still much cheaper to build a clean room or a vacuum chamber on Earth (a cost in the thousands of dollars) than to launch a manufacturing satellite (millions of dollars) or a manned manufacturing orbital station (billions of dollars). The "vacuum of space" around something like the ISS or any spacecraft is far from being pristine anyway. The vicinity of the ISS is just about as dirty as it gets, with particles, paint flakes, residue from venting, outgassing and RCS... In fact, the ISS is surrounded by clouds of crap. An industrial vacuum chamber is much better, cheaper, and easier to maintain and service, and in addition, gravity has the advantage of pulling any polluting particles to the bottom of the chamber, insuring a cleaner environment than in zero-g. However, if the need ever arises for space manufacturing, I would envision something like the X-37B to do the job rather than a full blown space factory. Actually, it's hard to think of any use-case for the X-37B other than space manufacturing.

I was joking about Zaeo's post, because he was pretty much handwaving away the real roadblocks for commercial space exploitation. And technical difficulty is not always solved by human brains. Some problems remain unsolved, some might be solved in the future, some might turn out to be unsolvable or just impractical. The real issues are physics and economical feasibility. It takes huge amounts of energy to accelerate a single ton of equipment to beyond 24000km/h. It also takes a lot of energy to bring any mined materials back or to transform them into something useful. Energy is never going to be free, so the means of producing that energy are going to be expensive and require massive investments. Massive investments can only come up if there is a planned ROI. There currently simply is no business case for mining asteroids. There isn't a single industry that would benefit from it. There isn't a single mineral that we couldn't extract from Earth for much cheaper than venturing into BEO space. Asteroid mining is only space enthusiasts grasping at straws to find a purpose for space exploration. It's a solution looking for a problem.

That isn't code. It looks like XML, which usually isn't used as an algorithmic programming language. It's usually used to encapsulate data or for coding graphic layouts and it is totally unrelated with the game being a port or not. It means nothing. Programmers use PC workstations to code console games anyway. Porting is simply adapting a game to another platform by replacing library calls and native functions. If the game is available on multiple platforms, then it's a port. It doesn't really matter what system the game is originally coded for, as long as the job is done properly and the QA process is appropriate.

Ok, so the only thing stopping us is technical difficulty, budget, heat, and mastery of null-g construction... What are we waiting for?

You do realize that a space elevator wouldn't be practical for manned travel anyway, don't you? The hypothetical climber vehicle has to travel 36000km to get to GEO, which means that even if it climbs at 200km/h (which would put a lot of stress on the cable and require a lot of power) it still takes over a week to reach orbit. That means that the climber will only to be large enough to accomodate a few passengers with shielding, life support and supplies for 8 days. Plus, it won't be too healthy to spend that much time travelling through the Van Allen belt. A space elevator is only theoretically practical for cargo and raw materials.

I disagree. There is Ariane 6, Falcon (which can still be considered in development), Long March 5, GSLV-III, and probably others. Having new ideas is great, but aerospace is an area where you need reliability and safety. Space agencies are reluctant to invest in ideas that are totally new, because the investments are huge, and risk is much greater that implementing proven solutions. Some ideas look great on paper, but once you move into industrialization, with reliability, industrialization, operational, legal, and serviceability constraints, they can be a major source of schedule and budget overruns. This happens with just about every civilian or military aerospace project, even the most conservative ones. This is true for Orion and SLS, but look also at the industrial problems that Boeing had with their 787, Airbus with the A380, or the whole F-35 project. I can't think of a single aerospace project that hasn't had either cost overruns or performance problems. Skylon, like any SSTO, is on the theoretical edge of just about every envelope. The design assumes optimistic values for just about every component and has virtually no margin for error. A little extra weight or a little less thrust than planned can reduce payload capacity or zero and ruin the whole program. Nobody has ever built an airframe like Skylon's, so nobody has any experience about how it will cope with the extreme flight regimes, temperature variations, air pressures. Nobody has ever flown anything that uses the same aerodynamic principles... Nothing ever goes as smoothly as planned, and with all its new ways of designing just about every element, Skylon is bound to hit technical problems which will add cost and constraints, and might make it simply useless as a payload launcher. It's a huge risk. This doesn't mean it can't be done. It just means that there is so much new R&D that needs to be done that the scope of the project is more complex than the F-35, SLS and Orion combined, which are all based on quite conventional technology. And I can't see anyone coming up with the sort of money needed for Skylon. And then there is the whole reusability issue again. Reusability and high turn-around requires a frequent launch rate. Currently, there is simply no demand for the sort of launch rate that would justify the investment in a reusable launcher. And yes, I know that REL estimates the development cost at $12 billion. That is less than the development cost Airbus A380 and less than half the development cost of the Boeing 787, both of which were based on mature technology and well-understood principles. This is another example of their unrealistically optimistic numbers. If Skylon development costs a more realistic $40 billion (which is the cost of the F-35 development program for example), and you could justify a fleet of 5 vehicles, that puts the unit price of each vehicle at over $8 billion per unit (ignoring the manufacturing cost). The combined fleet would have to perform 800 launches before saving costs compared to a $50 million expendable Falcon 9. There simply isn't a market in the foreseeable future for that many launches.

I can't think of anything more boring than a Skype session with Mars.

Laztek's Dragon has replaced CbbP's Dragon in my heart, although it needed a lot of rebalancing and cfg editing to get it right. Otherwise, I really like BobCat's Orion and Soyuz TMA. There is a distinct lack of decent lander pods.

They don't have broadband Internet. They have file transfer and email which are synchronized several times a day, but they can't surf the web or watch YouTube for example.

And don't forget the gullwing doors!

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1772240/

Well, although I don't consider it proper "space flight", a Virgin Galactic ride is already accessible to anyone who is willing to spend $250000. It's affordable if you are willing to sell your house... If I finish paying my mortgage when I retire in 20 years, I suppose I could do it, but I still find it expensive and rather pointless for only 5 minutes of weightlessness. Hopefully, the price will have come down a bit by then, or they might be offering orbital Dragon rides for an equivalent price. I'm not counting on it though. The sheer amount of energy needed to boost 100 kilos of human meat to 24000km/h is never going to be cheap. I'm willing to bet that we will actually see neural-level virtual reality simulators that will provide an identical experience for cheaper than an actual space flight. If we can create VR experiences that are indistinguishable from reality, there will be no more point in space tourism (or travelling at all).

It takes many years to train an astronaut. There is no point in spending millions to send inexperienced kids with no scientific background. It would just be a PR stunt with no real value. There are a limited number of seats, so space agencies want to make sure that they send the best of the best. Plus, there are legal liability issues. It's a dangerous activity that needs legal consent, which is problematic if you're a minor. If you want to be an astronaut, you will be better off working at being the best at everything in school. Get a PhD or other high-level degree in physics or biology or join the armed forces to become a pilot, or both.

Do we really need to have yet another discussion about Skylon? REL isn't much more that 4 old geezers who have been working in their shed for 30 years. We pretty much came to the conclusion that Skylon needs funding in the billions and what they are getting from ESA is in the millions. That's 3 orders of magnitude from what they need.

Read the post above, they travelled more downrange than they travelled vertically, so they didn't go "straight up".

The Minotaur V in the LADEE thread also uses SRBs as upper stages, and so will Ariane 6.

Ariane 6 will also be mainly made of 4 SRBs as first and second stage. Only the upper stage is liquid. You see, there are several ways of lowering launch costs. SpaceX believes in reusability, so it is going for relatively complex designs and they hope to recoup the cost by reusing the hardware over frequent launches. This will lead to fewer launchers being built. Another approach is to build cheaper dumb boosters and to mass produce them. The more you make, the cheaper they get.