Nibb31

Wow! That looked really wobbly... and judging from the pilot's voice, they must have been getting some high Gs when the engine kicked in!

Certainly, those engineering problems are not unsolvable, but they still need solving. Orbital rockets are already have very constrained requirements with relatively low margins. Additional requirements will substantially increase the development cost and force you to compromise other parameters of the vehicle. For example, a rocket that is designed to be fueled vertically only needs ribbing or reinforcements on the longitudinal axis. If you have to add lateral reinforcements, with internal struts or plates, it will end up being heavier, which will impact performance. This means that the upper stage will need to be a bit larger to compensate, and the aircraft, which has its own constraints, might need to be even heavier, etc... Sure, it can be done, but it has a cost. And that cost might not be worth the expense. Actually, Virgin hasn't proven anything. The system is designed and built by Scaled Composites. Virgin is only the operator. And the concept has existed for a long time, ever since NASA dropped the Bell X-1 from a B-29, even if SS2 is actually closer to the X-15. However, it's a system that simply doesn't scale well. An aircraft is a pretty crappy substitute for a first stage, so you still need a multi-stage rocket, albeit somewhat smaller, but at the cost of a huge one-off aircraft that is going to spend most of its time in a hangar instead of flying. An airplane might be reusable, but it's still way more expensive than a dumb booster or a bit of extra tankage. WK2 might be capable of launching nanosats, a couple of kilograms into orbit. It won't be cheap though, because the rocket is still expendable. As for people, SS2 is a roller coaster ride. It doesn't go to orbit. It doesn't leave the atmosphere. It doesn't even go hypersonic. To do those things would require much more technology, complexity, cost, and weight. It would have to be 10 times bigger and heavier, and the air launch concept simply doesn't scale well for that. You would get better performance by strapping a couple of cheap SRBs to the side of your rocket. Why would it be cheaper than, for example, piggybacking a nanosat on a commercial launch? or a Pegasus or Minotaur launch? You still have to pay for a disposable rocket, and the flight time of a unique aircraft, with a huge development cost, such as WK2 is not going to be cheaper than using SRBs as a first stage, or just designing your disposable rocket to be slightly bigger. Yes, there is a launch flexibility benefit. You can launch regardless of the weather and at any time from any location, but how many nanosats are that picky on flexibility? The only folks who might have that sort of requirement are the military, but they aren't too interested in nanosat-class payloads. They already have their own solutions (Pegasus) or ASAT missiles that can be fired from an F-16.

There are several problems with air-launch. First you need to custom design and build a liquid-fueled rocket that can be hung horizontally fully fueled under. The structure and payload must be designed to withstand both longitudinal stress (when the engines are burning) and lateral stress (when hanging underneath the carrier aircraft). This means that there will be a weight penalty. Second, there are a whole lot of LOM abort modes if something goes wrong with the launcher or the aircraft: - If the engine fails to start after being dropped, you lose the launcher instead of it just standing on the pad until you fix it. - If you abort the launch before dropping the rocket, you need to land with a fully fueled bomb under your belly and pray that the landing gear works. Finally, the actual gain is rather small. Sure, you will save a small amount of delta-v by launching from altitude, but you are still going to need an expendable multi-stage launcher that can accelerate to 24000 km/h. The cost of building and maintaining a specially designed aircraft for this single task instead of just making your first stage slightly bigger, as well as all the added complexity, is not necessarily worth it. It is feasible for small rockets, such as Pegasus (also the cost-effectiveness of Pegasus was dubious), but it doesn't scale well.

LauncherOne is only for launching nanosats or other very small payloads as a way of spreading the maintenance cost of the WK2 over various programs. No way can it be upscaled to launch a human being. Not necessarily. G-loads are more a matter of thrust/weight than anything to do with vertical or horizontal launch. A soyuz launch has a max of 4G (although landing and reentry are much tougher). The Shuttle was around 3G for launch and reentry. Some rollercoasters are harsher than that and don't require any special training.

A system for what? It is basically a glorified vomit comet. If all you want is several minutes of weightlessness, it is still cheaper to book a parabolic flight on zero-G aircraft. If Virgin ever wants to offer orbital flights, they would be much better off with an off-the-shelf spacecraft like DreamChaser or Dragon. Air launch is dead end for orbital flights.

...Also BOR-4 and 5 (which flew), Kliper, Hermes, DynaSoar (which never flew but were very advanced designs), and Hope-X or the Chinese CALT project (which are/were early concepts). Early concepts of the US Space Shuttle were also inline. Actually, most small spaceplane designs use an inline launch architecture, because they use an existing booster and it is safer. Sidemount is more complex to handle and launch and requires a specially designed booster. It has also proven more prone to damaging the orbiter and doesn't cope well with abort situations.

The strut gun connects to any part that is in front of it. The Quantum Core is useless IMO.

During Apollo and Skylab, NASA didn't have TDRS satellites, so they needed ground stations all around the world to maintain continuous contact with the Apollo missions. If you wanted to listen continuously on those comms, you would have needed the same. The KGB routinely deployed "fishing trawlers" that were rigged with all sorts of satellite equipment... There is no doubt that the Russians and the Americans were both listening in on each other's space program, which is why the stories about lost Russian cosmonauts and fake Moon landings are all hoaxes. It's hard to hide a space mission, and if those stories had been true, either side wouldn't have missed an opportunity to leak the truth out.

After spending 23 pages explaining why sending people on a one-way trip to Mars is neither cheap nor easy (or even particularly desirable), there are still gullible folks to support the idea. Quite amazing.

The actual flags probably no longer exist. They were just standard nylon flags supplied from the US federal supplies catalog for $5.50. The UV radiation will have faded the die colors to white and made the flags so brittle they have probably crumbled to dust.

Presence in space and survivability of our species are unrelated. We've already had this discussion...

What is there to fear exactly? It isn't something that would have happened in our lifetimes anyway, so what difference does it make if it happens in 200 years or in 2000 years? There is no rush, and if expanding to other planets turns out to be utterly impractical, it's no big deal. A private lunar probe mission would cost much more than that, so the Google Prize isn't much of an incentive. Actually, I think there are no serious contenders that will actually make the 2015 deadline.

kerbal.net died at least a year ago.

The landing strip is part of Yuma Proving Ground, a US Army facility where they test weapons and military systems. In Google Earth history layer, the object has been there since at least 2003. It's a bit weird to a permanent structure like that in the middle of a taxiway though. It looks a bit like a radial VOR navigation beacon that you usually see around airports, but it's also a strange place to put a VOR, and it has 24 spokes, whereas a VOR usually has 36. It has shadows, so it's a construction, not just a painted pattern on the ground. I'm guessing it might be some sort of radial military radar or navigation aid. It could also be a test target for spy sats. Radial patterns are good for testing resolution and moiré effects on imaging systems.

No we didn't. For $100 billion. I don't see how they could, they are short of $99 999 860 000. If, not when. And they would still be short of $94 999 860 000. Not really. When, not if. And I'd rather live long and prosper than die prematurely from starvation alone on Mars.

I don't like spinach, but it's healthy.

Unfortunately, I believe this is true. Even 7 launches sounds optimistic right now.

China has their plates full with their space station plans until 2025. NASA has EM-1 and EM-2 planned up to 2021 and no plans for a lander. Russia actually has plans to assemble interplanetary spacecraft at their OPSEC station after 2025. ESA has no interest in a manned program. So, maybe after 2025 there might be an opportunity, but aerospace projects typically take at least 10 years to design and build, so I can't imagine anyone returning to the Moon or landing on Mars before at least 2035 or 2040.

You can get cheapo android tablets for kids these days for cheaper than that. And games on android are also much cheaper.

I don't think anybody said that CO2 wasn't good for plants, but that doesn't mean that it can't have a negative impact elsewhere. Water is also good for life on Earth, but flooding and tsunamis can kill us. It's all a question of balance. Anyway, life on Earth has nothing to worry about; it will survive with or without us. Species disappear or evolve, others emerge; that's no big deal in the grand scheme of things. What we should worry about are the consequences of climate change on human activity: if some areas become unhospitable or uninhabitable, it could lead to famine, mass migration, war... A new balance will have to emerge. As a species, I have no doubt that we will survive, but not without massive suffering and political instability.

I don't think climate change requires protesting, especially not with ad hominen attacks. It requires awareness and the removal of corporate sponsorship in US political campaigns. There are several facts that *everybody* agrees on: - The Earth's climate is measurably changing. - The Earth's climate has varied a lot over millions of years in the past, but never this rapidly. - Extreme climate change will have negative effects on human activity. - Burning stuff emits CO2, which is a greenhouse gas. - We have only be massively burning stuff for the last century or two. - There is a finite amount of stuff to burn. - Big corporations don't want to stop burning stuff. - Environmentalists want us to stop burning stuff. And there is the stuff that we do not agree on: - Whether climate change was caused by human activity. - Whether we need to stop burning stuff. - Whether we can actually fix it. Now, there are at least 2 events going on at the same time that are unprecedented in the millions of years of historical data that we have: - An unprecedented rapid change of climate. - An unprecedented industrial and demographical explosion of one species. Correlation doesn't imply causality, but it would be foolish to not consider it. We can't necessarily confirm the causality (although mechanisms are suggested), and we can't deny it either. Science is never about certainty, but about establishing predictable models. Climate and weather are chaotic in nature (the butterfly effect...), which makes them hard to model and predict. Our models are currently imprecise and need refining, but ultimately, does it matter what triggered the changes in the climate? The question is, what do we do about it? When your house is on fire, whatever the cause, do you keep on throwing wood into the fireplace? We have two options: - Stop making things worse by burning more stuff. - Ignore the fire alarms and keep on with business as usual. The main force that is driving the "let's ignore climate change" current is big corporations who want business as usual. They don't want to invest in the future because their main focus is on next year's earnings and they can't project themselves over a decade or two. Incidentally, they also have the money to influence politicians and the public opinion, especially in the US which is the only democratic country where political campaigns are paid for by corporations. When people complain about the political influence of environmentalists, I think that the political influence of corporations is much more dangerous.

We've been discussing Skylon for ages. Please don't start new threads when one already exists: http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/showthread.php/34403-Do-you-think-Skylon-will-be-our-first-completed-SSTO

I prefer the smell of Napalm in the morning...

I like it ! It needs some bumpmapping for the little ridges and bumps and plates and rivets and stuff... I think it should have only 4 grid fins and it seems that there should be 12 of those protruding propellant umbilicals on the side of the Block A.

Smart meters can warn you when you are using too much energy, which is a good thing. It's nice to be warned if you have a faulty appliance or if something is wrong with your installation, rather than having to pay an huge bill later on. And even conventional meters will cut off if your installation starts pulling too much power. However, there is no way it could control actual devices or individual power sockets without some extra wiring or installing networked smart sockets. If you are living in the sort of fascist country where people are being arrested for having their lights on, then you have bigger problems than your electrical installation... It's time to move to Canada or Europe or some other friendlier place...