Nibb31

There already isn't much of a market for Falcon Heavy. Nobody on the market has any 50t payloads to launch, except maybe the US Military. Unless SLS is cancelled and NASA suddenly gets enough funding to want to go to Mars without it, there are hardly any payloads for it.

Not sure in what context you heard that phrase, but it doesn't sound like something any space engineers would use. It really depends on what phase of the mission you are talking about. It might refer to the point during a launch where, instead of aborting by trying to return to the ground (with the LES or an RTLS or transatlantic abort mode for the Shuttle), you abort to orbit by cutting the engines and riding it out until you reenter.

Maybe for one or two very fragile experiments that fit in a suitcase, but I doubt that it is a real requirement. Most experiments are packaged in standard ISPR racks to facilitate installation on the ISS. Dream Chaser (or any of the crewed vehicles) cannot return ISPRs because they can't fit through the new docking ports (APAS/NDS/LIDS/SIMAC or whatever the latest acronym for them is this week). Dragon cargo is the only vehicle that can bring back ISPRs because it berths with a CBM, which is big enough to allow the ISPRs to fit. The Orbital Cygnus and the HTV, which also berth to a CBM, can take ISPRs to the station but can't return them obviously. There are currently 3 candidate vehicles for CCDev: Dragon v2, CST-100, and Dream Chaser, plus 2 for the cargo program: Dragon and Cygnus (in addition to HTV and Progress). That's a lot of vehicles for a service that is only going to last 5 years. At some point, Congress is going to force NASA to downselect to one crew vehicle and one cargo vehicle. Unfortunately, Dream Chaser being the latest on schedule and less proven of all the commercial vehicles, is bound to be the first one to go. Boeing and SpaceX simply have a more reliable track record with more reliable designs and more flight-readiness.

Funny how this thread has been brought back from the dead... When was the last actual dogfight between two fighter planes? Missile, radar and communication technology has come a long way since Vietnam. Modern air superiority fighters like the F22 are really weapons platforms. Although they are highly manouverable and the pilots are highly trained, in a real world interception scenario, they will typically fire their missiles from 200 km away, without even making visual contact, based on intelligence from an AWACS aircraft or from the rest of the air group. Interception nowadays is about being the first to fire your missiles and being able to evade the enemy's missiles. If you can make some sort of hybrid between a UAV and a long range anti-aircraft missile, you no longer need air superiority fighters. A swarm of UAVs loiters over the theater, or fly in formation with an F22, and when a hostile aircraft is detected, the F22 or an AWACS sends the kill command, which switches the UAV to missile mode and goes in for the kill. Space combat would be similar. There is no point in using a manned spacecraft to launch a missile. The unmanned spacecraft would be the missile. It would manoeuver to intercept the target and neutralise it when it gets close enough.

There are 47 active astronauts in the NASA Astronaut Corps. Most of them have flown. Only those from the last two classes (2009 and of course 2013) haven't flown yet. You don't have to be a NASA Astronaut to fly with NASA. Mission specialists and astronauts from other agencies are not necessarily full-time NASA Astronauts. It doesn't make sense to immigrate to the US to become an astronaut. If you are among the best specialists in your field and you can be of value to your country's space program, you could always contact ESA to become a candidate in the European Astronaut Corps, which currently has 14 members.

Soyuz lands at 3m/s, which is equivalent to a 10km/h fender bender. With the crew strapped in an optimal position and suspended seats, its no worse than a hard landing in a airliner. The seats and floor of the capsule are designed to collapse so that a 10m/s impact (which is what you get if you landed solely on the parachute) would still be survivable. If you get caught in a 30km/h car accident, properly braced and strapped in, you will be a bit shook up with a few bruises, but you will walk away alive.

You don't need to strut the hell out of it. Just add 4 struts between the tanks and the engine like. SOP. There are still a few balance problems. The size of the upper stage implies that it should carry 2070 and 2050 units of fuel and oxydizer instead of 800 and 960. It should be much heavier, with an empty mass around 4 or 5 tons instead of 1. The lower stage is more balanced in terms of fuel, but should also be much heavier, at least 10 tons. Even with those values, it's overpowered, especially the upper stage. I suspect the Merlin engines have way too much thrust for a rocket of this size. I'm cutting them down to 300 instead of 475.

You'd need a hell of a bath tub though...

*sigh* You're not listening, are you?

Were they referenced as probes or debris when they were detached from the mothership?

This is the root cause of most of our problems, and the real elephant in the room that nobody wants to address. I'm also a strong believer in the Global Footprint hypothesis, which is quite alarming (our 2013 Overshoot Day was last wednesday, and it's getting earlier every year. If we don't resolve exponential population growth during this century by peaceful means (by making birth control widely available to all human populations and by ending foolish pro-natality programs) the problem will take care of itself, and it won't be pretty. Of course, this and global warming are way beyond the topic of feasibilty of MarsOne and probably deserve their own thread.

Clarification: Delta-v imposed equatorial landings. Communications imposed near-side landings. The result was a limited region for candidate landing sites. Constellation was planned to have global access.

Climate change on Earth is an undeniable fact, but there is still a lot that we don't understand in terms of feedback loops and long term effects. It's also the result of billions of tons of hydrocarbons being burned over several decades. We know very little about Mars' climate mechanisms and ultimately there is very little oxygen to actually burn. We don't have the technological capability to intentionally control the climate of a planet. It's science fiction. Anything beyond a decade or two away is pure speculation. It's pointless to plan for things that are so far into the future. Nerva was abandoned, therefore is a technological capability that we no longer have. It was also far from being complete and operational. We have explained to you that having a theoretical solution does not mean that you have the technical capability. There is a huge gap between theory and reliable operational hardware. As for the Mars Cycler, you appear to not even understand what it is. In no way does a Cycler increase your transportation capability. It only makes the journey less unpleasant (but longer) by allowing a more volume and comfort for passengers. You still have to accelerate the same mass on the same trajectory as if you were going direct. Reusable is not necessarily cheaper either. This is speculation. You seriously don't know because nobody has done the actual studies to determine the level of radiation on Mars, its effects on the human body, and how to mitigate those effects. There needs to be a lot more serious work spent on this before we can actually risk lives. This is handwaving. Both are impossible for now (this includes MarsOne) because we don't have the technological capability. However, it is easier to develop that technology for the Moon, simply because the Moon is much easier to get to and to return from.

What you and I think has absolutely no pending on what will actually happen. I want to see NASA build the USS Enterprise as much as any space geek, but that doesn't mean that it will happen, for all sorts of technical and economical reasons. Terraforming is science fiction, se we can evacuate that. Mars is as much a sterile desert as the Moon. As for the radiation and gravity issues, we simply don't know what effects they have or what is needed to mitigate those effects. The surface radiation might be higher, but because the Moon is closer, it is easier to ship material to alleviate the problem. You start by building a base that lives on supplies, something like Scott-Amundsen base in Antarctica, or the ISS, and gradually you ship equipment that makes the base more autonomous... A Moon base is still a much easier place to construct our knowledge about living on another planet. If we can live on the Moon, then we can live anywhere. The whole point is irrelevant though, because there is no money for either a Moon or a Mars landing any time soon, let alone a semi-permanent outpost. I don't think you realise how little we know about Mars and human biology or how complex space engineering projects actually are. We might get some technological breakthroughs, but the laws of physics aren't likely to change, and it will always be expensive and complicated to safely send payloads into space. We've already showed you that a self sustaining closed-loop "fully functional colony" hasn't even been demonstrated on Earth yet. It's a capability that we simply don't have yet. Even if it was a proven capability (and if there was actually a point in colonizing other worlds instead of our local deserts and seabeds which are much more hospitable and easier to reach) it would require massive migration of hundreds of highly trained people and thousands of tons of equipment, which is simply not possible with any current or near future technology. That is a goal that MarsOne simply doesn't work towards. A round trip will have to happen before you can even start suggesting something as stupid as a permanent colony. We simply don't know enough about Mars to determine if humans can live durably there or not. All we can and should do, is to send small crews and bring them back, so that we can learn how to live on another planet. This is also a something that MarsOne doesn't help. What MarsOne would do (if it succeeded in ever flying) is to end tragically and turn the general public against any hopes of returning to Mars under more favorable conditions.

You need to get into your head that colonization is off the cards for at least the next century, probably more. Comparison with 17th and 18th Century colonization on Earth is meaningless because there is no comparison. The best you can hope for is a round trip with a long duration outpost on the surface for a small crew.

Yes, exactly that. Apollo could only land in the equatorial regions on the side facing the Earth for delta-v and communication reasons. Orion/SLS is not going to the Moon. NASA has no plans to develop a lander since Constellation was cancelled. Constellation had a requirement to land anywhere on the Moon, including the polar regions where there are some shaded craters that have never seen sunlight (which might hold water ice) and other areas where there is permanent sunlight (great for a solar farm).

It reminds me of the British reality show Space Cadets, where they picked the most clueless idiots they could find and tricked them into believing they were flying on a new Russian space shuttle. You can find it on YouTube. Quite entertaining really...

The premisce of the movie is that signs of life were discovered on Europa, so they skip Mars and NEO programs and head straight for Saturn... They say it's the first manned mission beyond lunar orbit since Apollo. I suppose that the mission could be funded by the government and the company gets exclusive rights on the commercial exploitation of any biological discoveries.

Reusable for the sake of reusable is pointless. If your requirement is to provide the cheapest service, then reusable is not always the best solution.

They recently switched all the laptops to Linux. They used to be on Windows.

I liked Europa Report. It was quite believable scientifically, and the mission made sense.

Imagine that there is one single hostile species (as in the Killing Star hypothesis) with relativistic FTL technology. FTL weapons typically have the ability to break causality: you can kill before the threat even exists. Any emerging civilization that emits a signal would be pre-emptively destroyed by the hostile species BEFORE they got the chance to emit that signal. The hostile species would then return into blackout mode and passively listen for the next signal. The result for an external observer (like us) would be the absence of any obvious signs of any other intelligent life in the galaxy.

Inspiration Mars is more realistic, but actually quite pointless. Calculations show that the actual flyby of Mars will happen at night time, so they won't even be able to see Mars when they get there. I guess it will provide valuable biological data about interplanetary travel. The timeframe for implementing closed-loop life support and getting their inflatable module built, tested and launched before the crewed launch in Jan 2018 is also quite short. I don't think they can make it.

The difference with sending prisoners to Mars is that you are going to need people who are highly qualified, highly motivated, mentally stable and disciplined. That sort of profile is quite rare in the prison population.

There are currently 47 members in the NASA Astronaut Corps, many of which have never flown. The previous selection was Astronaut Group 20 in 2009, none of which have flown in space yet (one of them is scheduled to fly to the ISS on Soyuz in September, the others have no flight assignments). NASA has way more astronauts than available flight seats. Orion has only 2 flights scheduled in 2017 and 2021, and they usually put astronauts who have already flown in Commander and Pilot positions, which means that only 4 rookie astronauts from Group 20 and Group 21 are likely to fly on Orion before 2022.