Nibb31

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Citation needed. Any real-world examples of low-maintenance robotic mining on Earth to prove your point? Citation needed. You forget the supplies for the journey (hint: they won't fit in a deflated inflatable module for launch) and the dozens of launches to land enough supplies and equipment for the crew to survive on Mars. Individual launch cost is irrelevant. The cost 'per seat' has to take into account the total cost of the program, including development of hardware that doesn't yet exist and delivering all the supplies and equipment to Mars. A F9H launch is expected to cost around $100M for 1 ton delivered to Mars surface. Simply delivering 20 tons of supplies (which is basically the contents of a two ATVs to the ISS, ie: not much and certainly not enough to sustain 6 astronauts for a year) will cost $2 billion. This doesn't even include the cost of the Dragon itself and hardware development.

Version 1.9.8 is deprecated and was designed for 0.18. Many things have changed since then. Do not use it.

Plenty of people are crazy, but that doesn't mean that you can create a viable industry to cater for any kind of craziness. You need to have a viable market and an economical business model to fund the investment in infrastructure to cater for the crazy people. Sure, and how do you 3D print rocket fuel, consumables, lubricants, seals, clothes? A 3D printer is nothing more than a simplified CNC machine. You are still going to need heavy machinery and workers to extract and process raw materials. Then you will need facilities and workers to assemble, test, and operate the machines. You are going to need more people to provide food and basic services for all those workers. A self sufficient colony is going to require thousands of workers and billions of tons of equipment and machinery. It's science fiction and has nothing to do with MarsOne or any current technological capability. A small colony of a dozen people is going to rely on supplies from the outside to survive. Without supplies, they will either die, or they will barely survive to live a miserable life inside their tin cans. Yes, but a superfreighter costs a lot more to build than a land rover. Economies of scale are only possible when there is demand for a large volume. Large-scale interplanetary space transportation will arrive when there is a need to transport large volumes of freight between planets. This will only happen if there is a business case that involves that kind of requirement AND if the investment is justified. For the foreseeable future, there is no such business case. Until then, you are again in the realm of science fiction. ...Or flying cars, the cure for cancer, moon bases, immortality, and teleportation. That's a typical fallacy. Plenty of stuff that "was going to happen" didn't, and lots of stuff that people couldn't even imagine 50 years ago, like the Internet or MP3 players, happened too. Just because you can dream something up doesn't mean that it makes sense or that it will happen one day. And vice versa. You can't fly 6 people to Mars on a reusable F9. The F9R won't be able to carry a Dragon to LEO (it will have a reduced payload compared to the non-reusable F9). A DragonRider can't carry life support for 6 people on a 1 year trip. It's designed to carry 6 people to the ISS with life support for 1 week. Where are you going to put the supplies? Where are they going to sleep and exercise during the journey? A RedDragon can only land 1 ton of equipment and supplies on Mars, by launching on a F9H. That is not enough to keep 6 people alive indefinitely. It's not even enough to land a proper ECLSS module like the one on the ISS, let alone the greenhouse tents and had modules, the ISRU equipment, the power generators and batteries, the excavating equipment, the radiation shielding, etc... The ISS needs 3 or 4 resupply flights every year to keep the astronauts alive. Each flight carries 10 or more tons of supplies. You will need dozens of RedDragon flights every year to maintain an equivalent supply line. That is a totally subjective view. You need to take a step or two back. We have only been on this planet for 200 000 years. We have had writing and agriculture for only 3000 years. 500 years ago we didn't even know that the Earth was a rotating around the Sun. Powered flight was only 100 years ago and we went to the Moon 30 years ago. In the grand scheme of things, we are far from stagnating. Also, nothing implies that we must be on that exponential curve forever. We are likely to reach a plateau and stagnate for various reasons, or decline and rise again, like we have in the past. We also try things, fail, and figure out what is practical and what isn't. It's called learning. Right now, colonizing Mars is not practical. So let's concentrate on stuff that is practical.

You might find that the market for a $10 billion vacation to climb Mount Olympus is rather small. Not enough to build the infrastructure for even a low-volume viable tourism industry. But unless you build your rockets on Mars, you still have to launch them from Earth. You might argue that you just have to build the rockets on Mars, but in that case you still have to send thousands of immigrants to work on Mars, as well as the factories and machinery and supplies to allow them to live there. We could also build the USS Enterprise, but that is science fiction and it won't happen in this century or the next. It is certainly way beyond the scope of MarsOne's proposal. What do you mean? If you are discussing a Mars Cycler, you still have to lift the metal from the planet's surface to rendez-vous with the cycler, correct the trajectory of the cycler ship, and bring the payload back down. The delta-V expenditure is the larger than flying that mass of metal directly. It's pointless for cargo. If you mean a reusable cargo ship, why not? A transfer vehicle and off-planet mining and processing facilities will still cost trillions to build and operate, with a return on investment that is not worth it. It would be cheaper to extract minerals from sea water than to go with your proposal. Yes, it's pure speculation. You've been reading too much science fiction. Half a million? That's a joke, right? It would more likely cost half a billion. You'll find that there aren't many people who have half a million (that's a joke, right? ) AND are willing to give up everything. Most rich folks have ties with families, homes, jobs, and leisure activities that they won't want to abandon forever. They might sign a check for a glass of zero-G champaign with Virgin Galactic, but they are not going to give up all their worldly possessions to live in a tin module and drink recycled urine. The World is a big place. You can go and live anywhere on Earth that doesn't require an ID if that's what you really want. Life will still be more fun than on Mars.

No. What pushes Humanity to explore and expand is to find ways to improve our living conditions by increasing wealth, comfort , security, or all three of those conditions. That's all. We go where we will be safe, where the food grows, where we will find a decent job and get a better home, like our ancestors followed the bison and dwelled in caves. When people emigrate it is always because they hope to find a better life for themselves and for their children, not because they want to "give themselves a meaning". Exploration and colonization was a government-sponsored initiative to increase the wealth and political influence of the country. The goal certainly was never for the colonies to become self-sustaining and independent, quite the contrary. The "give ourselves a meaning" is western romanticism, not human nature. Nothing on Mars provides any hope for increased wealth, comfort, or security, or for a better life for your children. In fact, it's quite the opposite. There is no possible trade or wealth to exploit, and life would be harsh and dangerous.

The space industry has always been full of dreamers. Many of the commercial ventures (such as MarsOne) are not actually scams, but they are often set up for their founders to make a living with their dream rather than to actually achieve the dream. They attract venture-capital investors with neat powerpoint slides and cheap studies. The little money funneled into the project is never enough for the project to actually reach its goal, but it's enough to keep the company afloat, to generate more powerpoint slides and cheap studies, and to provide a decent paycheck for the company founder and a couple of employees for a couple of years. When they finally fold, they usually start up another VC business in the same field or in something entirely different. Some of these people have been at it for 20 or 30 years, and it seems to work quite well as reliable source of income, even though everybody knows that they will never launch anything.

Yes, just locally producing the low-temperature lubricants or rubber seals for all the machinery is a whole problem that needs solving. People need food, but they also need soap, clothes, wipes, toilet paper, razor blades, q-tips, disinfectant, medicine, air filters... It's hard to make all that stuff just from grinding Mars rocks and mixing water. Many people seem to think it's simple to live in a tin can, recycling urine and eating hydroponic tomatos until you die, but the level of complexity of life-support in such a harsh environment is mind-boggling. The discomfort is simply not worth it, especially if you know that you're never coming back and that you absolutely no future perspective for yourself or for your kin (assuming you could have viable children on Mars)

The black and white color scheme for the PR renderings is intentionally reminiscent of the Saturn V to be "inspirational" and to separate it visually from Ares V. In reality, the main tank will probably use the same orange foam insulation as the Shuttle/Ares V main tank, because it uses the same propellant and is based on the same tanking technology.

Or use ORDA for docking.

*sigh* Yes, that's his dream. However, he can't pay for that by himself. SpaceX is a launch provider. They will develop hardware to go to Mars if NASA (or someone else) pays for the ticket. MarsOne doesn't even have the money to pay for a single LEO Falcon 9 launch, let alone dozens of Falcon Heavies, DragonRiders, and all the stuff that has to be built and put on board those rockets. Red Dragon is just a 3 page paper study, presented as a cheap alternative to delivering 1 ton of cheap experiments to the Martian surface using off the shelf parts. It certainly isn't a study for a one-way long duration manned flight. There is no funding for Red Dragon, and because NASA was not interested, there are no customers. Falcon Heavy will fly, but it is having trouble finding customers. Most launch providers have heavy variants of their launchers in their catalog, but the commercial market for large payloads simply doesn't exist.

No. Elon Musk has a dream, but he is primarily a businessman. In the end, SpaceX is a launch service provider. They launch stuff for insititutions and corporations who pay for it. SpaceX is not space program. They are not going to fund their own exploration missions. You can argue that any technical problems can be solved of you inject enough money into them. However, there is no money to be made in space exploration. The infrastructure does not exist. Falcon Heavy and Red Dragon are powerpoint concepts at this stage. There are many problems, while not unsolvable technically (sure, you could always ship billions of tons of lead to Mars to act as shielding) are unsolvable economically. We simply don't have the infrastructure to support permanent life. Closed loop life support and ISRU, even on Earth, have yet to be demonstrated, let alone developed into critical vital hardware (and no, the ISS is not a closed loop). We have the theory, but there is a huge gap between the theory and designing and building robust equipment that humans rely on with their life. Having the theory is not having the technological. The technological capability comes from having the hardware designed, built, and tested. And I won't even mention the ethical issue of stranding a dozen human beings with no hope of return and watching them die slowly as TV ratings decrease and the program runs out of money for the resupply missions... Oh, and I doubt that the type of people that would make an interesting cast for a reality TV show are the type of people you would want to send on a mission to Mars. As for starting a colony, the whole idea is stupid. We don't even know if humans can reproduce safely in the radiation and low gravity environment of Mars, and even if they could, there would not be enough genetic variety and you would eventually run into congeniality problems. You would need to send several hundred people to Mars to make a colony sustainable, which is something not feasible with current launch technology.

Yes it's just media hype. There are so many things wrong with the idea that nobody in the space industry is taking it seriously.

The main advantage of the ATV-based service module is that some of the cost is paid for by ESA in exchange for seats on Orion for European astronauts. The secondary advantage of getting international partners is to make it harder for Congress to cancel the program. The agreement covers the joint development of the service module design, and delivery of two service modules for the only two Orion missions that are currently planned, EM-1 in 2017 and EM-2 in 2021. NASA currently has no funding for further missions, and is still trying to figure out what they are going to do with SLS after those two flights. Future service modules might be mission-specific, or they might be based on the ATV design but built in the US. The difference is a bit like between an urban minivan and a land rover. They are different vehicles designed for different purposes. The CCDev vehicles (Dream Chaser, Dragon, or CST-100) are designed to act as cheap LEO taxis, to deliver crew and supplies to the ISS. Orion is a deep-space exploration vehicle designed for a harsher environment and different mission requirements. Dream Chaser isn't made for long duration flights, it cannot withstand high-speed reentry, it has less shielding against radiation, and it cannot be depressurized for EVA like Orion. Also, it's silly to bring a winged vehicle into deep space. The wings and landing gear are just a waste of payload mass and the TPS is much more exposed and fragile. A capsule is much better suited to the job.

You won't see any of the monoliths twinkle, they are too small to be seen from orbit.

Radars on the ground measure altitude and speed. That's enough to extrapolate the orbital parameters. Spacecraft also use star trackers to figure out their position, similar to the way you would use a sextant.

You guys are aware that we are in the middle of summer and R4m0n might just be on a well-deserved vacation... You might want to wait until september before declaring MJ abandoned.

What is your point?

Yes, they train them in a dedicated underwater astronaut training facility, not on a nuclear sub. Totally different environments.

A submarine is also always less than a week or two from a friendly base at all times. It can be reached by support ship or aircraft at any time. They can surface, bail out, and be rescued if necessary. There are also physiological factors, like the lack of microgravity and the quality of food (you can afford a proper galley and larger shorter-life food supplies on a submarine, whereas space crew will have to eat zero-g rations with a long shelf-life). And as already stated, the psychological pressure between a crew of 150 and a crew of 6 is totally different. No, there really isn't much in common between a submarine and a spacecraft.

The problem with Windows 8 is that it is a schizophrenic OS. Having the desktop on one hand and the Metro UI on the other is like having two different operating systems that work in very different ways using very different graphical cues and functional pradigms. Every time you switch from one to the other, you have to mentally switch from one OS to another, it's like switching incessantly from a Mac desktop to an Android smartphone, or from one language to another, or switching from a driving a car to riding a bike. Although most computer-savvy folks can figure it out, it remains distracting and takes your mind off of what you were trying to do (the function) to force you to think about how you are going to do it (the form). In the long run, the lack of consistency and the fact that a lot of it is driven by hidden gestures is just time consuming and mentally exhausting. For example, on the desktop, moving the mouse wheel up and down typically scrolls the document you are working on up and down. In Metro, scrolling up and down scrolls left and right, which is confusing, illogical and breaks everything you've learned since you have been using computers. On a tablet, it's not so bad, because that's what it was designed to run on, and you can ignore the desktop in most cases. Tablets are designed for consuming information somewhat passively. However, at work or at home, people use their computers for creating and entering information and actively. They are typically more concentrated on the content that they are working and don't want to bother about figuring out hidden gestures just to print or save their work. The IT industry is still dominated by non-touchscreen desktops or laptops. One of the reasons Windows 8 is a flop is because corporations have no interest in replacing their current office PCs with touch-enabled devices. For professionals who work all day on Excel, Word, SAP, or any other professional software, leaving the keyboard/mouse to raise your hand up to the screen just for the Start menu is disruptive, tiring, and just slows you down. On the other hand, it's probably the fastest and most stable version of Windows. There are some good things in it. I find it usable only with something like Classic Shell, which allows you to completely bypass the Metro UI and get a proper Start button and a highly configurable Start menu replacement.

You're not getting it. Solid rockets use a chemical compound mixture of fuel and oxydizer, like gunpowder. You can't cut off the oxydizer because it is mixed into the propellant. The method used to terminate thrust on an SRB is to rip open the casing with an explosive cord that runs up the side of the booster. This effectively blows it up by rapidly burning all of the propellant at once outwards instead of letting it burn slowly through the nozzle. Shutting the nozzle would terminate thrust, but wouldn't stop the combustion, so the SRB would explode uncontrollably under pressure.

Simply "attaching a capsule to a spare booster that is lying around" is called "integration" and typically takes months. Rockets are not legos. The STS program had a procedure similar to what you are describing, which was called Launch On Need (LON or STS-300 and STS-400 missions) which became a requirement after Columbia. The STS-300 missions were rescue missions for Shuttle missions that went to the ISS where the crew could wait for 80 days for the STS-300 mission to be launched. The STS-400 mission was only implemented for the final Hubble repair mission, STS-125, where the ISS could not be used as a safe haven and the rescue mission would have to be launched under less than a week (the Shuttle could only survive on orbit for 20 days). These plans put a lot of pressure on the ground and flight crews, which obviously translates into extra cost. Also, any delays in the STS-400 preparation would have delayed (or maybe cancelled) STS-125. And there was always the risk that a problem that occured on STS-125 might also occur on the STS-400 rescue mission, in which case they would have lost 2 orbiters and 2 crews, because the timeframes for the rescue mission would not allow any proper root cause analysis or corrective measures. All of this can be prevented if you properly design your spacecraft to not have the fundamental flaws that the Shuttle had, and if redundant systems are already in place. Orion will not need LON missions because it has different failure modes and contingency plans.

That has a huge cost, because it requires two vehicles to be processed in parallel, which means that you need structures twice as large, and twice the amount of manpower. The requirement for supporting two vehicles in orbit means that you need two mission control centers, double communication channels, etc... It also doubles the risk of delays and the failure rates. You can't launch if your backup vehicle has a faulty valve for example. This also doesn't help you if you find a fault in the first vehicle that is also in the backup vehicle. Full redundancy by using an identical backup vehicle is not usually considered a good option. It's much better to design redundant systems and backups into your main vehicle, where there is always a secondary system that can be used if the primary system fails or primary systems that can be used as a backup for another primary system in contingency modes. For example, if the hatch of the Apollo CM jammed, there was always the option of transferring to the LM by EVA through the side hatch, or the way Orion can be used as airlock when docked to a DSH or space station if the main airlock is unusable for some reason. When redundancy isn't possible, instead of designing adding safety features into the design it is sometimes preferable to make the design as simple as possible to minimize the number of components that can fail.

I remember reading that an uncontrolled ballistic trajectory would make the first stage impact between 200 and 300 km downrange. I assume that the first flights of a modified F9 expendable first stage will be about trying to restart the central Merlin engine and attempting a soft splashdown in that area. Once they get that figured out, they will start doing tests involving navigation and pinpoint splashdown before going for a full RTLS landing.