Nibb31

If we had unlimited funding, we might have a colony on Mars by now. But we can't really say, because it would be a whole different world. Your "what if" assumes that there was unlimited funding and continued support for space. There would be no Vietnam War and no economical crisis, which would have been unlikely. I don't think it would have been possible to sustain a space race over 40 years. One of the reasons the USSR collapsed was because the spending simply wasn't sustainable.

You won't be having a video chat with anybody on Mars. There is a 15 minute round trip for the radio waves to go back and forth. The cave idea is cool, but you would need some kind of custom built inflatable habitat that you could inflate inside the cave to make sure it's sealed. It would be hard to make something like that on Mars, so you would need to recon the caves, build the sealing/habitat equipment on Earth, and then send it Mars. It would take several years. I think the first thing humans should be doing on Mars is ISRU and closed loop life support experiments, biology experiments. Basic stuff, that we should have done on the Moon first really...

On the other hand, if you are flying 27 engines but you could succeed the mission with only 24, then you are have 3 engines on your rocket that are dead weight. In the case of the SpaceX Merlin, that's 2 extra tons of payload that you could be carrying instead. If you have 2% failure rate on a single engined rocket, then you have 1 mission failure every 50 flights. If you have the same failure rate on a rocket with 27 engines, then you can expect at least one engine failure (which might mean degraded performance or loss of a secondary payload) every 4 flights. It was a long time since I did any probability calculations, but you can also extrapolate that the figures for a double or triple engine failure (in which case you might lose the mission) are not negligeable.

Constellation Duna Base

Did you take a screenshot ? In the absence of any other evidence, then I think it's just a glitch.

Parachutes are actually heavy beasts. They can also be complex and are prone to mishaps. A parachute large enough to slow down a Falcon 9 first stage could easily weigh more than the extra fuel needed to brake from terminal velocity to zero. As for a downrange landing site, the only possibility would be to launch from Texas and to land on a refurbished oil rig somewhere in the Gulf of Mexico, refuel and self-fly the stage back to Texas. That might be feasible, but I think Elon's plan is to return to the launch site for a quick turn around.

Powerpoints are easy. I will be impressed when it flies. ULA also have Powerpoint versions of ultra heavy evolutions of Atlas and Delta, just in case the need ever arises for large payloads. That doesn't mean they will ever be built. However, SpaceX has all the hardware already. They should be able to build it if they ever get a launch contract. And that is the crux of the matter. SpaceX is a launch provider, not a space program. They launch stuff that other people pay for, and there is currently nothing for this to launch. Commercial comsats are usually based on standard satellite busses, which are sized for current comsat launchers. Commercial operators are not interested in building larger comsats, especially as the need for GTO comsats is probably going to decrease in the near future as satellite TV is being replaced by broadband TV and 4G. Also, larger birds cost more if they fail. So I don't see them ever wanting a >30t comsat in GTO. Government organisations will not design any payloads specifically for F9H until it has a proven flight record and they would need a backup plan. If for some reason the F9H program was to be cancelled, they would have an expensive 50t bird and no launcher to send it up with. And no, SpaceX is not going to Mars unless someone pays them to. NASA certainly has no plans for that, and I don't see any other credible plans for that.

My Kerbal testing for returning a first stage launcher to the launch site needed something around 10 or 20% of the first stage propellant. Of course, that is meaningless, because mass fractions, distances, fuel density, launch profiles, ISP, consumption, etc... are all messed up in KSP, so real life figures would be totally different. In real-life, there is a heavy penalty for reusing the first stage, due to: - Extra mass for reinforcing the tank - Extra mass for the landing gear - Extra mass for the return trajectory and landing fuel - A suboptimal launch trajectory If you are recovering your first stage, you don't want an early gravity turn, because any horizontal speed will have to be reversed if you want to return to your launch site. You want a launch profile that remains as vertical as possible until the first stage runs out, so that it can come as straight down as possible, and let the second stage handle most of the horizontal speed. Of course, anyone who has played KSP knows that this is wasteful, and reduces your payload. It also means that you need a beefier second stage, which also eats into the payload mass. So yes, a reusable Falcon 9R will have a massively reduced payload. I believe they are aiming for 7 tons to LEO instead of 11 tons. This puts the F9R in the same class as Soyuz or Ariane 6, whereas the non-reusable F9 1.1 is in the same class as Ariane 5, Delta IV or Atlas V. The plan is that the savings of reusing the first stage instead of building a new one allows for a lower price per pound to orbit. The jury is out on whether they can manage to be cheaper than Ariane 6 or Soyuz. On the other hand, it can be argued that the best way to reduce hardware costs is mass production of cheap elements. That is the approach of Ariane 6: cheap mass produced SRBs as a first and second stage. While the Merlin engines are cheap and simple, reusability gets in the way of mass production by reducing the production rate and adding complexity to the elements (landing gear, avionics, weight, etc...). There is also the cost of refurbishing and testing, which is still unknown. SpaceX seems to have done the math and figured that it works. We'll see. At least they are trying something new. But lets not forget that this isn't a holy grail, as Kryten posted this in another thread: So the best we can hope for, even if SpaceX manages to cut the cost of a Falcon 9 launch by 50% (which I doubt) is a 10% savings for the average space project. And of course, we all know that the airplane analogy (you don't throw away your airplane after each flight) doesn't apply to rockets. Airplanes do not have the same mass fraction, jet engines are vastly more expensive than rocket engines, they are not subjected to the same forces during flight, their purpose is to go from the ground to another point on the ground, and they usually arrive at their destination in one piece. There is no point in comparing rockets to airplanes. The sheer energy involved in accelerating a payload from 0 km/h to 25000 km/h will always be significant, therefore Space flight will always be expensive. I don't think that kind of energy will ever be routinely available for cheap.

Musk jumpstarted SpaceX with his own personal money, in the hope that he could get the COTS contract. He could never have funded Falcon 9 on his own, and without Falcon 9, the company would not be viable. The market for small LEO payloads is simply not large enough for the Falcon 1 to have been sustainable. I'm not really sure what you think the British government is actively encouraging. Space as a solely commercial activity is simply not viable. They should be actively funding ESA instead of paying lip service to 4 blokes in a shed, hoping that they miraculously invent a viable commercial SSTO.

There is waste in the single-nation projects and in the private sector too. Trust me, I've seen a lot of waste in large private corporations... I certainly agree with you here... There should be no discrimination as long as you are from a UE member state. Other than for the sake of capitalistic dogma, I don't see why not. Whether shareholders are corporations, banks, private individuals, or state institutions, it doesn't make much difference. For governments, it's a political lever as well as an investment. Sectors such as this could not exist without government funding, so if the alternative is to have no space industry in Europe at all, then I'd rather have pragmatism than dogma ! SpaceX has been massively subsidized by NASA, and it uses the technology developed with those subsidies to offer commercial launches. SpaceX is no different from the others, it only exists thanks to US taxpayers.

Those are a problem with KSP, it can only save one animation state per part. The solution is to disable one of the animations in the cfg file.

Ariane 4 was retired 10 years ago. Not sure what you're trying to say here. The point of Ariane 6 is to reduce launch costs by making a simpler rocket. Mass produced solids are cheaper than liquid engines. As a European, I don't think that money is wasted. If that's the cost of maintaining an aerospace industry, developing technology that trickles down into all the economy, then so be it. There's nothing wrong with subsidizing. The money creates jobs for people who pay taxes and buy stuff, which keeps the economy running. And it definitely beats the *hundreds* of billions of US taxpayer money that subisidizes Boeing, Lockheed Martin, ATK Thiokol and others through military contracts. So is ULA, a joint-venture of Boeing and LM, which are both largely subsidized by US government contracts. EELV development was funded by the USAF and now are the basis of ULA's commercial offering. Falcon is largely subsidized by NASA and will also allow SpaceX to offer commercial launches. Arianespace is legally a private company, but its major shareholders are government institutions, or corporations that are also controlled by government institutions. Government funding is pretty much the only way to develop space hardware, because there simply isn't a commercial market large enough. If you want your country to keep a technologically sector that is not self-sustaining, it makes sense to subsidize research and development.

The drawback is that Ariane 6 closes the door to manned flight and ATV derivatives. It's unfortunate that ESA is not interested in acquiring domestic manned flight capability, but that ship sailed years ago. On the other hand, Ariane 5 can remain in limited production if any large institutional payloads do emerge, because many of its components are shared with A6 and because A6 is getting new launch facilities, the A5 facilities can be preserved. The great thing about the Ariane 6 design, is that all 4 SRBs are identical. If 1 A6 flight replaces 2 A5 flights, that means that they will be producing over 40 P135 boosters every year, plus the P80 boosters for Vega and any additional A5 EAP boosters (and the M51 ICBMs). All these solid boosters share a common diameter (except the M51), common propellant, and probably many other parts. In the real world, mass production brings down cost much more that reusability does, so this will be a very competitive GSO launcher.

What you are describing is similar to the Space Elevator concept. You basically want a tower that reaches up to geostationary orbit. This is not possible on the Mun, because the altitude of a geostationary orbit is beyond the Mun's SOI. On Kerbin, it would need to be 2868km tall, which poses quite a challenge, as anything larger than 2.5km cannot be rendered by the graphics engine. On Earth, it would need to be 36000km tall, which poses all sorts of structural problems. I suggest reading up on the Space Elevator idea.

That definition fits just about every single rocket on the market. Replace France and Germany with Texas and Florida, and you have a neat description of the SLS program. Except for the "no use" part. It caters to the commercial launch market much better than its predecessor. Ariane V, which was originally designed to launch the Hermes shuttle, is over-engineered for what today's market actually needs.

1st and 2nd stage actually. I don't think there is any precedent.

Wow, so it'll be nearly all SRBs... I hope they don't have the same issues NASA had with Ares I. At least it should be cheap.

Make sure you are using gimballed engines. You shouldn't be wasting RCS on launch.

Do all your approach without RCS. You should only need RCS for the final docking approach, when you are under 500m from the target. Also, don't go too fast. Going slow and taking your time saves propellant. If you are trying to dock a large multi-stage vehicle, then you are doing it wrong. You should learn the ropes with two dedicated 'Gemini-style' spacecraft, small with lots of monopropellant. If one runs out of propellant, switch to the other one. Do this a couple of times until you've learned the basics. Then you can go for your refueling station or whatever you are trying to do.

Phonesats are variants of cubesats, based on an off-the-shelf smartphone, which already has a lot of hardware that is useful for a satellite bus (GPS, a camera, gyroscopes, sensors, etc...). You can build one for a few thousand dollars. The biggest difficulty for launching a cubesat is finding a slot on a commercial launch. Although they are considered as secondary (or even tertiary) payloads, it will still cost you over $50K to get it to LEO. I suppose that's still affordable for a private individual, if you have the motivation to do it. Now, to get to Mars would require some sort of propulsion. I don't think there are any interplanetary grade upper stages that are sized for a cubesat, and there is usually no extra space to piggyback on institutional exploration missions. If you really want to land a cubesat on Mars, your only option would be to make some sort of tiny propulsion system and reentry/landing gear (probably some sort of inflatable heatshield coupled with an airbag). Those would be very advanced one-off prototypes, so expect a price tag in the range of several million dollars. I suspect that it might not be possible to fit all that stuff inside a 3U cubesat. I reallyt don't think it's possible to make a Mars probe in the Cubesat form factor. Actually, the defining factor for your package size would probably be the antenna, the radio transmitter and the power source, which would have to be pretty large if you want to get any information back from Mars. You will probably need at least a few hundred kilos and millions of dollars to spare.

It depends on your entry velocity. Other than making some complicated calculations, the best option is probably to try several altitudes and see how it works out. On my last mission, I found that a planned periapsis of 11km was to deep and I crashed. 15 was too shallow and I didn't bleed off enough speed. After some trial and error, I settled with 12km.

Using the Moon as a launchpad might not be a good idea: 1) A Moon base would have to be on the poles, because it is the only place with semi-permanent sunlight (for solar power) and it also has more water. This would make for an awkward location for BEO flights. 2) If you are heading for BEO, it doesn't make much sense to land on the Moon first. Although the gravity well is smaller than the Earth, it's still wasteful to launch from. 3) An Exploration Gateway station at EML-2 makes more sense as a refueling point for BEO missions. You could resupply it from the Moon Polar Base if you managed to achieve ISRU.

Inclination changes require that you rotate you ship during the burn. As your inclination changes, so does the normal/antinormal axis, so you need to rotate your ship accordingly, or do it in several burns. The easiest way is to use MechJeb and use the Smart ASS to keep your ship pointed Normal/Antinormal during the burn. And yes, inclination changes are expensive in terms of fuel. It is best to minimize them. They are cheaper when done at a high altitude (because you are going slower), so it is usually best to do them when you are entering the SOI of a planet, or even to raise your altitude, change your inclination, and come down again.

What kind of "finite resources" are we running out of on Earth that would be needed in space? It will still be many years before it is cheaper to launch a space mining and processing facility than to extract those resources on Earth and send them up as we need them. Even if we had a mission requirement of 1000 tons of water in space (which we don't), it would still be cheaper to launch 50 Falcon 9s than to design, build, and maintain a mining facility on an asteroid. We currently don't have the technology to do it, and some of the problems are simply unsolvable (for example, landing on an asteroid that is tumbling on multiple axes, which most of them do). We are not going to be a "spacefaring civilization" (whatever that means) any time in our lifetime, so there is no point in aiming for science fiction. We should focus on goals that are achievable with current technology and budget constraints.

Which has been true for just about every political entity throughout human history. Nothing special here. I don't think the decline of the US is anything to be particularly worried about. Nothing lasts forever, and America isn't a special snowflake. The influence of America's power over the World since the end of WWII hasn't been particularly nice and rosy for most of Humanity. Nature hates emptiness, so when the US loses its influence, something else will take its place. It's no big deal.