Nibb31

X-37 has nothing to do with the STS and it's not a probe.

Because to remove it's most blatant flaws would mean to redesign a whole new vehicle. Which is what they are doing with Orion and SLS. Today's requirements are completely different from NASA's requirements from the 1970's. The Shuttle has taught us that most of its capabilities were not really useful. The Shuttle's only unique capability was to bring back large payloads, but it was only demonstrated once because there was no real use for that capability. All of its other missions could be performed cheaper nowadays with other spacecraft. What??? All three Orbiters have been transferred to museums now and the infrastructure to fly them has been dismantled or is being reconverted. The Shuttles are dead.

Wow! So many things are wrong with your proposition: - First of all, lunar orbits are typically unstable. You can't stay there for a long time without constant reboosting. It's a really bad place for a space station. - Why do you need a substantial fraction of G when you have gravity on the surface. If this is a gateway station, you won't be staying there for long. - How to you build a torus shaped station? It would require a massive amount of launches and many years of EVA construction for no real purpose. - If you want to build a ground infrastructure on the Moon, there is no use for an orbital station above the Moon. If the objective is establishing a human presence on the Moon, the first step is to start building a semi-permanent polar base for long duration scientific research. There is water on the poles, but not much sunlight, so the base has to be nuclear powered. The purpose of the facility would be to perform research on low-g biology, ISRU technology, robotic construction, interplanetary logistics, as well as to be a base for robotic exploration. These are all capabilities that we need to demonstrate before going to Mars, and it's much easier to test them out in our backyard before going interplanetary.

Musk is a businessman with a dream, but he is still a businessman. SpaceX would not be sustainable without government money. SpaceX is not going anywhere unless somebody pays them to.

The principle is the same as for a rendez-vous really. Only you are blind. You would need to calculate the delta-v of your missile (assuming it's some kind of SRB) and put your ship in an orbit and an orientation where the extra delta-v will make your rocket rendez-vous the target. I would actually make it more of a drone. Separate the missile, switch focus, calculate a rendez-vous trajectory with a manoeuver node, and burn towards it. Instead of matching target velocity and docking, just correct your trajectory so that the predicted approach distance is zero and ram the target. Also, you have to imply that your target is actually cooperating and wants to be hit. Firing a missile on orbit might take several minutes to reach the target, which is plenty of time to perform an evasive manoeuver. Simply firing its RCS thrusters will put the target several kilometers out of range of your missile by the time you get there. Space-space missiles make no sense for this reason: It's effectively impossible to rendez-vous with a target that is actively trying to avoid the rendez-vous.

SpaceX is a government contractor. NASA is both their main investor and customer. They only exist because they are funded by NASA. Take away NASA, and there is no more private space sector.

One of NASA's problems is that it makes too many videos and powerpoints and not enough metal.

Anyone who is fiercely pro or anti anything is going to get stuck in their dogma. Ideally, you will want a mix of power sources, so as to not rely on a single source. If your country is 100% nuclear and the price of uranium goes up, then you're screwed. If everyone went 100% uranium, this would certainly happen and the World reserves of uranium might not actually be able to meet the demand. Dogma is what made France switch to almost 80% nuclear power (nowadays it's closer to 60% I believe, the rest of it is mainly hydro and a tiny proportion of wind and solar). France has 19 nuclear plants and 58 reactors. Many of its nuclear power plants are reaching their end of life and the bill for dismantling them is approximately $1 billion for each plant. This cost was never factored into the total ownership cost of nuclear power policies. Now, add the price of rising costs of Uranium, the dubious supply routes for uranium, the political compromises of bribing and supporting dictatorships in Africa, and the storage costs for the spent fuel... Nuclear power would never had been worth it. Nuclear energy has advantages and drawbacks. The advantages are that it's reliable, continuous, and generally clean energy. The drawbacks are that it's extremely expensive, makes us rely on uranium, and the spent fuel is accumulating and we don't really know what to do with it. And when a freak accident does happen, the cleanup cost is tremendous. The cleanup cost for Fukushima is estimated at $250 billion, which pretty much negates any cost advantage that nuclear power might have had versus other power sources. Renewable energy sources are cheaper, but they have other drawbacks. The main one is that they are unreliable because they are cyclic (hydro is seasonal, solar doesn't work at night, and wind... er... depends on wind). These cycles don't necessarily match the power demand cycles (which are also day/night and seasonal), so you have to maintain an auxiliary source for when they are not producing. The problem is that you have to maintain enough auxiliary power sources to cover the maximum demand when the renewables are at a minimum power output. This means that you have a power production capacity that exceeds your demand, which is a waste of money. Because nuclear is expensive and can't really be powered down, it's not great as an auxiliary power source either. Gas or oil are better suited for auxiliary power, but they are dirty, and you rely on oil or gas. So these are complicated issues and fiercely "pro" and "anti" stances are paralyzing the debate by making most information sources untrustworthy and biased. Other energy sources have their own advantages and drawbacks. We should be using renewable energy wherever we can and only resort to nuclear power for peak

The NASA Administrator really doesn't have much power. It's Congress that controls NASA by deciding which programs can be funded or not. When you look at the scientific background of most members of the US Congress, who are more interested in banning Evolution from Biology classes, taking bribes from from corporations and giving free guns away in raffles, it's easy to understand why NASA is in such a mess. NASA has become a jobs program. Members of Congress don't vote on whether a NASA project brings value to the nation, they vote on whether their particular district is going to get any of the jobs and money related to it. NASA's budget is discussed every year, and gets cut every year, so it's impossible to plan ahead. What NASA needs is a clear mission statement with a tangible objective. It also needs to be cut lose from Congress and become a scientifically-driven organization instead of a politically-driven one. It needs to have a garanteed budget over 10 years, in order to achieve a specific mission. Once those goals are set, then they need to stick to them, and a change of Administration should have no effect.

You're either trolling or overreacting.

We produce 20000 tons of nuclear waste every year. If you wanted to lob that into solar orbit, you would need hundreds of SLS launches per year, or a thousand Falcon 9 Heavy launches (3 launches per day). Even if you could reduce the cost through mass production and reusability, it would still cost billions. And even with an unrealistically optimistic failure rate of 1%, you would still have at least 10 major disasters every year.

You aren't playing with the demo, right?

Why not launch with a second orbiter on the opposite side of the rocket?

Spaceflight has always involved a lot waiting around. These guys don't have timewarp

Yes, and don't forget that EVA is a pretty physical task. It's hard to move in those suits, the thermal conditions are pretty extreme, and these guys have to remain concentrated for 8 or 10 hours because a single screwup can kill them or their partner. Tough job, tough guys.

1) He-3 will be of no interest for us for the next 40 years. When we finally do have fusion power, there are easier fuels to get to than to mine He-3 on the Moon. There is not a lot of it on the Moon either, you need to mine 150.000 tons of regolith to get 1 ton of He-3. As for the other elements, we have them in more abundance on Earth than on the Moon. 2) The comparison between colonization of space and the mythology of the American Frontier is typically a strong element for Americans. Although I understand that it is a strong part of your History, it is not a universally shared concept and there is no point in applying the same romanticism to space. As I said earlier, when colonists left Europe for the Americas, they were dreaming of a better life. They knew that they would be able to live off the land, gather the wealth, and trade it back to the homeland. The first colonists screwed up, mainly because they were ignorant, but at least they had a dream and there was an actual potential. There is no better life awaiting anyone on the Moon. The Moon is a barren rock with no special resources waiting for you. You won't be offering a more comfortable or a safer life to your family by moving there. Besides, if you really want to compare with History, colonization didn't really end very well for most of the leading powers of the time. They spent huge efforts to build those colonies only to lose them to independantists years later. The experience shouldn't really act as an incentive for any political powers to found an autonomous colony on the Moon. The only thing we can currently do on the Moon is to explore and study it. We have a lot to learn, and we might just unlock something special that will spike more interest in the Moon. So yes, let's build a scientific outpost. It can start as a semi-permanent base like Byrd Station in Antarctica and evolve into something more permanent like the Amundsen–Scott South Pole Station. A permanent colony on the other hand is silly and pointless at this stage. Everything we do, we do at least one of three things. To increase our wealth, to increase our safety, or to increase our comfort. These are the basic motivations that have been pushing Humanity since we were hunter-gatherers. We will always push our boundaries to explore, but that exploration is also based on the hope of finding ways to increase wealth, safety, or comfort. Venture capitalists are first and foremost capitalists. They will take risks if there is a potential for profit somewhere down the line. So yes, you will need a potential business plan to attract venture capitalists, so cost effectiveness is a mandatory part of the equation.

The backup for Humanity argument doesn't make sense. There is no single event that could totally wipe out 8 billions of individuals in one go. Even the most catastrophic event would likely leave at least a few million survivors. We could dig ourselves underground and live in caves for hundreds of years, it would still be easier and more pleasant than sending a thousands of people to live on a sterile planet where you can't survive without a space suit. As for capturing the imagination, I'm afraid that is a bit weak as a business model for spending hundreds of billions of dollars on a space program when most people on Earth lack basic healthcare and education. It might be your own personal dream, but I don't think there is even a small minority of the 8 billion people on Earth who agree with it.

Same here, I couldn't get aerodynamic rockets to work with MechJeb, even after tinkering with the flight profile curve. I suspect that there is an incompatibility between MJ assumptions and the new aerodynamic model.

Don't compare the colonization of the Americas with the colonization of space. They are radically different things. First of all, it was obvious from the start that there was wealth and trade opportunities. Secondly, you could actually survive there without supplies and live off the land. Third, people went there because there was a promise of a better life. None of these work with the Moon. It would make way more sense to colonize Antarctica, the Sahara, or the Mariana Trench? These places are easier to get too and are actually less hostile than the Moon or Mars.

The fastest one to put on the pad is the one that is the closest to launch. As it happens, the final ATV flight is scheduled for 5 June 2012, which is in only a couple of weeks. However it might be postponed, because the last Progress is suspected to have damaged the Kurs docking equipment. Not that there is any emergency. There are currently at least 3 spare ammoniac pump units on the station.

Radioactivity doesn't disappear overnight. Some particles have a half life of a few days, others take years to disintegrate. Those particles fall to the ground and are absorbed by the soil, the water, the plants, the animals. The particles in the water evaporate with the water and end up airborne again. Absorption doesn't mean that the radioactivity disappears, it means that the particles are still there, but in the plants or living organisms. You don't want to live near a puddle of radioactive water or near a woods that has radioactive trees. Dead leaves on the ground, mud, crud in roof gutters... these are all places where radioactivity can concentrate. This is why there are exclusion zones. It's pretty easy to remove a layer of soil if you do it in the early stages, but when there are hundreds of square kilometres to clean up, it can be a long process and the longer you take, the more those particles get assimilated by living organisms. People in Tokyo have analysed air filters from cars or a/c units and found high rates of radioactive particles in them. If it's in air filters, it's also in peoples lungs. Once these particles gets into your lungs or your intestins, you are going to live with a small source of gamma radiation in your body for the rest of your life.

Do we really need to beat the same dead horses every week? I realize that there are new KSP players coming on board all the time, but in my days (yeah, I'm showing my age), I was always taught to read forums for a while before posting. It allows you to get a feel for the place and to see that some topics have already been over-discussed to death.

Evidently you don't. No you didn't. You demonstrated the opposite by linking to a page that shows that NASA's budget has been declining since the 60's and that listed the cost of the Apollo program in perspective. $136 billion dollars (equivalent 2007) compared to a current global budget (for all areas of NASA activity) of $16 billion dollars (equivalent 2007). This explains NASA difficulties with SLS/Orion. They managed the Apollo program because there was an unlimited budget and a specific goal. After 1974, there was no longer an unlimited budget. Nobody threw anything in the garbage bin. Hardware production was stopped because it could not be sustained. That production could not be restarted because a lot of the tooling and infrastructure was converted for the STS program. A lot of knowledge gained during Apollo was reused in STS. Expanding their knowledge is exactly what they did by refocusing on long duration flight, life and construction in LEO instead of rehashing Moon landings that had already been done. I clarified in my previous post, and asked you a question.

They'd probably just clip if you were looking at them from the map. If you happened to be in orbit in the area, weird things would probably happen, most likely ending in the game crashing.

Didn't we already have this thread in the Science Labs forum?