Nibb31

I don't know, but I think it depends on the nature of the failures. I know that there are some situations, like the risk of an MMOD collision, where the procedure is for the crew to sit it out in the Soyuz just in case.

Dammit, you don't read, do you? Because there was no money and no interest. During the 70s, 80s and 90s, Apollo was "been there done that". 1974 was the first oil crisis and the end of the Glorious Thirty. Nixon cancelled Apollo and drastically cut NASA's budget, because Americans were no longer supportive of it. The next big thing was providing cheap access to space and learning how to live routinely and build stuff in LEO, because that was seen as the key to unlocking affordable deep space capabilities. Plus, that's what the Russians were doing too, and the US couldn't afford to let them rule alone in LEO. Meanwhile, the STS ended up pumping up all the manned spaceflight budget, so there was no budget for anythin else. In the 80's, there wasn't even enough money to build Space Station Freedom until NASA got international partners involved. Changing course by scrapping STS and the Space Station to return to the Moon, while the Soviets were making huge progress in LEO, would have been a silly thing to do at the time. Did you even read my post? Some technology advances have made some areas cheaper than they used to be. But that has been offset by the increased expense and complexity of modern engineering projects. The World is a different place. How do you explain that it took 2 years to develop Gemini and it has taken 15 years to develop Orion?

Yes, I know about NASA's budget. Notice how it used to be over 4% of the federal budget during Apollo, and now it is under 0.5%. $18 billion is chump change. You could probably go to the Moon with it, but you couldn't fund a permanent outpost and you would have to scrap the unmanned exploration programs, the aerospace research programs, the earth observation programs... And it would take 10 to 20 years to design and build the infrastructure. That is just for Apollo flags and footprints, not for a Moon colony or even a small semi-permanent outpost. The designs and research for Apollo were done in the 60's. You couldn't rebuild a Saturn V in 2013 the same way you did in 1969, so you would need to redesign practically everything, which is pretty much what they are doing with SLS. Why didn't they do it before? Because their budget was tied up with the STS and the ISS. As I said, technology might make things easier, but the progress was made mostly in the computer techology area. The laws of physics haven't changed, and now we have much heavier quality, environmental and safety standards and procedures, more economical pressure, more in-depth studies, approval boards, certification committees... Large engineering projects take longer now than they did in the 60's.

There are small quantities of He-3 on the Moon, but not in such huge concentrations that a mining colony would be worthwhile. You would need to process 150 000 tons of regolith to get 1 ton of He-3. Besides, He-3 fusion is still pretty much a pipe dream. There are cheaper ways of producing fusion power.

Between 1974 and now, when exactly was the point when NASA had "enormous amounts of money"? They were all tied up with the Shuttle and trying to get a Space Station so that the Shuttle had a place to actually go to. It's not because of the Van Allen belts that nobody went higher than 700km. It's because there was no manned spacecraft capable of going higher, and no money to design one. And also because there was more interest in doing new stuff than in doing stuff that had already been done. And you assume wrong about technology making things easier. We have become extremely risk averse. A human life is much more valuable now than it was in the post-war era. We test and validate more than we used to, we spend more time setting up commissions, validating numbers, getting approvals and certifications. And there is a lot less money. It took Boeing 2 years to develop the 747 and 10 years to develop the 787. This isn't because Boeing engineers suck or because flight is harder, it's because there is a whole lot more process overhead, economical pressure, and red tape nowadays than there used to be.

This poll is badly worded and bady placed. It's not a general discussion about KSP, so it should be in the Off Topic forums. First of all, NASA's charter doesn't talk about establishing colonies on other worlds. NASA is a research and technology development agency. Its role is to develop new technologies and to make them available to the aerospace industry. A colony makes no sense. There are only two reasons for colonists to want to migrate to another planet: either they are being forced to move there by the political power (ie. Australia) or they move voluntarily to improve their wealth, their confort or their security. Mars or the Moon offer neither wealth, nor comfort, nor security. Also, colonies only make sense if there is an economical incentive for the power who is financing the colonization effort, either though trade or by establishing a political land grab. Only the land grab idea is feasible, but there is no point in a land grab when there are no resources and there is no way to reach the land. The only thing that makes sense is a permanent/semi-permanent scientific outpost, similar to McMurdo base in Antarctica, with crew rotations and regular supply lines. However, this would be immensely expensive.

Apollo had to calculate their trajectory in order to minimize the time spend in the Van Allen belt. Unmanned probes can use low-thrust propulsion methods to get to the Moon, such as SEP, but a manned spacecraft requires a quick transition in order to minimize exposure.

It's been reported several times. It's a bug and no fix yet.

Comic Sans makes everything written in it look like a parish newsletter pinned to a noticeboard outside the local church. It also smacks of faux joviality - you can imagine the CEO of some multinational using it memos to make himself appear approachable.

The G'Gugvuntt were enemies of the Vl'hurgs, and these strange and warlike beings are on the brink of an interstellar war, because of an insult uttered by the G'Gugvuntt leader to the mother of the Vl'hurg leader. Resplendent in their black-jeweled battle shorts, they were meeting for the last time, and a dreadful silence filled the air as the Vl'hurg leader was challenging the G'Gugvuntt leader to retract the insult. At the precise moment, the phrase "I seem to be having tremendous difficulty with my lifestyle" (muttered by Arthur Dent to himself, which for some strange reason was carried by a freak wormhole in space back in time to the farthest regions of the universe where the G'Gugvuntts and the Vl'hurgs lived) filled the air over the conference table, which in the Vl'hurg tongue was the most dreadful insult imaginable. It left them no choice but to declare war on the G'Gugvuntts, which went on for a few thousand years and decimated their entire galaxy. After millennia of battle the surviving G'Gugvuntt and Vl'hurg realised what had actually happened, and joined forces to attack the Milky Way in retaliation. They crossed vast reaches of space in a journey lasting thousands of years before reaching their target where they attacked the first planet they encountered, Earth. Due to a terrible miscalculation of scale the entire battle fleet was swallowed by a small dog. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy states that this sort of thing happens all the time.

That would be expensive. Don't forget that nuclear power is about producing cheap energy. If you add so many safety features that it becomes more expensive than other power production methods, there would be no point. This is the main problem with nuclear power. Operators will tend to skimp on safety because of the economic pressure. It happens in just about every country: nuclear plants are run by subcontractors who employ temporary workers who are poorly qualified. Regulatory bodies have a hard time forcing the operators to comply with safety rules, and operators have a hard time running the plants economically because so often the cost of (safe) nuclear power production was underestimated.

And the same goes for this movie Gravity... A trained astronaut in that situation wouldn't be screaming and panting. They are trained for that sort of situation, so they would probably calmly activate their SAFER and scoot back to the ISS (assuming the ISS hasn't disintegrated).

I don't trust the numbers coming solely from NISA. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiation_effects_from_Fukushima_Daiichi_nuclear_disaster

I wonder what the Shuttle is doing conducting an EVA in proximity of the ISS without being docked, while a Russian is also doing an EVA at the same time.

Indy is getting too old for this ****.

It's not easy to clean up the ocean floor... And you can't say that Chernobyl had the most lasting damage when Fukushima is still spewing tons of contaminated water into the ocean, and will likely continue for many years. Also, the number of people who have been potentially contaminated is much higher for Fukushima, due to the sheer population density in the area. People should really watch the Gunderson video I linked to earlier, because the information comes from a guy who has spent his life working on these things. He is not against nuclear energy, but he is for educating the public about the actual risks and processes involved. Nuclear energy can be safe and clean, but it's expensive to design, build, secure, and dismantle (disposal and dismantling is never factored into the cost of nuclear power, because if it was, it would be way too expensive).

What do you mean "not working with NASA"? The spare pump is already on board the ISS, along with a sufficient supply of replacement coolant. There are quite a lot of systems that can be powered down before reaching the extreme situation of not having enough power for life support. Also, shouldn't this thread be in the Off-Topic > Science Labs forum ? Just about everything that could go wrong went wrong on Mir. They had toxic leaks, fires, collisions, decompressions, power failures... and toilet breakdowns!

I suspect those are clouds over one picture. The reason you see them fade in and out over several years is because the algorithm uses morphing in between two shots. The Aral Sea video is the most scary. That island in the middle was a Soviet bioweapon test range. It used to be isolated in the middle of the sea with restricted access, but is now part of the mainland, where animals can roam freely.

Arnie Gunderson doesn't agree with you. This whole speech is really interesting, but for a comparison of release levels between Chernobyl and Fukushima, you can skip to 28.00: http://www.fairewinds.org/content/fairewinds-speech-new-york-academy-medicine

Only Star Trek (and Defiance) figures that Aliens are pretty much like us, except for weird hair colors and shapes on their forehead.

Economically, Fukushima is most definitely worse because the real estate in Japan nowadays is way more expensive than Ukraine in the 80's. It will have a durable effect on the fishing industry, which is quite big in Japan. A lot of the cleanup work has been reported to be taken up by the Yakusa, which will have some heavy social repercussions. Ecologically, Fukushima is a slow release of radioactive elements, that occurred over several months (and might still be happening...). Chernobyl was a sudden explosion, with most of the radioactive elements released in a single relatively short event. Due to the accumulation effect, on the sheer amount of radioactive particles, I guess that Fukushima is worse. However, Fukushima released most of its pollution into the sea, where the actual effects are hard to measure, whereas the effect of the Chernobyl was measured all over Europe and directly affected populations. Fukushima has probably contaminated a much larger number of people, due to the proximity of Tokyo, which is one of the most populated cities in the World. So all in all, Fukushima is probably worse than Chernobyl.

If you got to within a few meters, then you had pretty much achieved the rendezvous, which means that you must have pretty much aligned the planes already. The next stage is to match your velocity with the velocity of your target. This mechanically puts you in the exact same orbit as the target, because you are flying at the same speed. To match your velocity: 1) Make sure your target is selected in Map view. 2) Make sure the Navball is in Target mode. 3) Point your ship towards the retrograde marker and burn until the relative velocity is zero. From there, switch to the target and switch on the ASAS. Then, switch back to the docking spacecraft, put it into the same orientation as the target, and switch on ASAS. Finally, proceed with the docking using only the RCS translate controls (IJKLHN)

Because it's a multi-role fighter. In a ground strike role, it comes in fast and stealthy and can fire a whole range of weapons (including nukes), and it can fight back and defend itself if attacked. In an interceptor role, it flies high and fast. It also needs to be capable of flying slow to land on short runways, and indeed, carriers. It's a compromised jack of all trades, but the whole point of a standardized multi-role aircraft is to streamline support logistics. This is particularly important for countries who don't want to spend 30% of their budget on military spending like the US does, or when you have limited supply lines like on a deployed aircraft carrier. You only need to stock one type of tyre, one type of spare engine, and so on... Current drones are limited to certain roles. You can only use them when you already have air superiority, because they are a easy targets. They can't break enemy defense lines and they have limited defense capabilities. You still need to gain that air superiority with conventional fighters.

These aren't mods, they are cfg edits, which pretty much anybody can do with a text editor. They don't require any particular skill. If you can't do 3D models, you might want to team up with someone who can, but be warned: anyone who can make 3D models can also do cfg edits and might not approve of the cheatiness of your parts.

Nice model, but to be even slightly realistic, it would need to be at least 4 or 5 times the size. I'm not sure you need to code anything. You could use a "Pellets" ressource that uses one unit on each pulse and calculate the Isp accordingly. Thrust vectoring should be disabled.