Nibb31

No, you're right. You can't have an apoapsis above the atmosphere if you only burn in the atmosphere.

Have you tried aligning them in normal and antinormal positions and activating ASAS on both ships ?

It's hard to keep an orbital launch "hush hush", and a lot of soviet accidents are perfectly well documented, so I doubt there are any cosmonaut deaths that we don't know about by now.

There is a lot of crap on TV. It is usually either dumbed down for the average American audience or sentationalized to increase ratings. You really shouldn't use History Channel documentaries or TV in general to learn about science. Start with Wikipedia, and follow the links to the source material in the Reference sections. Be curious, you will learn a lot.

I really don't remember anyone in the industry referring to Windows NT as Windows 4. It might have been labelled internally as 4.x, but for almost everyone, it was Windows NT, and it actually came after Windows 95. I also had the extreme displeasure of owning Windows Me, which was probably the worst version of Windows ever.

*sigh* Please stop spewing misinformation. This forum is supposed to be *The Science Lab* not *The Crazy Alien Hoax and Conspiracy Theory Labs*. Do you have any references for these "hundreds of planes and ships disappear out of the blue"? Any statistics that might suggest that there are more incidents on one the highest traffic navigation lanes in the World compared to other places? Did you even read the Wikipedia article before posting here?

A little bit of advice, friend. If you want to find a job at NASA, you might want to tone down the extremism and obsession when you are talking to adults who might be experts in the field. Throwing tantrums, inventing theories without doing any basic research, or yelling "I'm obsessed", "I could commit suicide or cause a riot for the cause" or "I lol at your stupidity", won't earn you brownie points in an industry that is looking for highly-competent rational level-headed people with a scientific or technical background. It's good to be enthusiastic, but if you want to promote space without being an embarrassment to your cause, you are going to have to quit the obsessive ambitions, do your homework about science and technology, and be humble. You've got to accept that most of the people you are going to talk to know more about sciency stuff than you do. I suggest that you spend a little more time learning about sciences (not just space) and epistemology. Be curious and set yourself up to ask questions and learn instead of pretending that you know everything. PS. You won't find liquid rocket engines on eBay. Playing with rocket fuel in your backyard is dangerous business. With your level of knowledge, you will likely blow your head off.

But it wasn't Obama's decision.

Windows 3.1 was the first useable and successful version of Windows (there was no such thing as Windows 4, after 3.11 came Windows 95). Before that, it was MS-DOS or proprietary stuff like Amiga or Atari at home. Windows 3.11 was the first version of Windows that could access the Internet, but had to get Winsock.dll on a separate floppy to do it. I remember the great joy of installing Windows 95 that came on 25 floppy disks. IInvariably, you would get a Abort-Retry-Cancel error on the 24th disk.

A fool and his money are easily parted. You should try Kickstarter to fund your asteroid mining company ;-) No it isn't and no they're not. You know the annoying thing with you is that you make all these extraordinary claims based on what you want, but fail to even do any basic research. Read this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/He_3#Extraterrestrial_abundance Again, you make all these claims and ad hominems on people, but you have nothing to back them up. Other than "I see" or "I have the feeling". Basic facts contradict you. And you are basing that on what evidence? Actually, lessons from nature teach us the opposite. Some of the oldest living organisms on Earth survived basically because they were in isolated ecosystems. They might seem insignificant to you, but they have been around for much longer than us. They survived this long because they were perfectly adapted to their environment, and had no predators. Maybe reaching out of our solar system will get us wiped out by another predator species. And you will be the one who got us all killed Erm... Yeah. Whatever. lol again. How old are you?

You don't use geostationary satellites if you're looking for global coverage. Geostationary satellites are designed specifically for one-way regional coverage over a specific country, which is what makes them perfect for TV broadcasting. They are not suitable for two-way communication because of the distance, which causes latency. Each signal has to travel 72000km. Because of their power requirements, they are also big, heavy, and expensive to launch. If you want global coverage, you are better off with a constellation of LEO sats, like GPS, Iridium, or TDRSS systems. They will be smaller, cheaper to build and launch, and have a much lower latency. Molniya orbit sats are suitable for regional coverage over high inclination locations, which is why they were developed mainly for Russia. You still need 3 satellites, but you don't need directional dishes on the ground, because there will always be one satellite within the azimut range of your dish.

And there you go ;-) The point of my comment about comparisons, is that in Human history, people voluntarily migrate for only one reason: to improve their wealth, their comfort or their safety. It is part of human nature because we are a nomadic species. We will go where the food and shelter is. In the past, colonization was only possible because it was funded by governments as a means to increase their wealth (and therefore power) through trade, or by individuals who were seeking to find a "better life", but those destinations always had in common the perceived promises of food and shelter once they got there. Space provides neither wealth, nor comfort, nor safety. There is no food, no shelter, no living off the land and not even any breathing without life support. You are totally reliant on supplies from home and technology. I don't want to be around when the conditions on Earth make living in a -60°C radioactive desert with only CO2 to breath a "better life". And you are doing biased comparisons again. There even more examples of technological dead ends that went nowhere or were simply bad ideas: Dirigeables, daisywheel printers, insane medical treatments, nuclear cars, the Segway... We tend to take note of our successes but forget all the failures that we have left on the side of the road. Space tourism might end up being as much a bad idea as the Ford Nucleon or time travel. However, I don't doubt that we are going to improve the cost of getting to orbit. I think that reusable spacecraft are promising (I hope SpaceX delivers a reusable Falcon one day), but the amount of energy required to get to orbit will always be prohibitive and I don't think spaceflight will ever be a recreational activity for the masses.

And your point is? If the rocket equation is just blabber, then there are a lot of people at NASA and in the space industry who are eager to hear about your ground-breaking new physics theories that will allow reducing the cost of getting to orbit.

Both Falcon 9 and Antares were both funded in majority by NASA. Both SpaceX and Orbital expect to recoup their additional private investments with the government COTS contracts because there is no other market for launches to LEO. Falcon 1 didn't make any money. The only money to be made in space is from government contracts and the traditional comsat market. The launch market is currently saturated. But competition doesn't magically make things cheap, because in this case the demand is constant. Rockets are, and always will be, expensive. They are labor intensive, high precision, high technology, high complexity products. You will always need a highly qualified workforce and expensive facilities to build, test and transport the rockets, to produce the fuel, to monitor the launches. It costs around $100 million dollars to launch a satellite. Massive new markets are not going to emerge if you cut that price in two or three or even ten. The probable outcome of the current situation is that the weakest competitors will fold and only the fittest will survive, but prices are likely to remain in the same order of magnitude.

It looks simple and cheap, which is basically what it was designed to be. I find that quite elegant.

No, because you can't live on the Moon or Mars. There is nothing to do there. There are no people to visit. There is nothing that you can do find there that you couldn't find for a fraction of the price on Earth. There is no massive demand that could justify the huge economical expense of building a hotel on Mars, and not many people are going to take a 2 year vacation to go there. Two weeks living in a tin can on the surface of Mars, looking out of a porthole, and drinking recycled pee will get boring fast. You're going to have a hard time selling that as a fun vacation for the masses.

Folks need to stop applying pseudo-historical analogies to space. Space is the not the American Far West. Space is not a new continent. Spaceships aren't airplanes or sail ships. Colonizing the Moon or Mars is nothing like colonizing America or Australia. History doesn't repeat itself. For one example of "heavier than air flight", there are hundreds of examples of other technologies that ended up being dead ends because they simply weren't practical or they ended up being useless. Air travel is a bad example, because there were destinations, places where people wanted to go. There was a massive demand for people to travel before there was an economical offer. In space, there is no habitable place for the masses to go, no destination. At a stretch, you might one day be able to build a Moon base or an orbital hotel for a few hundred people, but a few hundred travellers a year is not going to bring the prices down. Space flight will never be cheap, because the amount of energy that is required to accelerate a given mass from zero to orbital velocity will always be the same. There is no evidence that energy will ever be cheap. The price might go down, but even if it is divided by 10, it will still be too expensive for the masses.

Neither will any private company. There is no money to be made on the Moon in the foreseeable future.

lol. Humanity has had Moon base plans since long before even Jules Verne wrote about flying to the Moon. As far as space-flight goes, we advanced quickly during the cold war, but we have been on a bit of a plateau for several decades now. It's a typical learning curve. We might make progress, but we might also hit economical or technological boundaries that make progress impossible. Also, don't forget that History has seen ages of rapid advancement followed by dark ages of limited advancement. With the current economy, the stupidity of politicians and those who elect them, and the rise of religious ignorance (even in so-called developed countries), we might be heading into one of those dark ages again. Back to Moon bases, there are no serious plans for any. There might be some Powerpoint studies, but no serious projects with any political backing or funding. There is also no real reason for one. A scientific outpost, ala McMurdo in Antarcticta, would be nice, but there really isn't much point. Robotic missions could do better scientific research by being sent to many different locations. Economically, it just doesn't make sense. Absolutely. What purpose do you think we have? As an American kid from the 21st Century brought up on science fiction and video games, you might have a few ideas, but those are not values that have been universally shared by all Humanity throughout all of its existence. Humanity as we know it is only a few thousand years old. We won't live forever because nothing does. We will either go extinct or evolve into something different. If you check back in 10000 years, you will probably have difficulty recognizing our descendants as human because they will have evolved, physiologically, culturally and socially, into something completely alien to you. Nature doesn't have a purpose or a final goal. There is no "right" or "wrong", just evolution. A species only survives if it is suited to its environment. If we disappear, it will be because we weren't suited to our environment. Life will go on without us, and in a few million years something might emerge that is better suited to Clinging on to some western first-world idea of what mankind should be is just as ignorant as our 17th Century ancestors who thought that they had a divine mission to civilize and colonize the rest of the World into submission. As a species, that might be exactly what we are doing... However, we are alive, so we might as well sit back and enjoy the ride. Our purpose is to enjoy life, to try to be decent human beings to each other and try to leave a decent heritage to our children. Anything more than that is delusional ethnocentrism and ignorance.

Even that isn't true. People don't get more confused in Caribbean than in other places. The Bermuda Triangle is a myth that has no evidence behind it.

Neither does the US Navy or the US Coast Guard or the Lloyds Insurance Company. Statistically, the number of incidents in that zone is actually below average considering its an area that has a lot of traffic. Millions of people fly or sail through it every year without anyone disappearing mysteriously. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bermuda_Triangle#History Don't believe everything you see on TV.

Why do you say you miss the Shuttle and post a picture of a Russian spacecraft? Because it's the only one available. The reason is the Shuttle. It was so expensive that it used most of NASA human spaceflight budget, so they simply didn't have enough money to remake a modern Apollo capsule. Now that the Shuttle is finally gone, they can divert the money towards Orion. No, it couldn't. The highest apogee of a shuttle orbit was around 500km. LEO is generally defined as below 2000km. No, it was an expensive and wasteful way of sending people into space. It makes much more sense to have separate spacecraft for people and equipment. It hardly had the payload capacity of a Delta-IV or Atlas V, for 10 times the cost. Nowadays, it doesn't make sense to repair stuff in space. It would have been cheaper to launch a Hubble II than to send multiple manned launches and dangerous EVAs to fix it. I don't think Obama has anything to do with it. George W. Bush scheduled the Shuttle's mandatory retirement for 2010 in the 2004 Vision for Space Exploration. But actually, everyone was eager to get rid of it. Everyone knew that it was dangerous, expensive, and that as long as the Shuttle was around, the US would never get out of LEO. Obama cancelled Constellation, but that was actually easy, because although NASA had made lots of PowerPoint presentations and some studies, the Bush administration and Congress never really funded it.

To make Bobcat Mir and Soyuz scale together as they should (and to fit with Kosmos scale), you can edit the cfgs like this: Mir modules: rescaleFactor = 1.25 Mir probe: rescaleFactor = 1 Mir docking ports: rescaleFactor = 0.85 Proton parts: rescaleFactor = 1.25 Soyuz: rescaleFactor = 1 Soyuz Block-D: rescaleFactor = 1.8 (also set the LiquidFuel and Oxidizer to 720 and 880) Note: cBBp's parts are not perfect either. I've had to rescale the KVTK tanks to 2.1 and the Dragon to 1, and all the Kosmos parts are too heavy. But that's the fun of having modifiable cfg files. You can set everything the way you really want it.

Health care, education, highways, social care, are slightly more essential than "free" space exploration. I see no reason why we couldn't have all of those things. However, colonization will not happen within my (or your) lifetime. Simply because there is no reason for it. There are plenty of empty places on Earth that are easier and more productive to colonize than Mars. Space is big and there is nowhere else where we can live. Yes, there is the survival of the species issue, but you are completely misguided if you believe that we, as a species are any more significant in the universe than a cockroach or a gnat or a pile of rubble on some other planet. We have only existed for a few thousand years and in that time, our population has exploded and we've eaten up most of the resources that were available. In the grand scheme of the universe, or in the life of planet Earth, we are nothing more than a virus or a rash. If we destroy our host or kill ourselves, it won't make any difference.

The same thing that happens when you lock 5 people in a tin can for several months in the Nevada desert. There is no need to go to Mars for that. Actually, emigrating to Mars makes no sense. You would be living in a tin can, drinking recycled pee, eating hydroponic tomatoes, and you would never feel the fresh wind in your hair, the sun on your skin, or the rain on your face ever again. Your life would rely on a supply ship every 2 years, desperately hoping that there is still a budget for one. Not to mention no TV or internet. If that's the kind of life you want to live, I can lock you up in a trailer in the Nevada Desert (preferably somewhere radioactive, like the White Sands Test Range) and promise to send you a supply truck every two years. It would be much cheaper, and the end result would be the same.