Nibb31

Why would you still be using an outdated version?

The ejection angle defines the direction in which you will be flying. I figure it's more important than the phase angle (which can be off a degree or two). Whatever you do, without super-precise calculations, you will always need a mid-course correction burn. Even NASA does them, and they are usually better at maths than I am

It's pretty useless, because for orbital flight, you never want to point your ship directly at your target. You might as well ignore the purple marker.

1) Apogee is the best place to burn prograde to raise your Perigee, and therefore to turn a ballistic trajectory into an orbit. If you burn at a lower altitude, you will necessarily have to burn at a different angle than prograde to circularize, which is less efficient. 2) dV depends on thrust and mass. A 3 engine rocket with tanks will weigh 3 times more. For the same reason, a setup with 1 engine and 2 tanks is more efficient than a setup with 1 engine and 4 tanks. You will burn 4 times longer, but you will accelerate 5 times slower because of the extra mass.

What you want to do is called an inclination change. The best point to do it is at the intersection of your current and the desired orbit. For example in your case, if you want an equatorial orbit, you want to do your "north/south" burn (it's actually called normal and antinormal and is perpendicalur to your orbit) where your orbit intersects the equator.

Unfortunately, return on investment is a strong motivation for most human activity. Actually, most exploration of the World was motivated by finding new resources and trade routes. Scientific research is another motivation, but is often either a byproduct or a way to gain a technological advantage that will lead to a marketable product or increased competitivity down the road.

I haven't visited the Munoliths since 0.17 came out, but I can assure you that in 0.16 they were all reachable. Only one of the Mun Arches was underground. I wonder if Nova changed anything in the Mun's surface mesh.

Those were jobs were created because of massive government spending (which proves why government spending is sometimes a GOOD thing). However, Apollo was only possible because America was at the peak of it's economical growth. It was not Apollo that caused the economical growth. Unfortunately, there is no money to be made in human spaceflight (other than the launch business for government programs). If there was, then people would already be making money.

SOI = Sphere of Influence. Basically, it means that in your screenshot, on the blue line you are in Kerbin's SoI, meaning that your speed and position are shown relative to Kerbin. The yellow line is when you are in the Mun's SoI, so your speed and position are shown relative to the Mun. The little blue circle is where the switch happens. The yellow sphere indicates where the Mun will be when you switch SoI. Look at the diagram in your screenshot and try to mentally imagine that the blue line continues on the same trajectory. Now, remember, the Mun is moving around Kerbin. The yellow line is traced relative to that movement, so as the Mun moves along, so does your orbit. Relative to Kerbin, you do not change directions at all and your spacecraft remains on the same trajectory.

Red Dragon is an unmanned one-way lander probe, not a manned mission to Mars. It would be more of a publicity stunt for SpaceX than a serious custom-built lander.

Don't get me wrong. I'm a big fan of SpaceX and their designs. Their Grasshopper program, a reusable Falcon, has the potential of being a real gamechanger in the launch business and that is pure awesomeness. However, as much as Dragon is cool, it's just a LEO taxi, not an interplanetary exploration vehicle. It doesn't even have a toilet! You could probably stick one on a rocket to go to Mars, but you'll also need a fully equiped hab module for the 2-year mission, radiation and MMOD shielding, supplies, a lander with a very beefy ascent stage (Dragon's landing rockets will not put you back into orbit), a rover, ground equipment... 12tons to GTO is not nearly enough for a survivable Mars mission. It is orders of magnitude more complex than anything even NASA can pull off with its thousands of employees, so it's really unrealistic to imagine a relatively small company like SpaceX doing it. Oh, and there is the cost involved. I know that Elon Musk is a billionnaire and he wants to go to Mars, but he doesn't have infinite pockets. SpaceX is a private company and there is no business model for Mars missions. No bucks, no buck rogers.

Please ! A freefall at Mach 1 is levels of magnitude easier than reentering at Mach 20. You would need a serious rocket to deorbit and lose as much of the speed as possible before reentry, then some kind of TPS and a rigid suit or capsule or else you would be ripped apart and toast, and then some sort of attitude control system to keep your TPS properly oriented. SAS is Kerbal-speak for a gyroscopic flywheel. That would be heavy!

That really depends on the area of technology. The last 50 years has seen advances in computer science, materials, and biology. However, that is not necessarily true for spaceflight, energy, or propulsion, where we are still fighting against the same laws of physics. You can't extrapolate technological advances on an exponential curve just because the last 50 years have seen advances. Technology can slow down and hit barriers. Social and economical changes can shift our focus from scientific research to other priorities. This has happened many times in the past, where we have alternated between dark ages that have lasted centuries and periods of enlightenment. We might actually be ending one of those periods and reentering an age of recession. Our society is also vastly more complex and risk averse than 50 years ago, which also causes a certain degree of paralysis: it used to take a couple of months to design engineering projects such as aircraft or nuclear plants or motorways. Now any serious project takes at least 10 or 15 years for inception to finish, even with off-the-shelf technology. SpaceX hasn't even launched a single human yet. 10 years to design and implement a manned Mars mission is totally unrealistic. It takes more than that just to design the toilet. They don't have any of the technology or hardware needed to get to Mars.

He3 is a myth. We can do fusion with Hydrogen for much cheaper. It's also easier to build 30 percent larger solar panels on Earth than to send smaller solar panels into space... and the costs of helium or deuterium aren't worth spending humans to Jupiter. Even if we do get to that stage, of we have advanced enough to develop fusion and deep space travel, then we will also have advanced robotics capable of doing the dangerous work for us. And although I do believe that there is life on other planets, I really don't think they would be stupid enough to waste the energy required for interstellar travel just to kick our ass. That stuff belongs in sci-fi, not in a serious discussion.

Why? Because of money and politics and lack of interest. A better way to answer your question would be with another question: why should ESA spend billions to develop a manned spacecraft when they can hitch a ride on Soyuz or Orion and spend their money on other stuff ?

Haha... It takes 10 to 15 years to design a spacecraft, and I don't see anyone seriously planning the budget to go there, si I don't think we will have visited Mars by 2030 or 2040, although we might have a Mars sample return mission and maybe some robotic landers on a couple of Saturn's moons by then. At the current budget levels, we are not going anywhere. NASA's Orion/SLS will cost $1billion/year for one launch, and there is no budget planned for mission modules (landers or exploration modules), so there will be no Moon landings before 2025-2030 at least. The chances for Orion/SLS of being cancelled by then are actually rather high because of the high cost/per flight, the low launch rate, and the lack of budget for actually doing anything once the infrastructure is in place. There is simply no budget for a lander or a Lagrange space station and there is no real justification for the public to send humans into space when robots can do most of the work. If we're lucky, we might have a couple of Orion asteroid missions, and maybe a small space station at Earth-Moon-L1. That's probably as far as we can get. Now, moving out to 2060, either we have given up on manned spaceflight altogether, or there might be some huge event that will change public opinion: maybe a new cold war, the discovery of life on Mars or Europa, or a giant asteroid. Those are pretty much the only things that will motivate the public opinion enough to put space exploration in the spotlight once again. If this happens, then yes, we might finally get our Moon base and maybe a Mars landing, but I really wouldn't count on it. You shouldn't forget that space is a hostile environment and it's hard to get to, and it always will be. The laws of physics are not going to change and it will always take a huge amount of energy and technology to put a human into orbit. Whatever technological breakthroughs come around in the future, there is no such thing as free energy, and you will always need to accelerate stuff to 28000km/h to get into LEO. Even if we do crack nuclear fusion power, it will still take 20 to 30 years to design and build power plants and for the technology to go mainstream. People (especially Americans, because of their history) often compare Space to the colonizing the Western Frontier. This is a flawed comparison for many reasons. First, in space, there is nowhere to go. You need technology to survive and nobody is going to voluntarily emigrate to Mars or the Moon and spend the rest of their life living in a sealed hab module with recycled air and water. Colonies started with people willing to live off the land and trade with the old continent. In space, there is no land to live off of and nothing to trade. It will always be cheaper, safer, and easier to colonize the ocean beds or Antarctica than to colonize the Moon.

It's not so much about money, but about political will. There is always some inside fighting about which country should be in charge of each program. France controls most of Ariane, Germany and Italy are mostly in charge of ATV. And these projects are part of international negociations that handled by politicians. It would be better if the governments just allocated general funds and let the experts at ESA decide on where the funds go. The other problem is destination. The ISS will be reaching its end of life in 2020, with no planned replacement. It takes at least 10 years to design and build a new spacecraft, so by the time ESA has a manned spacecraft, it will have nowhere to go. Building a new space station or a deep-space spacecraft are beyond ESA's budget. Ariane was designed to be man-rated for Hermes, so there should actually be very little work to use it for manned launches. ATV is a pressurized automated spacecraft with a modular design, which means that the components could actually be used as a service module for a manned spacecraft (See http://www.esa.int/SPECIALS/ATV/SEMNFZOR4CF_0.html). The only part missing is a re-entry capsule (and ground infrastructure, of course. A new launchpad would be required). There have been several studies going for unmanned reentry spacecraft (ARD, IXV, Hermes...), so ESA certainly does have the capability. Ironically, there seems to be negociations between NASA and ESA about using the ATV as a basis for Orion's service module.

I find it a bit annoying hearing the media talk about "the edge of space". Space is empirically considered to start at 100km, which is nearly 3 times the altitude reached by Baumgartner's balloon. I even read articles this morning claiming that this jump was a huge step to figure out how astronauts could evacuate from orbit which is totally silly, or people asking if he was closer to the ISS than to the ground (the ISS orbits at 10 times this altitude and more importantly travels at 28000km/h). Most people don't realize that spaceflight is about speed, not altitude, and that you can't just jump off the ISS wit a parachute or get into orbit with a balloon.

m is the abbreviation for meters. If the altimeter indicates M, then you might be talking about Million meters, but then you would be pretty high. Orbit is not about altitude. It's about speed. If there was no atmosphere, you could orbit the Earth 10m above sea level if you flew fast enough. On the other hand, if you fly straight up 10000 kilometers and run out of speed, you will still be on a suborbital trajectory. The only reason rockets launch vertically is to get out of the atmosphere as fast as possible. As soon as they can, they tilt sideways so that they can accumulate horizontal speed. This is a pretty cool video of a shuttle launch seen from an airliner. As you can see, the Space Shuttle follows a parabolic trajectory instead of going straight up: http://youtu.be/GE_USPTmYXM Anything that goes up and down is on a ballistic trajectory. An orbit is a ballistic trajectory that is perpetually falling down, but is going fast enough to "miss" the ground. To orbit Kerbin, you need to fly above the atmosphere (70km) and reach a horizontal speed of 2200 or 2300m/s (this can be lower if you are orbiting higher). The typical way of doing this is to progressively tilt your rocket sideways during the launch so that you are going horizontal when you exit the the atmosphere. If you watch the map view (M) as you burn, you will see your ballistic trajectory elongate until it passes over the horizon and effectively goes full circle. When this happens, you have achieved orbit.

They are in there, they just don't show up on the screen because there is no interior view. Right-click the capsule hatch and you will see their name.

We've been in a financial and economical crisis since 2008 and nobody has really bounced back. Capitalism as a system is fundamentally flawed. It used to be about creating wealth based on growth, but infinite growth is impossible in a finite system. Wealth can no longer be created ex-nihilo. Resources and habitable/arable land surface don't grow, while population grows exponentially. This means that either we need to share our wealth (this means that rich countries have to give up their lifestyle, which they are not prepared to do), or we have to just accept that fewer people get richer while more people get poorer (which will significantly increase social pressure both on national and international levels). This can't last indefinitely, so I foresee some major economical and social collapses and revolutions, and it probably won't be pretty. I get the impression that extremists are much more vocal and mainstream nowadays than they were 10 or 20 years ago. Sarah Palin, Santorum, Glenn Beck, Ann Coulter, etc... The entire Republican party has been taken over by the bible-thumping luddites and tea partiers, and half of the US population is going to vote for them. These are people who oppose religion and science, who want to cut spending on research, education and healthcare. The US is essentially divided in two very different nations right now. Combined with the social tensions that I described above, it's a ticking time bomb. "When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross." - Sinclair Lewis. Yes, with industrialization, literacy rises, but so does the thirst for consumerism. The Global Footprint concept shows that for the current level of world population to be sustainable, we already need 2.5 Earths. The world simply can't cope with every Chinese and Indian having an SUV and the same level of consumption as the west, yet who are we to deny them access to the same level of comfort that we have? These emerging countries will aspire to a more comfortable lifestyle and they are going to hit a barrier.

That is likely the dev debug menu. It's not in the released version.

MechJeb's time to launch rendezvous feature records the previous launch that used the Ascent Computer. Therefore it only works with 2 identical rockets launched to the same altitude. There are many guides that explain how to do a rendezvous. Here is my shameless auto-quote:

There's also the goal of finding all the easter egg artifacts.

What you're seeing are plugins, like MechJeb.