Nibb31

It isn't "Nothing". Everything that goes to orbit is already required to either deorbit or boost itself to a graveyard orbit. Regulations for that have been in place since the 80's at least. Most debris these days is accidental. By definition, there isn't much you can do to prevent that. You can't reasonably require everything to deorbit. It takes quite a heavy upper stage to get a comsat into GEO. It would take pretty much the same dV to deorbit, so unless you triple the size of every single comsat, and require a Falcon Heavy for every launch, it's not gonna happen.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federation_(spacecraft) http://www.russianspaceweb.com/acts.html

It's not as big a deal as some people think. Space is big. There's lots of room out there. The best we can do is track and avoid the big stuff.

The legal term for the FAA, under whose jurisdiction this flight is to take place, is "spaceflight participant". There you go. Argument settled. Can we move on ?

Since those old bits no longer exist, yes, it would be a new design.

The term "astronaut" currently refers to anyone who flies over the Karman line. That's fine with me. <pedantic>Actually, that makes you a cosmonaut.</pedantic> Semantics like this are a bit pointless.

Because SpaceX has a pretty bad track record of sticking to schedules. As explained above, manned Dragon is 6 years late. Same is true for flying a reused F9, which we have been talking about for ages and hasn't flown yet. And F9, and RedDragon, and that comsat constellation... If SLS is cancelled, the money is gone. NASA will have to convince Congress to fund yet another shiny new program, which is certainly not a given in the current climate. The only way NASA can end up funding ITS is if there is a fair competition for "Commercial Mars", where SpaceX wins against Boeing, LM, Orbital, etc... and if ITS is redesigned to fit NASA's requirements (NASA has no use for 100 tons of cargo or 100 pax).

I have a little more faith in NASA's flight record that in SpaceX's. Cutting corners in sourcing, experimenting new procedures on the customer's dime, employing junior staff, blowing stuff up to see if it works... I admire SpaceX, but I'm not confident at this stage with man-rating the way they work. They haven't even proven they can do a Mercury program and they want to do Apollo 8 next year. They currently have their plate full with: Reusable F9, Fly Falcon Heavy, Reuse F9, Fly Dragon 2, Reuse Dragon2, Internet constellation, DoD Raptor US, RedDragon, ITS, Mars colonies, and now the Moon. As I said above, they need to stop adding goalposts and strike a few actual goals, without blowing up customer's payloads. A little less conversation, a little more action.

Yes, it would definitely be more like Zond than Apollo 8. There is no way they could enter and leave lunar orbit. Still, Zond was a bit of a hit and miss. They are going to need a couple of test flights before they can send actual people. Definitely. Many things are much more complex than they were then because the world is a much more complex place.

Different day and age. STS-1 was still the Cold War, it couldn't fly unmanned, and the Orbiter had gone through years of development test flights. And it wasn't flying a 6-day mission around the freaking Moon on its first flight either.

Next year ? Maybe in Elon Time™, but not in our universe. SpaceX really needs to stop adding more goalposts and start striking a few goals. At this stage, the hype is starting to look like the Russian space program. Dragon2 hasn't flown yet. Falcon Heavy hasn't flown yet. I doubt anyone would be crazy or confident enough to put humans on the maiden flight of a new rocket and a new spacecraft. Even man-rating Falcon 9, at this stage, seems a bit premature with its current flight record. They really need to get a couple of test flights in there first, including at least one unmanned circumlunar flight to test reentry. It would be really suicidal otherwise. Also, this means that Dragon2 is going to be get all new inertial navigation and deep space comm systems. No more reliance on GPS and TDRS. If they do manage to do a manned circumlunar flight before SLS/Orion, it will certainly a bit of a humiliation for NASA.

Pretty much all of the things that you mentioned. Components have MTBF ratings and known failure modes. Not all of those failure modes cause a LOM/LOC. There is also built-in redundancy and redundant systems. This is all why "man rating", like most certification processes, is such an expensive thing, even though it's mainly just a lot of paperwork. Think ISO9000 on steroids. This is also why the aerospace industry uses aerospace-certified components and frowns upon SpaceX's conduct of buying"off-the-shelf" struts and fasteners. Absolutely. It's theoretical of course (I doubt there will ever be 500 flights of SLS), but you've gotta work with something, right?

LOC/LOM rates are calculated from the failure rates of individual subsystems, which are calculated from the failure rates of components, etc... Doing all these calculations is the major component of "man rating" a vehicle.

And that is the whole point. SpaceX has been offering DragonLab as a commercial proposal for nearly a decade now, and it hasn't found any interest in the market. The cost of buying rack space on a DragonLab flight is one thing. The cost of developing, miniaturizing and automating a microgravity wafer or crystal production facility to fly on it is probably much higher. The economics simply don't work out. Only if you obtain the same quality and rejection rate. To produce those wafers in microgravity, you need to completely automate the manufacturing and quality control process and make it fit on a spacecraft. Building a manned space station and sending factory workers into space is simply never going to be competitive. However, once you have developed that level of automation and miniaturization, you could apply the exact same techniques to your conventional production process. Instead of sending a trailer-sized wafer factory to orbit, shut down your factory, fire your employees, and park a dozen of them in the parking lot. This will also drastically reduce costs, regardless of wafer size, and make microgravity production less attractive.

Instead of a manned EM-1, they should do an EFT-2 with a Delta IVH and a systems-complete Orion with full ECLSS. No need to man-rate the D IVH: Fly unmanned in LEO for a week, including propulsion tests and maneuvers. Dock to the ISS, be boarded by crew and tested for a week in LEO. Undock and free-fly for a week, including manned propulsion tests and maneuvers. Dock to the ISS, disembark crew. Undock and reenter. You might even be able to squeeze an EVA from Orion in the schedule somewhere. That plan would need some logistics, including having the two fully-functional IDAs installed at the ISS, and rotating the astronauts trained on Orion into an ISS expedition. But it would be cheaper and safer than a manned EM-1. Of course, the long pole here is a "systems-complete Orion" with a functional ECLSS. I doubt that will be ready before EM-2 anyway, so speculation about a manned EM-1 is a bit moot.

Before Apollo 12, there wasn't much confidence that they would be able to do precision landings, so it didn't make sense to pre-land equipment or supplies if they ended up more than a kilometer away. Hence, it was never part of the mission profile.

How would that help ?

Need more data. Speculation is pointless.

Even if gravity was cancelled for a minute, trains would derail, cars would crash, planes would fall out of the sky, rivers would stop flowing and cause major floods, dams, bridges and major buildings would suffer serious damage. Anything that uses gravity for fluid circulation or convection for cooling would break (this includes most generators, hydro dams, nuclear power plants...). More dramatically, the Earth's orbit would be durably modified (it would fling off on a tangent, then find itself in an excentric orbit when gravity is switched on again). The result of such an orbit would be huge climate variations, which would influence the polar caps, sea levels, crops, ecosystems, and resulting in millions of deaths. As for the Shuttle, it would likely crash too, like anything that relies on gravity, since most of its sensors and software controls would be wrong, making it uncontrollable. It would probably endup going off-course, slipping out of the airflow, and breaking up due to aerodynamic forces.

Already posted in another thread

There would be no more Earth and no more Moon. With nothing pulling it together, the Earth's crust would fly off with the centrifugal force. The Moon would fling away on a tangent into an escape trajectory.

In that case, you would need zero propellant. You wouldn't even need a Shuttle. Just put the payload in the parking lot and give it a nudge. It's not like orbiting makes any sense without gravity anyway.

If you had no gravity during a shuttle launch, then you would have much bigger problems than the shuttle launch, like the planets flying away from the Sun for example and the Earth ripping itself to pieces.

After developing FTL, develop time travel and eradicate the enemy with a bioweapon when they are at the protozoic stage.

What you want is probably something like this: http://a.co/2LN2UEp