Nibb31

I specifically mentioned that exploration is a worthwhile goal. Colonization on the other hand is a pipe dream with no realistic motive, no societal or political support, and no economical purpose. So what programs and policies do you strip to fund your personal pipe dream? Politics is about decisions. Deciding is renouncing. So what do give up? Education? Roads? Clean air? Jobs? Research? Energy? Defense? Healthcare? Unfortunately, we live in a world where defense is necessary. You could probably cut some defense spending, especially in US, but one could argue that most of the G20 countries you mention actually don't spend enough money to protect themselves from threats. This is true for all government spending. Including defense. The difference with a multi-trillion dollar colonization project is that we reap benefits in return for that spending. Even if the government buys gold-plated toilet seats for the White House, that money is injected into the economy, creates jobs, which is a good thing, and comes back in the form of taxes. But of course, some expenditures are more beneficial to the population than others. You think, but you still haven't given a single rational reason why.

You don't spend significant percentage of your country's GDP just to entertain maybe 1% of the population. Setting up a colony on Mars is a mind-bogglingly expensive endeavor. You would need massive political, economical, and social support if you wanted to do it. Yeah, what about them? How do you pay for all that work if you don't look at the economics? There are plenty of higher goals (fixing the climate, creating jobs, clean water for everyone, security and law enforcement, better education, free healthcare, preserving biodiversity, universal basic income, stronger military, free beer, and so on...). Every person has their own priorities regarding which goals deserve the most resources. Which is why there is such as a thing as politics and why you need to justify spending on your pet peeve instead of someone else's. That justification can hardly be "because it's fun" or "for fame". That's what Hollywood is for. I disagree. I think throwing money and resources at a pointless project is a waste. I believe in science and in exploration. I believe that learning how to live in space is essential. If a need arises, we'll find a justification to send people to Mars, because developing the technology is the easy part. But spending trillions of dollars for the "fun" of a minority is counter-productive because it can only result in a backlash that will push your goal further away into the future. Logic means there is a rational argument to do something. You are suggesting the opposite. "Do it for fun" is not a rational argument. Being able to afford a Tesla while rejecting economics is a bit hypocritical.

Star Trek has never been about Science Fiction. It's fantasy in a futuristic setting where technobabble replaces magic.

Astronauts are selected as a group. Gender parity and racial diversity are requirements for constituting that group because NASA's mission includes inspiring kids from diverse backgrounds. A diverse Astronaut Corps is an essential requirement to fulfill that mission. One could argue that the astronaut selection program is correcting inequalities that exist in other areas of society. Not when your goal is to represent the diversity of the population. Being an astronaut is as much a representation job as it is a technical job.

Who cares if there is a delay? There is no "too late" for exogeology or even exobiology. It's not like those rocks are going anywhere. They will still be there in 1000 years, and it's much easier to send another automated experiment in 10 years than to send a hypothetical 10-percent-of-your-GDP manned expedition in 30 years (maybe). "Missing something" is just a matter of sending the right sensors to the right places. There is no need for human presence. A human driving an RV over the Martian landscape at 50km/h is going to miss stuff too. We are already monitoring Mars from orbit. The amount of sensors and instruments pointing at Mars increases on each mission. Believe me, if there were flying saucers on Mars, we would already know. I'm not sure where you're going with this, but none of those US-centric "great american frontier", the "old world colonization", or the "wild west" analogies apply to colonization of the solar system.

Even those horrible people can't make the Earth more unhospitable than Mars or Titan.

There's nothing you can't study with a robot for orders of magnitude cheaper than sending humans. To study the cellular structure of grass, you send an miniature automated lab that is designed to study the cellular structure of things.

This is an international forum, so I don't really see it as appropriate vector for "national interests". There is zero interest in colonizing planets, let alone terraforming them. Space elevators are a cool theoretical concept, but they have been repeatedly proven as wildly impractical. Solar sails are similarly a nice concept, but SEP is still much more practical. As for getting NASA to fund a Mexican-based game company to turn KSP into a simulation, I really don't see the purpose when NASA has plenty of their own simulation applications. You could try Orbiter as a more realistic simulation engine. Have you even asked Squad if they are interested in your idea ?

Huh ? Where does this come from ? KSP is a game, not a simulation. Most of the stuff you talk about in your post is science fiction and technobabble.

As anyone who has studied economics knows, the price of a product or service is rarely related to the actual cost. Vendors set their prices based on what their customers are willing to pay: a pair of sneakers only costs a couple of dollars to make, but they can sell them for $150 because that's what people are willing to pay. The difference in price between what commercial satellite operators pay and what NASA pays are due to plenty of things: - NASA's commercial cargo is a bulk contract for delivering X tons of cargo to the ISS. The price is for a specific amount of cargo to be delivered (and returned optionally), not the number of launches or the spacecraft that is used. Of course, NASA gets to decide how much goes on each flight and certifies the vehicles that operate at the ISS, but the Dragon, Cygnus, CST-100, and DreamChaser are all owned and operated by the commercial vendors. On the other hand, commercial satellite contracts are only for the launch service. The responsibility of the launch provider ends when the spacecraft reaches orbit. A launch is much cheaper than a full mission. - NASA uses a government procurement process which is much more strict than a commercial RFP. Commercial Crew and Commercial Cargo programs include the development and operation of a fleet of commercial spacecraft. In other words, the development of Dragon, Cygnus, CST-100 and DreamChaser, and their launchers, including multiple test flights, is all part of the price paid by NASA. - It's not a problem if NASA pays more for a service than a commercial business, because part of NASA's role as a government agency is to subsidize the industry. This keeps highly skilled jobs in the country, maintains and develops technological capability, helps national competitivity, and ensures that the country remains a leader in the aerospace industry. Money spent by the government is never wasted. It flows through the economy, creates jobs, and most of it comes back to the government through taxes.

SpaceX is already the cheapest launch provider on the market. The appeal for customers is price paid for the service, not the cost for the provider.

We're only talking about launch costs here. Launch cost is traditionally regarded as about 20% of the cost of the satellite: one fifth for the payload, one fifth for the satellite bus, one fifth for the ground station, one fifth for the launch, and one fifth for operating the satellite. That is the traditional rule of thumb. So for the actual customer, saving 20% on the launch represents a total saving on the project of 20% of 20% = less than 5%. That's nice, but it's not a game changer. Of course, this assumes that SpaceX passes on their own cost cutting to the customer, which would actually be silly given that they are already 40% cheaper than the competition. They have nothing to gain in cutting prices even more. When you buy a plane ticket, you don't buy a plane, or even a share of the plane's cost. You buy a transportation service to get from A to B. It's the airline's job to manage their fleet competitively. You don't get to choose the type or the age of the plane. In the same way, launch customers don't buy rockets. They buy a launch service. They pay SpaceX to get their payload into a specific orbit.

Did you consider radiation levels ? That huge fusion power plant in the sky isn't very healthy.

We really don't know much about water on Mars. Yet another point where SpaceX is putting the cart before the horse.

The cost of a launch is not the cost of a rocket. The first stage is only a part of that hardware, let's say 70%. But reusing doesn't mean that you don't pay for recovery, refurbishment, and amortization of that hardware, so even a reused first stage isn't free, which brings the savings down to something closer to 50%. However, the launch hardware is only a small part of the total cost of a launch. Probably like 50%. You need to factor in construction and maintenance of the launch facilities, transportation, integration, launch range fees, as well as R&D, manufacturing, testing, and all the usual overhead stuff of running a business. Your biggest cost factor is going to be your workforce, but reusability doesn't do much to reduce that. In the end, you only really save the manufacturing cost of the first stage which probably represents less than 50% of 50% percent of the total cost of a launch campaign, which is 25%.

Nobody ever said those costs were negligeable. Even Musk has only claimed a 20% cost reduction through reusability. No way is that even close to the actual ratios.

Because launches aren't free. There are costs associated with mobilizing air force assets, enforcing no fly zones, transporting stages around the country, integrating them at a launch facility, planning a flight profile, etc... And of course, developing an expensive dummy 2nd stage, payload, and fairing just for a single pointless flight. Pointless, because there is nothing that such a flight would prove that hasn't already been proven multiple times by a whole campaign of full duration burns at McGregor.

The door is supposed to be on the side of the cargo with a deployable elevator winch. And internal staircase or ladder seems out of question, because they don't seem to have any provisions for cutting a hole through the tanks. Again, the whole concept is very high-level and there are many stumbling blocks that make the layout impractical at this stage. The biggest problem at this stage is the engine placement.

No, you said there is not enough evidence. There actually is. Pretty much every aspect of the Apollo missions is public, including peer-reviewed research from scientists of all nationalities. All you need to do is look for it. Try http://scholar.google.com for starters. What evidence are your suspicions based on ?

There is plenty of evidence. Did you even look ?

Does it need one ? It will typically take 6 to 12 hours to get to the space station. You just make your arrangements before you get on board and you wear a diaper. Because cruise ships sink and people bail out. A capsule doesn't sink and you don't bail out. The suits were orange on the Space Shuttle because the Shuttle couldn't land on water. The procedure was for the crew to bail out using parachutes and a long pole to avoid being hit by the wings (it was doubtful that it would have worked, but the Shuttle was a death trap). The suits were designed to survive the airblast of bailing out at supersonic speed. Capsules are much safer. They float. The procedure says that you stay inside. The new suit doesn't get to go in the water or to resist an airblast. If you get out, you die, orange or not.

The reason there were no female astronauts in early NASA was simply because astronauts were selected among the military test pilot corps and there were no female military pilots. It was thought that the skills and capabilities required to fly on rockets were close to the skills required. If there was any sexism it wasn't as much due to NASA policy, but due to military prejudices. Those prejudices also existed in science and engineering careers too, which is why there were few female astronauts even after the test pilot profile was no longer the main requirement. As for now, one of NASA's missions is to educate and inspire younger generations, including girls and kids from all sorts of minorites, into science and engineering careers. The Astronaut Corps is probably one of the most visible arms of NASA, therefore the bias towards gender parity and racial diversity is an absolute requirement in order to meet that goal. It's not discrimination, it's candidate selection geared towards creating a divers group capable of engaging with a diverse population.

There are pictures. Just Google them. Stuff doesn't "float around" in space. Learn something about orbital mechanics, and then you might be qualified to have an opinion about stuff that you clearly don't have any understanding about. No it hasn't. It has presented much evidence, including detailed schematics of all the hardware used to get there, hundreds of peer-reviewed science papers, broadcasts sent from lunar orbit, laser reflectors installed on the lunar surface, testimonies of thousands of scientists and engineers who worked on the Apollo, and lunar samples given as gifts to other countries, including to the USSR who could compare them with their own lunar samples. All queries were answered 40 years ago. As a government agency, NASA doesea pretty good job of answering honest questions and FOAA requests. However, they can't afford to employ dozens of people to respond over and over again to dumb remarks about flags waving, stars being underexposed, or shadows not looking the same as they would on Earth. There's only so much ignorance one can reasonably be expected to respond to. How can you really accuse NASA of failing basic queries when you clearly haven't even looked for a single science publication on the subject.

Contrary to what some people would like, reality is based on facts, not opinion. Reality has a habit of biting back those who base their actions on opinion rather than on facts.

Reading that article, the entire thrust of the boosters is translated to the core through four ball joints attached to a thrust structure at the top of the core. The separation works like this: 1) They reduce the thrust of the side boosters. The difference in thrust between the core and the boosters causes them to "lag behind" the central core. This disconnects the ball joint at the top of the boosters. 2) The disconnection triggers separation sensor. Which does two things: A valve at the top of each booster vents the upper oxygen tank which pushes the boosters away from the core. The lower connections, which contain power and data lines, are severed by pyro bolts. Very interesting stuff.