Nibb31

They will be hydroponic, so they won't be any different from hydroponic tomatoes on Earth. Martial regolith is not only sterile, but it's also highly toxic. You might be able to use it as a building material, as long as it de-perchlorated (which requires massive amounts of water) and it's isolated from the actual pressure vessel, but turning it into something that food can grow on is not going to happen unless you import massive amounts of fertilizer and nutrients. Anyone who thinks that Mars would be a pleasant place to relocate your family is dead wrong. You would be stuck inside a hab module for the rest of your life, breathing an A/C airflow, drinking recycled urine, and eating low variety hydroponic tofu. Your children will never feel the wind on their face, swim in the ocean or run around in the sun ever again. If the ECLSS fails, you die. If your ISRU equipment fails, you die, only a bit later. The radiation, the dust, the atmosphere, the cold, are all deadly. There will be no places to visit on vacation, no variety of cultures or landscapes. And your internet connection will suck. As I explained above, settlers are attracted by a better life, more confortable and/or safer. That's why migrants are often from persecuted communities or extremely poor. You won't get middle/upper class westerners to sell their homes en masse to live on Mars (or anywhere else in space).

No they didn't. They knew that once they crossed the ocean they could live off the land with very little need for imported goods. They could grow food locally, build homes with local material, breath the air and drink the water. They also planned on getting rich by exporting resources. None of that is applicable to space colonies.

Ants don't have much relevance to human life support systems. Most life support experiments have been done on animals already. Most ISS experiments on animals don't get much public coverage because of extremists who would scream out about it, but they exist. There is also Russia's Bion program (The Bion spacecraft are derived from Yantar military observation sats, which are derived from good old Vostok!). The last one flew in 2013 and carried gerbils, mice, geckos, fish, snails, and other microbes and critters, with various rates of survival. As for measuring radiation exposure levels, there are more reliable ways of getting raw data than sending animals.

It might be viable one day, if there is any demand for the stuff. Right now, there isn't.

We've been through this conversation a billion times. Do we really need to start another thread ? Deporting people to space is a stupid idea. Besides the cost (sending them to Guantanamo is much cheaper), the skillsets that are required to maintain a viable colony aren't typically found in your average prison population. This isn't Australia where all you needed was unskilled labor. Any manual work will be done better and cheaper by robots. People selling their house to move to Mars isn't realistic either. Although migration is part of human nature, we also tend to follow the bison, to seek greener pastures. Poor people are the ones who migrate, not rich people with a valued skillset. People move because they want to improve their living conditions, not degrade them and put their families lives at risk. The sole motivation of colonists and settlers has always been to increase their comfort, their safety, and those of their families. Space is neither safer nor more comfortable than even the most hostile place on Earth. It has no promise of a better life. There will be explorers who will go for the thrill of adventure, but explorers are not settlers.

We've been through that before. There are no tangible benefits at this point. There might be in the future, but there are very few business cases in the space industry that don't rely on taxpayer money. You're a bit of a newcomer here, so I suggest reading back through some of the threads that have already covered these topics. Yes, but can we please steer clear of the 16th-17th-18th century colony analogies, because none of them are applicable to today's global economy or political environment, and space certainly isn't a land of plenty and promises. Spain's political power collapsed under the weight of supporting its colonies and every colonial power ended up losing everything, most of the time after bloody colonial wars. Not a great return on investment after all.

Damn broken forum software. I'd add to what what Starman wrote above is that most space cadets love to put their favorite pet solution before any problem that it might solve. We typically spend resources on stuff because it solves a problem. Most of the stuff space enthusiasts advocate are solutions looking for a problem.

You don't say! It's not like this isn't the key problem that has been the main focus of space enthusiasts for decades.

Not everything is about capabilities. It can also be about resources and collective will. Ask people in the street how much they are willing to spend every week on space exploration. It simply doesn't register as a priority for enough people. Why does it bother you? We can't grow wings and fly. We can't breath under water. We can't live forever and we can't all win the lottery. There are just some things that are not possible and we can absolutely learn to live with that.

Both pessimists and optimists will tell you that they are the realists.

Maybe people who are in the industry have a better understanding out how hard space is. When you don't know how stuff works, it's all just magic, and everybody knows that with magic everything is possible. When you actually understand how stuff works, you get to realize that engineering problems are usually the easiest ones to solve. The biggest roadblocks are usually economical and political, which doesn't make them any less real as the laws of physics.

Galileo only has a handful of sats, so acquisition definitely won't be good.

There's no such thing as filling something with vacuum. A vacuum balloon can only have zero pressure inside with positive pressure outside. No existing material can be strong enough to maintain its structure with a pressure differential, while being light enough to provide bouyancy.

No. You can technically reach the Karman line (and therefore "space" with near-zero velocity). It has nothing to with orbit.

Yeah, "build it and they will come". I have a bridge to nowhere to sell you. Or an Interplanetary Transport System. Except that there was always a demand for quick land transportation, even before cars existed. In your example, the car was an enabler for other business models. Your local milk shop was in the business of selling milk, not driving cars. By your analogy, we already have cars. What we don't have is the milk shop owner who needs a car. Those business models have yet to be proven to be viable. There is no indication that they are, and launch cost is only one of the factors. The same principle that prevents Esso from blowing up Shell oil rigs in the North Sea. International law condemns piracy. Any company that does business in space will be operating out of an actual country and subject to the laws of that country. Do we need an international governing body to prevent maritime piracy. Maritime law was elaborated for exactly that reason. There is no reason why it can't be extended to space.

The problem is that it's a market that lacks demand, not offer. The launch market is already saturated. What we need are actual applications for space other than comsats, not more/cheaper launchers.

It's a plane. It can only go up to 60000ft max. It has nothing to do with space.

Not sure why anyone would thing link this to space tourism. If that was the case, then Concorde would have been a spaceship.

Not "any decent airport". You need an airport that can handle an oversize aircraft (many airports had to do major changes to support the overhang of the A380 because of the risk of ingesting grass and dirt in the engines). This is an even bigger challenge for something as wide as Stratolaunch. Also, you need an airport that can handle LOX loading and whatever your rocket runs on. This includes safety perimeters around the rocket at all times for loading, takeoff, and contingency landing (you probably need a system to dump fuel safely in case of a scrub). You need an airport that has payload integration facilities, which means a large cleanroom facility with provisions for hypergolic fuel storage and handling. So basically, once you add in the installations that need to be specially built or modified, you end up with a very limited number of airports.

You can be pretty sure that US and Soviet Union didn't wait for an actual capture event to start fitting anti-tampering devices on their military sats.

Like most innovative launch proposals, this one is shot down by economics more than by technology. With air launch, your aircraft is basically a very expensive and very low performance first stage: a first stage that only gets you to a low Mach number at a relatively low altitude. Most first stages get the rocket to something around Mach 10 at 70-100km altitude. So the air launch saves you maybe 10% in the size of your rocket. Your aircraft also has to be pretty much a one-off design, which means that instead of spreading development and tooling costs over a large production run, you only get to build 1 or 2 aircraft. Each one gets expensive to operate and maintain, because spare parts are difficult to source, and with for example one or two launches per month (which is highly optimistic), it still spends most of its time in its super-huge custom built hangar waiting for rockets and payloads to be built. Add in the lack of flexibility (very few airports will be equipped to fuel rockets and land such a large aircraft), failure modes (landing a fully fueled rocket after a scrub for example), and the increased weight of a rocket that can withstand vertical and horizontal structural loads, and it quickly appears that it's not worth the risk or complexity. In the end, it simply makes sense to do away with the air launch, and just build a rocket that's 10% bigger. And yes, I know, Paul Allen doesn't agree with me.

If you were in range of aircraft, then you might as well drop paratroopers from an aircraft. The whole idea was based on "global strike", which means that you are dropping on another continent, far away from any air support. In practice, there aren't any conflicts where this sort of capability is useful. It would take several days to prepare and launch a mission involving these vehicles, which is more than it would take to send troops to a nearby base in conventional aircraft. US military doctrine leaned towards establishing bases in foreign countries and its carrier doctrine. Yes, and look how well that worked for the Germans. Not. It was the height of the cold war. Both the US and Russia could detect ICBM launches, which is basically what this is. Which is why the military rarely deploys its most advanced weaponry in real world theaters.

It was a silly idea, which is why the military never showed any interest. First of all, dumping 100 marines in hostile territory without a logistics supply chain to relieve and rotate them is suicide. If you have a logistics chain, then you don't need a suborbital lander sent from the other side of the world. Secondly, it ignores extraction. How does it take off again ? How do you evacuate it from the battlefield? And how do you get your troops back ? Tu ensure extraction, you are going to have to land at a friendly airbase where you can send large aircraft, so why not fly in your troops in large aircraft in the first place? Thirdly, there is zero stealth. A reentry vehicle like this is going to come in hot and show up on every radar. It has practically no manoeuverability, so it is very easy to intercept. Finally, you are exposing a super high-tech SSTO rocket to the possibility of being captured by the enemy, so the cost of losing one is also too great.

There are very few totally secret launches. Most US military launches are openly identified as SIGINT, communication, recon satellites or experimental flights like the X-37B missions. From the moment of their launch, military satellite orbits are public knowledge and can be followed on sites such as http://www.heavens-above.com/. This includes any changes of orbital parameters. Pretty much every military or paramilitary organisation knows when a spysat is going to fly over.

Says you, who has visibly zero understanding of those sciences. The knowledge gathered by social sciences is still valuable and has real world applications or simply advances our understanding of the world we live in. Congress decides where the money goes. If NASA stopped doing Earth observation, the money would not be freed up for NASA. It would simply not be allocated to NASA. It might end up going to NOAA, NSF, DoD, or it might not be spent at all. The same is true for SLS by the way. If SLS is cancelled, NASA doesn't automatically get to spend the SLS budget on other stuff. The SLS money doesn't get spent, period. Oh yeah. Where do you think those 2 BILLION $ end up being spent ? Who builds the spacecraft that NASA designs ? Private institutions can only work if someone is paying them. Whether that someone is NASA, NOAA, NSF, or DoD doesn't change much. Sounds like how the Soviet Union spent money too. Some could argue that won't help up much, since we aren't going there any time soon. I would love it if ESA got more money personally. I also think that research in general should get more money. Spending money on research isn't just altruism. It's a demonstration of soft power, which increases political and economical influence. Keeping the edge in technology helps the economy and And I agree that the EU is becoming more and more irrelevant in technology, because it isn't spending enough on research. The result is a high level of brain drain and strategic technology is being bought up by foreign companies (See Alcatel, Alsthom, Nokia, Siemens, Bayer, and so on...) or being given away as part of trade deals (Airbus or Dassault). ESA is not the EU by the way, so its percentage of the UE GDP is irrelevant. Lucky you !