Nibb31

Still irrelevant to SLS/Orion.

The lifetime of a species is on a totally different scale to the lifetime of a star. You're talking about billions of years when our civilization has only been around a few thousands of years. I don't get what the relevance to Orion is at this scale.

I wonder what data that claim was based on.

Unfortunately, that's not up to you to decide. The telephone company probably won't agree with your interpretation and they have more lawyers. When (not if) your company kills someone, you will be liable. If you are Google or Tesla, then you have deep enough pockets to settle the litigation. If you are a small company, you will be sued out of existence. In fact, it's up to the FAA to set up a whole new regulatory system for your system, like they are doing with drones. This will take ages and some of the decisions made are likely to make your idea impossible. That certainly never was NASA's motto. Adding redundancy only adds weight and costs. You need to design the redundancy into the system. An aircraft can simply glide to safety, even if all power fails, the pilot has time to react. A power failure on a quadcopter means you're dead. Adding manual controls and parachutes that are never going to be needed are only going to increase weight and cost. That changes the game completely. In this case, you are no longer operating as a taxi cab service (which is what I presumed was your first idea). People will not want to pay to pass a manual-flight license that they will only need in case the software crashes. That is not going to give them much confidence in your system. No because collision rules mean that there must always be much more distance between two flying aircraft than between two cars. A 200m distance between two aircraft is considered a near-collision in aviation safety. In urban areas, if enough of your quadcopters are around, you are going to have trouble keeping the minimum distance.

Check your display resolution.

Z80s are out of production and obsolete (it could only address 64KB of RAM anyway, so 2MB would be useless). There is very little to gain in terms of cost by using obsolete specs. Nobody makes Z80 CPUs or 64KB RAM chips any more because modern ARM processors or DDRx RAM chips are so much cheaper to produce in larger volumes and so much more capable. You couldn't produce a Z80 today for less than a cheap ARM processor. Your claim is like saying that VW could sell old Beetles for cheaper than a modern Golf, or that we could revive the old Atlas II as a cheap orbital booster to compete against Ariane, which are both impossible. Now, come to think of it, there are such things as $10 mobile phones. They typically have something like a 240x160 color screen, a physical numeric keypad, an email client, 3G, and maybe even a minimalistic web browser. Doesn't that fit your bill ?

As we already told you, 3D printing is super expensive. PCBs are cheap to manufacture, but expensive to design, and components are expensive. Look at how the Raspberry Pi Zero was designed precisely to fit under $5 by minimizing components and bulk purchasing. It pretty much reaches the limits in terms of what can be done for $5.

I know plenty of Americans who define themselves as Italian or Irish although they have never set foot in those countries.

3D printing is way more expensive than conventional plastic moulding. It's only useful for prototyping or very small production runs. You won't get even a monochrome LCD for under $10. In fact, given production volumes and economies of scale, I'm pretty sure that a touch sensitive LED matrix is going to be cheaper. You also need to factor in the cost of software. A tight RAM allowance means that software needs to be optimized, maybe even written in assembler, which is going to cost more than using a widespread language like Java or C++ running on an operating system that already provides all the basic services that you need.

Incidentally, a Raspberry Pi Zero costs $5 and is perfectly capable of browsing the internet and running a GUI. Granted, it still needs a screen, keyboard, mouse, power supply, micro SD and a USB hub, but it's a start.

Production was stopped after 14 production aircraft were built between 1975 and 1978. They received upgrades over their lives, but not the sort of redesign updates that you would get between different generations of 747s or 737s. A 747 built in 2016 is a very different aircraft than the original 747 from 1969. The Concorde airframes that were still flying in 2003 were the original ones built in the 1970s. Most of the 747s from the same era have also been retired, but if you were to visit one, it would not have the latest engines and avionics.

The latest ones had their interiors refurbished in the late 90 early 2000 by couture designers. It's size was driven by it being as a successor to the Comet or the Caravelle (the French design was originally called the Caravelle II), which were commercially successful aircraft. When comparing with modern aircraft, remember these aircraft were from the same era as the 707 or the DC10. The cockpit is all analog gauges and switches and the flight controls are all mechanical. It used mechanical fuel pumps to move the CoG around depending on the flight regime. Being unimpressed by Concorde is a bit like feeling unimpressed by the Apollo CM when compared to Orion or CST100. It was really a huge accomplishment to make such a complex aircraft with only slide rules and wooden templates and hardly any electronics in sight.

Bone loss can be fought with medication, including some of the same molecules that are used on earth against osteoporosis. Muscular atrophy and cardiovascular problems can be fought be exercise. The most troublesome issue at this point are the optical nerve and ocular issues. There might be pharmacological remedies against those symptoms too, but they have yet to be experimented on the ISS. If we have to wait until we have developed and tested orbital centrifuges, then nobody is going to Mars for the next 30 years.

That picture is a recreation. There are pics of both spacecraft taken from each other, but no pictures of them docked together from the outside, for obvious reasons.

There's already a thread on it.

Nope. That's why CRS vehicles are primarily required to be berthed to the CBM ports.

Yes, and the more people get to live and work in space, and the more diverse the vehicles get, then the more contingency modes are necessary.

An androgynous system is much safer in that it provides more contingency modes. If your station is limited to one probe and one drogue, and for some reason the one you intend to use becomes unusable, then you're not going to dock. Also, imagine a reusable Moon lander that docks to a permanent station. For some reason, it gets stranded and can't reach the station, you might need to be able to send another vehicle to rescue the crew. There are similar rescue requirements in a scenario where a vehicle's heatshield is damaged, or its reentry engines malfunctioned, and you need to send another craft to rescue the crew. There are plenty of situations where an androgynous system is more flexible, including station building.

Obviously nothing to be concerned about. Why are you reviving it ?

It was an extremely dangerous situation. The Mercury-Redstone had actually lifted off and fell back to the ground, fully fueled, and could have toppled over at any time. If an astronaut had been on board, he would have no way to escape.

No, APAS is the old Russian androgynous docking system that was originally designed for Mir, but isn't used any more. The Shuttle fleet was equipped with APAS for the Shuttle-Mir program, so this was carried over to the US section the ISS. It is now being replaced with IDS. IDSS (International Docking System Standard) is supposed to be the new international standard for docking ports is, which has many implementations (iLIDS, NDS, IDA, SIMAC, IBDM, etc...). IDS is supposed to replace all current docking systems in order to provide interoperability between countries, which should allow cooperation and more flexibility for contingency modes. The standard also includes fluid transfer and data connections, although those are not always implemented. It will equip Orion, Dragon, CST-100, and the IDA adapters that are going to be attached to the existing APAS docking ports on the ISS. IDA-1 was destroyed in the CRS-7 accident. As with all standards, it has to fight against the existing standards. Although they agreed to the standard, the Russians aren't too keen on implementing it. Their vehicles still use the old "drogue and probe" from the old days. Drogue and probe equips all their ISS components, so why change something that works? It is thought that China uses a proprietary system derived from APAS, which may or may not be compatible with the Russian

The weightlessness you feel in an aircraft has nothing to do with drag. It's basically the same phenomenon as when you drive over a speed bump.

NASA retired the last airworthy SR-71 in 1999. All USAF/NASA/CIA airframes have been retired to museums. There might be a couple left mothballed in a USAF hangar somewhere, but it would cost a lot to return them to flightworthiness. Certainly not worth expense.

Did you try just deleting the .au from the URL ?

The efficiency of the photovoltaic cells, which is probably pretty much invisible from the outside. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soyuz_MS#Soyuz_MS_Improvements On the outside, I think the main difference is that it has 3 less antennas for the docking system and it has a square box on the service module for the satellite communications, as shown in the first post in this thread.