Nibb31

Sure, but what's the point of going all the way to Mars, in at least 3 or 4 SLS launches (4 years of SLS manifest to launch a single 6 mission), if you don't event land on the surface, when you could actually do a landing in 5 SLS launches. Sure. But wouldn't you want to test the same hardware that you would use for a landing rather than a totally different design? Not really. You don't need a manned orbital lab to store fuel for the way back. This is again, one of those great fallacies of space exploration that sounds good on paper, but isn't worth it in practice. How long would the manned expedition be? 6 months ? So you would be sending this rover all the way to Mars for just a 6 month mission? Or does it have to be a dual-mode rover than can also run in autonomous mode? In that case what's the point of putting a human operator in the loop for only a small part of the mission? And who gets to decide where the rover goes what are the targets that need to be studied? Are you sure the operator in the orbital station will make better decisions than the team of 30 scientists who run MSL? Or do you expect the orbital operator to report back and await instructions from mission control on Earth? In that case what is the benefit of the orbital operator? You will cut some of that 7 minute latency, but not all of it, because you will always be waiting for feedback from mission control, and your orbital operators will also have their own sleep/eat/rest schedules. In practice, we already have self-driving cars. Autonomous rovers don't run themselves into ravines. An orbital remote control wouldn't have saved Beagle 2 or Spirit. You have a team of scientists that operate the rover. They discuss the objectives, simulate every move, send a bunch of commands and wait for the response. In practice, this isn't a problem because time isn't limited and it allows input from more people. With an orbital operator, you are going to be under pressure to get a max of science before the return date and that person is going to carry the weight of all the decision making. But you'll need 80% that budget to send an orbital mission in the first place. You might as well go the full monty for a landing.

Landing what? There is no lander. It's an orbital outpost. If you're landing on Mars, you don't need an orbital outpost. Yeah. They don't plan on landing on Phobos or Deimos either. The picture only talks about "exploring" them with an Orion, which means flyby. It looks like a concept banged together by an intern, or a graphic artist. As an actual concept from one of the biggest aerospace companies, it's amazingly poor.

Yeah, Lockheed Martin trying to pitch a Mars orbital space station to dumb Congress members. The idea is silly. Why go all the way to Mars and just stay in orbit? Why do the solar panels talk about SEP and then the whole thing has LOX/LH2 tanks? Why put a docking module on top where the solar panels are going to interfere? Why bring two Orions all the way to Mars and back ?

No because Kerbal solar system is much smaller, distances are smaller, travel times are shorter, everything is in the same plane, dV amounts are much smaller and dV is cheap. In KSP, most rockets have excess dV. In real-life, the margins are much thinner. The distances are much greater so aiming is more difficult. It takes 9000m/s of dV to reach orbit and squeezing that much dV out of a rocket requires some serious optimization. You can't just strap more boosters to a rocket like in KSP or make a bigger rocket because there are physical limits.

I'm not 100% what the OP means with the question. After all, there are plenty of space programs in real life. I think what he meant to ask about was the possibility to build rockets like Lego with interchangeable parts. Well, in some cases, it is possible (for example, rockets can be assembled in various configurations, and some stages can be used on different rockets, and some payloads are launcher-agnostic), but in most cases, components are built for a specific task. In real life, margins are tight, so every single part must be highly optimized for a specific application.

No images at all ? Not even stills ?

Form follows function. You need to know the purpose of a tool before you design the tool. Size has nothing to do with mass. Density does. A truss doesn't have to weigh much, neither do solar panels. If you want a spinning structure, then the larger it is the better, to minimize rpm and Coriolis side-effects. If you have a nuclear reactor, then you want to put it far away from the crew, which dictates a long ship. If you are talking near-future, then you are going to need orbital assembly. You haven't even stated if you want your spacecraft to go to LEO, the Moon, to Mars, to Pluto or go all the way to interstellar destinations with a full-on magical warp drive. You haven't said if you wanted a lander on it, how many people you want to transport or what kind of propulsion it has. You just want it to look cool, so go ahead and do what you want. But you're not listing any requirements for your design, other than "I must like the way it looks", which is subjective and not a decent way to design anything. If you don't want a realistic design, then take the discussion to The Lounge, because this forum is supposed to be about science and real spaceflight.

Hey, if it's just science fiction, then your thread shouldn't even be in the "Science and Spaceflight" forum. You obviously don't want any input about real science and real spaceflight, so just go ahead and make up whatever you want.

A ring-based centrifuge makes no sense, as explained above. Any imbalance in the ring will induce vibrations. The joints are going to be problematic. The whole thing is much more complicated than it needs to be. The simplest design for centrifugal artificial gravity is going to have the whole ship rotate, like a tethered design or a rotating spine like the "original" Hermes as posted above (that is a rotating design where the CoG is where the ION thrusters are). So, if you want a ring-shaped spaceship, then go and design one, but don't go around claiming that it has a realistic design. Yes, because it's the easiest way to build a spaceship. Who cares about the smallest area? Space is freaking big !

So what is it about? aesthetics? If that's all that matters, then why bother asking for something realistic? If this is just for some science fiction fantasy, then you can just pick an empirical shape and then try to fit whatever technobabble you need to justify the shape, like for the Endurance or the USS Enterprise. If on the other hand you want something semi-realistic, then give an outline of the requirements. Where is this vehicle supposed to go? What does it do? How many people does it carry? For how long? How is it built? And most importantly, what makes it move? The long spindly design makes a lot of sense, especially in designs with nuclear propulsion. You want to have the crew compartment as far as possible. Any "near future" spacecraft is likely to be assembled in orbit by shipping up modules, which are going to be designed to fit inside a cylindrical fairing or payload bay and docked together by some sort of tug.

What nope ? When designing something, form should follow fonction. Start by defining requirements. This should give you a good idea of the components your vehicle will need to contain. Then you can come up with an architecture, and finally a layout.

Once you add a fairing and a spacecraft adapter, there wouldn't be much left out of those 2 tons. And you'll be throwing away a whole first stage with 9 Merlins.

No, that wouldn't even be remotely possible. The Antonov was for transporting the orbiter, just like NASA's 747 SCA.

There is no doubt that both Russia and the US have sat inspection and killer spacecraft (probably China too). However, a spaceplane is a stupid design for a sat killer. The hazmat suits are because of the hydrazine fumes. You really don't want to breath that stuff. Shuttle ground crews wore them too for post-landing operations. Even Apollo recovery crews and astronauts wore respirating gear around the capsule after splashdown.

Lots of things. Microgravity manufacturing, stealth satellite coatings, optics, transmission technologies, orbital manoeuvering techniques, long duration exposure (vacuum chambers don't run for several years while bombarding with various electromagnetic sources). If you're going to launch something, then launch it. Bringing it back only means that you have to make it more complicated, expensive, and probably smaller, than it has to be. For a surveillance mission, this makes no sense. If you want an orbital surveillance platform, then instead of bring it back on the X-37B, save money and put it on a smaller rocket with a standard satellite bus. Or launch it on an Atlas V with enough fuel to stay up there for 20 years. Both options will cost much less than using the X-37B. It's on its 4th mission now since 2010, so the vehicle itself is proven. The previous mission actually spent nearly two years in space. I wouldn't be surprised if this one stayed up there for three years.

Not if the materials and technologies that you are testing only work in microgravity or if you want to see how they fare over longer timeframes.

Why would they spend millions of dollars to bring back a surveillance satellite after only a year in space? The only reason to bring stuff back is if you are testing it and you want to see what it looks like when it comes back, which means that it is not performing any kind of operational mission at all. If it was carrying surveillance hardware, it would be cheaper to just launch a handful of surveillance sats with the same hardware and use them for several years until they die. It spends a year in space, so it most certainly has deployable solar panels. But why would they spend millions of dollars to learn how a nuclear weapon degrades after spending a year in space when it makes no sense to put nuclear warheads in space in the first place?

No you didn't. I said it was probably for testing materials and technology. You said it was for testing "nuke" (whatever that means), which is a subset of testing materials and technology. So we are saying the same thing. One isn't "more military" than another. What I'm saying is that it makes no sense to test exposure of fissile material (if that's what you mean by "nuke"). That doesn't mean that the technologies that are being tested aren't of a military nature. Orbital bombardment was an idea in the 60's that makes zero-sense today for a whole lot of reasons. Most nuclear powers now have SSBN forces prepositioned all over the globe, which provide autonomous global strike capability. This is cheaper, stealthier, quicker, and safer than an orbital platform. The USAF also has strategic bombers and land-based ICBMs which also provide global strike capability. To strike from orbit, you have to wait until your orbital platform is properly positioned over the target. Depending on the inclination and period of the orbit, you might have to wait several hours or even days before you can launch the strike. There is no stealth in orbit. Amateur astronomers can track most military satellites. Foreign intelligence agencies know exactly where your satellites are. Any foreign power with nuclear capability will take out your orbital bombardment sat preemptively or plan its first strike when your orbital platform is in its less favorable orbit. Any warhead coming in from orbit will reenter faster and hotter and for a longer time than an ICBM, making it much easier to intercept. Orbital weapon platforms are against international law. So no, there is no reason to test the exposure of nuclear weapons in orbit, since there is no reason to deploy them to orbit in the first place. Even if the purpose was to test material or technologies for a nuclear weapon, an inert device would be perfectly good enough for testing, since any fissile material would be buried deep inside the warhead and would never be exposed to space in the first place. Who's talking about aluminum racks? Military grade material can cover transmission technologies, antennas, transmission, optics, stealth materials, reflectors, propulsion, etc... They could even be growing cristals or making superconductors for some unrelated ground-based applications.

Because what? You're not making any sense. If the X-37B is for studying materials, then it could potentially be any material that has a military application. However, there is no need to put nuclear warheads in orbit because other methods of prepositioning them are safer, cheaper, and allow faster delivery. Even if this was a plan, you would only be testing exposure of the confinement vessel or shielding in space. There would be no need to test the exposure of fissile material. Because research on the ISS is public and open to international scrutiny, whereas X-37B is a USAF program. Any top secret material that you want to study on the ISS has to be manifested and can be observed by the international partners.

Didn't I mention material testing ? I don't see why you would want to expose a nuclear warhead to space for a year, though. Orbit is pretty much the worse place to preposition nuclear warheads.

It is most likely for material production or endurance testing. It's for sending stuff to space, testing it, and getting it back to study how it fared. Stuff can include any sort of material, propulsion, electronic, optical, or transmission equipment, etc... Most likely for use in future military space applications. No other military mission profile makes any sense.

You're right I forgot about ASSET.

Congratulations! You have just invented the capsule!

You said we should prevent companies from making phones, TVs and iPads, or that we have to stop people from buying them. Same thing. Then you say that people should be free to do whatever they want. Which is it? Is preventing kids from smoking "punishment"? Punishment is childish. It doesn't solve any problems and it doesn't achieve anything. Nobody here is talking about punishment, except you. We are talking about not repeating the same mistakes twice. Once you realize that banging your head against the wall hurts, then the clever thing to do is to stop doing it. We are talking about building the foundations for a sustainable economy, not one that is reliant on finite resources that are running out and is causing pollution that the whole world suffers from. If you want to get rich countries to pay, that is what we have been saying all along. Rich countries should be helping poor countries to develop a sustainable economy based on sustainable energy. You are preaching one thing. You want to "educate" people so that they align with your warped vision of the world. How is that any different? BTW, this is the third time you Godwin this thread. Do you really want to have it locked ?

I really wish you would drop the ad-hominem attacks about slavery and totalitarism. Especially when you yourself are proposing authoritarian measures like deporting billions of people from cities into suburban gardens, banning technological devices, or allowing a a minority of countries to pollute the rest of the world. Because some countries made mistakes when they knew no better, which has caused one of the greated crises that humanity has faced, does it mean that we should allow other countries to make the same mistakes at the expense of the rest of the world? Cigarettes cause cancer. Old folks knew no better, but it's our duty to prevent kids fom smoking (especially when everyone suffer from passive smoking). It's not slavery. If anything, it's liberating people from slavery to the cigarette manufacturers.