Nibb31

Is there a law that prohibits the government from wasting money ? Incidentally,in the US, the Congress makes the law, and also votes NASA's budget. I don't see them voting a law that makes their own decisions illegal. They wouldn't exist without government contracts, or they would just be making commercial airliners (which would be much less competittive without the subsidies from the military branches). There would be zero space industry without DoD and NASA money. But there isn't. The reality is that without NASA and DoD, wouldn't have developed Falcon 1, Falcon 9, or Dragon, and they would have had to develop a whole new engine from scratch. In fact, without the jump-start from government money and R&D, the whole SpaceX venture simply wouldn't have been possible. He knows something we don't? So where does he get that from? He has psychic powers? Alien informants? A time machine? You're just being silly here.

Private companies take risks, but only if there is some kind of reward. There is no return on investment in exploring the Moon, Mars, or anything else. There is no immediate return on investment in Hubble, Curiosity, or the ISS. None of that would exist if it wasn't for government money. SpaceX, Boeing, or Lockheed wouldn't exist without NASA or the DoD.

I think it's stupid to oppose the private sector and the government. The government runs a space program with a set of requirements. The public sector makes stuff to those requirements for the government.

$35000 is going to end up over 40000€ in Europe, which is way above the price of the average car. An "average" car would be something like a VW Golf at €25000. The Tesla will be competing against the BMW I3 (43000€) and the Renault Zoe (20000€) I always thought that the "range extender" architecture was the best, like the Chevy Volt/Open Ampera. You run on batteries for your daily commutes, which is 90% of the time, and use an petrol/gas engine to top up on longer journeys. Because the conventional engine is optimized to run at a unique rpm, it's much more efficient. It's a shame that car was such a flop. Renault has a great business model for its Zoe too: You buy the car and you rent the batteries on a monthly basis. The cost of the car is similar to an equivalent Renault Clio, and battery rental (around 100€/month) + electrical charge is still way below the average monthly fuel bill (mine anyway). Because the batteries are rented, you get them replaced for free when they start losing their charge. The car has great performance too, it's a shame it's so damn ugly.

We should be aiming for achievable goals, stuff that we know we can do, now. We need to be concentrating on real accomplishments, not fantasy that is centuries away. Getting things done, making them routine, building infrastructure and industrial capability are more important than premature pipe dreams about Mars or Venus colonies. At best, a manned Mars landing is 20 years away. Self-sustaining colonies are hopelessly delusional. And space exploration will be done through government space agencies because there is simply no business model that supports doing it through private investment. I believe that Commercial Crew is much more important than NASA's stupid "#JourneyToMars" mantra. I believe that we should concentrate on accessing the Moon and building a sustainable research outpost there. We've got to learn to walk across the street before we can climb Mt Everest.

Boeing is a publically traded multinational corporation. Like most big companies, they only move after they have everything covered economically and legally. Why does it take Boeing so long to design an airliner? Probably because they get it right the first time. They have everything modelled and tested, suppliers selected, parts certified, logistics planned, factories laid out years before the first prototype rolls out. You don't see them crashing 2 or 3 planes during test campaigns, using off the shelf parts that aren't aerospace certified, nor do they start building them without enough preorders to make a profit. One could argue that Boeing has the power to start up projects that SpaceX cannot do either.

Hey, being realistic is just understanding how the world around you actually works. Sorry if it sounds pessimistic, but you won't change anything by ignoring politics, economics and society. If you want to go to Mars this century, then you need to find a compelling reason for society to divert the R&D and resources to that goal instead of other stuff. Wishful thinking won't be enough.

Because NASA's funding is controlled by Congress, they only get to spend money where Congress tells them to spend it. And for Congressmen, NASA's sole purpose is to spend government money in the districts where they are elected. Any other goal (exploration, science, propaganda...) is secondary. NASA doesn't do cheap, because that's not what it is for. Anyone who thinks that NASA will always choose the single cheapest solution misunderstands NASA's purpose. If NASA wanted cheap, then any of the usual contractors (including Boeing or Lockheed) could do cheap. Cheap just isn't part of NASA's requirements. I'm also with Tyson here, there is no commercial space program without someone footing the bill. Musk alone can't do it alone, he's not that rich, he only has billions. The effort would have to be paid for either by the government or private customers. The government can't and won't write a check to SpaceX, because that's not how it works (fortunately) and there are no private customers that fit any credible business model.

It's actually much thicker and heavier, with more material to stop the MMOD from penetrating.

There are 3 (soon 4) different types of ports on the ISS. - CBM (Common Berthing Mechanism). These connect the US modules ( and the ESA and JAXA modules) together. They cannot be used for docking but require berthing, with a robotic arm. They are wider and allow standard ISPR rack modules to go through. The US modules use this, and so do some cargo vehicles: Dragon, HTV. It cannot be used by crew vehicles because they couldn't undock autonomously in an emergency. - Probe and drogue: This is the Russian docking system for Progress, Soyuz, ATV. It's only on the Russian side and allows to refuel Zarya, which is the service module of the station. - APAS: This was a Russian docking system, but was used for the Shuttles (the Shuttles had APAS docking ports installed for the Shuttle-Mir program). The advantage of APAS is that it is androgynous. I think APAS also connects some Russian modules together too. - NDS: NASA docking system, this is based on an international standard and is to replace APAS. New commercial crew vehicles (and some cargo vehicles) will use this. There are two adapters that are to be delivered by Dragon to the station to go on top of the two APAS ports on the US side. One was destroyed in the CRS-7 explosion. And all the reasons for disposing of old cargo vehicles are correct: - To dispose of waste (you can't just open an airlock and chuck out the waste) - Because the vehicles have a shelf life - Because they aren't suitable for habitation. They lack air recirculation, life support, climate control, etc...

Once they get confident enough in the booster and its RTLS capability, they could probably do away with the separation and try to land with capsule attached. That would simplify operations greatly. It would probably be safe to keep the chutes and abort system though, just in case.

It's been done before. Bigelow launched two subscale demonstrators, Genesis I and II, in 2006 and 2007. They are both still up there.

What sort of emergency would see an unshielded vehicle doing an uncontrolled reentry where it made any difference if it disintegrates at Mach 20 or Mach 18 ? There is no way you would aerobrake an unprotected orbital module in any kind of survivable manner. Seriously, what type of crazy scenario would this be useful ? For the same reason, Boeing or Airbus don't do simulations or train airliner crew to recover from stall situations, because they assume that an airliner should never get that far into a failure, and that if it does, everything has failed so terribly that it won't be recoverable anyway. What software ? Nobody does simulations about the reentry disposal. The crude data is more than enough to know that everything is pretty much destroyed. Even large parts that aren't vaporized will never be reusable. It's typically a chaotic situation that doesn't require modelling.

We don't do assumptions on how a vehicle survives when it's outside of its safety envelope. The whole point of vehicle design is to ensure that the vehicle remains safe and controllable. Once it's on a deorbit trajectory, it's going to burn up whatever you do. Why would engineers waste precious time calculating reentry simulations for stuff that is destroyed?

First of all, SSTO does not equal spaceplane. You could have pretty much any combination single-stage/multi-stage, vertical take-off/horizontal take-off, reusable/expendable launcher. SSTOs are always less efficient in terms of payload fraction than a multi-stage vehicle, because physics. The Saturn V first stage or the Titan first stage could have been SSTO, but the payload fraction would have been so tiny that it would have been pointless. Musk says that the F9 first stage could fly to orbit too if you removed the upper stage and payload. But what good would that be? If you have a small payload, then it's much cheaper to simply build a smaller multi-stage rocket than a huge single stage one. A multiple stage Falcon 9 weighs around 500mt for a 10mt payload. An equivalent SSTO would have to weigh something like SLS, but that doesn't factor in the extra hardware for getting it back, which would likely weigh more than 10mt. So to be of any use, an SSTO needs to be as big as possible. SSTOs suck. The best setup will be a magical engine. SABRE is supposed to work on paper, but the economics behind it don't pan out and none of it is proven to work. It still has to be enormous (bigger than an A380) just to carry a 7mt payload to LEO. Probably vertical takeoff. Wings are useless in space and dead weight that eat into your payload fraction. Your SLS sized SSTO with 10 mt of payload wouldn't even reach orbit if you added wings, TPS, hydraulics, and landing gear to it. SABRE is SABRE. There is only one SABRE design. None. Wings are useless in space. An SSTO with wings Nobody knows because hasn't ever made sense to launch one. They simply are not practical. What SSTO ? Maybe one that is several hundred times the size of an A380. Good luck building a hangar to park it.

...is not worth the expense. Astronauts have better things to do. If you want entertainment, ask Hollywood. Luckily for astronauts, that is not how human-rated space missions work. Hardware is certified for a specific set of requirements. When you exceed those requirements, bad stuff happens (see Challenger, or closer to us, CRS-7). You don't want to have a toxic leak, a major power failure, or a module depressurize with a crew on board.

We have experience soft-landing on hard surfaces since Mars 3 in 1971, then Viking 1 and 2. There have also been Phoenix and MSL, and in the future Insight (if it ever flies) and Schiaparelli (the Exomars lander). We also have experience soft-landing on the Moon, and on Earth. There is no reason why we couldn't soft-land a larger vehicle. On the other hand, deploying sustaining balloons from a hypersonic reentry vehicle isn't something that we any experience with.

You're confusing PR and propaganda/soft power. Either way, a spending millions to rig GoPro cameras to a dead ISS just to post a YouTube video does nothing to for either PR, propaganda or science. It's pointless, not "cool". Not when the reason it's turned off is because it's reached the end of its shelf life. Once that happens, it just becomes a hazard. The solar arrays are not stowable (the folding mechanism was designed to unfold, not fold back) but even if they were, they will have degraded to the point where they will no longer be useful. Many parts are not designed to be serviceable, and many of those that are require an EVA and special equipment to do so. EVAs are expensive and require specific procedures and training. I understand how emotionally attached we can be to our grandparents, but when a family member passes, we dispose of them through cremation or burial, because it's just not healthy to keep them around. Keeping a dead station loitering in LEO is just a hazard. You'll get plenty of nice footage from telescopes. NASA is not in the entertainment business.

I don't think it does have an active abort system at all. Maybe the landing rockets can be used to abort, but then you'd be in for a hard landing.

Landing legs and wheels are not animated, or am I missing something ?

Your 2016 prediction is not realistic. Orion will not be cancelled at this point and Dragon will not be converted to a deep space mission (why bother, when you have Orion as a deep space vehicle). DreamChaser will not selected for Commercial Crew, that boat has sailed.

The guy has a militiary space background and currently runs an airline. Maybe he wants to pull a Branson and diversify into the commercial launch business. He still needs a rocket though...

The scientific consensus is that positive feedback loops are in action and that a runaway effect has started. The effects of rising sea levels will incur huges costs which are not manageable in the near term. It's also due to pollution. And overpopulation only makes that lack of infrastructure worse. I'm not claiming that overpopulation is solely an environmental issue. The "pie" analogy is primarily an economical issue. Constant growth in a finite world is impossible, and our governments who keep on striving for growth are delusional. There comes a point where the only possible growth is at the expense of others. The only possible path is in sustainability, not constant growth. The problem is that to sustain an economy without growth while the population grows, you need to share the wealth more equally, which requires that the richest give up some of their wealth (which is why there is so much resistance against global thinking in the US, while the rest of the world is pretty much in a consensus). It's a situation that can only lead to tensions between rich (who legitimately want to preserve their lifestyle) and poor countries (who legitimately want a piece of the pie). The symptoms of those tensions will be massive migrations and wars, which incidentally is what we are seeing today... I really can't understand how you can disagree that our civilization makes a huge impact on biodiversity. It's an undeniable fact. Although extinction is a natural phenomenon, it is happening at a rate of several thousand times the natural extinction rate, and those extinctions that we do record are primarily due to human activity. http://www.biologicaldiversity.org/programs/biodiversity/elements_of_biodiversity/extinction_crisis/ Increasing the surface of mining zones only makes the biodiversity problem worse. One could argue that the last agricultural revolution was due to pesticides and weed killers, which has pretty much ruined farmland. The increase in productivity is only due to artificial fertilization, but if you look at any modern farmland these days in Europe or the US, it's mostly just sterile substrate. Without chemical fertilization, nothing would grow on it naturally. Again, hoping that a 4th industrial revolution will come along and save the day is wishful thinking. We can't simply rely on hope that technology will save us, because the productivity increase is bound to plateau too. And when we are already overpopulated and overexpending resources, expecting population growth to slow down is simply not enough. Yummy! Sounds like a great future. I'd rather we have less children and grand children, but allow them to live in better conditions, than have to rely on synthetic protein sources and rationing just so that 10 billion people can barely survive on the planet.

Apparently it was sold to a certain Vladislav Filev, owner of the S7 airline in Russia for "billions of rubles" (but with a ruble at 0.015 dollars, that doesn't mean much). http://www.kommersant.ru/doc/2951522

PR has never been the main reason for sending people to space. It might have been a corollary, or it might have been a side-effect of demonstrating soft-power. We already know a lot about reentry, and there really isn't much point in learning how a decaying object breaks up because it's going to break up anyway. We already know how stuff burns up. What do you think the applications of such knowledge would be? Designing future space stations so that they burn up prettily ? How exactly does a video of a space station burning up convince congress to give NASA more money ? If anything, the reactions from the general public will be akin to this thread: NASA is wasting taxpayer money by letting it burn up. No. Real life is very little like KSP. Funds are not proportional to reputation and science isn't counted in points. No it wouldn't. You can't disassemble the ISS. Disassembly is the reverse of assembly. It would require just as much work to disassemble it as it took to assemble it, including a lot of EVAs, training and writing procedures, studies, etc... If the ISS is decommissioned, it's precisely because the solar panels will no longer be producing power, the radiators will be all leaky and the habirable volume will be obsolete. And it would cost a large portion of that to deconstruct it.