Nibb31

Because Flash is obsolete, buggy, and proprietary. Nowadays we have HTML5. Even Adobe has stopped supporting it. The question should be, why do some web designers still insist on using that old piece of crap.

I doubt there is much IP in Sea Launch. The IP for Zenit still belongs to Yuzhnoye Design Bureau in Ukraine. There is no reason for Boeing to buy it. Also, Boeing is a publically traded corporation, which would have to disclose any acquisitions.

Actually, one could argue that it evolved into the Holy Roman Empire, which was dissolved in 1806 by Napoleon Bonaparte.

Hopefully. But if the Earth, as some claim, is already overpopulated by 30%, what we need is to increase productivity by 30% before the lack of resources becomes irreversible, which is a lot to hope for. Or we can just reduce our load on the planet by 30%, which means they either everyone gets a smaller piece of pie (with the richest people losing the most) or we reduce the number of people at the party. Yes, but the productivity increases come at a price: exhausting resources, increasing farmland at the expense of biodiversity, increasing use of pesticides, diminishing fertility of farmland, etc... We have only been using modern agriculture for the last 30 or 40 years, so we really don't have a good enough view on its consequences. No, I don't think it will cause the end of humanity. But there it will necessarily cause a major rebalance at some point, because imbalance is not sustainable in nature. Either we do nothing and wait for the rebalance to happen naturally (through famine, massive migrations, wars, and so on) or we do what we can to reduce the load ourselves by reducing our numbers peacefully (through contraception, education, and social incentives) in order to provide higher standards of living. What's the point of being 20 billion if we all have to be miserable, eating tofu and protein pills, when we could be 4 or 5 billion and have much more comfortable life with sustainable resources?

Still a waste of money.

Without any crisis? Seriously? Climate change, whether you agree that it is man-made or not, is a thing. 10% of the population doesn't have access to safe water. Farmland that was once fertile is now practically sterile due to the excessive use of weed killers and pesticides, which leads to excessive use of fertilizers. The imbalance between the richest and the poorest have never been higher. Bees are dying off. Forests are being cut down. Fishery resources are dwindling. We are in the middle of the sixth mass extinction event, with huge threats to biodiversity. All of those problems are related to industrialization and mass production that are required to feed a population that is already to large. Can you really claim there is no crisis? Yes, but the problem with relying on increases in efficiency just to survive is the law of diminishing returns. Up until the 1980 or 1990s, it was pretty easy to improve extraction and production methods because those low hanging fruit are easy to pick. The further you advance though, the harder it gets to wring out a few percent more. In the end, it takes more resources to produce a tiny gain. And as your resources degrade from overexploitation, things get even harder not easier. Hoping that the curve of technological efficiency always increases faster that population growth is a huge risk to take. Increases in efficiency are bound to plateau following a logarithmic curve, because physics whereas population has been growing on an exponential curve. We are already beyond the point where those two curves cross each other, so if population does not decrease, then we are screwed. And if the conditions of technological advancement become less favorable (budget cuts in scientific research or growth of religious influence in society), then we're also screwed. All of which require more resources and increase your global footprint instead of decreasing it.

Sea Launch has been sold, but the identity of the buyer hasn't been disclosed. Citing Boeing is pure speculation. The only assets of any value are the ship and the platform, both of which are obsolete and were specifically rigged for a rocket that doesn't exist anymore. The intellectual property of the Zenit launcher still belongs to Ukraine or Russia. If Boeing was interested in reviving the Sea Launch concept with Vulcan, it would probably be cheaper to go and buy a more recent oil platform and start from scratch. But I really don't think they are. They have no shortage of launch facilities that they can use. My opinion is that the assets were either sold to a ship company to be converted into some other maritime use, or to a scrapper.

Thanks for the clarification, Captain Obvious.

And what would be the purpose of spending millions of dollars to answer those questions? Once a spacecraft is deorbiting it's finished. It's not like there is any purpose in improving the survivability of reentering space station modules. I'd rather spend that money on developing new technology.

Even if growth stops, it doesn't mean that we aren't overpopulated and that overpopulation isn't a huge problem. With 7 billion people, we are already seriously overpopulated. Lookup the notion of ecological footprint. It currently takes 1.6 years to regenerate 1 year of our consumption of resources. In other words, for our current population to live sustainably, we actually need 1.6 times the planet Earth. The average world citizen has an eco-footprint of about 2.7 global average hectares while there are only 2.1 global hectares of bioproductive land and water per capita on earth. This means that humanity has already overshot global biocapacity by 30% and now lives unsustainabily by depleting stocks of "natural capital". And that is if we remain with the same ratio of rich and poor countries. You would need 9 global hectares to produce resources for an average American, whereas the populations of African countries only consume resources for less than 1 hectare. The average is around 2.7 hectares. As emerging countries increase their standard of living, the situation gets worse and the Earth's surface or resources aren't growing. So we not only need our population to stop growing, we actually need to decrease our numbers. If we don't find a way to do it peacefully ourselves (through education, contraceptives, and social incentives) then nature will rebalance like it always does, and it won't be pretty. In fact, overpopulation is the elephant in the room, and the root cause of all of our other ecological and economical problems. It's not difficult to understand, if you have a pie and you keep on inviting more people to the party, either everyone gets a smaller piece of the pie, or some get to stuff themselves while the others only get crumbs. The only reason why 1 billion people in the Western world gets to live comfortably is because the rest of humanity is only left with the crumbs. The Earth's resources are not extensible. If 8 billion humans all had the same standard as living as, for example, the population of the USA, the Earth's resources would be exhausted in a couple of years. People in the Western world do not want to give up their pie, and people in the rest of the world want more crumbs. Nature hates imbalance and something has to give somehow. Unlimited economic growth in a world where resources are finite, is simply not a sustainable model in the long term. The only way for all humanity to reach a decent standard of living is if there are less people sharing the pie.

You've got your facts wrong. The sudden "fall of the Roman Empire" caused by barbarian invasions is a myth. In reality, a multitude of political, social, and religious factors caused the influence of a central empire that covered most of Europe to be gradually replaced by local political entities. It also wasn't as much a "fall" as a political transformation that lasted several centuries.

How ? You'd need to develop a new Space Shuttle system (the old one is permanently gone). That would cost tens of billions of dollars. If you have that sort of money, they you might as well spend it on building a new ISS or exploring Mars. How do you send them into lunar orbit? And by the way, the whole point of retiring the ISS in 2024 is because those parts will be obsolete.

Evolution.

Hey, you're the one proposing a big "interstellar" reusable multi-purpose spaceship that runs on a magic propulsion system and carries a shuttle/lander craft. Whether you call it USS Enterprise, ISV Venture Star, Discovery, Endurance, or Battlestar Galactica, doesn't change the general concept. Neither of them are realistically possible in the foreseeable future.

A debate is going nowhere if you insist on using words because they sound cool instead using the proper terminology. Do you want interstellar travel or interplanetary travel? Which is it ? Look them up if you don't know what they mean, and then we can talk. Language is a communication protocol. Communication is only possible if we agree on using the same protocol, i.e. using the words that have the same meaning for everyone. If you don't agree on using the common protocol, we are not going to communicate. But they are. The Apollo CSM was a "mothership" (It wasn't a "one vehicle to do it all", Apollo was distinctly a series of specialized vehicles for each job). The MTV in the Mars DRM (look it up please) concept is a "mothership". This is another example where we are not communicating because you insist on using the wrong word "mothership" instead of something like "interplanetary transfer spacecraft". "Mothership" doesn't mean anything in engineering terms. A spacecraft is defined by its role. I get it. You want something like the USS Enterprise, which could be loosely defined as a "reusable manned exploration vehicle". So why doesn't NASA build the USS Enterprise ? Simply because the technological level that would allow a warp drive powered reusable spaceship does not exist. We are stuck with expendable spacecraft, even for going to the Moon or to Mars, because we still haven't found anything better than chemical propulsion and because throwing away stages is much more efficient than carrying the penalty of reusability. Besides, you are advocating using specialized vehicles (one for interplanetary transit, another for landing, etc...), which is pretty much mainstream since Apollo. Yet a multi-purpose exploration spacecraft actually goes against that idea. A spacecraft designed for visiting the asteroids would not have the same requirements as a vehicle designed for visiting Saturn's moons. Since the laws of physics reward staging architectures imply that you need an expendable design, it doesn't make sense to build a one-size-fits-all exploration vehicle. So unless you come up with some technological breakthrough that enables us to build the USS Enterprise, we are stuck in reality. And trust me, when you have the brightest minds spending their careers at NASA, Boeing, Airbus, SpaceX, ESA, JAXA, CNES, Roskosmos, etc. all working on optimising spaceflights for decades, the answer is very unlikely to emerge from a kid on an internet forum. Again, look it up. Google is your friend. Seriously, if you want to have a proper debate, you should have started there.

A Cygnus-based "station" would be too small to be of any use, and probably wouldn't need an SLS to launch anyway. Anything bigger would be a new spacecraft. US ISS modules are little more than tin cans. To be viable, they would need some sort of service module with propulsion, station-keeping, power generation, life support, etc... Basically a new spacecraft again. I doubt you could get either of those concepts ready in less than 10 years. And of course, that assumes that US Congress decides today that they want NASA to build them, which they don't seem to be ready to do.

I saw that presentation a while back. It seems to be dated january 2014, so it's hardly news. It's a cool PowerPoint presentation of what SLS could do if Congress granted NASA with the mission to do all that stuff. But they haven't, so NASA can't do it and all we have is PowerPoint presentations. It takes at least decade to design any large aerospace project, so even if Congress woke up tomorrow and gave NASA a mandate for a single one of those large payloads, it still wouldn't launch until at least the late 2020's. Until then, NASA has to maintain the infrastructure for launching a huge rocket without having anything to put on top of it, and the SLS, sitting around with no payload, will have to survive several election cycles without being cut, until a payload is actually ready to be launched.

My point was that convincing the public and the politicians is probably harder than solving the technological problems. Besides, the problems with nuclear-powered rockets are not just "perceived". Nuclear power is relatively safe because there are extreme safety barriers and procedures in place, which makes it very expensive. Anyone who thinks that operating an Orion-drive spacecraft would actually be affordable is delusional. Building an infrastructure for building and handling thousands of nuclear bomb pellets is not going to be cheap, and the risk of proliferation cannot be underestimated. There is no way you can safely launch it from the ground (atmospheric explosions are not healthy, however you look at it, and you can't afford to irradiate a billion dollar launch site every time you launch a new one), so you would need literally hundreds of HLV launches to assemble the vehicle in orbit. As for NERVA, yes, it was actually designed and tested, but it was eventually rejected for several reasons. It was supposed to be implemented as the S-N stage, to replace the S-IVB stage on a Saturn V. It would have offered twice the performance of the S-IVB, but for many times the cost. Not only was it politically unacceptable, it was also unnecessary and would have enormous costs to build new facilities and developing new procedures at the Cape for storing and handling nuclear fuel, alongside all the other highly hazardous material that is used there. Integrating a machine as complex as the Saturn V was one thing. Adding in the safety requirements for working on nuclear rockets makes everything orders of magnitude more complex. This has all been discussed to death. The idea goes back to a day when the USAF was seriously discussing nuking the Moon, when Ford was going to put a nuclear family sedan on the market, and when the USSR was using nukes to dig artificial lakes. It was a crazy period, when plenty of great ideas made the covers of Popular Science, but luckily for us all, most of the crazy ideas of the 60's (not just the nuclear stuff) were rejected for very good economical and political reasons. With those roadblocks, the question of whether nuclear rockets are possible technologically or not is moot, because it's a non-starter however you look at it.

I think that you're wrong. Many people here seem to think that the hard part is figuring out the technological solutions to a problem. That is simply not true. The laws of economics and the laws of politics are just as real and just as immutable in the real world as the laws of physics. Stuff can only happen if the three converge. You might not like it, and I agree that it sucks, but it's the harsh reality.

When an article quotes "NASA scientists", you know that it's rubbish. NASA is a 20000-employee organisation with many facilities, many labs, many employees, each with their own agenda. The article quotes "Popular Science", which is famous for publishing stuff like this:

Beleive it or not, nobody disagreed with "your" idea of a "mothership". The idea of a specialized vehicle for long duration flights and a specialized lander/shuttle has been part of pretty much every interplanetary concept ever since Apollo. It's nothing new, and it's pretty much mainstream thinking. I really don't think that anyone has proposed an "all-in-one" architecture since Flash Gordon. The problem with spaceflight is propulsion, on which there are plenty of threads that you are welcome to search for, read, and contribute to instead of duplicating those discussions yet again in this thread. We have yet to find a propulsion mode that is both high-Isp, high-thrust, and compact, and light, and cheap, and politically acceptable. The entire space industry, which employs some of the brightests human minds, has been trying to find one for decades, so it is rather unlikely that a random kid on this forum is going to revolutionize space travel with a logo and a "mothership" concept that predates even Star Trek: TOS. If you want to be taken seriously, you should drop the "interstellar" idea. Humans travelling between stars is pretty much out of reach of any foreseeable technology in the near or distant future as long as the laws of physics exist as we know them. It requires either generation-ships or near-light-speed or FTL technology, which might not even be physically possible, at all, ever. Those are concepts that are in the realm of science-fiction fantasy, not reality. "Interplanetary" is the best we can reach for within the next couple of centuries, and it's plenty enough really.

I'm sorry if my remarks came across as rude, but that is nothing compared to the cruelty of the rocket equation. Space is hard. If, as you claim, I misunderstood something, then maybe you should clarify what you really mean.

So what are your actual ideas, besides a logo and fantasy spaceships ? This forum is supposed to be about science and real-life spaceflight.

I pretty much stopped here. Getting into orbit is about reaching a certain speed, and chemical rockets are simply the best we have for converting an energy source into velocity in a vacuum. Your spaceplanes and motherships still need to convert some sort of energy source into velocity, so unless they are powered by magic or you live in a fantasy universe, they are still going to need rockets. Also, spaceplanes are a pointless waste of mass. You don't need wings in space. They just eat up your payload fraction with structure, moving surfaces, heat shielding, hydraulics, landing gear, etc... None of that is useful in space. So again, unless your spaceplane is powered by magic, you don't want to waste energy by carrying all that useless stuff to orbit when you could be carrying propellant or useful cargo instead.

The point of a parking orbit is to give more flexibility on the TLI window. This gave them time to perform a checkout of the vehicle before committing to Go/No Go on the TLI burn. The Apollo missions had two TLI windows, which were after 1.5 and 3 orbits. If they had a No Go on the first window, they had about 2 hours to prepare for the second window. More detail here: http://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/20090016334.pdf The launches were mostly co-planar with the Moon. There might have been a small adjustment depending on the latitude of the landing site, but maybe that was done during the TLI burn and the two midcourse correction burns. The Moon doesn't orbit the Earth on the equatorial plane. Its orbit has a 5.14° inclination, but the earth's axis is also tilted at 23.4°, so you can combine the two to get a launch window at 28° latitude, which is where Cape Canaveral is. Yeah, KSP makes things so much easier with Kerbin having no axial tilt, KSC on the equator, and everything orbiting in a 0° inclination. You can launch to the Mun at pretty much any time. This wasn't true for Apollo. If they hadn't used a parking orbit, they would have needed to both a launch window that fits both the inclination AND phasing for the TLI burn, which would have been much more difficult to get right.