Nibb31

Yeah, it's the climate control system to protect the payload. It's mainly thermal blankets with a whole lot of pipes going in and out.

He was also confident about the other stuff I mentioned. But it's not gonna happen. Detachable nozzles, in themselves, would be a major development. Has it ever been done? How do you design them to be detachable, resist the heat and vacuum, and make them fit into the existing design? It's far from a non-issue. Oh, and once you're on the Moon, what do you do? You are aware that Dragon isn't designed to be depressurized or to support spacesuits, aren't you? You can't EVA from it. Adding that capability would also be far from trivial.

He also suggests freaking colonies on Mars, and nuking Mars to terraform it, and yet we all know that none of that is going to happen during his lifetime. His PR suggested reusable upper stages, reusable Dragon V1, powered Dragon V2 landings, Falcon Heavy crossfeed, and none of that is happening either... He has delivered on other stuff, sure, but I really wish people would stop taking Musk's tweets as the voice of <insert your favorite deity here>. Some of what he has to say is decent information. A lot of what he says is starry eyed wishful thinking. And most of what his companies actually come up with in the end arrives late or gets abandoned along the way, because real-engineering is much harder than tweeting. Nozzle extensions on Dragon's Super Dracos would require a pretty serious redesign of the shape of the capsule, since they are designed with short nozzles precisely so that they stay out of the airflow. That is absolutely not "minor", and neither is fitting an auxiliary tank inside an existing pressure vessel.

Real life engineering isn't KSP. None of the modifications you are proposing are anywhere near "minimal". It would be a totally different vehicle. For example, flush-mounted panels mean that the structure of the aeroshell is completely different, with holes in it. Its resistance to thermal and aero loads needs to be reassessed. Mounting tanks on the inside means that you need to redesign the pressure vessel, including new plumbing, holes, and again, studies about the physical forces that are going to impact that new structure. It's not a "simple mod". How do you even fit those 2m tanks through the door without redesigning the way the pressure vessel is built? In the end, you'd be better off scrapping the entire vehicle and starting from scratch.

The Shuttle SRBs were the largest items ever parachuted down, and carried the biggest parachutes ever made. Each chute system, with covers, pyros, etc, weighed about 2 tons for an SRB that weighed 90 tons empty. Even with those massive chutes, the SRBs splashed down at a pretty high speed and were often damaged. Contrary to what people think, parachutes are heavy and expensive. They need a lot of manual processing, and the bigger they are, the more complex it is to pack and handle those chutes.

Within 5 years, isn't possible. It takes more than that to design and build any spacecraft. Even more for an advanced concept such as this. To be undertaken by a private corporation requires a market for frequent launches. The market simply isn't large enough to support a high-frequency infrastructure such as this. And a tug for boosting comsats would be a very different design from tug for boosting the ISS, because the docking and thrust requirements would be completely different. It would also have to be in a totally different orbit. Comsats need engines for station-keeping. Adding a little extra fuel and tankage is cheaper than adding a docking system, and paying extra for a tug service. Especially as your tug is going to have to be overengineered and carry twice the dV that a good old disposable Fregat or Ariane ESC upper stage has. And you also need to add the extra launches that carry the propellant for the tugs.

For it to fly in 2020, they would need to be building the factories, selecting suppliers, and having completed most of the design work. Do you have any idea how much time it takes to pull off a major aerospace project like this? Just getting the construction paperwork for a spaceport in the UK is going to take the best part of a decade. No way is it going to fly in the next 10 years. SSTO has a silly payload fraction. If you add reusability and landing equipment, then you get a negative payload fraction. I really don't understand the appeal of SSTO other than "it looks cool".

Yet Dragon 2 will only be using parachutes on its CCDev flights, it probably won't be reused (reusability is pointless when you fly less than 10 times) and nobody knows if it will fly again when the ISS is gone.

What's uncool about Apollo ? You do realize that a modern 787 uses the same old shape that harkens back to the 707, or even the DC3... That's probably because the laws of physics haven't changed and it's the best configuration for the job.

It's also much heavier than an A380. It will definitely need a reinforced runway for takeoff as well as a liquid hydrogen supply facility. There is no way it will be using a standard airport.

Nevertheless, it was actually only possible because the sats were designed with attachment points that were compatible with the Shuttle, and because NASA had full details of the dimensions and weight distribution of those sats. Bringing back a hostile military sat simply was never a serious option, although it was sold to the military at one point. To do so, they would have needed to have the fully detailed plans of the sat in order to build a proper cradle, and they would have needed to be sure there were no countermeasures on the satellite or that they could be safed. That would have meant that they already knew just about everything about the satellite, which would have made the whole operation pointless.

Dragon V2 is only going to fly less than 10 times to the ISS. Unless someone builds a commercial station to replace the ISS, that's all there is.

The Shuttle could only retrieve those satellites because they had already been launched by the shuttle. They had grappling fixtures and cargo bay cradles especially designed for them. Also, the Shuttle retrieval missions cost more than building replacement sats. It never had anywhere near the capability to retrieve uncooperative military satellites.

Which is pretty much what this mockumentary is claiming. It's rubbish.

The movie is real. The story is a hoax. They take footage from all over the place and put it into a fake context. The genre is called a "mockumentary". "Object 505" was un underground bunker for Mig-21s. You can see it on Google Earth, and it has been well explored and documented. Claims such as "many parts of the Apollo program were designed and built in Yugoslavia" are purely bogus, and Tito wasn't the only leader who changed his lifestyle when he became a dictator, so that doesn't prove anything.

On paper. I'm pretty sure that the "SMART reuse" that we saw by dropping engines and picking them up with helicopters won't ever be implemented. It wasn't a serious proposal, just a concept to show that they can do it if they need to, just like the "Adeline" project from Airbus DS. Most of the industry has done their homework and simply doesn't believe that reusability makes any economical sense in the near future. They are not ignoring it because they can't do it or because they are too stupid. They simply think that it doesn't reduce costs significantly enough to be of any advantage in the current market. It's not a matter of technology. For companies like Boeing or Airbus, the technology will be easy to develop when the economical need arises. They can write software and stick landing legs on stuff just as well as anybody else if they want to. It's just that the economical need hasn't arised yet, so they are not investing in it.

Boeing isn't slower than SpaceX, that's just a illusion because of the way both companies do things. Boeing's develops CST-100 the same way they develop airliners or fighter jets. They spend years designing every part in 3D CAD systems, testing against requirements through modelization, selecting suppliers and finding customers. Only when everything fits together and works, when the supply chain is secured, and when they have enough preorders to ensure viability, do they actually start cutting metal and putting things together. SpaceX does hardware development the old fashioned way. They build mockups and prototypes that they tinker to make things fit, and then they aren't afraid of blowing stuff up. They don't bother much with a supply chain because they make a lot of stuff in house, and they are more "guru-driven" than actually customer-driven. The erratic process makes SpaceX more likeable (or even cultish), but I'd rather trust Boeing to get stuff right the first time. When was the last time you heard of Boeing crashing a prototype of an airliner or a fighter jet? They don't because they do it with 3D models instead of actual hardware.

It was a concept, but it would have needed yet another megafactory and a huge logistics effort (bigger barges, bigger launch pads, bigger crawlers...). It totally wasn't worth the effort, and probably would have put the Moon landing effort "before the end of the decade" out of reach.

There is also <>. It depends on the language you're using.

And how is that worse than the amount of transmission infrastructure, storage, and real estate for oil ? Look at all those refineries, pipelines, gas stations... All you need to transfer power is a power line. A high voltage line across the mediterranean will be much cheaper than a fleet of tankers. Storage is a problem, but not unsurmountable. These new solar concentrator plants use a heat transfer fluid and molten salts to keep the fluid hot during the night so that the power output is constant.

Solar panels aren't the only way to produce electricity from solar. Marocco has just opened a large thermal solar collector plant in the Sahara desert: http://edition.cnn.com/2016/02/08/africa/ouarzazate-morocco-solar-plant/

We should be trying to rely less on burning stuff for producing power, rather than trying to find ways to burn more stuff.

How do delete a post in this stupid forum software?

You're not going to do much with $109 million, and the people who fund that actually expect something (virtually) tangible in reward. That won't happen with a space kickstarter (other than "have your name added to a .txt file that goes on a micro SD card to orbit". Now, if you could have got Facebook to spend $22 billion cash on something of real value instead of buying Whatsapp...

Wrong.