Nibb31

I'd take either the Venus probe or the Moon sample return. It's a shame to have to choose, they are all interesting proposals.

Are you trying to be funny or did you really only discover DreamChaser today? It's not blackhole research. It's been under development for over 20 years under various forms. Just because you haven't been following the news doesn't mean that it's covert. Do some wikipedia reading.

Read the thread. It's not that it can't be done. It's that we don't want to take less time.

A corset won't help you against chemical leaks or fire. Why spend money on rescue equipment that will only serve a single (rare) purpose. Most decompressions can be dealt with by compensating the air supply, which provides enough time to find the hole and close it. That is how the ISS deals with the risk of MMOD.

The Airbus Beluga can take up to 7.4m x 37m. Airbus is replacing the A300 CST "Beluga", with the A330 CST "Beluga XL", which will be 1m wider. I couldn't find the cargo size for the 747 LCF "Dream Lifter" that Boeing uses for carrying 787 fuselages, but I think it's not as wide as the Beluga, but it is longer. For rocket stages, length would be an issue. A F9 first stage wouldn't fit in a Beluga. The An225 is limited to 4.4m in height, so no go for a 5m diameter stage, and there is only one for rent, and it's expensive. For routine transportation, they would need to build and operate their own aircraft. I don't think it makes sense economically, which is why most people speculate that their "BFR" is probably going to be built at the launch site.

That doesn't mean that global demand for launches has increased twofold.

Commercial space flight has existed for 40 years now. The reason prices haven't gone down is due to low demand, not lack of offering. In fact, the commercial launch market is pretty saturated, between Atlas, Delta, Ariane, Soyouz, Proton, etc... for a market of less than 100 launches per year. ULA is a commercial business, of course they don't want competition. SpaceX will probably fight hard when it gets challenged too. SpaceX prices (for example), are already rock bottom. Shaving 10% off of the ticket price of $60 million is a nice saving for its customers, but when you're talking about a $500 million GEO comsat project, it's not going to be a game changer. The launch market is pretty inelastic. SpaceX has already cut launch prices by practically 50% compared to ULA or Arianespace. That hasn't resulted in a doubling the demand for orbital launches, because that's not how it works.

NASA used those suits as the LES on the early shuttle flights. They phased them out in favor of ACES for various reasons. If you want an emergency suit, you don't just want it for one type of emergency (depressurization). You also want it to be fire-resistant, water-resistant, chemical-resistant, and floatable. In the case of the Shuttle, it also needed to be wind-shear resistant so that they could bail out at a rather high speed. Which is why I suggest that the ACES suit is probably very close to what you'd need.

They were an independent design from someone at MIT, not NASA-driven.

It doesn't really matter whether it's private or public. There is no demand for huge payloads. The only real commercial market for orbital launches is GEO comsats, which typically cost several times what it costs to launch them. Making them bigger won't bring down costs. In fact, the trend these days is to make them smaller so that they are cheaper to launch. Lots of people don't understand that the launch cost is only a small part of what it costs to build, launch, and operate a satellite. Reducing cost of a kg to orbit by 10% or 20% is appreciable, but it's not a game changer that will create new markets if there is no actual demand already. Falcon Heavy doesn't need crossfeed to already be overkill for the market. All it needs is to be able to launch GTO payloads with the mass penalty of getting all 3 cores back. There is no point in investing a lot of money to develop crossfeed when there are no payloads that will benefit from the extra capacity.

The N1 was assembled on-site. The rudimentary conditions in which it was constructed at Baikonur and the lack of testing capability on-site contributed to its poor quality control. Saturn V rocket stages were transported by ship, which is why the Michoud facility is near the sea. The Super Guppy was used by NASA to transport the Apollo CSM and S-IVB, not the other rocket stages (After Apollo, Airbus bought NASA's Super Guppy and got a couple of others built. They were retired when Airbus switched to the A300 Beluga, and NASA bought one of them back and is still using it). Space Shuttle tanks were transported by barge from Michoud, the SRBs were transported in segments by train from Ohio. SLS will use the same transportation modes. And of course, the 747 SCA: Russians typically use rail or air transport. The An-225 Mriya was built to carry Buran, but is also used to carry other stuff. Nowadays it's rented out to anybody who needs to transport oversize payloads (including Arianespace and sometimes NASA). They also used two modified Myasishchev M-4 bombers for Energia tanks. Arianespace uses ships to transport Soyuz or Ariane to Kourou. Sometimes they borrow a Beluga from Airbus or they rent the An225 Mriya.

ACES suit ?

It's clearly photoshopped and it's out of Vogue. When it's on a SpaceX or a NASA web site, we'll talk.

First of all, visiting vehicles typically use low-thrust RCS engines for orbital manoeuvering, so they can't afford to do a single quick burn to adjust their orbit. They usually do several orbital adjustments to reach the destination orbit over the course of several orbits. And real-life spacecraft carry a lot less dV than in RL (Soyuz only carries 390 m/s of dV for example, and they need a good deal of that for the deorbit manoeuver), and the actual velocities are much higher than in KSP, so they need to be much more efficient. If the dV required to rendez-vous takes a 30 min burn and each orbit is 90 minutes, it's more efficient to do 1 min burns at the right time over the course of 30 orbits than to do a single 30 min burn over one third of a single orbit. Also, typically, in KSP, you plot an encounter where you have a large speed difference with the target, and they you do a full thrust braking burn to match velocity. In RL, they approach slowly, raising their orbit in several steps so that they are never on a collision course with the ISS. They can't risk having a large speed difference with the target, nor can they do a braking burn to match velocity, because if for some reason that burn fails, they risk a high speed collision, so the approach is always slow. Another reason that manned vehicles used to take 3 days was because the crew had a lot of work, from prelaunch activity, to launch, on-orbit check out, reconfiguration/deployment, donning/doffing suits, performing the RV and docking, and finally opening the hatch. Nowadays, procedures have been streamlined and automated, and one-day docking is the new routine, but this puts a lot of pressure on the crew, with an extremely long working day. Real docking/undocking manoeuvers typically occur from the nadir direction of the ISS, so that if something goes wrong, the visiting vehicle is in a slightly lower orbit and it will passively move away from the ISS. This is also used for undocking so that they don't have to use thrusters in the close vicinity of the station. If it was docking from the same altitude and suddenly became unresponsive, it could find itself on a collision course.

Current plans are to use chemical propulsion, so I don't see why you consider it "not likely". It's the likeliest option. The second likeliest is SEP. None of the other options are anywhere near the TRL level required.

That's not what the report says. It says that the root cause was the lubrication interval. The lubrication procedures were too vague, but the report says " The extent to which these deficiencies in the lubrication procedure may have played a role in the inadequate lubrication of the accident jackscrew assembly could not be determined." As a result, though, they rewrote the procedures and specified shorter intervals.

The limitation is going to be communication between each Raspberry Pi. They are limited by design to a crappy 100Mbps bus that shares USB and Ethernet connections, so even if you cluster 1000 Pis together, you will never get the performance of a modern PC. The bus bandwidth is going to be the bottleneck, and the more Raspberries you add to the cluster, the worse it's going to get. The Pi cluster idea is a fantastic educational project for computer science students who want to study parallel processing without using valuable time on a real super computer, but it isn't worthwhile if you are after actual processing power.

Probably not.

In real life, all of the controls above used switches, so it was basically on-off.

The term "RUD" predates the KSP forum by at least a decade.

You can't extrapolate cost from price. Hardware is only a small part of the cost of a launch service. You also can't consider that infrastructure costs are equal. FH launches from LC39A, F9 launches from LC40, Vandenberg, or SpaceX-owned Boca Chica. The rental costs of each facility will be different. And those prices are indicative. They are likely to vary by purchase volume, urgency, orbital parameters, etc...

Not sure how many people can afford a two year vacation just for that.

It was all down to an improper lubrication schedule.

Citation needed. An empty conventional booster is mostly aluminium tankage, designed for vertical loads, and a few tons for the engines. For example, the expendable F9 1.1 first stage weighs empty ~23 tons (including 9x470=4.2 tons of engines), for a size of 44m x 3.66m. That is much lighter, than an equivalent sized aircraft, like the Airbus A321, which weighs empty ~47 tons (including 2x2200 = 4.4 tons of engines) for pretty much the same dimensions. That's a 100% difference, not 10%. The mass of the engines is similar for both the airliner and the rocket, so the difference in weight is mainly due to the stuff that makes the A321 fly like an aircraft (wings, structure, hydraulics, flight controls, landing gear, power, etc...) and the stuff that makes it comfortable for people (pressurization, windows, seats, galleys, toilets, etc...) Adding wings, structure, APUs, hydraulics, and everything required to turn a booster into an aircraft (even without the people carrier equipment) will make the total mass much closer to the mass of an aircraft than to a rocket. Maybe not 100%, but certainly not 10%. 10% mass penalty is what it takes to simply add landing legs and grid fins to the F9. You don't necessarily need a heavy TPS, but the X-15 flew to Mach 6.7 and needed a special ablative coating. Wings add surface, and more surface means more mass for the coating.

It's a cargo vehicle. There is no abort. The Commercial Crew proposal didn't have a fairing, but it had booster motors on the back for launch abort (the cargo vehicle only has RCS). If the abort was high and fast enough, it would glide to a preselected runway. If it was too low, it would land on parachutes. Basically, in addition to wings, landing gear, and hydraulics, the crew version also had to carry abort motors all the way to orbit and back, and parachutes, which was a huge mass penalty compared to a simple capsule.