Nibb31

I'm guessing that they're going to try to make a BA330 and see if someone is willing to pay for it. Any testing could be part of the deal.

They can test it on BA330. There is no need for intermediary steps.

I don't think anybody is proposing a DSH based on a BA330. It would make no sense. Inflatables save space on launch, but they need a lot of time outfitting, and with one SLS launch per year, you can't afford to do many servicing missions to get it running.

You see, people can't agree on global warming because there are economical interests that cause some people to not want to believe that it's happening. The same would be true with any threat, including a Big Fraking Asteroid headed to Earth, because as soon as you are going to want to divert money and resources from other sectors of the economy into risk mitigation, some people are going to start spending a whole lot of money in denial and counter-studies. Seriously, do people really think that all humanity can ever unanimously agree on something? When was the last time that happened?

A manned battleship makes zero sense however you look at it. Space is an extreme environment where pretty you can lose everything to simple malfunction. Why would you risk something as expensive and fragile as a manned spacecraft in a battle? You would need to carry such heavy armor that it would be totally impractical. If there is ever a space war, it will be using swarms of kamikaze drones.

Bigelow has zero customers for any of his modules. There are no inherent differences between the smaller modules and the larger, so why bother spending the R&D on three different designs when you already can't sell one.

It's the only thing that SLS has to launch after 2023, so if they don't want to cancel the whole program, it pretty much has to go through.

The Jedi seemed to be actively scouting for kids with a high midichlorian count so that they could permanently abduct them and train them as Jedi. That seemed to be the regular recruitment process portrayed in Episode I, complete with a blood test and heartbreaking separation from the family. Nothing suggested that what happened with Anakin wasn't SOP for Jedi when they found that the Force was strong in a kid. If there was a rule to scout for blue eyes to abduct them and force them to become celibate monks, if you do it properly you won't be seeing many blue-eyed kids after a few hundred years. If the Jedi recruitment policy and the celibacy rule both worked, then there wouldn't be any Jedi left after a few hundred, which means that the combination of both was stupid. The whole idea was silly and badly thought-out. The only reason for the celibacy rule in the plot was to make the Anakin-Padme relationship politically unacceptable.

The reason DC stands out it because most astronauts are military, and you have more chances of enroling in the military if you are from a military family, and there is probably a higher proportion of military in DC than in other states.

Yes, the Starfish Prime test: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starfish_Prime

What tells you that it could actually be "tripled-cored". If it wasn't designed for that purpose from the start, you would basically need to redesign the entire structure to handle the dynamic loads on the attachment points. Also, I would think that the aerodynamic system at the top of the rocket would prevent any lateral attachments. No, if they want to go orbital, it makes sense to design an orbital rocket from scratch rather than to waste money modifying something that wasn't designed for it in the first place.

United Nations Conference on Climate Change that took place in Paris last month. It pretty much proved that humans as a group are incapable of rising to a challenge when their entire existence is in balance. There is no reason to believe that a predicted extinction event would be dealt with more successfuly than we are currently dealing with climate change. 5 years? It takes 2 years just to organise a freaking conference !

If the event would wipe out all life (such as it blows up 100% of the Earth's crust), then there is simply nothing we can do about it. There are no plausible evacuation scenarios that would work in 5 years. We might as well accept it and enjoy what life we have left. It's a bit like discovering that you have terminal cancer. You can either spend the rest of your time fighting the ineluctable in chemotherapy and meds, or you can just accept it and spend the rest of your time doing what you like to do best. If it's an extinction event on the scale of those that the Earth has already been through, we can survive as a species. Society will be toast, most of our ecosystem will be put upside down, and we might get down to another bottleneck event, but we are better than most species at adapting. I don't see why a small number couldn't survive and start all over again, and that number will always be much larger than you could save by trying to evacuate.

You weren't following the COP21 negociations, were you.

Maybe it shows propriety information that they don't want their competitors to see. There is no reason for them to show it, which is a pretty good enough reason not to show it. They made mainstream news with their landing, do there isn't any more PR to squeeze out of it, other than to feed the fanbois, which isn't SpaceX's priority.

Does not compute. If we are thrown back to the stone age we are not wiped out.

None of the extinction events that the Earth has gone through in the past had ever left it uninhabitable. There are nearly 8 billion of us. If something wiped out even 90% of the population, there would still be more of us left over the globe than the entire population 2000 years ago.

My point was that they don't have to release it. They are a private corporation, they have no obligation to release data to the public. Why would they ?

Apparently, this was explained in the novelization and was supposed to be in the movies, but was cut out. The Empire collapsed, but its ideology survived under the form of small pockets. At one point, Snoked dude and Kylo Ren managed to reunite these pockets into the First Order. In the meantime, the New Republic pussied out and didn't want to start a new war, so they are running a proxy war (think Syrian civil war, or Korea, Vietnam, etc...) through the Resistance, which is a guerilla group run by General Leia, and funded by the New Republic. Probably Leia took more interest in pursuing a military career than a political one. Now that the New Republic has pretty much been annihilated, I guess the guerilla Resistance is now the only thing left from the actual Republic... Yes, this bit is annoying IMO. Rey goes from "oh I thought it was just a legend" to becoming a autodidactic Force user, where Luke actually spent several weeks (months?) training with Yoda to even start properly using the Force. Rey using a Jedi mind trick to escape just seemed too easy for someone who didn't even know that the Force existed a few minutes earlier. And the same is true for both Finn and Rey being able to handle a lightsaber. During the actual fights, you see them both just trying to stab and bash Kylo the best they can. They're not demonstrating much skill at all. They said it was the Hosnian system. Maybe Coruscant remained faithful to the Emperor and fell into the hands of the First Order (although we do see Coruscant celebrating at the end of ROTJ-Special Edition).

It's proprietary information. What could be the logic in releasing it?

I don't have a problem with politics and romance per se, but meaningless politics (why was a trade embargo such a big deal for Naboo? they seemed to live in a lush paradise with pretty much everything they needed. Where were the starving populations? Where was the economical crisis? Where were the people dying in the streets?) and forced romance (Padme and Anakin had zero chemistry and visibly both annoyed each other). And how come high midichlorian count seems to be hereditary, yet Jedi are forced into celibacy. Who was the bright guy who came up with that rule? No wonder there aren't any left. As for the light saber battles, I preferred the low key versions of the original trilogy. A lightsaber duel is as much a confrontation of the Force as it is a battle of skill. You could feel that the real fight was between their minds, which you couldn't see.

XS-1 is a development competition for a first stage that gets to Mach 10 with a small payload. Basically, it's a first stage, not an SSTO.

Not fully fueled and not with the Orion LAS. ESA has no interest in buying stuff from a foreign company, whether that's a design license, a complete vehicle, or tickets for ride to orbit. ESA only spend it's money in ESA member countries, so any discussion of using a foreign design (outside of a cooperation barter deal) is moot.

Follow the plot ! Fredinno mentioned licensing the Orion MPCV to serve as a European crew module with a European ATV-SM on a European Ariane 5. I only said that licensing CST-100 would probably be more adequate than Orion. Nobody mentioned purchasing CST-100 tickets from ULA.

Who's talking about paying for rides ? The thread is about a European manned crew vehicle based on the ATV. ESA is never going to "pay for rides", because that goes against its purpose.