Nibb31

New Shepard is suborbital and basically goes up and down. It probably reaches Mach 3 at one point, but when it reaches its apogee its vertical speed and horizontal speed are near zero. If you launch a second stage at that point, it will have to carry the total dV to reach orbit: 9-10 km/s. That's a lot for a second stage even without a significant payload. Most rockets, including Falcon 9, stage at around Mach 4-5, meaning that the total dV to get to orbit is nearly equally divided between both stages.

Yes, Su-27 and 35 are air-superiority fighters. Because they are multirole, they do have a gound attack capability, but they were primarily designed as long range interceptors. Stealth is always relative. There is no such thing as an "invisible" plane. The technical term is "low radar signature", and this is done through clever design and materials, but it has drawbacks. If you look at the latest Russian fighters, you'll notice that they have small black domes in front of the cockpit. These are for detecting "stealth" aircraft's IR signature and can be couple with the latest generation radars. Even a B-2 will leaves some hot air behind it at 50 000 ft and any aircraft will heat up when flying at Mach 2. So the US has a doctrine of favoring low radar signature vs other capabilities, and they spend a lot of money on that. Other countries have different priorities because either they don't trust stealth technology or they have other sets of requirements. For example, the Rafale has some elements of stealth, but they didn't want to compromise on performance or cost because they don't think it's worth it. The same is true for most Russian aircraft.

Interstellar wasn't very realistic at all. The Martian was much better. The only two things that made me cringe were: Andy Weir was aware of the above facts, but if he had removed those two points, there wouldn't have been much of a story.

High company value != Profitable

I think the barge landing has been making things more complicated than landing on pad. If they can get clearance for landing at "LC-1", they have higher chances of finally getting a successful landing.

To drive prices down, you need a combination of supply and demand. The demand for aluminium increased with the appearance of an aviation industry, which pushed cheaper production methods. Investing in supply and hoping that demand will follow is a sure way to lose money.

I don't think the F-22 has a central external mounting point, which might limit the size of the rocket.

Why does the new forum software insist that I want to requote an old post ? This sucks ! I don't see how that would be practical or useful. You can't remove them from a stage on orbit without some serious EVA work for which the stage would have to be redesigned from scratch. They aren't optimized for use in vacuum either. You'd be better off launching a cargo pallet of 20 new Merlin 1D-Vacs on a single Falcon 9.

I don't see how throwing away 9 Merlin engines for a 50Kg payload could ever be economical. A multistage rocket would be much cheaper and there are a couple of them on the market already.

It's not trivial. Human rating is mostly about recertifying every component of the rocket. Certification is one of the biggest activities in aerospace engineering, and although some see it as unnecessary paperwork, it is vital to insure that everything is up to standards. On the pure engineering side, it means more instrumentation, different flight profiles, more instrumentation and telemetry, launch abort systems, crew access and egress systems, and redesigned pad operations. And probably lots of other stuff that I haven't thought of. It's certainly lot easy, and not something that you want to go through for just a handful of launches.

Requiring thousands of web pages and blog posts to be manually updated is more than a stick in the mud. It should have got IPS rejected from your evaluation process. Also, the reply/quote process seems to be broken in the Wysiwyg editor. It seems to get stuck on the previous quote that I replied to... Grrr...

The reply and quoting seems to be broken for me. If I reply twice to a thread, it keeps on putting the first quote that I replied to. I suspect the problems that people are having with readability and UTF-8 characters are due to a poor font choice. It seems to be some sort of non-standard Helvetica Bold or something, and that is causing problems.

This should have been a non-starter for selecting IPS. How on earth did you guys manage to select a new forum software that couldn't migrate URLs properly? Maintaining inbound links with regards to search engines and external blogs and websites should have been the highest priority item in your evaluation. Now, all Google searches are going to lead to 404 errors. That's really stupid. Also, there seems to be something weird with the text font. Is it bold by default or something ?

[quote name='mikegarrison']It was like the very opposite of damage control, really. Somebody in their PR department should have cut off Musk's Twitter account. He made himself look really petty.[/QUOTE] From what I've seen of his management style, one doesn't simply cut off Elon's twitter account.

I don't see what data they can get out of that. Anything pertinent was downlinked as telemetry. The number of barnacles on it isn't going to help much.

[quote name='Rakaydos']To be fair, you dont really think the market can support anything, to judge by your other posts...[/QUOTE] Well, I think we have yet to find the "killer app" that will increase the demand for spaceflight, and I don't believe in "build a bridge to nowhere and they will come".

[quote name='prophet_01'] However, it's not rly comparable to what spacex does [/quote] Which is why nobody here should be comparing with SpaceX. Only the ignorant media and the SpaceX fanboys are. BO is competing against Virgin Galactic, not SpaceX. They have beaten SpaceShipTwo to the "Karmann Line and back" competition. It's Branson who should feel the butthurt, not Musk. I don't think the market can support two suborbital joyride providers.

I don't think it's healthy to kill too many of the background services. Most of them are designed to take a back seat when higher priority processes are required. On a modern PC with a multi-core processor, you won't see much of a difference.

What sort of stuff ?

[url]http://www.howtogeek.com/74523/how-to-disable-startup-programs-in-windows/[/url]

[quote name='Kanukki']What's the main advantage to powered landing, vs parachutes for recovering the launch vehicle? I'm guessing being able to precisely pick the landing spot?[/QUOTE] Less weight. The parachutes to gently land a rocket stage would have to be huge. The Shuttle SRB parachutes were the largest ever made and weighed nearly 5 tons with their deployment systems. Yet, the boosters still splashed down at 23 m/s (80 km/h) in the ocean and were often dented and buckled. To land on the ground, you would need much larger chutes, and to add some sort of dampening system such as airbags or Soyuz-like landing motors, which would also increase the weight. In the end, it's easier to just carry some more propellant for the landing and use the same propulsion system.

[quote name='Van Disaster']The point was *what might have been if there wasn't a Shuttle* - not what might have replaced it after it's existence. IE, replace the Shuttle in the historical timeline.[/QUOTE] I thought the thread was about *what might have been if there was still a Shuttle*. It's likely that if Columbia hadn't happened, it would still be flying.

[quote name='Pipcard'] He didn't get "burnt," landing a stage that has a higher horizontal velocity, and is much larger/taller (because it is the first stage of an orbital launcher) is still a much harder challenge.[/quote] He sure is acting on twitter like he is butthurt, which is definitely immature. Everybody here knows the order of magnitude of difference between orbital and suborbital. There is also an order of magnitude difference between BO's flight and previous rocket landings like DC-X, Armadillo, and Masten. There's no need to rub it in constantly. BO achieved a perfect landing on their second attempt and is likely to reuse a rocket stage before SpaceX. It is a great achievement and they deserve congratulations. [quote] (I'm just wondering, are you hoping for SpaceX to fail or something?)[/QUOTE] Nope, just observing objectively and not being a fanboy. I love what SpaceX is doing. I'm not keen on the hype.

[quote name='razark']I five billion years, our sun goes out. If we don't go somewhere besides Earth, the species dies. Why not start learning how to do that now? [/QUOTE] You're only showing that you have no sense of scale. The Earth is 4.5 billion years old. Humans only appeared a few thousand years ago. Do you really expect humanity to still exist in a million years in any recognizable form, let alone 5 billion? At those time scales, 50, 500, or 5000 years don't make any difference.

There have been plenty of first stages that had enough dV to go SSTO with a negligeable payload. Musk is just being an ass because he got burnt by Bezos. The phallic-substitute waving is getting ridiculous. Even if the F9 first stage did get to orbit, there is no way it could reenter and land in one piece. It simply doesn't have any reentry capability.