Nibb31

Orion is designed to only fly on SLS. The SLS program is scaled to only fly every two years. They might increase it to once a year, but there will also be unmanned flights, so optimistically, the best you can hope for is one Orion flight every two years. With a fleet of 4 Orions, each one flies every 8 years. If you reuse them 5 times, that means that each spacecraft lasts 40 years. In that time, you're going to be fighting obsolescence and stripping it down for inspections and upgrading it on a regular basis, so you really might as well build a new one for each flight. Reusability simply doesn't make sense for such a low flight rate, and that flight rate isn't going up unless NASA redesigns the whole exploration architecture.

Note that lifting bodies do not really "fly". They are designed to "glide" down in a controlled manner. The slope of the "glide", and the rate of descent, typically ranges from "scary" to "pants-ruining". The only thing that saves your day in a lifting body is the ability to flare just before touchdown.

Because it wouldn't have changed anything.

Of course they did.

Yes, the author of The Martian was aware of the perchlorate problem, but he waved it away because he wanted to write a good story. In reality, removing perchlorates from Martian soil isn't something that we know how to do yet, although scientists are working on it.

Exactly. The scene where the crewmember manually catches and berths the Chinese cargo vehicle was one of the most unrealistic parts of the movie and nearly ruined it for me.

Nobody uses blueprints any more and nobody designs rockets from scratch. Typically drafters do the drawing part on CAD/CAM systems with input from engineering team followed by multiple reviews. Nobody designs the whole rocket. There are teams in charge of high level design and teams in charge of system design. A single aerospace engineer will only have a small subsystem to design, and even then, there are different tasks done by different people: design, testing, validation, manufacturing, sourcing... Again aerospace engineers, and they also work in teams within a mission control center. This doesn't only concern wizzbang space probes. There are mission control centers for GEO comsats or ISS modules too. Navigational decisions aren't usually made by one person, and they are usually done after several weeks of simulation and meetings. Not one guy. In most projects, testing and validation is part of the design process, as well as drafting, prototyping, manufacturing, sourcing, etc...

Gmail does all that. In fact, my work uses it for business. But I wouldn't expect a freebie app bundled with Windows to have advanced features, especially because they make money with Outlook. It's not like there isn't a whole lot slew of free mail readers out there to pick from anyway...

Comfort, safety, or wealth. Fleeing persecution counts as safety. Note that they didn't migrate to a place that was even more dangerous, like the bottom of a volcano or Antarctica. They went to a place where they thought they could live off the land and offer a better life to their children. Nobody can live off the land in space and it isn't the safest place to raise children.

Actually, yes. Which is why SpaceX doesn't use parachutes. The Shuttle SRB parachutes and deployment systems weighed about 4 tons for each SRB. That's nearly 8 tons of wasted payload, and all that for a pretty hard splashdown. Most first stage engines are started or primed or ignited with ground support equipment. Air starting requires a major redesign of the engine where everything you need to start the engine is integrated into the engine.

Because it's most probably dead. It was a nice proposal, but its scope is way beyond what NASA wants for CRS missions at the expense of complicating operations.

Who uses an email program these days ? I've been using webmail for years.

Actually, Soyuz does launch from Kourou. But it didn't back in 2003. It also takes way over 30 days to ship a Soyuz rocket from Samara, Russia to Kourou, French Guiana. Which part of "Columbia didn't have an RMS" didn't you understand. There was no way Columbia could have "grabbed" anything. Couldn't be done in flight. Not hard. Impossible. And what would you have docked to on the Shuttle side?

Launch sites are typically located near the ocean so that spent rocket stages don't fall down on populated areas. If something goes wrong, they can just blow up the rocket. In Russia and China, launch sites are inland, and the rocket stages fall in the middle of steppes or desert areas. Occasionally on people's farms or villages. Nobody has managed to retreive a spent rocket stage, therefore nobody (in the US) has a reason to build a new launch pad inland. Launch sites are expensive. And even if SpaceX does manage to recover their first stages, they will be launching over the ocean and boost their way back to land, because failures do happen and nobody wants rocket stages and rocket fuel falling on their house (and SpaceX doesn't want the liability either). Secondly, parachutes are heavy. Rocket stages are heavy. So to land a rocket stage on parachutes requires the largest and heaviest parachutes ever (like those used on the Shuttle SRBs), which makes them the most expensive parachutes ever. There is no reason to recover spent stages if it is not economical. Parachutes take a heavy bite into your payload fraction and your costs. Finally, first stage engines aren't usually restartable. The Merlin is the first one. Engines are expensive to design, so again, it's cheaper to operate a disposable booster with an old engine design than to design a whole new vehicle. Reusability is coming, but the reason it's not here is because it isn't economical at current flight rates and there is no actual proof that it ever will be, unless we suddenly discover new business opportunities that justify increasing flight rates.

Which World Wars were those? You need to chuck out your Krussian history books I think.

Sorry, but nope. The fuel cell tanks were cryogenic and located under liner panels below the payload bay. They weren't accessible anyway since Columbia was carrying Spacehab. The tanks were filled with ground service equipment on the pad through an umbilical panel located below the aft OMS pods. This happened just before launch and the umbilicals were retracted on SRB ignition. That's an area that wouldn't have been accessible during an EVA because the orbiter didn't have an arm, and of course, it wasn't designed so that you could simply plug in a hose during an in-flight EVA. And it would have been challenging to fit the cryogenic fueling ground equipment (which wasn't designed to work in microgravity) into a spacecraft that could resupply the shuttle.

And how would you have got CO2 cartridges from the Pegasus upper stage rocket to the Shuttle? There was no spacecraft that could rendez-vous or transfer anything to the Shuttle, certainly not one that could fit on a Pegasus or or Minotaur rocket, and even less one that could be designed, built, and integrated in a couple of days. It simply wasn't possible. And the CO2 cartridges were only one of the limitations. The second one was the fuel cells, which used hydrogen and oxygen from dedicated tanks that were not replenishable. The report says that they could have waited 30 days if they had powered down pretty much everything on board, but even with CO2 cartridges, the shuttle would be dead after that.

I guess SABRE (or inflatables) are news to people who didn't know anything about space before playing KSP two weeks ago.

"Space" is not a destination where anyone actually wants to be. It's a medium that you have to cross to get to a proper destination, like an ocean or the sky. People didn't leave Europe for peace and quiet. They left for a better life, where they could bring up their children in a safer, more confortable, and possibly wealthier environment. There is no safety, no comfort, and no wealth in space, quite the opposite. I think you are overgeneralizing here. What proportion of the human population are actual explorers? A vast majority humans have never left the area where they were born. Those who travel and explore are a minority. The urge to explore is a trait of character that you find in some people, but I wouldn't go so far as to say that we are genetically programmed to do it.

There are plenty of cultures and civilizations that have different end goals than developing science and the economy. Ask an Iranian, an Indian, a Yanomami, a Somalian or even a person in your street what they think the purpose of Humanity is. I doubt that any single person will say "to expand throughout the solar system". Some cultures are more interested in spirituality, religion, family, living in harmony with their environment, or other political goals. Our western cultures are only a minor part of Humanity. It's extremely shortsighted to extrapolate your own values into universal values that "unite Humanity" because Humanity is much more diverse than that.

Note that I wrote "spacecraft", not "rocket". A launcher is nice, but you still need a vehicle to put on top of it, and a 500kg vahicle capable or rendez-vous and resupplying the Shuttle simply didn't exist? And what sort of supplies could you have put into a 500Kg spacecraft, if such a thing existed, anyway? "Launch on need" is a requirement for small disposable DoD military satellites, not for resupply spacecraft.

The F-15 isn't really state of the art in 2015. It would be representing the 60 year anniversary of Roland Garros' dogfight, not a 100 years.

Why is that ? If you are commemorating Roland Garros, you should be depicting the plane that he used, a Morane-Saulnier Type-L I don't think drones are representative of air-to-air combat. If you want to represent an air-superiority fighter, which is what the Roland Garros anniversary is about, the state of the art is probably the F-22. - - - Updated - - - The Rafale is probably better in most aspects than the Eurofighter.

It doesn't need to, nor does it need to provide unpressurized cargo. As long as one of the contenders can do it, that's enough.

Remote Manipulator System or Canardarm. If you can't dock, you need some way to capture the visiting vehicle. Columbia was never fitted with an RMS or a docking adapter because it was the heaviest of the Orbiters. It carried extra structure, sensors, and equipment that was never removed after the early test flights (which is also why NASA was able to get so much information during the investigation). They planned to have the docking adapter fitted after that flight, so that Columbia could finally visit the ISS. The RMS wasn't needed for Spacehab missions anyway.