Nibb31

Actually, the reason that air travel (or any of the other transportation industries) developed was because there was already a huge demand for fast transportation. The demand to go from point A to point B existed before there were cars, trains, and airplanes. The need for transportation has existed ever since civilization started spreading around the Mediterrean, and the innovations making it faster and safer have never stopped, because the demand was always there. The problem is that LEO is not a point B that is in high demand. It's a destination that doesn't exist, and an SSTO with frequent launch rates is simply another bridge to nowhere. "Build it and they will come" doesn't work when it's a bridge to nowhere, because creating supply doesn't automatically generate demand. History is full of great ideas that were industrial failures because they didn't have a market. You could make orbital launches 10 times cheaper, it won't make the market 10 times larger, simply because there isn't that much to do in space. - - - Updated - - - Standardization of what? Mass production for what purpose? The GEO comsat market is already saturated, and being replaced by low-latency ground networks (fiber, 4G) and a couple of constellation projects. How many more comsat constellations can the market really support? Earth observation is typically an institutional market. Maybe there is a market for a private sector, but realistically, how many satellites would they need? Do you think it would support 100 launches per year? And then there are the other red herrings that have never attracted any real attention from the industry: semiconductor production, space tourism, and maybe in a distant future, asteroid mining. But none of these activities have any real business case. Nobody has actually run the numbers or done any realistic studies that have proved that they are actually sustainable.

And rapid-turnaround orbital launches are a desirable capability. Instead of waiting for a military sat to arrive over a target area, launch a smaller disposable one. That's why DARPA is developing ALASA.

It's probably false, but then the 1950's propaganda (on which the Fallout universe is based) was a wierd period with promises of a brighter future thanks to the atom. Remember the overly optimistic "Duck and cover" educational films, the projects for using nukes to make artificial lakes, or the wacky ideas like nuclear planes, Orion propulsion, and the Ford Nucleon.

China has had ICBMs since the 1970s.

There simply isn't much demand for these small launchers. Falcon 1 and Pegasus were retired because of the low launch rate. Vega launches only once a year. Anything less and it simply wouldn't be worth it.

And what's it going to dock with? To land on the Moon, a Dragon would need a descent stage and an ascent stage, both much larger than the Apollo LM because Dragon is much heavier. It's a silly idea and a non-starter. Why does every thread have to turn into a SpaceX jerkfest ?

They wouldn't even land. Dragon is about 2km/s of dV short to land on the Moon, let alone take off again.

Star Trek science and engineering is based on magic. Not much of it makes any sense when you start thinking about the actual engineering problems and the best way to solve them. We've already had this discussion. There is no need for a closed "dry dock" unless you have lots of workers doing manual work on the outside of the vehicle, which is something that you would avoid by design in the first place. Humans are the most expensive thing you can send to space. Most assembly work has to be automated. You might need an occasional EVA now and then, but it would be much more efficient to design your spacecraft to minimize orbital work rather than to design and build a massive space dock.

Way off the charts if we are considering current technology and costs. As I said, anything involving people doing the assembly work is going to be orders of magnitude more expensive than automated assembly.

I don't think so. If it's like any other major news item, it will make (misinformed and click-bait) headlines for a few days and then everyone will switch back to the Kardashians and The Voice.

Large scale colonization is not happening any time in this century. This generation of spacecraft including will be long gone by the time we get to that point (if ever). Still, there needed to be a Model T before there was a Tesla and there needed to be a Wright Flyer before there was a 787. Nobody criticized the Spitfire because it couldn't do Mach 2.

Even if it is the MCT architecture, a powerpoint wouldn't cut it. It must be something more mindblowing than just a few slides with architecture. I guess we won't know until after RTF and probably after a successful F9 stage landing.

That preoccupation is premature by at least a couple of centuries.

There are three methods of orbital assembly: - Mir-style, where every module is an independent spacecraft with its own propulsion, avionics and power. This makes the hardware more complex, - Shuttle-style, where modules are "dumb canisters" that need to be brought to the station and assembled with an arm. This requires hardware that is much more complex, but is reusable. - There is a hybrid-style form of assembly, where an orbital tug picks up a dumb canister and docks it to the station, then detaches for the next job. This has never been done yet (the Russians used expendable tugs for Pirs and Poisk, as well as Kvant-1 on Mir), so we don't really have any idea of the economics. So to answer the OP, which one is cheaper depends on the cost of the assembly hardware and the number of times it's used. It makes no sense to develop an entire reusable infrastructure for a handful of modules (like Mir or ISS), but if you are going to have sustained assembly activity (which we aren't) then it might be more economical. I voluntarily exclude EVA assembly, because any method that requires EVA is going to be way over the top in terms of cost.

I don't see the fun in speculating about tooth fairies or pink unicorns. This is on the same level.

The thing is, extracting resources from Antarctica is hard and expensive. Therefore nobody is really interested in doing it. Places like the Sandwich Islands, the Kerguelen Islands, Svalbard, or the Cape Horn have the same sort of resources and easier to get to, yet nobody is stripmining those places because they are just so remote and inhospitable.

And the reason there is a UN Treaty is because nobody has any interest in colonizing Antarctica.

And then there is the moral responsibility. Who would be behind this colonization effort, and for what goal? Is it "cool" that a corporation or a government sends people off to die for financial or political gain? You can decide for yourself if you want to die for a cause. Organizations helping masses of people to die for a cause is certainly not ethical or cool.

A cheap Android cell phone has all of those built-in. If you don't want to program, you can automate most tasks with Tasker, and it can even call you back when it lands. The GPS will provide altimetry data. For temperature and air pressure, you could make an arduino bluetooth board or maybe one of those bluetooth weather stations from Oregon.

I'd like to see some of those modern studies... There were lots of studies that looked great on paper in the 1960's but would be considered totally dumb by today's standards. There were people at NASA that studied nuking the Moon or landing on Mars with a delta wing. Ford wanted to build a nuclear car. Concorde was going to make supersonic travel mainstream. Doctors claimed that smoking was good for you. The Space Shuttle looked like a great idea in the 1970's, yet we all know how that turned out. As always, the devil is in the details. There is a huge difference between something that works on paper and an operational design. Once the development work really starts, you typically hit roadblocks that were not apparent earlier and the designs get more complex, more expensive, and take much longer to complete that origically planned. This is particularly true for aerospace projects. I've always thought that boasting about one's IQ is more a proof of lack of intelligence.

I call propaganda on the GEO claim. It's way too ambitious when they haven't even done a Sputnik yet. GEO is a higher step up the difficulty ladder, because it typically requires a durable restartable upper stage.

Typically, nations don't abide to treaties because they are afraid of military action. There are all sorts of incentives that make them respect a treaty that they have signed, the first one being that when signing a treaty, they gave their word. If you ever want to be trusted with other treaties in the future, then you need to show that you are trustworthy. The OST doesn't exist in isolation. Then there is a whole range of unpleasant diplomatic sanctions, including pressure from allies, trade bans, getting other treaties cancelled, etc... In reality, most countries don't want to end up isolated like North Korea. Becoming a rogue state doesn't usually benefit anyone. Secondly, a corporation in space will always be based on Earth and pay taxes. Nobody is going to be living in space, producing stuff in space, and only selling it in space to other people who live in space, without ever interacting commercially within the geographic borders of a country on Earth. As long as it has assets on Earth, then it is bound by the laws of the country where those assets lie.

I wonder if the Exomars 2018 rover might be diverted to this area. Being smaller and lighter, it might be more capable of climbing the slopes, and it is planned to carry an exobiology package. Its funding isn't very secure, but this might cause a strong incentive to get it properly funded.

Perchlorate removal is a very involved process. Maybe they will repurpose the Mars 2020 mission? But it is more likely that "brown patch" exploration will be the focus of the mission after that one, which would postpone the sample return mission. In any case, there is going to be some reshuffling of exploration cards in the near future.