Nibb31

1Kg is totally unfeasible. Scientists fight to get an extra gram for their experiments, they're not going to carry 1kg all the way to Mars. The best you can get is an SD card with KSP on it, or some sort of Easter Egg engraved somewhere on the rover, but you will never get NASA to accept to add extra mass.

Lower altitudes are easier, because you have more margin for parachutes. I don't think there are any latitude constraints like on the Moon, MPL was able to land at a pretty high latitude, and small adjustments during the cruise phase can be used to target your insertion. However, they can't really do pinpoint landings yet, so it would be risky. They need a relatively flat and open area to land. The landing ellipse for Curiosity was initially 25x20 km. You wouldn't want to be blown onto the side of the canyon, or land just on top and roll down, or land at the bottom on top of a rock.

Sure, tell that to the police, firefighters, military, nurses, teachers, etc...

Sterling engines require moving parts. Space engineering typically doesn't like moving parts, because you get into all sorts of problems with lubricants, wear, and thermal tolerance. When a mechanical part fails, repairs are a pain.

I really don't see how they can secure funding for a 30 year project when there are presidential and mid-term elections every two years. The whole idea of a landing in 2040 seems so pessimistic, yet when you look at the size of the project, it is madly optimistic compared to current funding levels. So I'm not going to get excited. This is never going to go through.

What has the SLS got to do with anything here? We are talking about the dV of the spacecraft, not the launcher. An expendable LES optimizes spacecraft dV for deep space missions (which is the main operational role for Orion), not for shuttling people up and down (which is the main operational role for Dragon). Different roles = different requirements = different optimizations. Really, at this stage, I give up. I have better things to waste my time on than this.

We have pretty much zero meteorological data about Venus's upper atmosphere. Let's send an unmanned blimp probe to find out if it's possible and to see what it's like up there. Then maybe we can talk about manned missions.

No it wouldn't, because if it did, the capsule would have to be heavier, which means that vehicle would have less dV or would need a larger service module, which reduce the dV of the EUS, etc... And there are no benefits (it's benefits in English) for Orion to carry its LES all the way to the Moon or Mars. No it won't. It depends on the mission Orion has three parachutes, but can land safely on two. There is no reserve system. Dragon has exactly the same arrangement. I wasn't talking about mass, I was talking about mission. I don't really know how to get this through your thick skull. Orion and Dragon are different vehicles with different missions. Is a supertanker superior to an aircraft carrier? Both have different missions, therefore their systems are engineered for different requirements. Dragon and CST are taxis. Their job is to commute between the ground and LEO. Launch and reentry are the main parts of that mission. They are optimized for routine operation and low cost. Orion is an exploration vehicle. Launch and reentry are only first and last minutes of the mission. It is optimized for its versatility and ruggedness and cost is less of a factor. You really aren't getting this point. There must be something that isn't connected in your brain or something. At this point, I'm really going to give up because I can't figure out how to say it any other way. Nobody is seriously suggesting putting draco thrusters and tanks on the Orion capsule. What would be the point? Adding stuff makes it heavier. You would need heavier and bigger parachutes, a heavier and larger SM, etc... The LES works as required and is jettisoned when it's no longer needed so that it doesn't add extra mass for the rest of the mission.

Orion uses the same hypergolic propellants for the RCS, the main engine and the 8 auxiliary engines, all fed from the same tanks.

We've already said that that is just as stupid as comparing the wings of a 787 with the wings of a Cessna, or the engine of a motorbike with the engine of a tank. They all serve the same function, but the vehicles themselves have different missions and requirements. Dragon is designed for regular trips to LEO. It makes sense to make it reusable, which means that it makes sense to carry the engines back as long as the mass penalty allows payload requirements to work. Orion is designed for exploration missions at a rate of once a year. At that flight rate, it doesn't need to be reusable. Since the whole system is expendable, it makes sense to jettison as much as you can along the way in order to minimize mass before each burn. I think you might be insinuating that you could use Dragon to land on the Moon or Mars, which simply isn't possible without, again, heavily redesigning it. It doesn't have enough dV to land on the Moon, and it could only do a 1-way landing on Mars (with an expendable upper stage to do the deorbit burn), which is pointless. If you add a tank, you make it heavier, so you need more thrust, which means more weight, which means more engines and more tanks, etc... The typical new KSP player's mistake ! If Dragon carried the same equipment and the same internal volume as Orion, it would be the same weight as Orion, so it would need the same sized LES as Orion. The only difference would be that Orion dumps its LES when it is no longer needed while Dragon retains that mass for the whole mission. Again, for Dragon's LEO taxi mission, that's perfectly acceptable. If you are going to the Moon and back every year or two, then bringing several tons of landing gear for the last seconds of the mission is either wasted payload or lower dV, for no real benefit. Crew Dragon has parachutes for redundancy. All the Commercial Crew missions will be parachute landings because powered landing is unprovene. When they do start powered landings they won't be removing the parachutes until they build confidence in the system, which won't happen before the end of the CC program.

The IDS docking ring doesn't have provisions for fuel transfer, neither does the trunk ombilical. Those would require a major rework of the fuel plumbing system, in addition to a new ECLSS, new waste management, long-range communications and navigation, higher thrust engines, and additional EVA capability. So you're right, a BEO Dragon would really have to be a Dragon V3. Exactly. The LES is a fundamental design element of the entire spacecraft, and in both cases was designed for the requirements of that spacecraft, which are different because their missions are different, their flight environments are different, and their economical and political background are different. It's like comparing the wheels on a Hummer to the wheels on a Formula 1 race car or a shopping trolley, which are all well designed for the job they have to do. There is no "single best spacecraft", like there is no "single best aircraft" or "single best car". Is an Airbus A380 better than an F-22? Is a Tesla better than a Land Rover? It all depends on what your requirements are and how each vehicle meets those requirements.

I wouldn't judge a highly photoshopped picture from Vogue magazine as a depiction of the actual space suit that SpaceX is going to use. Leather (faux?) probably isn't the best material to use for a pressure suit and black is probably the worst possible color. - - - Updated - - - Dragon can last 10 days on orbit. Orion can keep you alive for 21 days. Orion also has EVA, long range communication and navigation equipment.

Because 5% LOC rate means that your astronauts die every 20 launches. Good luck getting money from Congress with that figure. If airliners had a reliability rate of even 99.99%, there would no air travel industry. The best launch company in the world has been grounded for 3 months after blowing up a customer's payload. - The Dragon abort system is carried all along the mission, which has its drawbacks. Some people might prefer to jettison the abort system and get more payload. - SpaceX has abandonned cross-feeding fuel. - Reusability has yet to be demonstrated. - NASA actually paid for the supersonic retro-propulsion tests. - Restartable engines are nothing new, and neither are aerodynamic surfaces and landing legs. I'm not saying that SpaceX's achievements aren't impressive, because they are, but there is no unique solution to a problem. I'm certain that their design is good for their requirements, but other missions have other requirements. And as I said above, SpaceX has its own problems. Their development process involves a lot of prototyping, tweaking, and trial-and-error. Cutting corners can cause problems, like the helium tank strut issue, which apparently wasn't properly qualified/certified. And they also have a lot of delays. It is true that NASA probably has too many space centers, but that's the price of being a political organization. It isn't much a matter of communication, especially nowadays (a lot of people work with colleagues on the other side of the world these days), but there is a cost of maintaining these large facilities. So they have the choice of closing down a facility and losing support from the local congressmen, or keeping them open and getting money to do stuff there. You need to stop comparing NASA with private companies. It's not the same world, they don't follow the same rules. SpaceX simply wouldn't exist without NASA. The Merlin engine was based on a NASA reference design. Falcon 9 and Dragon development were paid for by NASA. Pointing fingers and blaming is pointless. It doesn't help anything. There is just a reality that you have to deal with.

As if that was easy! You see, the problem with all those pesky procedures is that most of them are actually necessary. You can't just skip them or remove them. Yes. That's called a trade study. A proper trade study typically takes several months. Typically, this is done either internally or outsourced to a research organization or an industry. But before that, you need to go through a procurement process to find out the best organization to do the trade study. You also need to obtain funding for those trade studies, because somebody has to pay. Have you ever done any actual project management? The first steps are where all the fundamental design decisions are actually made. You won't make those decisions on your own. You are going to mobilize your top architects. They are going to have to consult with experts to figure out where the state of the art is. There will be architecture review boards and more feasibility studies. This also has a cost. And again, because this uses taxpayer money, you need to justify the expense, which means that you need to document everything you do in order to prove to the taxpayer representatives that you didn't just steal the money. Good, fast, or cheap. Pick two. As much as everyone wants a design that is efficient, quickly implemented, and cheap, that rarely ever happens in real life. You need to balance between a good design, a cheap design, and development time. If you remove everything that isn't cheap, then you are likely to end up with stuff that is under-performing or over-schedule (note that over-schedule always means over-budget too). How long has SpaceX actually been developing first stage recovery or the Falcon Heavy? SpaceX is pragmatic, they build stuff with rapid prototyping, blow up stuff, make tweaks, then try again until they get it right. This involves a lot trial-and-error, which I wouldn't call an efficient development process. It also results in a basic design with lots of tweaks added to it. On the other hand, the "classic" approach in the aerospace industry is to spend a lot of time in CAD and simulation, and only start production when you are 100% confident that it's going to work, including economically. You don't see Airbus or Boeing crashing prototypes and tweaking the wing shapes to get them to fly, or building new planes and then looking for customers. Actually, they typically only build one prototype of a new model these days, and that's mainly to develop the industrial procedures. It rarely works that way. It's more like you have a device with an efficiency of 50% but it's too heavy and you need 70% for the mission. So you need to get it to 70% and make it lighter, but then it gets more expensive and needs some other resource and more development time... Engineering is never clear-cut. It's a world of compromises and tough decisions. LOL. It really doesn't work that way. It's more the other way round, like "you have X billions per year, what can you do with it?" (and the answer is typically "not much"). And all the R&D stuff that you did above already cost a lot of money for which you must have already got a budget, right? And even politicians know that there is always another launch window! Yes, but nothing replaces the real thing. You can do a lot of simulation, but the actual validation can only happen through an actual flight test. It takes years to develop and launch a new science mission. The call for proposals for MSL started in 2004, and it arrived at Mars 2012. It cost $2.5 billion. Again, you might be able to do it faster, but it will cost more, or cheaper, but it will take longer. No, because if you skip on the review boards, the procedures, and the paperwork, the there is a lower chance that it will work. Because those are the basic tools that are used for quality control.

One of the big challenges when designing equipment for the surface of Mars, is dust. The wind isn't very strong, but it's enough for the dust to get in everywhere. It's abrasive, so you have to design your equipment with seals and filters to prevent ingestion and clogging. It's also toxic, so you don't want to get it inside the vehicle. This is why NASA is looking into suitports rather than airlocks for most EVA activity.

You can't just build "a ship to mars that will be equal to the one that will carry humans 2 years later", because we simply don't have the technology. You keep on ignoring all those steps that come before your step 1. Before you build a man-rated ISRU system, there are all these steps that you are ignoring: - Build a complete theoretical model (TRL 3) - Building a lab model as a proof of concept (TRL 4) - Engineer a subscale prototype that you can submit to environmental testing on Earth (TRL 5-6) - Design a pathfinder mission with a spaceworthy subscale prototype (TRL 7) - Study and analyse the results from the pathfinder. - Incorporate your findings into a new prototype. - Validate your new prototype - Iterate prototypes and flight qualified hardware until you build enough confidence to reach TRL 8 and 9. Increasing your TRL is an iterative process. You can't simply go from TRL2 to TRL9 overnight. Each of those steps is going to expose new problems and force you to workaround and improve your model and your methods. You are going to learn lessons on what works and what doesn't, because there is always stuff that you didn't think of or that you didn't know. Getting everything right the first time rarely happens (even for SpaceX!) and you would be stretching your luck by thinking that the first iteration of an ISRU-based spacecraft is going to work perfectly, or even well enough to keep your astronauts alive. We don't know where to start building a full scale ISRU plant that would work on Mars. We don't know how deep it would need to drill. We don't know how hard the regolith is underneath the surface. We don't know how efficient it would be. We don't know what the best lubricants would be. We don't know where the best landing site is. We don't know how much maintenance is needed. We don't know if it should be fixed or mobile. We don't know what to do if we don't find the deposits that we expected. We don't know how efficient the system will end up being. There are dozens engineering questions that need solving, like designing the fuel tanks or transfer valves, selecting the best type of pump for moving fuel around, figuring out the best power source, designing a low maintenance drill, and plenty of other stuff. They might seem trivial, but each one of those questions needs to be studied, analyzed, tested and answered. You need to test multiple options, build prototypes, test them, and select the best design. Every component needs its own development project, with teams of engineers and scientists and multiple iterations of development phases and review milestones. Think of how JPL got from Sojourner to Curiosity. It took them decades of R&D to evolve from the basic idea of a remote-controlled rover to a fulls-size design. They couldn't have made MSL without learning from Mars Pathfinder and the MERs beforehand. Apollo couldn't have existed if there hadn't been a Gemini program. Similarly, it would be foolish to launch a full-scale manned Mars ISRU program from scratch without the basic knowledge of how to engineer one and without learning lessons from several iterations of pathfinder missions.

And also, funnily enough, neurons. There are no neurons added to your cerebral cortex after birth. Any cerebral cortex neurons that die are not replaced.

You don't know what kind of sensors are required to analyse a chemical product automatically, and neither do I, because that development work has not been done. You can't be sure that there are no flaws in a system before you have certified it, which means going through the whole harvesting/transformation/storage/transfer/utilization cycle several times with unmanned in-situ testing. Hence iterations. With Mars windows opening every two years, and assuming that testing results could be translated into design changes instantly, it would take at least 2 years between each iteration from TRL 6 to 9. And that ignores the actual R&D that needs to happen in between each iteraration. Sending up the same equipment twice doesn't protect you against a design fault. For example, the backup plan for the star tracker on Apollo was to use a sextant. The backup plan in case the docking ring failed was to use EVA. The only possible backup plan for an architecture that relies on ISRU is to bring your own fuel with you.

More like Fox News. Do we really have to make a list of all modern-era military interventions from superpowers that have made things worse compared to those that made things better (if there are any)?

You can't check everything. If the lives of your astronauts rely on a working ISRU system, you need to be 100% sure that it's going to work flawlessly. The only way to prove that a system works is to test it in the exact same situation. The principles of ISRU fuel production might be simple, but the engineering implementation isn't. There are plenty of things that can go wrong. What happens if the tank laminates under the thermal constraints and debris block an internal valve? What if the fuel transfer doesn't work, or the quality of the fuel isn't good enough to provide enough dV? What if something unexpected breaks due to the temperature, dust or atmospheric conditions? If you launch your second vehicle with the same ISRU system as the first, then it will have the same flaws. This is why spacecraft don't usually launch with two of every system. Backup systems typically use completely different methods or a combination of other components that have a different primary purpose. Mars ISRU is TRL 2. To make it a vital system for a Mars expedition requires reaching TRL 9. There is no other way to achieve that other than through many iterations of experimenting, prototyping, and unmanned testing. How do you know that? Have you seen any proven implementations of water extraction systems for Mars? I'm not here for your entertainment. I have a life outside of the KSP forums, and honestly, I get bored from correcting your misunderstandings or your flawed vision of the world. When confronted with ignorance, sometimes it's better to just ignore it and move on. Past conversations have proved that there is no point trying to move you from your stubbornness and arrogance. HSF is always more conservative. For the reasons I've explained above, you don't test new technology on manned spacecraft. You only use TRL 9 technology for vital manned systems. NASA uses unmanned missions to test and develop the less mature technology so that it can be used later. This takes time and multiple iterations. One day you might get through your head that there is a difference between defending and explaining. Defending either position makes no sense at our level. What you or I think about NASA's policies will never have the slightest effect. You can argue with me as much as you want, it won't change reality. The only thing we can do is to sit back and try to understand how things work and why things are the way they are. Anything else is just wishful thinking. I don't know if I should be flattered or worried by the fact that you take this to such a personal level. And yes, if smart people don't implement a groundbreaking idea, there are two possibilities. You typically think it's because they are stupid and that you know better. I think it's because they probably have good reasons for not doing so. I'm not here to justify myself for your entertainment. I think I've pretty much explained my position enough. Take it or leave it.

How come the mods haven't shut down your jingoistic rants yet ? Politics are a no-go on this forum.

ISRU is not practical for an early manned expedition. You're going to have to make sure that it's reliable, which means many years of operation and several iterations of hardware. What happens when your crew lands after a 6 month journey and finds out that the ISRU machine is stuck or that the fuel is polluted and not usable? As usual, you are displaying your ignorance of reality and the huge advances in space bilogy that have happened thanks to research on the ISS. We are way beyond 1980's technology. We have a lot more experience with Mars reentry techniques and a much better understanding of Mars' atmosphere than deploying balloons on Venus. And it would be great if you stopped those claims that the people at NASA are idiots. Get yourself a degree in aerospace engineering or astrophysics, and then you might be qualified to judge.

I really like it too. It provides a sustainable architecture with global access and I've always preferred the "crasher stage" profile rather than the "descent/ascent stage" of Apollo. The only problem I can see is that the lander needs to be super reliable. There is no abort mode if the engines fail to start after dumping the EUS.

I really wish they would use Tapatalk like all the other forums I visit. This is the only forum where I have to use the clunky old browser.

Not sure really, the Wikipedia says that Orion will have a toilet. This paper from september 2014 discusses waste management on Orion and talks about a test article that is to be tested on the ISS in 2018: http://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/20140009939.pdf