Nibb31

It would be really great if we could be mature enough to not have giggle fits each time we hear the name of the planet. The stupid puns are probably the greatest obstacle for funding a mission to the ice giants at this point. It's ridiculous and it's childish.

It does seem to have landed upside down and on hard ground, which is the worst survivable situation. In real-life, it should come down upright, on water, and with 3 chutes. The boiler plate Orion in this test is shorter than the real Orion so that it could fit inside a C-17 cargo plane.

Yes, but a geologist can only stay there for a few weeks. A robot can explore for weeks. Speed isn't important here, the rocks aren't going anywhere. A human, who also has to concentrate on staying alive, navigating, and monitoring his reserves, and has to interrupt his EVA every couple of hours. He has to remain within walking distance of the ascent vehicle or the rover. He's also more likely to be distracted and to walk/drive past an interesting rock whereas a rover that crawls around can actually examine every inch of terrain.

The problem with this plan is that you're limited to satellites that are all in the same inclination as your orbital factory. If you are doing mass production in a single inclination, then the only real application is going to be GSO com sats, which happen to actually be quite similar. It isn't economical to build a factory if you're not going to be doing mass production. If you'll be doing one offs, they are likely to going to specific orbits, so it's more economical to build them on the ground and launch them where you want them to be. And again, there is no need for for human intervention once your facility is set up for mass production, except for some exceptional repair work. And remember that there are some components that 3D printers can make, but most of the equipment like electronics, batteries, fluids, seals, filters, solar panels, lubricants, insulation material, etc... will all need to be built and tested on the ground, and then brought up. There is no way that is going to be economical.

And working on Earth is even easier, cheaper, and faster.

If you only have 2 or 3 humans in the loop to occasionally kick the machines if something goes wrong, then you don't need a gigantic pressurized drydock.

Do you really think that you would use actual human workers? If work in space ever becomes a reality, it will be done by robots. There will be no space miners or space factory workers. That makes nice science fiction, but in reality it would be silly.

You'd be better off making it yourself. All you need is a soldering gun.

You know that the Bermuda Triangle is not a thing, don't you? Statistically, there aren't any more shipping or air incidents in that area than anywhere else. It doesn't even make it into the top 10 of the most dangerous places to navigate. It's just a big hoax.

Something to show the 9/11 conspiracy theorists when they complain that there was no plane wreckage at the Pentagon crash site.

The Mars Sample Return reference mission uses two robots. The first is the Mars 2020 rover (based on Curiosity), which will pick up samples and package them in a capsule. The second mission will come later (2024), with a return vehicle that stays in orbit and a lander that carries a small rocket. The rover meets the lander on the surface, puts the capsule on the rocket. The rocket launches, which rendez-vous and docks to the return vehicle in orbit. The lander has its own arm for collecting samples, just in case Mars 2020 isn't able to rendezvous with the lander. If we are lucky, we might get a sample of Mars regolith back to Earth in the late 2020's or early 2030's.

How so? How is it many times easier to send hundreds of trained astronauts with supplies, life support, hab modules, tools, manufacturing and testing equipment, jigs, cranes, materials, etc... to spend months working in space? Employing hundreds of factory workers in a conventional manufacturing facility will always be cheaper, faster, and simplify the logistics chain. It will always be easier to build, test, and integrate modules on the ground and only do limited assembly in space.

Actually, although it looks like my teenager bedroom, the location of pretty much every item and piece of equipment is tracked by mission control. They know exactly how many towels and waste bags are up there, as well as where they are. If someone needs a pair or pliers or a screwdriver, mission control can give the exact location.

A drydock makes no sense. This isn't Star Trek. Orbital assembly would be done with prefabricated modules docked together. It's much cheaper and safer than sending astronauts to do construction work.

What kind of optics do you think you can put on a cubesat? What sort of detail do you think you could resolve with those optics?

If your phone is branded, then updates need to be made available by your network, which is rarely the case. Your best bet is to root the phone and flash a new ROM manually. It's pretty technical and beyond the scope of this forum. I suggest looking at xd-developers.com, which is the most extensive site on the subject.

You guys are amazing. Depending on what suits you, Elon is either an altruist willing to give up his fortune for his dream or a businessman who would sell his mother. Talk about double standards. As a businessman, he knows what's good for his business. Associating with Mars One would be toxic. Mars One is laughing stock in the space scene. Being part of it would hurt his credibility with pretty much every investor, institution, or future millionaire colonist he would want to get on board down the line. Well, making money out of gullible people like the poster above for example. Thanks to the "support" from people like him, the Mars One team are able to pay themselves a decent salary in return for... well... telling people what they want to hear. It might not be illegal, but it sure is inethical. In what way are they forgotten? The Columbia accident was the main driver to retire the Shuttle and to "hopefully" be done with side-mounted winges reentry vehicles for good. I have no idea what the Shuttle accidents have to do with Mars One, but the victims of Challenger and Columbia are all but forgotten. - - - Updated - - - Not to be rude, but have you? To my knowledge, nobody has seen their plan. For all we know, it might just be a cynical HR plot to motivate their young work force into working crazy hours without benefits... Musk has a dream, not a plan, and Mars One is not part of it.

Ok, so you propose a subject and then you shoot down everybody's opinion, except yours. We've seen this before. So what is your point exactly?

Not wanting to play the Argument Clinic here, but... No they're not. There is no such thing as "minor reworking". The studies for repurposing alone would be millions. The integration with existing systems, the various interfaces to get the cobbled together systems to talk to each other. Mars One couldn't even have paid for time in a vibration or acoustic testing facility or a vacuum chamber. When it comes to space hardware, although it might sound counter-intuitive to laymen, it's usually cheaper to custom build for a purpose than to cobble together parts that are laying around.

Someone still has to pay for that R&D. In the private sector, the price of the R&D is paid by the end customer. Which is why rockets aren't cheap. They couldn't even afford a single launch, without even adding the cost of the hardware. And there is no such thing as "minor re-purposing" of space hardware. Spacecraft are not Legos. With that reasoning, you would go broke by sending Western Union transfers to all the Nigerian widows of rich billionnaires. That must be the most ridiculous justification of buying into a scam that I've ever seen.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perchlorate#Health_effects Not instadeath, but it's toxic enough to make Mars a very bad place to want to bring up your children. Add the cosmic radiation and the low gravity, and I really can't see why some people still think that it is somewhat desirable to colonize Mars.

Just going by the number of neurons, to simulate a human brain, you would need 90,000 of those chips (you'd only need 200 for a rat's brain). The chips might be small, but they need to be integrated on some sort of motherboard with RAM, power, interfaces, and other parallelization hardware... With all the associated hardware, they could probably squeeze a couple of them on a 1U 19 inch rack. Surely it will be possible to densify the integration to a certain extent, but I'm pretty sure that the first of implementation of human-level AI that ever exists will be a massively parallel supercomputer in large research datacenter.

[Citation needed]

Why? For a virtual entity, physical footprint or location is irrelevant. "On the Internet, nobody knows you're a building-sized AI."

Until someone comes up with a proven method for mining NEOs (which is not likely for the next 10 or 20 years at least), propellant depots still require that the propellant itself is sent from the surface. So scratch that if we are talking about feasible projects instead of science fiction. If a 100-ton MTV needs 500 tons of propellant to go to Mars, then you still need to launch the 100-ton MTV empty plus its 500 tons of propellant. But if the MTV has its own tanks, then why bother with a depot? Just use your MTV as a depot while waiting for the next window to Mars. I'd take it even further: why even put tanks on your MTV in the first place? The fuel will be coming up in disposable tanker vehicles anyway, which will basically just be a tank with a docking ring and RCS. So scrap the whole depot idea, and just dock a bunch of tankers to the MTV. All the MTV needs is a hab and engines, and you can dump the tanks as you go and plug in new ones before each journey. The only case where a depot might increase efficiency is if you have regular flights between Mars and the Earth and you need a fast turnaround, but that isn't happening anytime soon either...