Nibb31

But SLS is outsourced. The majority of people working on SLS and Orion work in the private sector. And NASA is not a company.

Angel, the fact is, NASA hasn't been broadcasting the first stage landing attempts for previous flights. They won't be doing it for CRS-7. You can argue about what NASA should or shouldn't do, but that won't change the fact that the landing attempt is not part of the CRS-7 mission.

The technical term of docking with the arm is "berthing". The ISS uses the arm to berth visiting vehicles and modules at CBM ports. Actual docking can only happen at a docking port. The US side of the ISS only has the old APAS docking ports that we used by the Shuttle. Dragon V1 is only equipped with a CBM, therefore it can only be berthed. The new commercial crew vehicles (CST-100 and Dragon V2) must dock and undock autonomously for evacuation purposes, but they use a new NDS docking ring. This mission is bringing up the new docking NDS adapter in its trunk that will be fitted to the old APAS docking rings for the future commercial crew vehicles.

So you figure it's ok to keep on burning more and more stuff?

Those are only replenishment flights, so there is less pressure. Virgin Group is a major investor in OneWeb, so I guess they had no choice. OneWeb justifies the existence of LauncherOne and vice-versa. It's all a very bold project, with a multi-billion dollar investments in a strongly competitive market with predictably low margins, an unproven business model, and a reinvented industrial base. Taking risks is part of what makes an entrepreneur I guess...

So we have our answers. Oneweb has signed contracts with Arianespace and Virgin Galactic for: - 21 Soyuz flights - 39 LauncherOne flights plus options for additional - 5 Soyuz flights - 3 Ariane 6 flights - 100 LauncherOne flights At nominal prices, that puts the price of launching the constellation at approximately 21x100 million+ 39x10 million= $2.5 billion. However they are probably get a large discount for ordering such a large volume. Something like 1.5 to $2 billion is probably closer to the truth. Those must be the biggest bulk purchases price and volume in commercial spaceflight history.

ISS modules are basically just empty tin cans. To turn them into a space station, you need a whole lot of equipment that doesn't exist including CMGs, solar arrays, propulsion, life support, docking systems... USOS modules were designed to be attached to Russian-built Zarya which provided all of those services. Designing equivalent systems takes time. Integrating them takes time. Testing takes time. Launching takes time. Not to mention that those modules were designed to be launched on the Shuttle, which doesn't exist any more. The structural loads involved in an SLS launch and being tugged around by an Orion are completely different. They might be able to take the loads, they might need to be modified, but you are going to need some long and expensive studies to determine that. Like most of the "let's recycle this spacecraft into something else" proposals, you will be better off designing a whole new spacecraft from scratch, which is why NASA is leaning towards a "Skylab II" proposal for their DSH rather than the "recycled ISS modules" proposal. Pretty much any aerospace project these days takes at least 10 years from kick-off to operational status, even much simpler ones than a new space station. I really don't see how it could only take 5 years to build a DSH without a crash program with unlimited budget, which we all know isn't going happen.

ISS modules aren't standalone spacecraft. To turn them into a viable station, you would need station-keeping, attitude control, life support, power, etc... Count another 10 years.

It's not a pyramid, it's a cone. There are plenty of explanations for natural formation of a cone: volcanism, impacts, etc... As for the white spots, it's either something highly reflective, or something that actually emits light. In any case, we've been discussing it here already: http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/107824-Dawn-at-Ceres-Thread

These pictures are amazing. However, the neural networks seem to have a limited number of recognizable patterns in their database. It seems that they have been fed pictures of dogs, pagodas, and roman-style buildings, so the same recognizable pareidolia patterns seem to crop up everywhere. It would be interesting to see what would happen if it was fed with a much larger database, like Google Images. It reminds me of this article about an experimental AI system at Google that seems to obsess about cat pictures: http://www.wired.com/2012/06/google-x-neural-network/

For that, it would need a lander. There are no plans for a lunar lander, and building one would take at least 10 years, so if you started today (which isn't going to happen) you might be able to attempt a moon landing in 2025, which is 4 years after the EM-2. What are you going to do with it between 2021 and 2025 ? That would make abort situations much more complex. Putting it on top would require a LAS that would be 10 times bigger and heavier than the current one, so it probably wouldn't make it to orbit. You would have to put it underneath the Orion, but for what purpose? It would still need a new propulsion module to go anywhere (which would take 10 years to develop) and you would still be limited by the lack of any mission-specific module.

Because Mount Everest is in Nepal. - There are no rocket factories there - There are no rocket propellant factories there - There is no industrial base to build rocket factories there - There are no seaports or large airports or logistics hubs to bring stuff to build rockets there The cost of building all that on top of a mountain, plus transporting thousands of tons of supplies and equipment, plus the difficulty of working in such extreme conditions, with the associated training, equipment, and safety constraints, plus the risk of investing all this in a potentially unstable foreign country, is not worth the 50m/s delta-v advantage. It's just easier to build a rocket with 50m/s more delta-v. Latitude is far more important than altitude.

The difference between SLS and Falcon Heavy is that the Falcon infrastructure and boosters are shared with Falcon 9. They can build a FH on demand whenever the need arises. If nobody orders one, it's no big deal because it doesn't cost much to maintain the capability.

Except that the Shuttle didn't throw away 4 heavy lift engines on each flight, or a Service Module that takes 2 years to build. - - - Updated - - - The more important question is who will fund the two-billion-dollar payloads to go on top of that one-billion-dollar rocket?

The problem isn't the launch rate of the rocket. It's the production rate of any meaningful payloads. There are no launches manifested beyond EM-2 in 2021. There are no payloads in the pipe. There are no plans for any exploration missions and no budget. For a large payload to be ready for a hypothetical EM-3 in 2022, it would have to have been initiated in 2012, yet there is nothing. You don't launch a $500 million rocket to launch a $10 million payload. Whatever SLS launches is going to have to be big, heavy and super-expensive. And $500 million is the (underestimated) cost of a single launch. It does not take into account the fixed costs associated with the infrastructure. Maintaining Michoud, Houston, the VAB, LC-39 and rest of the facilities for a single launch per year is going to be prohibitive if those costs can't be shared with other vehicles. When you spread those costs, you are going to be closer to a program cost of $1-2 billion per year for 1 launch every 1 or 2 years. It's going to be really hard to justify the cost of all that infrastructure and standing army sitting around for 3 years between EM-1 and EM-2 (let alone any further launches). So hard, that it's pretty certain that it will be cancelled after EM-2.

"Superior" is meaningless. There is no "better" spacecraft. Either you meet requirements or you don't. The requirements for STS and for Buran were different, but we can fairly say that none of the met their original requirements, therefore they were both failures. The whole point of the US Space Shuttle idea was to reduce launch costs. It was supposed to do this by bringing back the most valuable part of the rocket: the engines. Recovering payloads or cross-range were secondary goals. The rest of the vehicle, the spaceplane design, the infrastructure, the clumsy SRB design, the disposable tank, were only super-complex solutions to the sole problem of bringing back the engines. So, it achieved the goal of bringing back the engines, but it failed to do so economically. The Russians knew that the US Shuttle made no sense economically, so they figured that there must have been another secret military reason for building it. Therefore, Buran's primary requirement was to match the US Shuttle's payload launch and retrieval capabilities. Cost reduction was secondary, and would only have been possible if they had made Energia reusable, which was the original plan. Launching Buran unmanned and not recovering the engines basically made it the worlds most expensive reusable payload fairing. In the end, that design made no sense at all.

You'd have to be really far for that. We can still use radio methods to locate and recalibrate Voyager 1 and 2. And you could still use a star tracker (which is simply a sort of computerized sextant).

It could be some sort of meteorite. Where do you live?

I don't trust indiegogo products. They can claim whatever magical specs they want, until the phone is actually available and reviewed by independent reviewers, nobody knows what the actual performance will be. Also, I don't see the point in having 500GB of on-board storage. That's a lot of data to lose if you break it or it gets lost or stolen. Although there might be some niche uses for it, most of the time you'll be better served with a separate USB drive. As for the 21MP camera, image quality is about optics and sensor size, not megapixels. You will never get great image quality from a tiny sensor and a pinhole lens because you can't beat the laws of physics.

Millions of dollars is peanuts. It's probably more than that, but imagine the cost of all the conversions that US companies have to go through to do business with the rest of the world? And how foreign companies have to rewrite all their catalogs just to do business in the US. The cost disadvantage is detrimental to business. You can't be all about world trade and have stupid cost barriers like this with a single country. As it has already been said, this is a non-issue. Other countries have changed currencies, switch driving sides, or switched to metric before... It's a bit of a big deal, but nothing that can't be overcome with a few years of preparation and adaptation. Imagine living for twenty years using the French Franc or the Deutschmark and having it replaced overnight by the Euro. Your entire value system is replaced. I don't think Americans are less capable of adapting than Europeans. That's silly. It's just a matter of getting used to the values. For a guy, 1.80 is considered tall wherever you go in the world. 1.70 is average and 1.60 is a bit short for a guy. Six foot two is meaningless for 99% of the world's population. Personally, I have no idea what height it is. That's why the metric system has decimals. Weather temperatures are often expressed in steps of 0.5°C. But is that precision important? Can anyone actually feel the difference between 50 and 51? Again, it's just a matter of adaptation. In a temperate climate, 20°C is pretty comfortable. 0°C is freezing (literally). 40°C is hot. Some countries go to -20°C or 60°C, but those are extremes. And you can actually feel the difference between 19, 20, or 21°C.

Spacecraft since Apollo use an inertial guidance computer, which is basically a bunch of accelerometers and a gyroscopes that measure any changes in velocity and attitude. You recalibrate it from time to time based on your position and the ground data obtained from radar and doppler. Position can be calculated by using a star tracker which is a computer combined to a camera that observes the position of stars. Measure your position twice and you can extrapolate your velocity vector.

Just because Musk has dreams of going to Mars doesn't mean that everything he does revolves around that dream. I don't think he's an obsessive-compulsive type

The purpose of the messages on Voyager and Pioneer probes was PR, nothing else. It was a way to put something meaningful for the general public. Nowadays, NASA does "fly your name to space" where your name gets burned to a CD or a thumb drive that is stuck on the probe or rover. It's just as meaningless, because nobody will be ever be able to read that CD.

I see what you did there !

Hermes was cancelled officially in 1992, but by 1990 it was dead in the water. The design was overweight and after the Challenger disaster they added an ejection capsule which made it completely unmanageable. It could only carry 3 astronauts, no payload, and most of its systems were jettisoned in an expendable equipment module. In the end, the design was so compromised that it was clear that it wasn't going anywhere. Ariane 5 was initiated in 1987, but the early stages were high-level concepts with vague target goals. As noted, by the time the pad complex at Kourou was being built or the systems were being designed, any requirement for manned launches had been thrown out the window.