Nibb31

Wrenches, pliers, drill bits, are typically made of extremely strong forged steel, not 3D printer alloy or something that you can carve out with a CNC machine. The whole point of these studies is to figure out this sort of thing before people get stuck on Mars wondering what tools they should have brought along or what is the best layout for a hab module, or who gets to wash the dishes.

How would that be any easier than loading, flying, and unloading a couple of C-17s ?

Obviously, it's not about how much time it takes to use or maintain specific equipment that doesn't exist yet. This isn't about training for a mission. It's about learning about general organization and mission planning, things like the optimum number of crew members, skill sets, psychology, human factors, base layout, storage, communication, planning daily activities, as well as food, supplies, etc... These are all things that are better worked on beforehand than when people are actually on Mars or even in the planning stages of an actual mission. Are you implying that these human factors studies are unnecessary ?

Batteries aren't the only parts that can fail. You're still going to want manual screwdrivers, spanners, and pliers. Of course they'll have power tools, but sometimes you just need a BFH.

Don't be stupid. Any high-tech spacecraft is going to be designed with reliability in mind. That means the less possible moving parts and manual backup for most vital equipment. As a backup, why not ?., How would a pneumatic hammer be superior to a normal hammer or screwdriver ? The ISS uses special zero-torque screwdrivers for EVA because zero-G, but on Mars, they will be likely to have power tools with manual tools as a backup. Evaluating how practical it is to perform various tasks with various tools is pretty useful work.

Because in space, simple is usually better. These simulations are mostly designed to develop procedures, so it's perfectly valid to evaluate various tools to find out what is practical and what isn't.

Dragon starts flying in 2019. ISS is retiring in 2024. CCrew is divided between Dragon2 and CST-100, typically every 6 months. CCargo is divided between Dragon 1, Dragon 2, Cygnus and DreamChaser. I'd say 6 flights of D2 is optimistic. We've discussed it plenty of times. Hardware has a shelf life. It's government property and all control equipment is in Houston and can't be transferred. End of life is a normal part of a lifecycle. Gotta deal with it.

Never gonna happen. With BFR on the horizon and powered landing out the door, Dragon 2 is pretty much a dead end at this point. Dragon 2 will only fly half a dozen times for NASA. There is one circumlunar flight booked (we have yet to see if that ever materializes). Once they get confident with it, they might refly a Dragon 2 one or two times, but that'll be it.

So instead of spending billions to develop a SM, you multiply the development cost by the number of different SMs. Surprisingly, that might be what ends up happening. The deal with ESA for the ESM covers a grand total of 2 service modules. After EM-1 and EM-2 have flown, either NASA extends the deal with ESA, or they go back to the Lockheed Martin design.

I agree. They'd rather develop a data recorder jettison and recovery system that will only be used once. How much does this extra development cost compared to just packing a new set of parachutes and getting extra data from that. This program is crazy.

It was a rubbish idea. The changes made to ET would have been huge and required a major redesign. For example, the foam would degrade and flake off, so the whole thing would end up floating in a massive orange cloud of debris.

I stopped here. Do you have any idea of how long 40000 years is ? We were still living in caves 20000 years ago. Look at how humanity has changed in just the last 1000 years. Look at how close we have come to extinction in the last 100 years. Do you really think that Homo Sapiens will still be around as a species in 40000 years ?

Water glaciers might exist at high latitudes. Not much use for an equatorial base.

Please stop with your "plenty of ice" statements. "Ice" is not an element. Most of the ice on Mars is CO2. Even if we do locate water ice, look at what a desalination plant looks like on Earth. Extracting drinking water from Mars will be orders of magnitude more complex, expensive, and power consuming than extracting it from sea water. There is some water in the soil, but we don't know how much, how deep, or how hard it is to extract and purify. We also won't know until we actually send multiple missions, first to prospect, second to experiment ISRU, and third to produce massive amounts of H20 and Lox and CH4 on an industrial scale. With many years of iterations and launch windows, getting to that technology to TRL8 or 9 is not going to happen before at least a decade or two.

Soviet program names tended to be rather prosaic Vostok = East/Orient (mission: orbit) Voskhod = Ascent/Dawn (mission: go higher and fly longer) Soyuz = Union (mission: RV and docking) Salyut = Salute (mission: ambiguously civilian/military station) Mir = Peace/World (mission: to become a peaceful space station) Zond = Probe (mission: to probe) Luna = Moon (mission: to land on the Moon) Similarly, the Mir science modules were pretty much self-explanatory: Kvant (Quantum) 1 and 2 for physics, Kristall for material science, Priroda (Nature) for bio science, Spektr for a big spectrometer, etc... So pick something in the same vein... In the Russian program, only successful launches got an actual mission name. Maybe the lunar landings could have been called Mir (mission: exploring a new world). Also, Soviet rockets tended to end up with the name of their first successful payload(Vostok, Soyuz, Proton, ), so the N-1 would probably have been given the name of whatever the 7K-LOK spacecraft was going to be called.

That's a pretty good reason to go and explore, but it's a rubbish reason to sell all your belongings and bring your wife and kids to live there.

A "pod" is not a thing outside of KSP. It's called a capsule or a spacecraft. And not all scapecraft are EVA capable. Soyuz isn't (any more), neither are Dragon (that we know of) or CST-100. Nor were Vostok or Mercury. For Shenzhou and (old) Soyuz, the EVA would be conducted from the orbital module, the descent module cannot be depressurized. As for Dragon 1, I'm pretty sure there is a safety handle to open it from the inside so that ground workers don't get trapped inside during integration/loading.

Suitports. The suits stay outside. But even then, contamination from the outside is going to be a massive problem, especially if you live in underground habs or if any minerals that you might need have to be dug up and brought inside. Moon dust was already a problem on Apollo: once in orbit, there was lunar dust flying around the cabin. The dust was highly abrasive (due to the lack of erosion) and could cause severe respiratory problems: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adverse_health_effects_from_lunar_dust_exposure The problem would be much worse with perchlorate-ridden dust from Mars, since perchlorates are highly toxic. My intuition is that: If you have to live underground to protect yourself against cosmic radiation, If you have to decontaminate everything that comes in, If everything outside is sterile and toxic, If you have to rely on closed-loop technology to survive, If there is nothing of any inherent value in the environment, Then why choose to live there in the first place ?

SpaceShipOne was closer to X-15 than Mercury. It barely reached 100km, with a top speed of Mach 3, and vehicle that was not designed for actual spaceflight or orbital reentry. The Mercury-Redstone flights reached twice that altitude, flying at Mach 8. They weren't really designed as suborbital stunts, but more like test flights for the orbital Mercury spacecraft.

The Shuttle Orbiters have been butchered beyond repair. You can forget them ever flying again. Critical systems have been removed, engines are being irreversibly modified for SLS and Orion, holes have been drilled, wings have been cut off and bolted back on, etc... It's not just about people. It's also about materials and part supply lines. For example, the issue with the Russian Nauka MLM is that the entire fuel system, including the 6 side-mounted bladder tanks, were contaminated with metal shavings and corrosion. Nobody can make these tanks any more because the tooling is gone, the parts to make the valves and the material to make the bladders are no longer available. The idea of fitting other tanks that they had available didn't work. So the latest plan is to cut open each tank to clean it out, and weld them back together. The plan to deal with the corrosion is to file down the corroded metal and then to check that the tank walls are still thick enough to hold the pressure. If it isn't, the tanks are scrap and the last option is to either scrap Nauka, or to spend millions of rubles on designing and certifying new tanks, with tooling and procedures, for a total run of 6 units. The same is true for all of these old designs. If a part is no longer available, you need to redesign it again, which includes new CAD/CAM drawings, new materials with different properties, new manufacturing procedures, unit testing and integration testing. In many cases, you wouldn't simply replicate the design as it was, but you would probably want to improve it and the way it interfaces with the parts around it, and redesign those at the same time. The result is that in the end, you would basically end up with a different vehicle.

Not really. Most spacecraft that are in museums have been modified beyond repair, with sections cut out, holes drilled in, vital parts removed, and general degradation. None of the Apollo hardware or Shuttle Orbiters are anywhere near flight worthy, and restoring them to flight condition would be hugely expensive. The Russians have been struggling to restore the Nauka lab module to flight condition for 10 years, and it only dates back to the late 1990's. The project is plagued with contamination, leaks, and lack of spare parts.

The support infrastructure was basically the two pads, the VAB (leftover from Apollo), the OPFs, and the production lines for the ETs and SRBs. I wouldn't say that the infrastructure was too big, because none of those facilities were actually underutilized. The biggest problem with the Shuttle, IMO, was that NASA never managed to field a replacement or a Block II. It was an experimental vehicle made operational. Of course, because of the cost of all that infrastructure, it couldn't have been used as an experimental vehicle for a couple of years and thrown away. Servicing is just carrying supplies. The various arms on the station are sufficient. Besides, the ISS is going away in 2024.

Why would anyone want to refly a Mercury capsule? The movie looks they are are using a Redstone with small SRBs. Refurbishing a 1960's capsule would cost more than designing a new one from scratch. Also, Mercury had some serious flaws.

It's all good to want to avoid conflict. Grabbing territories is only going to cause conflict. As I said, you might think that that would make an inspiring setting for science fiction, but conflict is not fun. We should be working to avoid confrontation, not to use it as a way to push space exploration. The biggest application for oceans, by far, is transportation. No. What's good for a country, what's good for the population, what's good for the economy, and what's good for the government can all be antinomic. Corporations, governments, and individuals often have very different goals and motivations. Who is "you" ? In the 16th Century, the investment was typically done by governments, often on assumptions that no longer apply today. None of that is applicable to any current government. Of course, for the investment to be worthwhile, there needs to be an economical model. The model was obvious for establishing trade routes between the colonies and the European ports. There is no such model for a Mars colony, and that has nothing to do with militarization of space. Because there are many differences between colonizing the Americas or Australia, and colonizing Mars. For one thing, those places were actually inhabited, fertile, and offered resources that were both trade opportunities and sustenance for the colonies. In most cases, trade routes existed before the idea of establishing colonies. Colonization was mostly a way of reinforcing those trade routes and making them more efficient. In other cases, settlers were attracted to the New World because it was easy to live off the land and colonies offered a brighter future to their children. None of those factors apply to space. That's only for applied science, which is only a small part of scientific research. The motivation behind most scientific work, including exploration (which is now more like field research) is done to advance our knowledge of the universe. It is perfectly valid to pursue science without seeking an immediate economic gain.

It would also introduce conflict, war, death... You probably think that it would make a nice setting for Sci-fi movie, but there is absolutely no need for militarization as long as there is no threat. You also don't need to claim territory to exploit it. Fishermen have been exploiting the oceans for centuries without claiming territory. The Outer Space Treaty doesn't prevent exploitation. You need to make a distinction between a country, its economy, and its government. Those are different things with different actors. Anything that you have retained from 16th century history no longer applies. The world is a different place, with different actors and different rules. Exploration doesn't always go with exploitation. Exploration goes hand in hand with science, extending our understanding of the universe. Whether that science can be applied to economical gain or not is moot.