Nibb31

The SM definitely is being built, by ESA, and it is part of Orion. Orion = CM + SM. Dragon doesn't have a service module at all, so it can't go to the Moon. Neither can Dragon. Worse performance than what? Dragon? We don't know about Dragon's reentry capabilities because they haven't been tested. The "Apollo" shape is dictated by the ability to steer the capsule during reentry while keeping the sidewalls out of the plasma flow. Orion and Apollo are actually lifting bodies, that can bleed off speed by manoeuvering during reentry and performing a skip reentry. The steeper sidewalls on Dragon mean that it can't be steered as much, resulting in a lower L/D ratio, less cross-range, and more importantly less capability to bleed off excess speed. 21 days for 4 people, which is enough for a lunar sortie or a trip to EML1. Dragon has life support for 7 days, which isn't enough to go to the Moon and back with any margin. - Systems on Orion are hardened, redundant, and designed for on orbit service/repair, manual control, vacuum operation, multiple mission modes, BEO navigation, BEO comms, etc... - Dragon systems are not hardened, designed for a shirtsleeve environment and are geared towards regular automatic LEO taxi flights with minimal training. - Depress/Repress capability, support for EVA suits, and handrails/EVA fixtures are a requirement for contingency (crew transfer in case of a docking failure) and baseline operations (ARM) on exploration missions. Dragon does not support support EVA, therefore it requires an additional airlock module. - Solar panels are orientable, which allows to orient the spacecraft independently from power production requirements (for thermal control, propulsion, scientific observation, EVA requirements, or other mission-specific requirements). Dragon v2 needs to spend most of its time with the trunk panels towards the Sun. And no, you can't just "bolt" systems into another spacecraft. Spacecraft are not Legos. Spacecraft are built around their systems, not the other way round. Once you add a service module with equivalent dV and flight duration, extended life-support, deployable solar panels, EVA gear, and an airlock that are required for BEO exploration missions you would have pretty much the same, if not more, mass as Orion. A BEO Dragon would not have SuperDracos because it would be stupid to carry along that extra weight for no good reason. Until we get to a point where Earth-Moon trips become routine, propulsive landing and reusability make no sense for exploration missions.

There are only 3 business cases for the space industry: - Sell stuff to the comsat operators - Sell stuff to the military - Sell stuff to NASA SpaceX doesn't do exploration, colonization, or whatever. It is in those 3 markets. SpaceX is a NASA contractor. Without the government buying stuff from them and subsidizing development SpaceX wouldn't be in business. NASA is a science organisation, with exploration and R&D as their main goals. How they proceed depends on the nature of each project. When it makes sense to subcontract, they do it. When it makes sense to do stuff in-house, they do it. The important thing is that at the end of the day, they are pretty darn good at doing science.

I pretty much agree with your analysis about Orion. Whatever spin NASA puts on it regarding Mars and asteroids, Orion is a spacecraft that was initially designed for cislunar flight, and that is reflected by most of its actual requirements and capabilities. But that certainly doesn't change the fact that Dragon was designed as a LEO taxi, not an exploration vehicle. Again, spacecraft are not Lego. You can't just swap out shirtsleeve environment systems and replace them with hardened systems. You can't just recertify systems that are designed for a 6-month loiter time in LEO to a 3-year loiter time in deep space. You can't just bolt on EVA capability, a radiation shelter or a service module. If you do those things, you end up with a totally different vehicle with a whole new set of requirements and a separate design and certification process. The whole powered landing thing makes sense for a reusable taxi, but it's just detrimental dead weight if you have to carry that extra fuel and hardware all the way to the Moon, Mars, or wherever you're going and back. So SLS-Orion doesn't have a well-defined BEO mission, but then again neither does Dragon. It will not be going to Mars either, or at least not in anything resembling its current form.

Gemini used solid retro rockets, like Mercury, to deorbit, with the RCS as a backup (they ended the mission when they had just enough RCS fuel to deorbit in case the solid motors failed). Deorbiting the capsule plus the service module would have required much larger and heavier deorbit motors, as well as more reserve RCS fuel, than for just the capsule, which would be less efficient, require a bigger rocket or reduce payload capacity. Why bother deorbiting it when drag will eventually pull it down anyway?

Nobody said Orion is better. They are two different vehicles built for different purposes. Dragon is "better" to shuttle crew to the ISS, because that's what it was designed for. Orion is "better" for BEO exploration because that's what it was designed for. It would suck for ISS crew rotations. The requirements that Dragon is lacking for BEO missions are: - Radiation shielding - Hardened electronics - Redundant systems - Life support duration - Mission duration - Reentry speed - Navigation systems - Communication systems - EVA capability Dragon systems are not certified with the same requirements. It is optimized to be economical for short trips to the ISS and back. You might be able to modify each system to meet the requirements for BEO exploration missions, but you would need to go through the entire design and certification process again and you would end up with a very different vehicle.

Orion needs a mission module, but it is still built for BEO missions. Dragon isn't.

A highly modified one that costs way more than a Land Rover. But that's not a Mini. This is a Mini:

The Falcon Heavy already has 28 Merlin engines. Your "Falcon 10" would have 46. As said above, more parts means more failure points and more cost. There is a point at which it makes sense to simply build a bigger rocket. Also, if you were doing KSP-style asparagus staging, your first pair of boosters would empty really quickly. On a nominal flight the Falcon 9 core stage burns for 180 secs. To feed 45 engines, the first pair of boosters would be empty after only 72 seconds. I'm not sure how fast the rocket will be going after only 72 secs, but it's probably not worth the extra complexity and risk and the boosters might not be recoverable from such a low altitude.

Not in any recognizable form it won't. The requirements are different. Exploration missions require extra shielding, a beefier heat shield, longer duration life support, longer loiter capability, long distance communication, EVA capability for contingencies, redundancy and repirability, etc... They specifically don't require soft rocket powered landing or reusability, which will just add extra weight and complexity to the vehicle. Taking a Dragon on an interplanetary mission would be like taking a Mini across the Sahara. You might be able to modify it to survive the journey, but you would be better off using a Land Rover.

Better for what ? Which is better, a Land Rover or a Mini? Same thing, it depends on the mission. Dragon and CST are like the Mini, designed for short and frequent commutes in relative comfort. Orion is a Land Rover, designed for extreme environments and longer journeys with higher versatility and robustness. You can go shopping in a Land Rover and you can cross the Kalahari in a Mini, but neither are the best vehicles for the job.

I really wish people would stop automatically linking "Aliens" to UFOs. There are plenty of other wacky speculations that are just as plausible: Santa Claus, leprechauns, time travellers, Nth-dimensional beings, God or gods of your choice, underwater creatures, N.azis from the Moon, secret weapons of the CIA/NSA/KGB, the Illuminati, big foot, tooth fairies, etc... Why do they have to be aliens ? The alien thing is 100% cultural bias.

If it was night and all you saw was a light, it's extremely difficult to estimate distance and altitude, which also means that extrapolating speed and vertical direction is pretty much impossible. BTW, where do you live? There was an Ariane V launch last night.

Since when are Gravioli particles RL science?

I don't think that SSTO makes much sense, however: - NSP was perfectly impossible, and everybody knew it. It was mainly troll bait to push the USSR into a spending frenzy to bring down its economy (much like the Strategic Defense Initiative). - X-33 was way too ambitious, and Venture Star was probably not feasible with a significant payload (which is a problem common to all SSTO ideas) - MAKS/Spiral wasn't SSTO. It was supposed to be airlaunched, but the hypersonic carrier aircraft was (and still is) unrealistic. - Delta Clipper was probably the most promising, with no silly wings and wheels wasting precious upmass. Again, as an SSTO the payload fraction would have been abysmal, but it might have made a good first stage.

It's not a new idea. Having the water tanks surrounding the habitation module is a pretty common idea. Typically, the water is scrubbed and recycled, like on the ISS. However, you wouldn't want to use water for propulsion. First because it would require a lot of power to break down the water into LOX and H2. Second because expending the water would deplete your radiation shield, which is a bit counter-productive. Interestingly, what you propose is exactly the opposite of the fuel cell system that was used on the Space Shuttle. It converted LOX and H2 from the propellant tanks into power and drinking water for the crew.

Why? Nothing lives forever. When we're gone, we're gone. Something else will exist somewhere else in space and time, but whether that something shares heritage with our species or not doesn't make any difference. I can understand the quest for immortality on an individual basis, as long as you're enjoying life, but for a species it doesn't make sense. Once you're dead, you won't care about being dead. As for hypothetical unborn descendants of our species, they won't be disappointed by the fact they will never exist. Nobody is going to judge an extinct Humanity, or assign us some sort of high-score for acheivements. Either we evolve into something better suited to whatever our environment becomes, or we go extinct. There is no success or failure in evolution because nature has no sense of right or wrong. However, nature hates vacuum, so if we disappear, something else will eventually come along and fill our niche. In other words, it really doesn't matter if Humanity survives. We aren't special snowflakes when it comes to the laws of nature and evolution. There is no such thing as destiny and we don't deserve anything special.

No. Lagrange points require n-body gravity simulation, which is extremely complex to predict. KSP uses a simplified Newtonian model where you can only be under the influence of a single body at a time.

The LOK spacecraft was a hugely modified Soyuz that really only had the descent module in common with the original Soyuz. The current Soyuz TMA is a specialized space station ferry. Many of its redundant capabilities have been removed over the years. You would have to completely redesign it if you wanted to use it as an exploration vehicle.

Wait until you show them the bill.

Designing and builder would take at least 10 years. No way is 2022 possible. Also, rockets aren't Lego. You can't just stick bits together and expect them to work. And you seem to be way off in terms of dV.

Widespread small reactors would be a bad idea. Nuclear power is safe, as long as it's protected with security measures and centralized. Letting radioactive matter out in the wild, accessible to the public, would be thousands of Goiania accidents waiting to happen.

Generation ships are science fiction. It would require propulsion, orbital construction, massive access to orbit, and closed loop life support with regenerative food production and plenty of other technologies that are centuries away. Interstellar travel isn't something that would help us in our 11th hour.

How expensive is this compared to, for example, a reusable SSTO lander infrastructure? By the time we need regular access to the lunar surface, multiple reusable landers would offer more redundancy, more flexibility, and would not be limited to a single liftport, which might not be where you want to go. In the end, there are too many unknowns at this stage. Also, your cost figure only factors the launch cost, which is silly. The R&D and manufacturing alone would be orders of magnitude more expensive than that.

Technological progress isn't linear or exponential. It works by leaps, alterning exponential acceleration with slower periods until a new breakthrough is made. The rapid progression of computer science since the 60's is the tree hiding the forest of other fields, because the progression also varies for each field of research. Aerodynamics or chemical propulsion haven't evolved much over the last 20 years. Computers have, but they seem to be reaching a plateau in term of processing density for example. Moore's law is slowing down. It's the rule of dimishing returns. When a new technology appears (flight, DNA, automobile, nuclear power...), the early progress is spectacular and can appear exponential. Early improvements are impressive and require little effort, but the more you advance, the more complex it gets and each iteration of improvement gets more and more expensive, requiring more work and more compromises. - - - Updated - - - I disagree. Anything that we say or do won't have any impact on these forums. When the time comes when space travel make sense economically, socially, and politically, then we will find the technological ways to do it. Until then, the best we can do is to fund research in hope that we might find a new application that opens those economical, social, and political gates. If those reasons don't materialize, well, no big deal. In the grand scheme of the Universe and Time, we are as insignificant as a spec of dust. Our achievements don't matter.

Why would that be? What sort of event would leave less survivors on Earth than in a hypothetical space colony? Even a scorched Earth will always be more hospitable than Mars or the Moon. If we can build self-sufficient colonies on Mars, then surely we can build self-sufficient colonies on an uninhabitable Earth with far less effort.