Nibb31

Not on the geological scale. Not even on the scale of the project. It was started in 1996, nearly 20 years ago already. Another couple of years is a drop in the bucket.

Because even if you have the blueprints, it's still easier to study the real thing. I don't see what a shuttle has to do with human reproduction in space.

Huh? That makes zero sense. There is no such thing as an SSTO shuttle. A bit vague, eh? For the Shuttle, the tooling and facilities were destroyed or converted to build the SLS. You could rebuild the tooling, but at that stage you might as well make the tooling for a completely new design. No they didn't, it's an urban legend that "blueprints were lost". The Apollo-Saturn or STS vehicles were made of thousands of components that are likely still in the archives of contractors and NASA somewhere. The thing is, even if you had the blueprints for each part, they would be useless because the industrial environment is too different. First, you'd have trouble just finding a microcard reader or a working tape drive to read the files. And then we don't use the same manufacturing techniques or materials nowadays as we did in the 60's during Apollo, or in the 70's during Shuttle. You would have to manually convert blueprints to CAD files and redesign each part. Again, at that stage it's better to start from scratch. Now, to answer the OP, given that the Shuttle was a money pit for NASA, it would make no sense for a private company to operate one either.

Angel, I think you are the one being obtuse here. This is exactly like the previous discussion we had, where no matter how much logic, how many examples, and how much real-life experience we bring to the thread, there is no moving you. As soon as we counter any of your arguments, you either just repeat the same ones over and over until we get bored, or you divert to some other topic. It's annoying as hell. We all recognize that airships might be useful for some small niche sectors. But the rest of the thread is starting to look like the old Argument Clinic sketch: There's one thing to learn here. When you think that you are the only one who has the right ideas against the entire world, including people who are actually experts in the subject matter, then it is usually time to reconsider your ideas. In other words, when everyone says you are wrong, then chances are that you are. How much time-sensitive cargo actually needs to go from the center of the US to the center of China? Is there even 250 tons per year? Both American and Chinese populated areas have existing railroads and adequate logistic systems. Your factory to factory concept doesn't work either. Imagine a car factory. They assemble cars with parts from various suppliers. Seats are made by one company, plastic parts, switches, fasteners, tyres, oil filters, hinges, fluids, windows, etc... all come from different factories. Car manufacturers don't want to be delivered 250 tons of screws, then 250 tons of seats, 250 tons of switches, and 250 tons of headlights, because that would increase inventory and storage, which is a huge liability for them because they are taxed on their inventory and storage becomes a huge cost. Companies don't want stock. Instead, they want JIT (just in time) delivery and minimized inventory. Note that JIT delivery does not mean fast, it means getting parts in the supply chain when they need them. They don't care if the parts take 3 months to get there. That is a huge difference. So in the end, in order to supply the car factory with 250 tons of cargo, the airship would have to fly around the country to pick up 10 tons of car seats here, 1 ton of screws there, 20 tons of engines parts elsewhere, and so on.... In the end, the airship would be travelling an indirect route all over the continent, which would take much longer and be much more expensive than by train or truck. And for most of that route the airship would be half empty, unless you make an even more indirect route by picking up and dropping off other things along the way. And each stop needs some sort of logistics hub for landing the airship, loading and unloading, and freight storage. Also, car manufacturers don't typically build factories in the middle of nowhere with no roads or rail system. They also don't have acres of spare land to turn into landing pads and loading areas for airships, or the warehouses to store cargo, because they are usually near urban areas.

No they are not. But to answer your question, it wouldn't ignite unless it was mixed with oxydizer. Helium is pretty inert, so it would basically just expand in the vacuum into a very thin cloud.

No, of course they can't. Do all airliners return to Seattle and Toulouse for maintenance? You clearly have no idea how this works. No, you can't insert these slow-flying aircraft into existing airports. They are also too big to be handled by existing airport structures, they would get in the way of ground traffic and air traffic. As for unloading 1000 tons of freight onto 50 semi-trucks in the middle of field, after a rain storm, good luck with that. For the same reason cargo ships, cargo planes, and trains don't carry their own cranes. It's much more efficient to have heavy cranes at the port/station than to carry hundred ton cranes with you everywhere. Existing infrastructure is cheaper than new infrastructure. Even if it's just a 50 acre field covered in tarmac, it's still going to be more expensive than using whatever exists. Ports are paid by freight companies through portuary taxes. Airlines pay airport fees. Again, you have no idea how this works. No, I'm talking about the 20 years of planning and development it would take to develop the infrastructure described above. Do you have any idea how much time, money, and effort it takes to build large infrastructure? So how can you claim that is universally better and more efficient? He just explained to you that customers either care about speed and pay the premium (a small minority), or don't care about it. In most cases, they go with the cheaper option, regardless of how slow it is. There is no demand for a middle option. That is his experience as someone who works in logistics. What are your credentials in the transport industry? It looks like a pretty standard height bridge to me. Standard sized trucks can go through it without a problem. It's also an existing bridge that looks like it was built 100 years ago. If it's paid for, you might as well use it.

The pegs were added after landing for transport. The little holes with labels are pieces that were sampled from the heatshield for analysis. The scortch make in the middle look like places where the outer layer was completely ablated away.

I'm not sure what you mean with "Space Cowboy", but your reference to the early US astronauts doesn't fit at all with that description. They were highly-disciplined and highly trained military test pilots, not cowboys.

Even if you could influence the attitude of the aircraft, the flight control system would fight back and compensate. If it's told to maintain 2500ft it will do its best to maintain 2500ft regardless of the CG. When you get on board a plane, a train, a bus, or an amusement park ride, you are always at the mercy of the person at the controls. If a pilot wants to crash an airplane, he will crash the airplane, regardless of whether there is someone with him in the cockpit or not.

In most countries, the seaport and railway infrastructure exists since the 19th Century. Roads and airports are widespread since the 20th Century. The only cost is maintenance and expansion. Your blimps need a whole new investment in vehicle development, purchase, and infrastructure. A field is not enough, you are still going to need a logistics hub to load the cargo onto the blimp and transfer to trucks. This means roads, warehouses, cranes, tarmac, servicing facilities and maintenance hangars. You are going to need a lot of real-estate for that, so it would pretty much be the equivalent of constructing a new international airport near every major city. That is not cheap. You are also going to need to integrate the blimps into the ATC system, meaning that they can't just fly anywhere. They will have to follow ATC routes, and new specialized airlanes will need to be created because these blimps are slower than airplanes and fly lower. So your blimp service also has a pretty high upfront investment cost. It needs infrastructure, just like any other transport method. It can work as a niche transport method for large loads that need to be delivered to remote locations (like windfarms or ski resort construction), but it will not replace the entire ship-train-truck multi-mode transport systems because most logistics carriers have optimized those channels to an extremely high degree.

That's a bit of a weird question since I just gave you several ways of dealing with the problem that are used in the industry. Engineering is about requirements and trade-offs which are typically different for each project.

Well, yeah, no administration except the DoD

"having" hardware means maintaining the infrastructure, the production facilities, the trained personnel, the logistic channels, and so on. It costs billions of dollars per year in fixed costs whether you fly or not. The SLS program is based on 1 flight every two years, yet there are only two flights that are currently planned, EM-1 in 2017 and EM-2 in 2021. It takes approximately a decade to develop and build a spacecraft. To fly another mission on SLS in 2023, the hardware should already be in development, but it isn't. No payload means no flights. No administration can justify the infrastructure expense just to maintain a hypothetical capability without actually using it.

Ariane V uses RCS for attitude control after the SRBs are jettisoned: http://cs.astrium.eads.net/sp/spacecraft-propulsion/showcase/ariane5-attitude-control-system.html Delta IV uses a secondary exhaust nozzle for roll control: Most satellites use hydrazine RCS of some sort for propulsion and attitude control. Nowadays, some comsats are equipped with xenon ion propulsion. The ISS uses CMGs for attitude control (control moment gyroscope), which are basically big flywheels.

No, of course they don't: Air freight uses lightweight especially shaped containers that can be fit inside a standard container or a truck for multi-mode transport. To return to your OP, there is no single most efficient transport. Each vehicle is good for a specific portion of the journey, within a specific niche. Your blimp fills a specific niche, but it isn't useful for hauling thousands of tons of cargo economically from China to Argentina, for example. Nor is it useful for delivering a washing machine to an apartment block in a city. If it's capacity is 250 tons, then it wouldn't be efficient to use it transport 10 tons or 10000 tons. It might replace trucks on some specific routes, in some specific countries, and for some specific types and volumes of cargo, but it doesn't go the last mile and its capacity is too small compared to the thousands of tons that an oil tanker or a freight train can carry and too big for transporting smaller volumes. Unless the job is to send a full cargo of 250 tons from one "blimp-base" to another (which is a limited scenario because most end-consumers won't live at a blimp-base, nor will most factories have their own blimp-base) then you still need a logistics hub at each end to triage and transfer the cargo from trucks to the blimp and from the blimp to trucks for the last mile trip. So basically, you need the exact same infrastructure that you would find at an airport or seaport.

Yeah but NASA couldn't afford to develop a new vehicle while it still had to keep paying for both the shuttle and the ISS. They had to cancel the shuttle to fund SLS. Now NASA can't afford to develop mission hardware for SLS while still paying for both SLS and the ISS. They will have to wait until they cancel the ISS to fund SLS missions.

It damages the retina. Don't try pointing a laser into your eyes.

The problem isn't that SLS or Orion exist. The problem is that there are no missions for them. Orion was originally designed to return to the Moon. When Constellation was canned, its mission profile became exploration with 21-day life support. There aren't that many places you can go BEO in 21 days except the Moon. To do anything else than a lunar flyby, Orion is going to need either a mission module (a lander or a hab) or an artificial destination (the ARM asteroid or a deep space station). Those would need a development lead time of at least 10 years, and there will be no development funds available until SLS is finished and the ISS program ends. After EM-1 and EM-2, Orion is probably going to be mothballed until its cancelled. Nobody can afford to pay for the infrastructure of a heavy-lift rocket and manned spacecraft that sitting in a hangar waiting for a mission. Falcon Heavy suffers the same problem as SLS by the way: the lack of payloads. There are no 50-ton payloads in the pipeline. It might find a market for the 20-ton category (competitor to Ariane and Proton) with a comfortable margin for the flyback boosters, but it remains to be seen if that will be competitive.

BAe = British Aerospace, not British Airways. Both BAe and Aerospatiale lost money on the 15-year development program and only sold 14 aircraft. Those manufacturers were strongly backed by the government, so British and French taxpayers footed the bill for Concorde in the end. But I specifically said that British Airways and Air France did operate them profitably mainly thanks to the luxury niche pricing.

In a fantasy world, maybe. In real life, "plasma propulsion" isn't a thing. You might be talking about SEP, but that is low thrust which would make transfer times unsuitable for manned vehicles. It also needs a power source which is bound to make it more than 2 tons. But cities are cities. People travel to cities visit places, see friends and relatives, or to work. It's going to be a long while before people actually live and work permanently in orbit, if ever, because there is nothing that can be done there that can't be done cheaper on Earth. You're assuming a future where there is suddenly a reason to have hundreds of people working in space, a political/economical motive to build space colonies, mass-produced space cars, and a new magical propulsion system. Those are some wild assumptions. Even if that was true, orbital space stations would typically be in different orbits, at different inclinations. Therefore the quickest/cheapest way to get from one orbit to another would be to return to earth and relaunch on the next shuttle flight. If they were in the same inclination, it might make sense to have shuttles to transfer people from one to the other. No way would people ever need to own a personal space craft for the same reason most people don't need to own a ferry boat or a fighter jet. I repeat: that's fiction, not science.

The airlines operated the handlful of Concordes that they got, because well, the planes were purchased and delivered, so they might as well have flown them. But the production was given a death blow by the early 70's with the 1973 Oil Crisis and lobbying from the US manufacturers. British Airlines and Air France managed to operate them profitably, but BAe and Aerospatiale didn't make any money on the Concorde.

Skylon has been vaporware for the last 20 years. There are very little chances that Skylon makes economical sense. See the other threads on Skylon, I don't want to derail this one. Even if it brings the cost of a launch down to $1 million (which is far more optimistic than anyone's wildest estimations), it can only carry 10 tons, so if your "mini space cars" are something like 3 tons (which is less than a Gemini spacecraft), it would still cost each one $300.000 to get to orbit. You can only make space affordable through mass-production. Add the cost of the "space car" and its magical power source with the dV required to get from the release orbit to the space station (including plane changes), and the payment of space station fees (the stations are not going to be cheap to build), and it's going to be a billionnaire's hobby (assuming there is anything interesting up there for billionnaires to do on a regular basis), which rules out mass-production, which rules out affordability. Getting to orbit will always be expensive, even with fantasy propulsion, because the amount of energy required to accelerate something the size of a car from 0 to 27000km/h is enormous. Enormous amounts of energy tend to require enormous infrastructure, shielding, channeling, and some way to convert that energy into actual thrust. None of that can be cheap or available to average consumers because the possibility of accidents, mishaps, or foul play is just too big. The average Joe won't be allowed to handle that sort of power if it could wipe out an entire neighbourhood, just like you aren't allowed to build a fertilizer plant or a hydrogen storage facility in your back yard. Sounds like fiction, not science. Why would people want to travel between multiple stations? What would there be to do up there on multiple stations that can't be done on one station? I can see that there might be some to appeal for rich folks to go to a space hotel once or twice in their life, spend a few days having zero-G parties and gazing out of a port hole, and then come back down once they are bored. I don't see the use of privately owned runabouts to go from station to station.

DaveofDefeat is right. Ships beat everything over long distances. Speed isn't very important for freight, regularity is. Over land, rail transport is hard to beat. Your blimp sounds like a no-go from the start with the helium problem and low capacity compared to a freight train or a cargo ship.

Define "dilution". A typical homeopathic dilution is equivalent to a pinch of salt in the Atlantic Ocean. The chances that a pill contains even a single molecule of the diluted product are infinitesimal. Statistically, the pills don't contain anything. From Wikipedia: "A popular homeopathic treatment for the flu is a 200C dilution of duck liver, marketed under the name Oscillococcinum. As there are only about 10^80 atoms in the entire observable universe, a dilution of one molecule in the observable universe would be about 40C. Oscillococcinum would thus require 10^320 more universes to simply have one molecule in the final substance." This implies that the immune system actually gets in contact with the diluted molecule, which it doesn't.

My point was that the placebo effect doesn't necessarily rely on stupidity or gullibility. It relies on the patient not knowing that they are being administered a placebo. Placebo medication has a place in modern mainstream medicine, especially in palliative care. I think that public funding is perfectly appropriate in that setting. But yeah, there is no reason for public funding to be channeled into alternative medicines that have been proven to be ineffective.