maccollo

If you can land on Mun you can land on Duna.

You press Alt+X to reset the trim... or something like that.

Don't do suicide burns myself. They are merely the least inefficient way of doing an inherently inefficient maneuver. The more you burn vertically the higher the delta V penalty from gravity losses. *edit Well... sometimes I do if the body I'm landing on has low very low gravity like minmus, however for mun gravity or higher surface scraping is always the preferred landing approach.

With the current drag model there is no reason to "add" stability, because drag is so uniform and stable that you get all the stability you need from gimbaling engines and reaction wheels.

Well, you can make a very small SSTO with a 4.5 meter tank, a rapier engine, a ram intake and a lander can. This configuration of just 4 parts is easily capable of doing a mun flyby, so I would say this thing probably has it's uses. Other than that, the design of the engine is very boring and uninspiring.

I'm asking because I came across this article. http://www.wantchinatimes.com/news-subclass-cnt.aspx?cid=1101&MainCatID=11&id=20131203000106 "the moon could hypothetically be used as a military battle station and ballistic missiles could be launched against any military target on Earth" Now turning the moon into the death start sounds sort of funny, and this might just be vacuous propaganda, but never mind whether this is in any way practical or not. What if China actually began to militarize the moon? How would other space faring nations react, and would this have a positive or negative influence on and space travel and exploration? I've always thought that if China were to exceed the height of the the American space program it would serve as a wake up call. Presenting themselves as a threat while doing so would amplify this to the extreme. However instead of increasing the pace of space exploration it might just lead to a bunch of weapon technologies designed to take out targets in space, which would be unfortunate.

Redirect a planetesimal to a direct collision course with your planet of choice. Such an imact could lead to the extinction of all multicellular life on the planet (maybe?). It would certainly do away with us if Pluto were to hit earth at 40 km/s.

I gotta say, it is a very boring looking engine. Silhouettes are important, and the silhouette is indistinguishable from the fuel tank it's attached to. The nozzles of the SRBs are more interesting to look at.

Went to all the planets and moon and landed on them in less than 4 years, using one launch. And then I took the recorded footage and made it into a video.

I saw this documentary on national geographic about a hypothetical alien invasion. The motivation was that the machines (the aliens were machines btw) attacked earth because they wanted to harvest our biomass. I thought that was incredibly stupid because.... 1: Fossil fuels will not be get you very far in interstellar space. 2: Titan I'd wager that the would just have set our for earth on generation ships, in the belief that earth did not have a global civilization, perhaps based in information from probes that checked out the earth before we were as noticeable as we are now. When they arrive and find our a global civilization popped up in the time it took them to get here they would have no choice but to land anyway, because they hedged their bets on this planet and don't have the resources to turn back.

I gotta say, and this for some reason didn't strike me initially, is that this is probably one of the coolest ideas for a spaceship propulsion I've heard. I mean black holes are sort of perceived in popular culture as the ultimate monsters of the universe. Just the idea of us being able to tame the power contained in them and using them for our benefit is sort mind boggling.

Well... again, using breeding and genetic modification to accelerate the process would not be bringing back any extinct species of dinosaur. If derived from chickens the new species would be a subset of chickens. However dodos were birds, and birds are dinosaurs, so bringing back the dodo from reconstructed DNA would be bringing back an specific extinct species of dinosaur.

Alright then, assuming your numbers are accurate the correct course of action is to do nothing. The rocket that you send to divert the asteroid will release more energy than the impact itself.

Go back and double check the trajectory calculations because of they suggest an impact velocity that is 2 orders of magnitude lower than the minimum impact velocity, then chances are the trajectory calculations are bogus aswell. If it actually, for whatever reason, turns out that it is indeed going to hit the atmosphere at that velocity, then predict it's impact location. If it's not landing right on top of a city then do nothing. It will only release the energy equivalent of a couple of kilotons of TNT. The meteor that hit Chelyabinsk in Russia earlier this year released 500 kilotons.

I'm very excited about the progress of China in space, princely because there is no cooperation between them and NASA. Lack of competition leads to stagnation.

Wouldn't you have to constantly put matter into the black hole to keep it from shrinking and eventually exploding? What happens if you get a runaway effect where the black whole energy output exceeds to amount of matter you can pump into it?

Well birds are dinosaurs, and their basic anatomy is very similar to their theropod ancestors. Many of the genes for major features like tails and teeth are simply dormant. So it is conceivably possible to re-engineer chickens with breeding and gene modifications into something that closely resembles something like a dromaeosaur. Jack Horner, a pretty well known palientologist, is actually trying to do that. However, whatever comes out of this, if anything comes out from this at all, wont be any extinct species of dinosaur no matter how closely they resemble each other in appearance. But birds are dinosaurs, so it would be some kind of dinosaur.

Has there been any updates or any pictures yet? I sort of expected something to come through a few days after the rover deployed, but maybe I've just been spoiled by how NASA handles this their robotic missions?

Perhaps, but what the different types of fuels actually are is very vague, and from as far as the game mechanics go I simply don't understand the rationale for adding a separate resource for EVA. It just over complicates things when the primary reason for adding this was to prevent people from pushing their capsules around for unlimited deltaV, or so I thought anyway.

Well this is it, I'm no longer going to play this game. This mission burned me out to much.... But I had to do it! I designed this back in 0.21. It's a roundtrip through the entire Kerbol system, planting a flag on all of them and then returning to Kirbin, taking 1347 days from start to finish. The main principle of the mission architecture was not bringing more fuel to certain points of the mission than necessary, the Apollo approach as it were. This is obviously done with the landers and tugs, but also by splitting the fuel reserves. Only the parts that are needed for Eve and Moho are taken to the inner solar system. At jool the fuel reserves split up and use Tylo's gravity to swing down to Vall and Laythe, thus not having to accelerate the 18 tons of fuel down and out of Tylo's gravity well. For such a slow long mission it was pretty hectic, and after Eeloo success became uncertain because I took to long in getting there and missed the opportunity for a proper burn to Duna. Subsequently I had do a do a 2000 m/s burn to get Duna. I guestimated the deltaV I had left and what it would take for the rest of the mission and decided to gamble that I would make it instead of prolonging the mission. When a rendezvoused with the Kirbin re-entry capsule at the end the lander had 2 units of fuel left

It's the ideal lander engine. Even in 0.21 the 24-7S replaced the 909 for me as the engine of choice for landers, and then it got a 50% thrust improvement in 0.22. Sure, the 909 has more ISP, but that's irrelevant without considering the mass fraction performance of your stage. The 24-7S gets you more deltaV than the 909 out the vast majority of stage configurations for a lower starting mass, especially landers, which also means all the stages that come before it will also have improved performance.

Apparently, one of the reasons for that is because there wont be room for EMU suits on the Orion capsule. To me, something like this would make more sense on a mars expedition where you wont need significant radiation protection, micrometeorite protection or active cooling systems build into the EVA suits. On the asteroid mission (not an actual asteroid mission, it's a meteoroid/small rock) all those dangers will be present, so it's appears to be a compromise forced on NASA as a result of bad planning.

Ran across this video from NASA, complete with bad ass music. Didn't even know they were working on new space suits. They look only about 100 times more practical than the bulky ones they currently have. Thoughts on this?

I don't know about the last 3, but as for flag ship mission costs you could take Curiosity as an example, which would be as big a flagship mission as they come. The total cost for the whole thing was 2.5 billion US dollars spread out over the course of 8 years. source: http://solarsystem.nasa.gov/missions/profile.cfm?InFlight=1&MCode=MarsSciLab&Display=ReadMore

Can't wait to see the full resolution images The funny thing tho. When the next MSL rover lands on mars in 2020 and sends back the first images, people will say the exact same thing about those images as they said about these. They will then point to the high quality pictures sent back by chang'e and say something like "This is what China did 7 years ago, look how the once mighty US has fallen"