Wesreidau

A rather sympathetic man from a rather exceptional book.

A flag makes little sense for the side of spacecraft. Lets just adopt a roundel. I propose the Greek symbol for Earth. Looks good on the side of a white spaceship, and the fields can be colored or patterned for various nationalities.

I could probably cook anything with meat.

6/10 Creepy in that little-girl-from-Poltergeist way, but not creepy enough.

Somehow I doubt it will be airtight after smacking the ocean in a simulated landing glide path.

Heterogenous. However you have the correct answer for incorrect reasons, which justifies missing the question. It is not heterogenous because of floating debris but because the oceans are seperated into layers due to thermal layering. I had an AP Bio test back in the day regarding lake water thermal layering that we'd not studied in the slightest. My entire class was griping about it, except for me. I BS'd that essay so hard... I mean, I posited a theory based on known fluid dynamics to account for the ecological impact of thermal columns in an aquatic environment. In the aftermath review it turned out I was close enough for horse shoes and hand grenades. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermocline

Eagle, Gold Palms, OA. The first rule of OA is we don't talk about OA.

The Shuttle bay was engineered around fitting a Hexagon inside. The Shuttle wings were designed to return a full cargo bay after 1000 nm of glide. The Shuttle had to launch into a polar orbit and conduct a one-orbit-return with payload in case of emergency. Air Force requirements drove the Shuttle design. Hexagon had an elaborate power generation, station-keeping, and film-deorbiting requirement on top of the cameras themselves. The X-37 won't fit a Hexagon, no. But it can fit cameras. I think after the Air Force got burned expecting the Shuttle for in-orbit Hexagon refurbishment failing to materialize they decided to make their own system for satellite retrieval. They may also have developed a camera module for the cargo bay itself. But I can't possibly see them snatching other nation's satellites out of the sky. Unless something is designed to be clamped down in the cargo bay its going to be a bowling ball in a cardboard box all the way back to Earth.

Why that's a great idea in Post #6. Mine was Post #5. Please critique me for information discussed in Posts #1-4.

This is a pretty annoying post. Did I say it would happen overnight? No. Did I say it would blow away in a thousand years? No. Did I say it was impossible? No. I said it shouldn't be done unless we could render it relatively closed-cycle, IE, replenished. Don't strawman strangers.

And there goes a half-billion dollar spy satellite? Hardly. They want to bring something back, you're right. They want to bring back their own cargos.

I'd say the two budgets are already combined. People seem to have interpreted my comment in unintended ways. The author is dead, as they say.

May I recommend Sailor Jerry?

My little Kemini capsule contains two batteries, a probe core, a clipped-in parachute, clipped-in communotron, three Seprotron retro-rockets and three landing legs. Not cheating because I'm paying for it all in mass and funds. I think I clip about every ship I build. I've got the USI life support mod and merrily clip cartons of snacks into hab modules, because hey, there's space in there. I tuck half of my little fuel tank into a landing can to make a Mun lander with a low center of gravity. Its okay, Magy Kerman will fit, she's compact. And why shouldn't all my scientific instruments be clipped inside the science lab? Its just two Kerbals in that big thing. However, I do consider it cheating to clip fuel tanks into fuel tanks into fuel tanks into fuel tanks. Not saying my nuclear tug module doesn't have a fuel tank clipped into the middle of the four tanks, but that's for fuel ducting purposes and could just as easily be the adapter... I'm not arguing this well.

*pours a grape slurpee on the ground for the fallen* Lovely stuff. Per ardua ad astra.

I love how the representative basically said "go big or stay home". Texan for sure.

Ever watch Ice Station Zebra? I recall the Shuttle had a requirement to be able to land with its payload still aboard. I think the X-37 is for that purpose; if the Air Force wants to launch something with cutting-edge crypto or somesuch, there's an obvious fear that what went up will come down outside US airspace and possibly in the enormous land-mass of China, Russia, and their spheres of influence. So the X-37 exists as a guided parachute; return a sensitive payload to American airfield, or slam into a mountainside at Mach 6. That's why it isn't obviously useful, we're all thinking about going up, but it was designed for going down.

Pff. Two billion dollars is only 1/6th the cost of a Gerald R. Ford - class supercarrier. Uncle Sam's just cleaning out the couch cushions.

In a hole, in the ground, in the family cemetery, on the family farm, next to my wife.

There was no reason to force ourselves to learn how to go to the moon, and we did it in a tin foil Jiffy-Pop bag because we couldn't wave our hands at the engineering problems. "Moar Boosters" is something of a cop-out. And how are we going to learn to conduct 'full on construction in space' if we do not learn how to 'fabricate, assemble and modify structures in space'? Fast forward a thousand years. Will the Ceres Propellant Company have to open up a Sears-Roebuck catalog to get a new pre-fab office rocketed up because they can't imagine re-purposing an old hydrogen tank? Will the ability to launch a thousand tons to the Moon for a dollar a kilogram change that you can get more square footage a kilogram with inflatables than with pre-fab, hollow steel cans? Or for that matter, convert your hollow steel cans from some super-lifter into I don't see this argument going anywhere. "Remove a technological hurdle" begs a big question. People need to stop waving their hands at the very real problems that are the reason for the proposal in the first place, otherwise we can't have a productive discussion on a common frame of reference.

The only thing worse than "no politics" rules are threads full of coy political jabs based on nonsense and the sense that correcting them would attract a moderator. So there's my coy political post in what is fundamentally a political thread following the OP's lead. I'm so glad everyone appears to agree.

People are making a lot of assumptions, but I'm not predicting the future of technological development. Why should nuclear rocketry 'lag behind' solar-electric? Any improvement solar-electric sees, nuclear-electric can mimic with far more wattage while nuclear-thermal continues to out-thrust. What is so dangerous politically? A test ban treaty merely interpreted to include non-radioactive reactor exhaust? Throw a Russian into the crew or otherwise renegotiate it, if its even a relevant document. Just call it an open-cycle cooled reactor and fire it in a high orbit while wagging this at the press http://fas.org/nuke/space/consensus.pdf . What is so dangerous for manned flight? Radiation from the reactor? Reduced mission times equal reduced radiation exposure. But all that isn't related to wet workshop re-configuring. I'll say this; learning how to fabricate, assemble and modify structures in space is a lesson which must be learned. Everything can't be inflated or pre-fab for the rest of time.

Ammonia, NTR, 600 seconds ISP. Next question.

1. The scale is greater, sure. But that doesn't mean the cost is greater. Astronauts can bolt, brace or glue all the guts into the tank they need without the enormous launch cost of sending the thing pre-built. Not to mention you can get a much larger station this way. 2. Okay, worst case scenario. Your fuel is hypergolic K-stoff and C-stoff. Open the airlocks and wait a month. 3. Pff, those silly 50's / 60's people, trying to land on the moon.

Nuclear Salt Water Rocket. I don't see a need to go interstellar within the century, however. We've got enough Lebensraum in the heliosphere to last a millennium.