Mitchz95

Do we know when they're planning to "inflate" it? Also, do we know when SpaceX launches next?

You can certainly do this in KSP. Just capture a big asteroid, attach an ISRU and a drill (along with whatever crew accommodations you want), and boom, you have a spaceship. There'll still be a lot of dead weight from the rock itself, though, so it might be more practical to just build a ship from scratch.

Ignore the copyright thing I posted. I misread it and thought it was a digital recreation of a photograph. Now I realize it means they just scanned the real photograph.

Wikipedia's license for the image includes the following:

I'd probably star with Alpha Centauri and Barnard's star. One gives us an opportunity to study a multiple-star system, and the other a red dwarf system.

A manned station with artificial gravity, at least 0.4g. Maybe test something like Zubrin's Mars Direct design: a manned compartment attached to a counterweight by a long tether. And it should be fairly self-reliant, capable of going months or even years without fresh supplies.

I try not to get hung up on unrealistic science in soft sci-fi. I can enjoy Star Wars and Star Trek and stuff like that with no problems. It's when a movie pretends that its unrealistic science is realistic, and makes no real attempt to justify it in-universe, that I get annoyed. Armageddon and Impact are probably the worse in that area, Impact especially. One that always bugs me is when the differences between Terran and alien biochemistry are treated like they're no big deal. People land on an alien world, walk outside the ship without helmets or spacesuits, and proceed to eat native planets and animals with impunity. It's madness.

It would be a shame to lose Kepler, but I suppose we should be grateful (and impressed!) that it's lasted this long.

Do you want Hive Worlds? Because this is how you get Hive Worlds.

At this point I think this thread really needs to be pinned.

After re-watching the landing footage, I think I'm going to watch the hosted webcasts from now on. As awesome as the landing was on its own, listening to dozens of people cheer it on makes it extra exciting IMO.

Just like Mercury-Redstone 1.

"Window: 1 second."

F5 is the quicksave button for KSP.

Tough little ship.

I think the thread just got buried. The static test-fire was conducted at 9:40pm EST. Everything looks good for Friday's launch.

Why re-name it? I don't see anything wrong with Luna.

Every ship that docks at the ISS uses up a valuable docking port. There are a lot of them, sure, but they'd get filled up pretty quickly if every supply ship stayed there. The only way around this is to design the supply ships with an extra docking port of their own, and that's not worth the trouble or the expense. The station doesn't need the extra space, so it's better to just build the supply ships cheap and ditch them into the atmosphere afterward.

I just have no faith in the government doing what's needed to get to Mars in a reasonable time frame. Sure, NASA could probably do it better and safer, but they won't because the government won't let them. For that reason alone, I'm still betting that SpaceX will beat them to Mars. SpaceX was created with the express purpose of sending people to Mars. They've never shied away from the fact that everything they do is to move them closer to achieving that goal, and it's something the shareholders were aware of going into it.

http://www.geekwire.com/2016/jeff-bezos-plans-blue-origins-craziest-spaceship-test-flight-ever-lets-world-know/ The second launch happened on January 22nd.

Looks like they're going for a suicide burn ... six seconds before impact. This will be exciting.

Not sure what good that would do. You'd see plasma out the window, but things would look pretty normal inside until the hull breaches. And once that happens, anything inside (cameras included) will be incinerated instantly.

Probably because it was two years ago. I doubt anybody will be talking about this particular ULA mission in 2018, at least not in video game forums.

I'm pretty sure that if the same thing happened to a Falcon 9, we would be calling an Almost Fail just as we are now. And if ULA were the ones trying to land rocket stages, we would be cheering on every Almost Success just as we are now. Anyway, the fact that Atlas V was able to recover from this says a lot about the quality of their rocket.