Simon Ross

Unfortunately it's the same reality denial that NASA operated during the Shuttle era Fact.... All the Soyuz fatalities occurred during the very early flights, since then the Soyuz has proved itself to be a robust, safe system to get a crew to LEO Fact.... The Shuttle fatalities occurred when the system was pretty much a mature design The Shuttle was fundamentally flawed, too complex, too fragile and no way for the crew to survive if anything went wrong It remains today probably the most remarkable single piece of engineering we have ever built, but it was always one step away from a tragedy

Very simple really. Do I want to play hardcore, no help, launch tough missions, fail miserably....KSP lets me do it Do I want to mess around, build insane spacecraft and fly them...KSP lets me do it Add to that an amazing, supportive mod community ! Have probably have had more laugh out loud moments with KSP then every other game I have played put together That's why we love it :-)

Well, I was born in 1960 so was lucky enough to see the first moon landing as it happened. In honesty, I don't think I will live long enough to see us return. If Apollo has a legacy, it is as a tribute to what can be achieved when NASA has a clear political vision and the funding to make it happen. Sadly today, NASA is a pale shadow of it's former self :-(

Yes, Soyuz is unappreciated. While Apollo stole the thunder, Soyuz has quietly been putting people into orbit for nearly 50 years. It's not dramatic like Apollo was, it's not a high tech space plane like Shuttle was. However..... Pretty hard to be critical of a design that hasn't really needed to be changed for nearly half a century and still does the job it was designed for. Sometimes, keeping things simple really is the best way

What I hate about this image. When I was a kid, this was the future, 45 years later, we cannot even do this any more

Have tried variations of the suicide burn, but it really is hit and miss a lot of the time. What does actually work is the staircase burn which Apollo used in real life. Certainly not the most fuel efficient way to land but does give you a lot of control

Another aspect to consider in the equation is that when we talk about water on Mars, it's probably not going to be the clean, pure liquid we commonly think of. Quite possibly it will be polluted with a number of different mineral contaminants that make it quite possible to remain in a liquid form even down to -20c

Very true It did however make it a much more flexible system as it enabled Energia to perform a number of different roles with a range of payloads, HLV, Buran lift etc... It's actually quite surprising how much Energia technology is still in use today, Zenit boosters, RD-170 and 180 engines etc...

Hiya Folks Reading and commenting on a recent post regarding the Orion nuclear drive system, it kinda got me thinking about unmanned interstellar probes. Over the last decade or so, we have been identifying the existence of literally hundreds of planets around stars relatively close to our own, ranging from super Jupiter's to bodies not much bigger then our own Earth. So the question is, could we actually reach any of them ? Certainly we have the capability of building unmanned probes capable of remaining operational for decades, practical examples are out there now operating way beyond their original life expectancy. While Orion will never be used for surface operations, it still remains the only possible interstellar drive we could actually build with our current technology. The problems are all in the engineering, not the theory. I certainly don't see it happening any time soon, the political will is not there, and the cost would be simply horrendous, however.... I think we could actually do it now Opinions ?

I think you have to view Orion in terms of the political climate during which it was proposed. Remember, this was an era when a LOT of nuclear tests were done above ground under what we would consider these days, very poorly controlled conditions. In reality, Orion used very small nuclear devices that were calculated to add about as much radiation to the environment each launch as a single full scale above ground test would. While we are never going to see Orion used for a surface launch, it still remains the only practical interstellar drive our technology is actually capable of building. Does make you think, if we had developed Orion rather then blowing up atolls, we could already be heading for the stars with unmanned probes with no more background radiation then we have now !

Chill out folks. Don't you know the Squad team uses Star dates, not GMT ;-)

To a certain extent he was correct, Buran had a heaver payload to orbit capability, could be flown manned or unmanned and was a pure liquid fuelled system unlike the Shuttle

Says it all really If you really want to see toys out of the pram, try the Bethesda game forums. The almost childish entitlement attitude displayed there when the recent Fallout 4 news was proven to be a hoax for example.

Personally I think the Squad team strike a pretty good balance most of the time. Yes, first and foremost, we are customers, however the team keep in pretty close contact with us, take notice of trends that are taking place and generally respond pretty positively to mods and suggestions from the community. Compare this to some of the bigger game developers who simply take a product and throw it over the wall to us !

@iDan Totally agree with you. On the whole, Pournelle's book is quite positive in it's outlook, but is very clear about the risks of not advancing quickly enough while the resources are available to do it. Nearly 30 years later we live in a world where workable fusion is still 50 years away, where any attempt to build safe modern fission reactors are subject to years of delay and protests. You know you are heading for trouble when even the anti nuclear lobby are suddenly finding it to be a less unpleasant alternative to some of the things we are now having to do to supply our energy needs for the future. If we think that putting a dam across every river, a turbine on every hill and fracking our way out of trouble is the answer. then we really are in the s**t !

The simple answer is... Probably not. Whilst it almost certainly had an abundance or surface water during it's early formation, you don't actually need any kind of O2 atmosphere content to have standing bodies of water. As others have already pointed out, the only real way you can have significant levels of free O2 in the atmosphere is for something to be producing it...ie life Still it's not all bad, early Mars was probably very similar to early Earth and quite possibly would have been just as viable a planet for very simple life forms to exist. Unfortunately Mars low gravity and lack of magmatic field doomed it to a pretty sterile future.

Have generally gone through my life being an optimist rather then a pessimist, having said that, my views on us surviving as a technological society have certainly darkened over the last decade. A very good book to read on the subject is A Step Farther Out by Jerry Pournelle, it was originally published in 1984 and is a series of essays that look at what was possible. All in all it's a fine read, covering such diverse subjects as energy, space flight, life extension, education etc... One of Pournelle's main points through the book is that the only way we are going to advance as a species is investing in high technology and research. The book ends with the following... 'We could do it. We could spiral down until we have so few surplus resources that Roberto Vacca’s knockout becomes possible; to a point where we have very little, and many seethe with discontent, and suddenly it all explodes in riots, or war, or chaos; and when we recover from that (some of us) we will find that the business of living takes all our talents and energies; and our grandchildren will curse our memories.' When I first read this book 29 years ago, I never really believed that we would ever get to that point, but more and more I am suspecting that Pournelle may be frighteningly correct

And in 2 years time my friend, we will be sitting in this forum, bemoaning the cancellation of those two missions. SLS is a dead end.

OMG that looks interesting :-) Am I the only one who thinks there is very much a Homeworld look to some of the graphics ?

I'm actually pretty cool about movies playing with gravity, orbital dynamics etc... After all, they are made to entertain us. Certainly the only movies I have ever seen that were close to scientifically accurate were 2001 & 2010. What does bug the hell out of me is when characters in a movie act in ways that are directly in conflict with who they are supposed to be. By far the worst film for this was Prometheus, a potentially fantastic film ruined by the characters doing things no scientist would ever do in real life

Unforunatly every mission for SLS is conceptual, there is not a single mission for the system that has actual funding ! Trust me, this is not a dig at you, just a total frustration as to how NASA is funded at the moment.

Sorry, but with SLS, your never going to see a crewed Mars mission. It's not Apollo on steroids it's simply Apollo. This is the basic problem with the whole concept, Constellation made sense as it separated out the crew lift function from the HLV function, I might not have agreed with the hardware approach they were going to use, but in terms of getting the most bangs for bucks it was certainly the right way of moving forward. SLS takes us right back to Apollo, a system designed to do a number of things, but none of them very well. Yep, you can get back to the moon with it, but it's just another flags and footprints mission, no long stay support capability, no real mission goals.

And the missions for SLS are ? At the moment, actually none, and trust me, I say that with no satisfaction whatsoever :-(

Green slave women come to mind Oops, sorry, that's Star Trek isn't it :-)

A very simple answer, Saturn 5, do you see any of those still in use ? The last time we tried to combine a heavy lift capability with a crew carrying capability. It managed to do the mission it was built for magnificently, land men on the Moon, but as a simple way of getting materials into LEO it was too expensive, too complex. Here on Earth, if we want to transport people we use a family car, if we want to transport freight, we use a truck. If you want to convert a HLV into a family car, simply man rate it, but the performance costs are horrendous