Spacewalking on Sunshine

You're scared of ponies? Tell me more about how manly you are.

Robert Zubrin seems to think "We absolutely do need heavy-lift", and the whole Mars Direct scheme requires huge rockets with little to no loitering in orbit. Maybe a whole mess of smaller rockets would torment NASA's funding more than launching a few heavies and being done with it. Nobody really foresaw the shuttle program being as disappointing as it turned out. I don't claim to be an expert, but Apollo was done by one solid and true heavy-lift rocket, and that's the greatest accomplishment in spaceflight.

If they do I hope they add a SABRE-esque engine to compensate, there's probably a mod for that already. In the meantime, we can enjoy oddities like this monster. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fMOzbtZAfWM

Yeah, It seems that spit back there was as exciting as it's going to get. Now that I'm here though, I'll just say that the brony fandom has me endlessly perplexed, in no small part because of the hostility towards them too. We need more KSP fans in the world, surely we can all agree on that at least.

Probably because it is a space shuttle. Space shuttles tend to remind people of space shuttles.

Re-entry can't damage anything except solar panels at this stage in development, and the you can't pre-seat your kerbals so you have to stick a command pod on a decoupler, fill that with crew, EVA them and place them into the seats and then you decouple and fly away. It'll look sillier than a clown car, so I'd just make a new Spaceplane from scratch. You can put a small box in front of intake which gives you an attachment point for another intake and so, with no loss of intake. You can spam this as much as you like to get ridiculously efficient jet engines. It's to spaceplanes as asparagus staging is to rockets, don't leave home without it. I'm currently working on making a fleet of "Super Shuttles" that are supposed to be able to haul space station modules and reach munar orbit in one stage, You can do crazy things with spaceplanes if you try hard enough and cram in enough intakes.

Someone mentioned something innocuous about My Little Pony on a non-brony website?

My name's Hubert Blaine Wolfeschlegelsteinhausenbergerdorffvortschaferswesenchafewarenwholgepflegeun zenvonangereifenduchihrraubgiriigfeindtausendjahresvorandieerscheinenbanderechiffgebrauchlichtalsseinursprungvonkrrthinzwischensternartigraumaufdersuchebtbewohnbarplanetenkreisedrehensichundstandigmenshlichkeittkonntevortpflanzeslamdlichfreudeundruhemitnichteinfurchrintlligentgeschopfsvonhinzwischenster Senior Ya got that all down?

So it has less lifting capacity than the Ares? That's depressing. Though as long as NASA gets their hands on something better than the old Saturn V, i'll be happy.

I'm going to build this with the greenhouse and ioncross mods, wish me luck!

What I've yet to understand is why it will accept some things as sub assemblies and others it will dismiss with a "THIS PART IS NOT ATTACHABLE" message. It seems to be allergic to docking ports, but I'm not sure.

A bit off topic, but how does the SLS size up to the cancelled Ares?

Any thoughts about what it should be named and what it should be like?

The Kernadian Space Agency. Our ultimate goal is to build the galaxy's largest hockey rink on minmus.

There's alot of mods that need to graduate to stock. Especially In-suiti resource utilization, my whole space program relies on Kethane.

Possibly some Phlebotinum or Unobtainium, remember, any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a completely ad-hoc plot device.

As you jumped into career mode for the first time, faced with building your bold first step on your quest of science and adventure. You'll surely remember this historic rocket for quite a long while, so, in that moment, what did you name it? I named my cobbled together collection of scrap the S.S Misfortune, and it did good on that name. Followed by the S.S Ill-fated, S.S Tragedy and you can imagine the rest. It was hilarious.

I have no doubt that they could turn Earth into a slagheap within an hour, but my point is that Earth isn't worth the trouble of building shopping malls on, even if only because other planets may be closer. The lack of invading aliens here probably means they see it that way too. The galaxy is already more than half over, statistically if this sort of thing was to happen it should have already happened by now. Even if Earth is an economical target for invasion doesn't mean Aliens won't feel like shifting a few parsecs to the right. Humans are often stewards of their environment if resources aren't too much of a problem. Aliens living in a post-scarcity utopia might similarly feel like leaving Earth alone.

I think violence across star systems is too cost prohibitive and without a real purpose. All human conflict is caused by proximity, and the universe is plenty big for all of us.

Greeting from Earth.

You are absolutely correct. It's a world that would kill humans and all we hold dear. A realm that violates every fibre of our beings and a land no one possessed of reason would go. Now let's go over there to poke around and see what it's like. Just think of the data.