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Yeah, especially given the current economic climate in Aus (commodity prices especially) - I think we may have missed our shot at getting something up and running. Although I personally am of the belief that Australia could really benefit from having an agency similar to the Canadian Space Agency. They've contributed HUGELY to space (Canadarm for instance) and have their own astronauts, while having a population and GDP which - while certainly larger than Aus' - are fairly comparable. Canada doesn't waste money on launchers which it realistically cannot afford, but operates in a niche which it can happily use to co-operate with the larger space agencies and get in on all that good space action. But, like I said, the boat for this generation in Australia may have sailed when the boom went bust.

I've heard this brought up here and there, but calculus has never been my strongest suit so it's passed right over my head. What do you mean by 'integrate thrust' over the ascent profile? Do you plot the ascent path as a function and then integrate it? If so, what do you mean by 'integrate thrust over it'? :3

So the UAE anounced details about their misison to Mars on Wednesday. Definitely ambitious for a country still starting out in Space imho, and I am currently dealing with some jealousy issues (Come on Australia! We've got the 12th largest economy for pity's sake!). But, I can't quite grasp what they mean by a 'holistic' and 'global' view of the Martian climate? They say that it's never been done before, but surely that is the kind of thing NASA or ESA would love to sink their teeth into? Anybody here able to explain things in layman's terms, or perhaps more well-connected than I? I'm also curious what launcher they may end up using. The mission is scheduled for 2020, but as far as I'm aware the UAE has no domestic launch system so will have to look overseas. Any thoughts?

I think it's an interesting little thought experiment. Doesn't matter whether it'd necessarily be worth doing, but if you HAD to reuse the upper stage - how'd you do it? I can't really contribute myself, but how do these inflatable heat shields work? I first heard about them with the Vulcan but I can't for the life of me figure out how something inflatable could survive those conditions.

Popping in once again with another help request. I have karbonite installed on KSP along with DMP (and plenty of other mods) but even after I've researched the required techs in the multiplayer science game, I cannot find the KA-100 Array part which is required to find the darn karbonite in the first place! I've run a sandbox game in both DMP and solo play and the part sits there fine and dandy. I've also gone into the R&D file in the player section of the server folder, and it shows the part=KA.DetectionArray.01 bit clear as day (which I'm assuming is what's important here). Has anyone seen this before and got any ideas?

^This apparently. I know nothing on the subject but a video spoiled about half a dozen sci-fi plots for me

Could Orion get to the moon now? With existing rockets such as the Delta IV and its current design? Not necessarily a landing, but a flyby perhaps? If not, what would it take? Will such a mission be capable with the initial version (as we expect it to be) of the SLS? If THAT'S the case then how come a possible lunar mission is so far away? I'd have thought such a thing would've been high on the list, if only for the prestige factor. After all, if we have the technology and all that jazz.

Hey, first off, let me be the umpteenth person to congratulate you on an amazing mod! I've been playing it with my bro on a local server and loving every moment of it. We've run into a problem though, our reputation seems to be going down of it sown accord and we can't identify the problem that's causing it. I've got a ton of mods running so it's likely something playing around in there, but I was wondering if anyone else has encountered this problem whilst playing DMP? My first guess, could perhaps both of us using the same kerbal (I'm guessing that's the cause of the KIA message?) be triggering the decrease in rep for a kerbal death? It's becoming an issue with the two of us struggling to maintain a reputation of great than -100. :3 Cheers in advance!

Hi Henry! First off, darn it why didn't I think of this?! I'm currently in my second year of IB and nearing the final stretch for my own EE so figured I'd pop a post. I can't help with the actual nitty-gritty side of things other than saying that it looks really cool, but if you've got any Qs about the EE in general I may be able to help. I'm doing mine in geography rather than physics, but there's no shortage of orbital mechanics experts here so no big loss. My key tips for EE (probably all been repeated many times before to you): - Hit the deadlines for your drafts and planning, otherwise everything piles on at the worst possible time. i.e. I've got friends who have had to type up an essay from scratch in a weekend - emotional breakdowns have ensued. - When you're writing it up or planning it, keep the criteria and the mark scheme by your side. At the end of the day the EE involves jumping through a series of hoops no matter which way you cut it. - Pick a topic which interests you. I think you've covered this one pretty well, but worth throwing in there anyway. - Add your references as you go. Speaking with experience, backtracking to locate webpages in your browser history and the like is a pain in the rear. On a rough-guess, I'd say your initial ideas go well beyond the scope of HL phys. The closest would be the fields and forces topic but that doesn't really touch upon orbital transfers at all. I do like the sound of some of the research topics that you've brought up, and I think they'd be fun to go into. The one catch I'd say is make sure that it will fit as a physics EE. This is a major problem my school has run into with science EEs. Initially people were told that making it experiment-based was very important, but then midway through were told to throw half of their method and data into an appendix. This has scared a ton of us off from doing an EE in science, so I'd urge you to check with your supervisor whether or not they believe a secondary-research, non-experiment-based EE would be effective (a la looking at helium-3 on the moon, etc). You probably know more about what makes a good physics EE than me by this point, but that was an issue that hit some of my mates. Hope my waffling is at least a tad helpful. Good luck!

Found this on youtube and have had it on repeat for the better part of a half hour. Figured I'd share it for the wider community of erhm, kerbal engineers. WARNING: some cursing is present, so turn down the volume if sleeping children are likely to be in speaker range

^This is something which I didn't know before posting, and I find it brilliant that space programs collaborate so much for the betterment of all of us; stuff national differences when science is at stake! But then I figure it leads to another question: why isn't this so well known? I mean yeah it's common knowledge for all of you I imagine, but I just found out now, and (I suppose) most people who don't browse forums of a space-program-simulator would be in a similar boat. On the news it's always 'NASA's Curiosity' or 'ESA's newest mission', and so on. Why don't they publicize the co-operation more?

Consider me most definitely interested! Although, quick q, do we make the nations 'kerbal-y' or do we treat it like a more serious thing? (Poorly worded, but gets the point across...)

^This sums up what I figured pretty well, but surely economically it would be better for a nation to have its own launch capabilities in the long run? Else why would we be bothering so much? The other thing I was thinking about is specifically this foreign satellite data thing. I'm a bit limited on examples, so I'm going to keep coming back to Australia: we do this quite a bit, but I'm wondering if it's really wise if you're piggybacking military communications on private foreign-owned satellites. Not saying I'm particularly nationalistic or anything, it just seems a bit off. For countries like Azerbaijan I imagine that's the best way forward, but looking at much larger and wealthy countries - definitely not the top dogs for sure but still up there - with little or next to nothing of a space program to speak of is what confuses me a bit. My little experiment was to google a list of space programs and a list of countries by GDP and to see how they matched up. I had NO idea Curiosity was international like this. My excitement level for the rover just went up beyond the roof. Why isn't stuff like this publicized more?! Or do I just live under a rock... Yeah, my bad for being vague. Truth is I know next to nothing of the going-ons of most space programs, but again back to my stock example: recently in Australia during large bushfires the government had to ask China to borrow data from one of its satellites, as we had none of our own which could be used to monitor the blaze. Of course I doubt many other countries would have a bushfire-watching-satellite at the height of their priorities, so I imagine its a case-by-case issue as to what is really needed. And thus you have exposed how little I know about this kind of stuff.

Hits it on the head with the title. An earlier thread on 'if you were given your country's space program' got me to thinking, why don't we see more of these - a la ESA? I understand that a major component of space programs is national pride, so major players like China, Russia, the US etc are unlikely to team up simply because they don't need to; and Europe is definitely an anomaly to begin with with the EU already providing a lot of foundation for co-operation beforehand. But, logically a number of nations teaming up is better than going at it alone surely? So why don't we see more small-time players, or even those who don't have active space programs, collaborate? I'm not talking about massive international programs to send manned missions to Mars etc, but more along the lines of say Australia and New Zealand getting together to get at least a sattelite program going, or even some of the Middle Eastern or African nations getting together just to manage some infrastructure?

Well, Australia pretty much officially doesn't have a space program atm. But with 1% of the budget that'll give me ~3.5 bill to get stuff off the ground (probably kill the economy in the process, but SCIENCE!) I'd definitely start off by getting some Aussie-owned and run satellites into orbit, maybe use SpaceX as a launch-provider. Nothing spectacular, just the usual weather-sats, comms, etc, just a bit humiliating that we're still piggybacking on our allies' equipment even though we're the 12th richest nation!We had to ask China to borrow one to monitor bush fires...I mean, no offence to China but, really? After that maybe see if we could start getting our own science going. I'm not so sure if we'd have the weight to produce our own launcher, but I'd love to give it a shot. I read somewhere that the total development cost for the Dragon was 390 million or something (found it! http://www.parabolicarc.com/2011/05/31/nasa-analysis-falcon-9-cheaper-traditional-approach/ :3) so maybe it's feasible. I'd also definitely lease some of Bigelow's stations, just because I think its time they got some love, and it would definitely shake things up if AUSTRALIA had astronauts working on a space station. Maybe give some of the bigger boys a kick in the rear to get their act together, not mentioning any names. Other than that, try to put something on the moon for national pride, try to do some Antarctic research considering we're meant to administer a fair chunk of it, and see if we can do some kind of partnership with other friendly countries, almost ESA style to help with funding. At 1% of their budget that'll be an extra cool 500 mil, or maybe a few more launches in a year - plus you know, international collaboration for the betterment of mankind and all that