Brits on the Moon, 1939 edition - looks like a challenge to me!

[Andr0s]

So, IO9 just threw up this article:http://io9.com/the-union-jack-on-the-moon-1262867212 and wow and howdy, that's some insanity there - I wonder if that kind of extreme staging is doable in KSP. I guess I won't be sleeping tonight!

Edited September 16, 2013 by Andr0s
Fixed URL

[lukaszett]

um... 404-page is shown to me.

[Andr0s]

Looks like I jacked the link, apologies - I fixed it now

[TMS]

Shame we never got any further than black arrow.

[Vanamonde]

The propulsion seems precarious, but the rest quite practical.

[Masked Turk]

That's... incredible...

[Andr0s]

Isn't Manley British? Maybe we can mock him into giving it a shot, for the Queen and Country, wot wot?Vanamonde, propulsion is what makes it awesome - I'm totally trying it!

[Kerbart]

Fantastic! We can laugh at some of the visions mankind had 75 years ago about going to space, but predicting the future is hard... Arthur Clarke wrote wonderful stories about geostationary space stations used for communications. There'd be three stations, to cover the entire globe, manned with hundreds of technicians... He was right about the orbits... just not about the kind of sattelites that would utilize them. And how many science fiction stories written until the mid 50's wouldn't contain glorious sentences like "we have to calculate another hyperjump. Where's my slide ruler!?"

Omissions like the design of a space suit... to be honest, it doesn't seem like a big deal until you actually try one out and discover the constant volume problem. But who'd do that in the 1940s? The same goes for artificial gravity through a centrifuge design. We now know that the solution is worse than the problem, but it's easy to judge in hindsight.

I'm amazed at the detail that went into the article, and at the serious attempt that was taken to come up with feasible solutions to various technical challenges. Nowadays we don't get any further than fancy CGI and "magic technology" that will solve certain problems, usually in complete disregard of what is known of physics.

[TicTacToe!]

Shame we never got any further than black arrow.

"What if..." seems to be synonymous with us now

To OP, that is a really interesting read! Good find! Apart from it's propulsion, it looks quite functional!

[Kerbart]

Isn't Manley British? Maybe we can mock him into giving it a shot, for the Queen and Country, wot wot?Vanamonde, propulsion is what makes it awesome - I'm totally trying it!

English I think, from Wales. Although that accent... there must be some Irish blood in him!

(any Brits I left out insulting?)

[Flymetothemun]

Sounds like a lofty mission plan.

[HAMsmith]

Manley is Scottish.

[lukaszett]

English I think, from Wales. Although that accent... there must be some Irish blood in him!

(any Brits I left out insulting?)

He's clearly from London. That's quite an impressive Londonish accent.

[Andr0s]

If I'm not mistaken, Manley being Scottish does make him British as well, ne? Scotland is situated on the island of Great Britain (with exception of the Shetlands, Orkneys and Hebrides, as well as being a part of Kingdom of Great Britain since... oh, 1707 I think? Anyway, back to subject. I'm seeing quite a few skeptical remarks in regards to the propulsion schema. Do we think it wouldn't work? If so, why? You gonna save me a sleepless night of trying, or watch me drown in despair?

[DChurchill]

Manley is Scottish.

Edited September 16, 2013 by DChurchill

[British_Rover]

Is HAMsmith said Scott Manely is Scottish it says so right on his youtube page. Best not to get Scots, English, Welsh and Irish confused. They sometimes get pissed about that. Yes they are all from the United Kingdom but its region has its own culture and particular differences. Just like someone from Texas is a bit different then someone from Connecticut or Oregon.

http://www.youtube.com/channel/UCxzC4EngIsMrPmbm6Nxvb-A

Cool that Arthur C. Clarke worked on that. His TV show used to give me the creeps as a kid.

[Van Disaster]

English I think, from Wales. Although that accent... there must be some Irish blood in him!

(any Brits I left out insulting?)

That was glorious.

You missed off calling him an Irish Catholic though, they're the ones trying to be part of Eire & take a bit more offense

Edited September 16, 2013 by Van Disaster

[Kerbal01]

This Must be done.

[Specialist290]

Those of you who wanted Scott Manley to do this are in luck:

[lajoswinkler]

Yes they are all from the United Kingdom but its region has its own culture and particular differences. Just like someone from Texas is a bit different then someone from Connecticut or Oregon.

Except that those cultures have existed for a loooooooooooooooong time, having a historical heritage and most of the culture in America is extremely young pop-culture, if we ignore the little things that the first new America's travellers have brought from Europe that got mostly forgotten.

So it's not exactly just like that. The cultures on the continent of Europe are very diverse, so it kind of ticks me when people talk about "Europeans" and "Europe/EU is a country". Just sayin'...

[Bill Zarr]

There are some very nice pictures of it here.

[Scotius]

Those of you who wanted Scott Manley to do this are in luck:

Ask, and ye shall receive. Yes, Almighty Scott heard about this project before, and did such mission. Awesome to watch, but beware - you will feel very inadequate after watching it

[lajoswinkler]

I actually tried a mission with sepratrons only, carrying a small probe.. Something like this old envisioned mission. You spend it, you throw it away.

I've climbed out of atmosphere, but never established orbit. It Manlejevich reads this, here's an idea. Establish an orbit or go to the Mun using only the power of these small packs.

[SkyRender]

Most of the science fiction written between the 1940s and the 1960s had to do with space flight in some fashion, because between the 1940s and the 1960s, space flight was a big deal. It wasn't so much that nobody thought we would get amazing things like the internet (a chapter in one of Heinlein's novels, Friday, quite blatantly references the internet and comically claims that nobody ever uses it) or better computers (a number of sci-fi authors envisioned smaller computer units, albeit ones that worked solely as terminals; nobody seemed to think back then that you could fit an entire functional computer into something the size of a wallet), it's that everyone thought we'd be making a lot more progress than we did in the "space race". The idea that we'd hit our biggest bottleneck early on in the form of the Tyranny of the Rocket Equation and find no workable solution to account for it just plain did not occur to any of these authors.

[British_Rover]

The Tyranny of the Rocket Equation and money. http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/expeditions/expedition30/tryanny.html Good post on how hard it is to get stuff into orbit.

NASAs budget is less then $18 billion dollars for FY 2014 and without looking at what Russia spends on their Space program I would guess the US spends more then any other nation on earth.

To put that in perspective the US Federal Budget for FY 2014 is a little over 3 trillion dollars, 3.03 trillion dollars to be exact, so even rounding up the US spends 0.59 percent of the federal budget on NASA. Imagine where we would be if NASA's budget was say just double what we spend on it now so 1.2ish percent of the federal budget. Lets say that level of funding had been fixed since after Apollo.

From a technical standpoint we can obviously get the Moon successfully and if we had spent the last 30 years working on increasing our knowledge base about long distance manned space flight over that time instead of spending most of our time in LEO we could have probably advanced to Mars by now.