New Mars Forums

...not when their space agency gets a mere fraction of it.  Don't confuse gross national income with funding for a specific agency - the amount ur thinking of is divided across a whole board of agencies.

Its funny how when people say 1/10th price it ends up ballooning to more like 20/10ths of the original price...

The Russians are capable of alot, but I treat them as a player standing on a wobbly stool, much as China.

If they balance right and have a little luck, such as with their Phobos-Grunt probe, they certainly they may reach the Moon if not Mars.  However just look at their current budget as well as their track record.  They have noteworthy successes but they're rarely had consecutive ones.

Magnetic levitaion is not a bad idea, but it sounds borderline to the plain rail-gun proposal.  Still no harm in combining a rail-gun with a lunar rocket...

Don't underestimate the threat of meteoroids.  Those sails are still supported by struts so a critical hit can bring down a LARGE section which starts affecting your plans...

Yes, cargo obviously if anything.  Problem is solar sails need to be very light or else you require obscenely larger sails.  You need to slowly deploy those sails...and as Skylab and the ISS have demonstrated the compartely squat solar panels prove unfluring sail like structures won't be 100% perfect 100% of the time.  It starts becoming an ineffective balancing act worse than propellant loads on chemical rocket launches.

Again regarding those ground stations, too much stuff here on Earth will be in the way, whether its built by NASA or SpaceX.  Giant mirrors or giant laser beams don't come cheap and their beams will be blinding if not occassionally lethal.  The Moon would be a better site to use but don't expect immediate contruction.  Also what happens if your target is NOT Earth or the Moon?  You'll need multiple stations to slow you down, save perhaps Mercury or Venus where the light pressure increases.

Well if it flies I won't have anything against it.

Ok two problems I immediately see with solar sails that would keep me from supporting it:  extremely slow thrust - they make ion propulsion look like a Ferrari by comparison; a solar sail a few square kilometers in area makes a pretty fine target to a swarm of micrometeoroids - I don't care if kevlar struts support it I just can't trust a propulsion system thinner than the plastic in my garbage bags.  I could see an unmanned interstellar spacecraft making some use of it, but it is, sadly, the epitome of impractical.

NASA or any space agency is not going to contruct ground stations for remote propulsion. Worse still, just like laser pen lights, a beam like that would blind any stray airplane or satellite in its path.

If a propulsion system takes more than 10 days to reach simply the Moon from LEO or vice versa I have to say it is "out of the race" for human passengers.

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No offense but the laws of physics apply everywhere so, in short, yes...yes helium will still provide lift in the Martian atmosphere.  I'm pretty sure you could have gotten your answers in the Dirigible forum.

...only place helium and hydrogen wouldn't be so effective would be on gas giants - when the atmosphere is already primarily hydrogen its hard to get something heavy to lift above all that.

...oh and, of course, on airless planets too.

Martin...do you realize the ISS is in a roughly 50+ degree angled orbit?  That was decided upon because of our partnership with Russia that, while being useful, was basically a last-ditch effort that put the last nail in the ISS coffin for applications beyond its drying puddle of LEOresearch applicaions.

High orbital inclinations impose large correction maneuvers, therefore the more inclined the orbit the more propellants you must consume to get in alignment with your target.  Inversely, given how the moon is only 3 degrees off the Earth's equator in alignment...to go from the ISS to Lunar orbit would involve an even larger version of those second stages you blogged to GCNR that you despise so much...

So...

*a giant second stage falls on top of Martin_Tristar* Enjoy you present.  Maybe the ISS can use the remote manipulator arm to pry that off ya while the rest of us take a ride of the CEV to lunar orbit and moon ya. 

In seriousness...the only application left for the ISS, and this is one included in the VSE - funding allowing - is research into the effects of space on human physiology.  Even then we know the basics: without gravity the body slowly falls apart and the more radiation you're exposed to the greater your risk of cancer.

Space Station telescopes were scrapped because the vibration from life support would jarr their sensors, material sciences left because Earth-bound research is improving, and pharmacutical companies lost interest.  Possibly, and even hopefully, ESA and Japan might add such equiptment to their science modules but even then no direct applications beyond life sciences.

Nothing that visits the ISS will actually go anywhere else...even the CEVs that are 'station-bound' will be modified for servicing it alone, never the Moon.

When I was maybe 10 I had hopes for the space station but politics pretty much f***ed it all up to be blunt.  The CEV at least has a few hopes tied to it.

Using past veto-ed names isn't unprescidented.  The Voyager program, for instance, was originally the persuror of what later became Viking progam but at the time in the 1960s it was canceled for being too complex to undertake and the life-seeking experiments to expensive or ambitious.  And, obviously, the name was reused for the wildly successful twin fly-by craft and...heh...a certain Star Fleet spacecraft piloted by a Captain Janeway 

Orion itself is a pretty well-known astronomical name so it's not a bad choice.  I certainly can't see "The Big Dipper" (or even "Ursa Major" if you will) being looked at as a respectable name...

The only reason China has much of anything is because they copied a signifigant portion of hardware from the Russians and managed to update it marginally.

Money is debateable - I don't think they have any more money than the Russians if not less.

Never hurts to keep an eye out on 'competition' but China is not a concern for the immediate future.  10 years maybe, but not now.

Probably the first crew number for the first twenty years of moon visits but, as soon as commercial spaceflight catches up.... 

Actually Martin_Tristar I have an idea what you mean.  H2 and O2 make water, which is perfectly natural versuses fuels like keroseone, methane, and certainly hypergolics.  That was an idea behind the X-33 (as a bad example I'll admit).  And I also note how garbage is piling up on the ocean bottom courtesey of spent rocket shells and even LEO debris too.  Eventually a completely reuseable booster that is purely H2O in terms of waste will arrive...but given all the priorities space flight has to face and the larger concern of a few million cars around the world...

...well the sheer math explains itself.  However your point is valid all the same.

Regarding government funding government is gonverment for better or worse.  :?   It was tough enough to get the VSE accepted as is.