New Mars Forums

Cooperation beats the living crap out of competition.  :;):

All Falcon V need do is reach LEO Hotel Hilton. No further.

Which is good because it can't.  :;):

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I agree with this. The issue is "how" to do this best.

Edited By BWhite on 1110993965

Then it is false advertising to call it Moon-Mars?

And I have agreed on several occasions that it all might work out well for exactly the opposite reasons the neo-cons thought it would.

Read riverbends blog on why Chalabi deserves the Nobel Peace Prize. Its sort of funny. And maybe they will go "democratic" to persuade all those nasty Americans to go away.

The price we are paying, however, is very much higher than it needed to be. The apparent desire to maintain a long term presence and influence over Iraq delays accomplishing worthy goals and increases our cost in blood and treasure.

And the key question - - how the three main factions in Iraq balance each other without partition - - remains unanswered.

For humanity's very first lunar LOX pyrolysis unit, laboratory efficiency would seem irrelevant. Inflate some parabolic mylar balloons, point them at a box filled with regolith (filled with a rudimentary Bobcat)

Sit back and let the thing bake off O2.

Suppose "efficiency" were 50% of a fancy robotic system. Instead of building the fancy systemn spend a few milllion on mylar balloons and the lift needed for another 100 or 200 pounds of mass and build TWO solar furnaces.

Waay cheaper than the fancy system.

If the objective is LOX for ISPP (bring your methane like Zubirn says) make LOX in the sunshine and fly away in the dark. Load up the system as night approaches and "hop" to the sunlight.

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Pump the O2 out of your passive box, compress and store the LOX tanks in the shade. If in 100% shade, wiht the tank pre-chilled before it is left, how long would a tank of LOX survive without boil off?

Make 125% (for example) of what the tanks will hold, deploy the tanks in 100% shade (no sunlight at all, even reflected) chill the tanks with surplus LOX then fill.

How long would the LOX tank remain usefully filled?

Edited By BWhite on 1110986308

Forget "the Left" 

Before the Iraqi invasion I posted very plainly (here at NewMars) my view that regime change was "imprudent" even though Saddam was/is a MF bastard who deserved it.

I also posted that if we went in, we needed to go HEAVY, because going LIGHT would be a FUBAR.

I was right, going in light and wasting a year with Bremer's ham-handed Ameri-forming projects has turned what could have been a brilliant victory into a FUBAR-ed mess.

And this is pure revisionist history:

Paul Bremer intended a fundamental transformation of Iraqi society, which failed miserably. Too light, we went way too light while promising the American people we could have guns and butter.

No sacrifices, Iraqi oil revenue will pay for everything!

Edited By BWhite on 1110984540

Our checkpoints killed an Iraqi general today.

I can agree with this, but

No one knows if we can sustain a lunar presence with 40-45 MT per launch and we sure as heck are not going to Mars with a 45 MT launcher as our biggest and

if Boeing needs a new VAB and pad for the 7 core Delta, will we need to re-hire that standing army anyway?

Stick a cluster of RS-68s under a Michoud tank and what do you have?

Shuttle derived.  :;):

Can anyone make a big tank better or more efficiently than Michoud?

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How do we move from 45 MT to 90 MT with Delta?

Edited By BWhite on 1110924623

Heh! I await the details.  :;):  ???

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Another question. Suppose we have a quasi-permanent lunar base with launches leaving periodically and lift is powered by LH2/LOX or CH4/LOX or a mixture.

How much, if any, of the rocket exhaust combustion products would fall as water ice or CO2 ice within the close vicinity of the launch point? 

If we are scooping up regolith to process for O2, H2O or CH4 anyway, what about mining the regolith around your launch pad? Regolith that just got rained on with several tons of water and CO2 combustion products.

Exactly!

A rule of analysis that works equally well for domestic and foreign policy. Some neo-cons have been whining that the French have been thwarting our foriegn policy.

Well d'oh! DeGaulle did that 50 years ago.

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"Crying Wolf" on Saddam's WMD actually makes it harder to stop the Iranian bomb.

World politicians are amoral weasels, ALL OF THEM. Even GWB.

Who they "prefer" is entirely the wrong question to ask and utterly irrelevant.