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T/Space says Rutan is going to use propane/Lox for orbital craft in two stages. Being air dropped at high speed would make it a three stage system.
Surely you can get to orbit with a three stage Hydrocarbon/LOX rocket.
Super Heavy Rockets are extremely unfashionable right now. So unpopular that an 80MT class rocket is refered to as Really-Heavy.
The Apollo/Saturn System did not leave a lot of room to be scaled up. If you want to send six people in one mission you needed to send two Apollo craft. That will leave a whole bunch of Lem legs on the surface of the moon real fast.
It has slow take off and landing speeds so it avoids the problem of sonic booms that have generally shutdown supersonic transport previously.
It depends on how low the opreational costs go, these days they need to be about twice as efficient as a concorde.
Each Airport would have to operate a fleet of carrier craft and still come in with decent operational costs.
What I got out it was that Burt intends the sixth generation of the SS1 line, not to go to orbit at all, but to fulfill point-point transportation. He can do math as well as anybody and knows a completely different approach is needed for orbital stuff.
There is no reason a larger SS1 style craft with enhanced range wouldn't be really handy.
Dunno if anybody watches Dream jets on dicovery channel? In one episode the went through the regulatory process of getting approval for altering the interior of a Being 737. They had Binders four deep covering an entire boardroom table (and a big one at that) with diagrams of each bolt that had been altered, the flamability of materials used etc. This is for a private non-commercial aircraft that has already been certified.
Scary.
Include a limit to the amount of claimable land per person resident and you nearly have something workable.
How did gold rush claims work?
Who are you going to buy it from? Just claim it. Then sell it. Repeat.
Eventually you have enough money to defend a claim by being there.
Are there any methane/LOX engines currently flying?
If the plan really is to make propellant insitu then the earlier we start racking up expertise in Methane/LOX the better.
It would have been nice to build a 2million pound thrust reusable liquid engine to replace the SRBs. That would be some useful legacy shuttle hardware and thus a justifiable moneyhole.
This does really highlight the benefits of the 'Mars back' approach.
I don't know about all that. How about creating an regulated 'unregulated' space for sub-orbital craft to operate in. Similar to regular airline groups but without craft regulations (ratings, certifications) and perhaps a rudimentary space-pilot rating that can be achieved on a simulator?
Build in the craft class rules but give them ten years before they come into effect.
A company is not going to die because it had to go to the effort of filing a flight-plan. Certifing a craft could kill it real easy though.
It is for the rich who want to become poor by sharing the love and building up a space economy.
Ultimately it is the visionaries who do believe in egality that are building the next generation gear. People who went from poor to rich and have a grip on the realities of capitialism.
I was excited last year when I heard about Bush's exploration vision, but I was disappointed when the details came out: 15 to 20 years for a Lunar mission?
Slower, Cheaper, Better. See they do learn.
To be fair NASA wasn't allowed to dissolve, or to go outside LEO. They have had the budget and the lower people at NASA have wanted to go to be sure.
So you have to burn $15Bn per year, maintain human spaceflight but not leave LEO. Bummer assignment. I think the ISS ws a fairly creative solution, so was the Hubble. The Hubble was built to be maintained by the Shuttle same as the ISS.
And the whole time they kept up the required appearance of being on the cutting edge, it started coming apart about in the mid-nineties I think the whole solution was pretty creative, if insane.
If your infrastructure involves cyclers etc, then you either need an SSTO or a decent expendable, these only need to get into orbit and back.
If they build Kliper, they will still have Soyuz giving them options based on cargo. What they really need is a larger automated supply/resupply craft.
Could someone clue me in on the difference between man-rated and reliable? Does it mean escape systems or something?
It would seem to me that if you had something as labour intensive and expensive as a moon lander you would want to put it on the most reliable rocket possible. Wouldn't that be a man-rated rocket?
Radioactive elements can't breakdown as such. Well not for a few hundred years.
As far as paving goes... the surface needs to be sealed for a generous distance if your spray down is going to be effective or you will be trying to clean yourself in a dustbowl.
If the problem with cancelling the shuttle is the backlash from lay-offs then why lay people off. Nasa will eventually need a huge staff to support PlanBush so why not keep everybody around doing team building, outreach and experimentation while they wait for their new hardware? It might be throwing away money, but it would be throwing away less money and everybody wins.
If you want to keep the shuttle anyway why is there such resistance to changing out the SRB's?
Why is there not a thin ablative layer of cork or something underneath the tiles as a back-up. The back-up system doesn't have to be reusable; it just needs to make it home. On the same note, the nose cone of the shuttle (nearly entirely RCC) pretty much made it back in both disasters. What would it take to make the nose cone survivable? Taking the RCC around into a sphere? Adding a parasail and winglet stabiliser?
On the upgrade thread... would it be possible to boost the payload to a near ISS orbit on an expendable booster. The shuttle would then fly with an empty cargo bay save for a pair of upgraded EVA jetpack thingies... (I forget their name) to be used as space tugs? The rest of the 'cargo-bay' could be retrofitted as an internal fuel tank. This would be used to do a massive re-entry burn to reduce the speed that has to bled by the heat shield. This also has two bonuses:
- Hubble repair is back on due to the extended range
- Nasa and the Public get used to space tugs and separation of payload/crew launches.
Just a few thoughts...
The is better used being stored elastically in the spokes than being recovered.
The will definitley need to be some sort of paved area out side the airlock that can be blasted down daily. Cleaning outside before entering an airlock that is being kept at positive pressure should cut down on the amount of dust getting in the qirlock significantly right?
On tracks vs. wheels, efficiency is top of the agenda due to the premium on power/fuel.
Could a mesh tire have ...thin plutonium wire?... woven through it or small amounts of something warm alloyed with it? Plutonium pellets keep the rovers happy...
It seems that the usefulness of a bike is directly dependent on the design of a suit. A sufficiently mobile suit would allow an explorer to strap the bike to ones back and scale a cliff and ride off at the top.
However for people stuck in tuna cans, just the ability to tear around the base in circles leaping off piles of construction debris would be an amazing amount of fun.
Zubrin's plan is built around maximum scouting/science. Thus every two years the base is placed in an entirely different location until someone strikes it lucky and finds a reasonable source of water.
This is why each mission needs to take its own reactor unless you boost it back to Mars orbit to land it somewhere else...
Maybe... Initial Nasa stuff is showing thing concieved in zero-g have huge developmental issues.
Apparently a lot of zygotes have sort of gravitropic developmental operons or something.
In the RGB triology nearly everybody had become close friends with nearly everybody before they even left LEO. Go the free-love.
Well Plan bush seems to call for a universal Manned Exploration Vehicle which could land, in theory, pretty much anywhere except maybe Venus. It also sets a lot of principles that are generic rather than mission specific.
The Moon is really not practice for Mars but by going to both with the same infrastructure you ensure the infrastructure is flexible enough to support pretty much any long term space endeavour.
After Mars, the funding will be cut back, but NASA will continue to recieve Billions a year, just fewer billions. And they have to be piped into something. Apollo couldn't be sustained on a reduced budget, because the hardware had to be bought new every time.
The trick, I think, is to make sure that an ecconomic flight system is in place that can be operated on the inevitable reduced budget. I also tend to think Plan Bush lends itself to that fairly well.
Whatever Mars offers, it would offer the same fifty or one hundred years now.
The fear presented is that once we have gone, we will return too soon to discover what Mars offers and never return to find out.
Is there anyway to garuntee that the first mission or two will be followed up by anything substantial? Or will they run into "budgetary constraints".
Maybe if the crew simply didn't light the return candle...
yeah and if wishes were fishes we could build a really slimy space elevator.
A huge part of continued Mars work, is native creation of heavy raw materials, Pig Iron, Steel and plastics.
If you don't have to import your living space then the whole project gets a lot easier. But you have to get all the foundry stuff up there real soon, like third mission. Otherwise your Cycler has to bring everything for building domes, tunnels roads and rails. And any sorts of Glass being imported on mass is a dream.
Tonnes of Solar panels will have to be imported for a start, along with any elements Mars turns out to be deficient in.
On the other hand I think the MD habs may be more suited to the Moon than to Mars anyway. Landing one and you have a three year stay on the moon just like that! You probaly want to dig a big hole and bury the thing in the first week or so though cuz of the rads and stuff. But really any colonization project is going to start with tuna cans to support the real development.
In earth-side construction of large project the first things that get built are Fences and Port-a-coms and Port a Loos. Before the even dig the holes for foundations, they build a lot of temporary infrastructure to support the long term effort.
There were plans to follow on from Apollo but they got killed. Half of Apollo itself got killed.
I think the first mission there needs to be one way. Otherwise its entirely possible long term stuff might be left for mission 18.
In theory a staged chemical rocket can put 10% GLOW mass into LEO. That 10% has to cover tanks, engines, hull guidance, life support. Payload can be more than half of that, the Saturn broke up easily and had intergrated tanks, used kerosene etc.
If you want the thing to be reusable then you use about 90% of your mass fraction in vehicle, leaving < 1% of GLOW for payload.
Easy rule of thumb though is to weigh your payload, then your rocket will way 100 times as much. Its the best number to work with for back-of-the-envelope Chemical rocket design.