You are not logged in.
Probobly too heavy, the tiles are pretty light weight.
You're saying that a re-usable heat shield is lighter than an expendable one? I would not have guessed that.
If foam cells are having issues at low pressure, could they be sprayed in a partial vacuum?
How weight sensitive is the plan to get the ISS loaded? Could a tonne or so of payload mass be spared from each flight to wrap the tank in something realiable? Is every flight packed to the eyeballs with cargo or is there room to spare?
If the same people who ran the ISS run the VSE at least it will be nigh on impossible to stop the Mars mission, which will land in 2080...
What would it take to deorbit the ISS? Like two dozen EVA's just to unbolt everything? Various de-orbit burns for each bit?
Question: If the tiles all have to be inspected and removed and reglued and whatnot each flight, how are they better than a replaceable ablative shield?
Granted the tiles are more 'advanced' and so keep more people employed but they don't seem to keep the flight rate up at all.
I suppose if your base is founded on a series of large reactors then energy will probably be of little enough concern to run intensive processes like that.
I am soo happy. Mostly about the little orange pages that show up when a post is new, indicating I haven't read it. Saves a lot of time that does...
One way for someone or perhaps overlapping return. Like half of the first crew returns after two years, the other half returns with half of the second crew...
By ramping it up you end up with a lot of extra living space.
The question about titan, is how do you manufacture more base? Mars has iron pretty much trying to get into your Hab, what can you build out of methane without breaking it all the way down to carbon and working your way up?
You can already get 96 odd proccessors in a fairly small package. (5RU)
Thing about the Darpa Grand is that you have to maintain an average of 18 Mph over unimproved terrain for 10 hours just to qualify. Thats actually pretty significant for a human driver.
Robots still have trouble following roads, so finishing the Darpa Grand will represent a HUGE leap forward in the state of the art.
If the Hab had Monster wheels it should be able to get across most terrain. You are not trying to go somewhere specific, just somewhere else.
Also replacement crew would not need to bring a new Hab, they just pile into the old one and keep going. Alternatively They could connect their new hab to the back of the previous Hab and trailer adding redundancy, power and chasm crossing ability.
By the third misson you might have six or seven modules forming a wheeled train tootling around Mars wherever they can find access. Whenever they find an interesting spot the train lowers itself to the ground and the astronauts deploy their inflatable circus and set work.
send only monks. No corruption no unemployment.
Space stations are boondoggle magnets. They attract phrase like 'fuel depot', 'on-orbit construction' and 'microgravity industry'. Wierd logic begins to form, like 'why would we have a space station if the lunar mission did not obviously have to dock there?'
Pretty freaky stuff, put that thing away.
then the people leaving to live in Mars will be assured that the worst bunch have been picked out
Very KSR, turns out everybody lied on the test. Because, nobody sane wants to go to Mars, you really have to have something broken in you sub-concious.
How would an exam be set? Well they failed to guess what ethics system we are using so they failed?
Exams generate unethical behaviour in attempts to pass them.
A bad idea never stopped anyone.
Russian Communism failed under paranoid leasership and general execution of intellectuals as the enemy of the poor people.
How do you go upwind without a keel? How do solar sails solve the journey back in?
Will placing one nearly perpendicular to the solar wind you could generate reverse thrust I guess, and cause your orbit to decay, but you are still going to have a lot of drag away from the sun?
There isn't a useful 'ambient' cosmic pressure as far as I am aware...
Could an ISS module be launched with/under a CEV module? Could a CEV module manouver it? That would be ~ 85MT of hardware to LEO so I guess not, but say 2011 rolls around and the ISS is still hanging in there.
Huge pitfalls of course in limiting the CEV design to using the ISS docking ports, people being encouraged to design stopovers and refuels at the ISS etc.
I was wondering because we talked previously about the trouble of launching 'dumb' modules on their own. If you dropped the shuttles and switched to CEV and a huge launcher, is that even doable in 3 years?
...build two different kinds of ships for two different kinds of missions to two completly different places. In the long run, the superior efficency of each of the systems respectively will be cheaper then the additional development costs, since we want to go to the Moon & Mars perminantly... IE, a really long time.
This is an interesting point. If we do get past Apollo style thinking and begin to think about the early missions as basic infrastructure missions, should we begin to see two entirely seperate industries? Perhaps a third group that does everything that common or similar like guidance and suits, but generally keeping the two idea seperate to the point of spliting Nasa perhaps not entirely but at a department level.
How different are the two missions going to be? Would it be a better idea to make baseline Lunar sorties 700 days long? Overlap them obviously but to have commonaltiy you need to up the hardware lifetime demand on the Lunar side.
First up, there is no such thing as 'traditional capitalism'. The type we have is only ~20 years old. Today there are no great industrialists that control 1/3 of the U.S. economy (shadowy conspiracy types aside) like there were at the begining of the 20th century. Capitialism fails all the time, but its easy to prop up and replace.
Second all governments know that tax is bad, the more they tax the less they get because it kills growth. However if they stopped taxing you, you would have no lovely police system, army, Nasa, community education etc etc. People love there fringe benefits thats why ~50% of the country happily votes left wing. When you don't have some ability to control the economy capitialism tends to breakdown every now and then.
Mars will likely have a whole new type of capitalism probably fifteen years ahead of what any government has on Earth because of the time it takes for entrenched economists to die.
It is similar to how American republic is 200 years out of date. It was a wonderful chance to experiment with academic political science at the time but its really hard to change it later. Mars might be the first to experiment with full virtual democracy or maybe some type of cyclic oligarchy. It will be the academic flavour of the month, unless its the theological flavour of the month depending on who gets there first.
Limiting factors as reddragon mentioned will be puny populations and scarcity of available land. The 20th century saw an advance in transportation and then communications. Mars will have severley limited transportaion so it will be a wonderful experiment in what speedy communications can do on its own.
From This: 'Precursor Measurements of Mars Needed to Reduce the Risk of the First Human Mission to Mars'
1.2. Assumptions
Assume that there will be a series of robotic missions to Mars, of as yet unknown character and timing, that will be capable of carrying out investigations and measurements, and doing technology/infrastructure demonstrations.
The human site will have been certified for landing safety with data from robotic missions before the humans land.
1C. Determine if each martian site to be visited by humans is free, to within acceptable risk standards, of replicating biohazards which may have adverse effects on humans and other terrestrial species. Sampling into the subsurface for this investigation must extend to the maximum depth to which the human mission may come into contact with uncontained martian material.
If I understand that correctly, they want robots to go and look for life and characterise the life to the maximum extent that humans will do the same. Its like certifying the research as safe so that humans can repeat the same or less research and rubber stamp it.
Sounds like someone is selling robots..
If the problem of boosting extra cargo on current expendable vehicles to the ISS is last mile guidance, why not boost several payloads into the vicinity of the ISS while the shuttle is in residence. After the shuttle installs its payload if could quite easily ferry the blind payloads into position also?
Only when Genocide is Ethical and Right. Besides that example is the opposite of genocide. It is the maintaining of the specific Genepools future rather than trying to wipe out a specific genepool.
They will simply take a bunch of Euros with them. Nice stable currency the Euro.
Having too many children is unethical. If you have to many children I will force you to kill the extras.
There are only ~6 major building in that picture. Any serious moon effort needs to be thinking in terms at least that big. Otherwise its just flags, footprints and an outhouse that maybe doubles as a souvenir shop. ("I went to the moon and all I got was this $4,000,000,000 T-Shirt")
You could tape $10 BN worth of feasability studies to the bottom of it the CEV. That would take a while to ablate.
I'm not bitter.