This could become the SUSTAIN platform the USMC has asked for. Spacedrop a squad of Marines anywhere in the world within 40 minutes. The main question though is whether the crewed X37 will include commercial access or is this military only?
100X cheaper is roughly $100 per pound to LEO. That is absolutely doable with robust RLV architectures. It's just that no one has really tried yet. Musk has shown an entirely new way of building and operating otherwise conservative rockets. He chose the most known path (single core, 2nd stage, capsule) for a default cargo/crew system but used his knowledge of innovation to make that into the most affordable rocket on the planet, in 8 years.
This is one of the advantages of older water-landing proposals like the Boeing LEO from the 70s. It would have reached terminal velocity in the atmosphere then propulsive braking and dropped into a freshwater landing pond. That was for much, much larger hardware. Jon Goff has done extensive trades on propulsive vs heatshield/chute/etc reentry methods and propulsive comes out looking pretty good.
This reusable Falcon will have the same fireproof curtaining between it's engines and the rest of the outside is metal so not much of it will burn. Still has the issue of blast coming back from the tarmac. The animation's landing legs are pretty hefty, have to wait and see on real hardware.
It was to late to restart the contracting process by the time Obama came into office in early '09. To many contractors had already laid critical staff off. Shuttle was a dead letter after the Columbia tragedy; after RTF they were only flying out the remaining manifest. CCDEV, especially SpaceX and Boeing, is the way to go forward. Wings don't matter where there is no atmosphere.
We nuked each other, we'll nuke the little green buggers too.
My real critique of this is why would the aliens care so much for Earth's environment. We are a very aggressive, technical species with a penchant for things like nuclear bombs. Logically if they were going to exterminate us it would be for those reasons not because we don't tend the daffodils.
Go to the tech college in Takoradi, Ghana and install a FabFi mesh network. The students have to go to an Internet cafe for network access. They were one of the Fab Academy labs this year but had trouble keeping up due to lack of access.
This might not be as basic as digging wells or whatever but is much more technical.
But have to disagree with the message. We can not be seen as dumping/abandoning people in space. Dr. Davies' concept for crew transit has much merit but only if it becomes a sustainable method of transportation. We need to plan for the first crews to Mars but also for 10,000 people there.
We also need to plan for surface-to-orbit and Earth-return not just brush those aside. Cost-benefit to Mars orbit-only or orbit-early also need to be performed. Just dropping a crew on the surface has some serious unknown issues.
...than a Prius sliding silently past while you are cycling at speed. The first time this happened I only knew the car was there because the road vibrated differently as it approached.
Mars has equatorial glaciers for instance in Elysium. Boring tunnels on Mars is no harder than on Luna - it just requires delivering the TBMs as part of a stack. Anyone who shies away from orbital assembly should step out of the game.
Moon and Mars both lack nitrogen. Lunar regolith is silicon, aluminum and other metals and greatly lacks volatiles. There are many unknowns in all space development scenarios - that means we should focus on exploiting the knowns such as Martian glaciers.
And it all goes to the General Fund which is both good and bad. IIRC they have no control over the earned money, it goes straight to Congress.
As an entrepreneur, licensing is critical for these kind of technologies. Without access to patents/researchers it is very difficult to push the business envelope. Bigelow for instance licensed the old TransHab patents and is using them for all kinds of new space applications. -josh
NASA worked out a 20ton gravity tractor a while ago that would do the job given a decade. The nudge and the tractor don't have to be excessive.
Other options include painting the object to change it's albedo (reflectivity), docking ion or nuclear engines to it, using magnetic accelerators and (long term) using the entire rock up for industrial use before it impacts.
Space only makes sense if people can eventually live and thrive there. Profit is part of that, entreprenuership and creation of destinations maybe the rest.
Telecom and imaging satellites are known money makers. ISS tourism is a known market that is producing commercial follow-on and interest in lunar flyby. Virgin drop tested their new suborbital the other day.
Destinations in this context are places for people and materiel that can provide staging for further endeavors, whether that is exploration, extraction, settlement or remote sensing and control. Rick Tumlinson once proposed ISS be the central point for "Alphatown" a cluster of co-orbital stations, there are other strategic locations for bases through out the inner solar system.
Using ISS to stage a lunar flyby is a great idea in this context.
Elon is under 40, has a fortune in the low billions and several successful businesses under his belt. If anyone has a shot at getting to Mars, it is he.
Why are you disgusted? For a long time, the only people in space were military men. At least private space offers the opportunity for (richer) normal people to fly.
From the perspective of an entrepreneur, space is a place for industry, tourism, services and research, not just for research.
Proper RCS system would prevent the roll - the upper stage and dummy payload don't have the planned Draco thruster assemblies on the first Falcon 9. Might have helped with circularizing the orbit.
So a budget increase, a scope increase and general revitalization of a flagging agency are a death march? Only when some of the suffering is in your district. Obama is promising more NASA for more uses and the Republicans are screaming no.
Ares I is slated to cost $35 BILLION to develop. This is for a basically existing design. Delta and Atlas EELV cost about $5-7G together and produced two families of light-medium-medium-heavy launchers. Ares is a joke and the sooner it dies the better.
This becomes more of an issue for building out new clusters and upgrading existing ones. PS3 clusters are a tiny, tiny fraction of Sony's PS3 user base, affecting their bottom line at a minimum while providing very good press for them.
My involvement was with the UMass Dartmouth cluster and PS3Cluster.org not with the Air Force cluster. Dr. Khanna is using the cluster for simulating black holes and gravity.
As a member of the PS3Cluster team I would like to say that Sony's cutting off of 3rd party OSes from their platform is going to impact the Air Force, UMass Dartmouth and other organizations using PS3 hardware as massively parallel clusters for scientific computing. This goes far beyond the home-brew market.
We've been covered here before: http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/12/17/2251232
That depends on what you define as "US manned spaceflight". If you mean NASA owned and operated spacecraft, the answer is likely "never". If you mean indigenous US crewed launch owned and operated by one or several commercial providers, the answer is "in a few years but no later than 2015". Bolden and Obama are pushing to make space accesss common and much cheaper by fostering private providers. After 40 years of kicking and screaming, NASA is being forced to adopt the air-mail model of space development.
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This could become the SUSTAIN platform the USMC has asked for. Spacedrop a squad of Marines anywhere in the world within 40 minutes. The main question though is whether the crewed X37 will include commercial access or is this military only?
100X cheaper is roughly $100 per pound to LEO. That is absolutely doable with robust RLV architectures. It's just that no one has really tried yet. Musk has shown an entirely new way of building and operating otherwise conservative rockets. He chose the most known path (single core, 2nd stage, capsule) for a default cargo/crew system but used his knowledge of innovation to make that into the most affordable rocket on the planet, in 8 years.
This is one of the advantages of older water-landing proposals like the Boeing LEO from the 70s. It would have reached terminal velocity in the atmosphere then propulsive braking and dropped into a freshwater landing pond. That was for much, much larger hardware. Jon Goff has done extensive trades on propulsive vs heatshield/chute/etc reentry methods and propulsive comes out looking pretty good.
This reusable Falcon will have the same fireproof curtaining between it's engines and the rest of the outside is metal so not much of it will burn. Still has the issue of blast coming back from the tarmac. The animation's landing legs are pretty hefty, have to wait and see on real hardware.
It was to late to restart the contracting process by the time Obama came into office in early '09. To many contractors had already laid critical staff off. Shuttle was a dead letter after the Columbia tragedy; after RTF they were only flying out the remaining manifest. CCDEV, especially SpaceX and Boeing, is the way to go forward. Wings don't matter where there is no atmosphere.
We nuked each other, we'll nuke the little green buggers too.
My real critique of this is why would the aliens care so much for Earth's environment. We are a very aggressive, technical species with a penchant for things like nuclear bombs. Logically if they were going to exterminate us it would be for those reasons not because we don't tend the daffodils.
Go to the tech college in Takoradi, Ghana and install a FabFi mesh network. The students have to go to an Internet cafe for network access. They were one of the Fab Academy labs this year but had trouble keeping up due to lack of access.
This might not be as basic as digging wells or whatever but is much more technical.
Only really need: LEO, Earth-Moon L1 (EML1) and supplies in Mars orbit, then stage downward for surface expeditions.
But have to disagree with the message. We can not be seen as dumping/abandoning people in space. Dr. Davies' concept for crew transit has much merit but only if it becomes a sustainable method of transportation. We need to plan for the first crews to Mars but also for 10,000 people there.
We also need to plan for surface-to-orbit and Earth-return not just brush those aside. Cost-benefit to Mars orbit-only or orbit-early also need to be performed. Just dropping a crew on the surface has some serious unknown issues.
...than a Prius sliding silently past while you are cycling at speed. The first time this happened I only knew the car was there because the road vibrated differently as it approached.
They really screwed the pooch. I'll never go to their sites again, this is basic info-sec that should have been simple and unobtrusive. They failed.
Mars has equatorial glaciers for instance in Elysium. Boring tunnels on Mars is no harder than on Luna - it just requires delivering the TBMs as part of a stack. Anyone who shies away from orbital assembly should step out of the game.
Moon and Mars both lack nitrogen. Lunar regolith is silicon, aluminum and other metals and greatly lacks volatiles. There are many unknowns in all space development scenarios - that means we should focus on exploiting the knowns such as Martian glaciers.
True and yet this is an example of the system working.
And it all goes to the General Fund which is both good and bad. IIRC they have no control over the earned money, it goes straight to Congress.
As an entrepreneur, licensing is critical for these kind of technologies. Without access to patents/researchers it is very difficult to push the business envelope. Bigelow for instance licensed the old TransHab patents and is using them for all kinds of new space applications.
-josh
He probably intended to say solar orbit as that ~30km/sec delta-v to actually "drop" an object into the Sun is a hinderance.
NASA worked out a 20ton gravity tractor a while ago that would do the job given a decade. The nudge and the tractor don't have to be excessive.
Other options include painting the object to change it's albedo (reflectivity), docking ion or nuclear engines to it, using magnetic accelerators and (long term) using the entire rock up for industrial use before it impacts.
So much depends on time-to-impact.
Space only makes sense if people can eventually live and thrive there. Profit is part of that, entreprenuership and creation of destinations maybe the rest.
Telecom and imaging satellites are known money makers. ISS tourism is a known market that is producing commercial follow-on and interest in lunar flyby. Virgin drop tested their new suborbital the other day.
Destinations in this context are places for people and materiel that can provide staging for further endeavors, whether that is exploration, extraction, settlement or remote sensing and control. Rick Tumlinson once proposed ISS be the central point for "Alphatown" a cluster of co-orbital stations, there are other strategic locations for bases through out the inner solar system.
Using ISS to stage a lunar flyby is a great idea in this context.
Elon is under 40, has a fortune in the low billions and several successful businesses under his belt. If anyone has a shot at getting to Mars, it is he.
Why are you disgusted? For a long time, the only people in space were military men. At least private space offers the opportunity for (richer) normal people to fly.
From the perspective of an entrepreneur, space is a place for industry, tourism, services and research, not just for research.
tl;dr - NASA won't do this for us.
Proper RCS system would prevent the roll - the upper stage and dummy payload don't have the planned Draco thruster assemblies on the first Falcon 9. Might have helped with circularizing the orbit.
WIsh I had mod points for you.
Every year of Ares' existence pushed out first flight by at least a year. That's a jobs program not a flight development program.
So a budget increase, a scope increase and general revitalization of a flagging agency are a death march? Only when some of the suffering is in your district. Obama is promising more NASA for more uses and the Republicans are screaming no.
Ares I is slated to cost $35 BILLION to develop. This is for a basically existing design. Delta and Atlas EELV cost about $5-7G together and produced two families of light-medium-medium-heavy launchers. Ares is a joke and the sooner it dies the better.
This becomes more of an issue for building out new clusters and upgrading existing ones. PS3 clusters are a tiny, tiny fraction of Sony's PS3 user base, affecting their bottom line at a minimum while providing very good press for them.
My involvement was with the UMass Dartmouth cluster and PS3Cluster.org not with the Air Force cluster. Dr. Khanna is using the cluster for simulating black holes and gravity.
As a member of the PS3Cluster team I would like to say that Sony's cutting off of 3rd party OSes from their platform is going to impact the Air Force, UMass Dartmouth and other organizations using PS3 hardware as massively parallel clusters for scientific computing. This goes far beyond the home-brew market.
We've been covered here before:
http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/12/17/2251232
That depends on what you define as "US manned spaceflight". If you mean NASA owned and operated spacecraft, the answer is likely "never". If you mean indigenous US crewed launch owned and operated by one or several commercial providers, the answer is "in a few years but no later than 2015". Bolden and Obama are pushing to make space accesss common and much cheaper by fostering private providers. After 40 years of kicking and screaming, NASA is being forced to adopt the air-mail model of space development.
Only thing different is payload and aeroshell between Falcon 9 for satellite and Dragon capsule.