Everyone always bitches about manned Mars missions and all that.

Politics basically. Laymen complain by saying things like "what's the point of going to the moon anyway?" "Why waste money on space when we have problems here on Earth?" "It's too expensive and it doesn't even do anything anyway"
You get the idea. Besides no sitting president wants to emulate the success of the past; they want to one up it because otherwise it'll make them look politically weak. There are currently 4 viable options to make a moon base (and general space travel) a reality. Listed on a scale of feasibility.

1. Monetization of space by private companies. The second someone figures out how to make money from space (ie mining, transport), business will go into a feeding frenzy. Money will flow, R&D spending will skyrocket, and space travel will become the new normal. Best part is that it doesn't matter what governments or plebs have to say on the matter.
2. Development of better spaceships.
3. International cooperation. Basically, if the nations of the world came together and built the ISS, why not a moon base? As I mentioned, governments and laymen interfere with national space policy, and unfortunately this multiplies exponentially when trying to conduct it internationally.
4. A new race. The moon landing was not achieved because the people supported science. The government did not fund NASA's endeavors because they truly believed anything of consequence would be gained. The only reason it happened was because the public was threatened by the Russian menace. Fear of communism prompted public and government support for space travel. It was not about expanding humanity's knowledge of the cosmos and venturing out of our planet, it was about showing the commie bastards who had the bigger cock. A Chinese, Russian, or Iranian push for space dominance would incite the masses once again and allow for the right thing to be accomplished for the wrong reasons once again.

Unless any of these 3 happens there's no point in talking about moon missions.

>>7933256
>But it seems logical that at least going back to the Moon first and setting up some kind of base there would be the first step?
Yeah, probably. It would also make a good successor to the ISS, providing a safe(r) environment to learn about long-term habitation in space and low-gravity.

>Why does nobody talk about new manned Moon missions
Because they think of space as a checklist of accomplishments, rather than an opportunity for exploration. We've "done" putting people on the Moon, so everything after Apollo11 is "pointless". Nevermind that there's still shitloads of things we don't know.

Also, here's the source of your image:
http://www.esa.int/spaceinvideos/Videos/2016/02/ESA_Euronews_Moon_Village

>>7933354
To expand on #2 (I hit character limit), NASA basically used variations of the same fucking shuttle for about 50 years! When I first saw SpaceX's Falcon/Dragon combo my first thought was "it's about fucking time!". When a superior engine, fuel source, design, hard/software upgrade is developed (could be anything but I don't have an engineering background), the cost and difficulty of space travel will be decreased exponentially, allowing for more ambitious space goals without incurring too much cost.

>>7933354
If we finally got some sort of high thrust high Isp electric engine, then assembling spaceships in LEO would make sense

The original crew of the moon mission said that they saw UFOs and 'aliens on the moon' that did not welcome their presence.

That probably has something to do with it.

>>7933419
>lsp
>LEO
>implying others would understand or care about your jargon
Fucker this is why normies hate scientists! Quit being a fucking autist and practice delivering a message to a wider audience.

>>7933444
Back you go m8 <<</x/

>>7933447
fk you lazy normie shit
google the acronyms you don't understand

>>7933450
lel fail
typical low IQ sheep

>>7933452
>implying there is only ONE possible acronym for any give set of letters
No m8. I'm in genetics if I told people that shit, nobody would or ever will bother to do so. Neither would I nor should you that's fucking stupid. It's about bringing the plebs on to the scientific side. Your off-putting, normie shunning ways only serve to keep science down. Don't forget it's faggot normies that control the funding.

>>7933456
Bruh I'm 8 beers in, cut me some fucking slack faggot.

>>7933256
Its ALL Fake... Didn't you know

>>7933461
then you aren't really in any state to pass rational judgement?

>>7933528
Until you can shoot down my ideas with your own, I'm technically as sober as that one straight-edge faggot we all know.

>>7933368
>SpaceX's Falcon/Dragon

Sorry to tell you this but SpaceX is still firmly rooted in the 60s when it comes to technology, the reason that they can market themselves so cheaply is due to a number of factors, most of which have nothing to do with engineering and efficiency of the rockets and more to do with efficiency gained in production and economics along with trying to make rockets as reusable as possible. That's why they have such a huge drive to make the boost stage reusable, SpaceX estimates that 70% of costs comes from the boost stage, being able to recover that would cut costs for them and make flight cheaper, although probably only by a small margin.

>>7933568
The people involved in making those boosters will become turncoats to a new company, taking the knowledge with them as soon as SpaceX has a legitimate competitor. Natural selection (aka "business") will run its course and result in better tech down the road.

>>7933444
If this was /b/ your trips would confirm alien life bro.

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why aren't we cannibalizing the moon RIGHT NOW?

>>7933256
Isn't there some retarded global legal agreement that states no one can own anything in space?

>>7933605
Yes but it was technically to prevent anyone from launching weapons platforms into orbit. That's why there's just a bunch of spy satellites instead of orbital missiles. Given our fledging capabilities, it would be pretty easy to do/build anything on the moon without anyone knowing. Better yet, if there's international (aka G8) agreement, there won't be problems there. Also our laws assume we are on Earth, these will be forced to evolve as well.

>>7933605
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outer_Space_Treaty
http://www.unoosa.org/oosa/en/ourwork/spacelaw/treaties/outerspacetreaty.html

>Article II
>Outer space, including the moon and other celestial bodies, is not subject to national appropriation by claim of sovereignty, by means of use or occupation, or by any other means.

>Article VII
>Each State Party to the Treaty that launches or procures the launching of an object into outer space, including the moon and other celestial bodies, and each State Party from whose territory or facility an object is launched, is internationally liable for damage to another State Party to the Treaty or to its natural or juridical persons by such object or its component parts on the Earth, in air or in outer space, including the moon and other celestial bodies.

>Article VIII
>A State Party to the Treaty on whose registry an object launched into outer space is carried shall retain jurisdiction and control over such object, and over any personnel thereof, while in outer space or on a celestial body. Ownership of objects launched into outer space, including objects landed or constructed on a celestial body, and of their component parts, is not affected by their presence in outer space or on a celestial body or by their return to the Earth. Such objects or component parts found beyond the limits of the State Party to the Treaty on whose registry they are carried shall be returned to that State Party, which shall, upon request, furnish identifying data prior to their return.

You can't lay claim to the moon itself, but you still own (and are responsible for) anything you put there.

>>7933457
>>7933447

/sci/ isn't for normies in the first place.

>>7933686
Thats all well and good but we all know how power and claim REALLY works. If you could land yourself on the moon and defend it with weapons/army etc. then none of these so called treaties mean squat. The fact is no on can even get past the Van Allen Radiation belts so deep space is imaginary like the boogey man or Santa Claus. One day we might get there but as it stands - nasa faked moon landing. We are not exploiting space because it is beyond our grasp. The treaty is just there to keep the illusion going. Even the mere "space station Mir" is inside the earths atmosphere (if it is real).

>>7933734
Fuck off.

>>7933739
Suck my saggy sweaty six inch ballsack

>>7933742
Jeez

>>7933734
you idiot.

apollo 11's navigational computer ran on 55 watts. Your average microwave's power consumption is 1000 watts and even it'll work fine if you toss it through the belts and back.

Fuck off with memelanding bullshit.

>>7933734
>there are 6 landing sites on the moon. To see each locale, a 4-inch or larger telescope magnifying 75× or higher will get the job done. But the larger the scope and higher the power, the closer you'll be able to pinpoint each landing site and better able to visualize the scene.

http://www.skyandtelescope.com

>>7933786
Trololololololol Da fak duz a microwave have to do with it? Radiation fucking kills people. Put your head in your 55watt microwave you fool.

>>7933568
Thats because the whole thing is rooted in the 60s. Space development has been so stagnant.. Pluto and the mars rovers have been the only majorly publicized events in my generation. Obviously there other great discoveries, but i mean the shit that news will tell you about. Thats another argument though. The lack of excitement and drive is astonishing. Fuck justin bieber and football. Tell me about the color of saturns atmosphere or about a new space engine. I would rather pay my taxes to real relevant things than a new tank and welfare.

>>7933734
>completely fail at understanding even the most basic scientific principles
>out of control ego
And thus, another dumbshit conspiratard is born.

>>7933256
Colonizing the Moon is only a marginally less stupid idea than colonizing Mars

Without solid economic benefits there is just no way to succeed. Yes it may be scientifically feasible. And a first outpost may even be achievable. But a full scale settlement requires proper returns on the investment.

Economics are just as fundamental as physics.

>>7933794
Stop!

You cannot see the landing sites from Earth with any telescope. And simply throwing a link to Sky and Telescope website is not sourcing things.

>>7933256
>Why does nobody talk about new manned Moon missions

Moon dust is a major impediment to humans establishing a base/colony on the Moon. It's extremely abrasive and is electrically charged, so it sticks to any surface it comes in contact with.

Scientists who have studied lunar soil have concluded that lunar dust will fuck up machinery, and it will definitely fuck up humans. So until we crack that nut, we have to rely on robotics for lunar exploration and the potential development of it as a resource.

http://www.universetoday.com/96208/the-moon-is-toxic/

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>>7933892
>Without solid economic benefits there is just no way to succeed. Yes it may be scientifically feasible. And a first outpost may even be achievable. But a full scale settlement requires proper returns on the investment.
That's really going to depend on what you consider "colonising". A permanent base with (say) two dozen people would provide amazing research opportunities, without costing obscene amounts. A self-sustaining habitat of hundreds(?) would obviously cost vastly more.

>>7933978
>You cannot see the landing sites from Earth with any telescope.
You can with Moon-orbiting satellites though.

>>7934025
>http://www.universetoday.com/96208/the-moon-is-toxic/
I'd never heard of that before. Still, it looks like just another technical challenge, rather than an actual show-stopper.

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>>7934042
I may as well post the other two.

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>>7934045

>>7933368
Here we go.... Can we have one space thread without Musk worshippers shitting it up?

>>7933447
He meant that current electric engines fire for a long time (high Isp) but the thrust is small (low thrust)

>>7933807
Since the 60s we have launched hundreds of orbiters and rovers to every planet and most moons and built two space stations. What else is there to do apart from a base somewhere?

>>7934066
Build a permanent space station that actually has some practical use and can be steadily built up?

>>7934073
What is wrong with the ISS?

>>7934093
It's already EOL and falling to bits. Plus the tech onboard is ANCIENT - we could do much better starting from scratch.

>>7934094
It werks. You have an experiment you need to do in space you can go there and do it, I don't see the problem? All these armchair rocket scientists where's your contribution if you're so much wiser?

>>7934103
>It werks.
Sure, but it's not going to keep working forever.

>you have an experiment you need to do in space you can go there and do it, I don't see the problem?
As it gets older the different systems are going to get less and less reliable. That means that more and more (expensive) astronaut time is going to be dedicated to keeping the lights on, rather than doing science. It also means that the safety margins are shrinking.

>All these armchair rocket scientists where's your contribution if you're so much wiser?
I'm sorry, have I done something to offend you?

>>7934114
>I'm sorry, have I done something to offend you?
Well yeah, you are shitting on something that cost $150 billions and thousands of scientists to create as "not good enough" when all you can build is your gaming PC. Why don't you get a degree in aerospace engineering, join a space agency and inform them how inefficient and backward their methods are? I'm sure they will drop everything and build a new space station based on the wisdom from your superior intellect.

>>7934127
>It's good because they used the most expensive launch platform possible to launch it!

A lot of money was flagrantly wasted, doesn't mean its something wonderful, doesn't mean it couldn't better, and it doesn't mean that the ISS won't be deorbitted sooner or later.

>>7934127
I'm trying to shit on the ISS, it's a fantastic accomplishment. But it's also getting older, and we can't just keep patching it and expecting to extend its operational life indefinitely. Sooner or latter we're going to need to build an new station if we want a continued permanent human presence in LEO.
Hell, one of the largest advantages of starting a new station from scratch would be that it would allow us to make us of all the person-decades of experience gained from keeping people alive on the ISS.

>>7934167
>I'm trying to shit on the ISS
*not
I'm not trying to shit on the ISS

>>7934167
No shit. Why do you think that this is a new opinion?
>>7934166
You have no serious ideas on how to make it any better so shut the fuck up

>>7933568
>SpaceX is still firmly rooted in the 60s when it comes to technology, the reason that they can market themselves so cheaply is due to a number of factors, most of which have nothing to do with engineering and efficiency of the rockets and more to do with efficiency gained in production and economics along with trying to make rockets as reusable as possible.
Yeah, man. They are totally "firmly rooted in the 60s"... except for how they make the rockets, and what the rockets are made of, and how the rockets are fueled, and how the rockets fly back and land, and how they make the capsules, and the heat shield on the capsule, and the capsule's ability to navigate itself, and how the capsule can be reused...

They've set records for thrust-to-weight ratio on the engine and for ratio of loaded mass to depleted mass, while using structural safety factors larger than standard (the strut failure was a single-point-of-failure component ridiculously far out of spec) and having engines that can run for hours without refurbishment.

It's a serious mistake to characterize their technology as primitive. Rather, they've disregarded the generally stupid and aimless technology developed in the conventional (government-sheltered) launch industry, which has emphasized arbitrary things like specific impulse rather than overall cost-performance, and they've developed in their own, more useful direction, taking full advantage of modern technology from outside of the space industry.

The reason it's taking them time to ramp up their launch rates is that the rockets are full of cuttting-edge technology that nobody else has and nobody has experience with. In about a year, maybe a year and a half, there's going to be just no competition for them at anything but national security/pride launches for countries other than the USA. They'll have the most capable launch vehicle, partial reuse enabling the highest launch rates and most schedule flexibility, and the lowest prices.

>>7934169
>Why do you think that this is a new opinion?
?
I don't think it's a new opinion. It seems to be fairly common.

>>7934166
>A lot of money was flagrantly wasted,
If flagrantly wasting money gets us 400+ tonne permanently-inhabited outposts in LEO, we should probably be wasting a lot more.

>>7934174
Let's not have that argument here.

>>7934169
I have several ideas
A: Build cheaper launch vehicles
B: Standardize self-sufficient modular habitats that can just be added on like lego, with integrated computers/batteries/solar panels/etc
C: Send empty first stages of rockets up to serve as workshops/living room/sports areas/green houses

Thats what space brothers did

>>7934174
now now, anon....careful with listing up actual facts, you dont want to be labeled a musk-fanboy now.

>>7934188
>Let's not have the other side of that argument here.
If you don't want to get corrected, don't post bullshit.

>>7933256

That is basically the plan. NASA's goal all along was to do at least a few moon landings to test out whatever landers they will use on Mars.

But it's not the focus, because the moon doesn't have a lot of things on it. Mars has an atmosphere and possibly water and (microbial) life. Same for Jupiter's moons Titan and Ganymede. Venus has a thick atompshere worth looking at as well. Basically more varied environments means more reasons to do manned missions to them.

>>7934224
its not like the thin atmosphere on mars is any better for humans than a vacuum
Moon has water, moon has minerals/metals/etc to mine
No much point going direct to mars without establishing a permanent lunar/orbital base first.

>>7933354

>space travel
>new normal

We can't even get supersonic transport to be normal. Until self-sufficient colonies are built, then there won't be any reason for the average joe to go into space. That said, costs can come down where many companies are engaged in spaceborne activities.

>3. International cooperation. Basically, if the nations of the world came together and built the ISS, why not a moon base? As I mentioned, governments and laymen interfere with national space policy, and unfortunately this multiplies exponentially when trying to conduct it internationally.

Putting things into LEO is far easier than putting things onto the Moon. So far, only the US has been able to successfully put a people on the moon and return them. International cooperation here isn't important insomuch as it is NASA committing to the space shuttle in the 80s.

>Unless any of these 3 happens there's no point in talking about moon missions.

NASA's currently trotting along fine enough with the SLS plan, so moon missions are basically inevitable sometime in the 2020s.

>>7934212
I haven't posted any side of that argument.
SpaceX is pretty much skub on /sci/ right now, so if you want to have that fight please just make a new thread for it. Let's not flood EVERY space related thread with "SpaceX is great/terrible" posts.

>>7934231

That's pretty much my point. The moon is a means, not the end NASA is trying to obtain. Hence why it tends to be in the background nowadays.

The water on Earth is due to intense bombardment by ice asteroids during the formation of 'The Solar System' (which needs a name). The moon was a satellite of earth at that time. So where the hell is all the moon water?

>>7934167
The ISS isn't a fantastic accomplishment. It's gratuitous pork, and the main reason it was put up was to justify the continued operation of the space shuttle.

ISS is just a bigger Mir, and putting all of your station eggs in one half-trillion-dollar basket makes you too conservative and fearful to experiment properly.

A sensible station program run by people who actually cared about making progress would have spent less money, launched more stations, and long since demonstrated inflatable modules, artificial gravity, and maybe a wet workshop.

The worst of it is the lack of experimentation in artificial gravity. That can be done with nothing more than a capsule, a tether system, and an upper stage for a counterweight.

ISS simply hasn't been experimenting with technologies we'd actually want to use. Rather, they've been avoiding real experimentation to avoid looking bad.

>b-b-but the science! it's important to see how to live in zero-g for so long!
No it isn't. It's important to see how much artificial gravity is necessary to avoid those problems. Nobody is going to want to spend years in space without gravity. This is dead-end research, file results under "nobody cares". Anyway, they did all that with Mir.

Fuck the ISS. We should have been experimenting with little stations. When it splashes, we're half a trillion dollars down with nothing to show for it.

>>7934241
then mars is a means as well
To live on mars we'll need to construct habitats and to supply ourselves with everything we need to live. You could just as easily do that in earth orbit by bringing back asteroids/launching construction material from the moon.

>>7934250
When you say "little station", how little are we talking here? satellite-sized?

>>7934232
>NASA's currently trotting along fine enough with the SLS plan, so moon missions are basically inevitable sometime in the 2020s.
No, NASA's letting it tank now, while congress is trying to force them to keep sending money to their old shuttle friends.

They didn't even request funding for development of the upper stage engine needed for SLS to have a second flight. They don't care. They're just waiting to get enough support in congress to cancel SLS.

The current NASA upper administration is planning to just use commercial launch. They can't come right out and say that the congress-mandated stuff is nonsense without getting fired, but they're dragging their feet now to make SLS/Orion more and more obviously in need of cancellation.

It was a nonsense plan from the beginning. Turning the shuttle into an expendable rocket is a bad idea. When the baseline shuttle already took about a hundred tons to orbit that could have been payload in an expendable configuration, complicating it by adding a segment to the boosters, adding another main engine, and redesigning the fuel tank so another stage sits on top of it destroyed any hope of having a short or low-cost development program.

>>7934253

what's your point?

yes, but this also requires different devices than landing something on a planet. It also means you can't just dig down and build an underground habitat. Also in space, you only need thrusters to move things. Neither are mutually exclusive, but they are different.

>>7934269

The "upper stage" isn't funded yet because there's no reason for it to be. The "upper stage" can be anything from Orion to cargo drones to anything else. NASA, like most sane people, would like to get the SLS proper built first before they start building the things that go on it.

>Turning the shuttle into an expendable rocket is a bad idea

It got things to orbit. If it werks, it werks.

>>7934242
>'The Solar System' (which needs a name).
It has one: 'The Solar System'.
We named our planet after dirt and our moon "Moon". The bar isn't set terribly high.

>>7934241
>The moon is a means, not the end NASA is trying to obtain.
Which is a shame, because there's a lot we could actually learn from a Moon base.

>>7934250
>When it splashes, we're half a trillion dollars down with nothing to show for it.
But we have learned a shitload from the ISS. Seriously, look at any list of the experiments running on there. And most of the proposals around for manned missions DO have astronauts weightless for months at a time.

>ISS is just a bigger Mir, and putting all of your station eggs in one half-trillion-dollar basket makes you too conservative and fearful to experiment properly.
What?
What experiments weren't permitted on the ISS but would have been okay'ed on a smaller (but still inhabited) station?

>>7934242
The latin name for the sun is Sol
so our star system can be called "sol system"
as it is commonly referred to in many works of science fiction.

>>7934242
the name is literally SOLar system. We revolve around Sol aka the sun

>>7934174
>They've set records for thrust-to-weight ratio

Woop de-fuckin-doo rockets improve over time, more at 11. You're acting like they've done some groundbreaking shit to make rockets 10x more powerful.

SpaceX is not special, anyone could have done what they did, but there is no point because there is no market for it. The main customer is the government and they are happy to pay whatever so what's the point in cutting costs? Musk's entire plan rests on thousands of plebs wanting to go into space. Will this happen? I doubt it.

>>7934285

>Which is a shame, because there's a lot we could actually learn from a Moon base.

as I said here >>7934271 it's not mutually exclusive. NASA can have different missions going at the same time. Moreover, once moon missions become routine/proceeduralized then they can look at expanding commercial crew into it

>>7934257
By "small", I mean put up with one or two launches on a reasonable budget, not necessarily small in internal volume.

A good research launch might be something like BEAM, launched with a capsule, with a tether experiment using the upper stage as a counterweight to simulate gravity:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bigelow_Expandable_Activity_Module

This 1.36-tonne addition to the capsule more than doubles its habitable space. A modest expansion on this concept (with a tube to a center-of-gravity hub containing supplies and waste, the mass of which serves as a radiation shelter) might provide a workable Mars transit habitat.

Another good test would be something like BA-330: a 20-tonne inflatable station which provides one third of the pressurized volume of the ISS and could go up on one launch of various standard launch vehicles.

While the shuttle was operating, one of the most interesting uses of it would have been to design a variation of the external tank which could serve as a "wet workshop". This could have enabled the launch of a 50 tonne space station, with crew, in a single shuttle flight, with up to double the pressurized volume of the ISS.

>>7934312
Even governments don't want to be horrendously overpaying for things, if there is a visible alternative

The commercial satellite market is a fairly large industry, and looks to be greatly expending with high bandwidth low latency satellite constellations going up.

>>7933444
you mean this?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9JnKHcPF4xs

>>7934319
>it's not mutually exclusive.
That's true. I just wish more people were enthusiastic about it.

>>7934312
Please don't start that here. Seriously.
Go make a new thread.

>>7934324
Musk has the right idea but the boot-licking has to stop. He is not going to revolutionize anything, he is merely dropping the price by a bit. This is nothing revolutionary, it is obvious to anyone that the launch market is overpriced. This is like me starting a sports car company and calling myself a genius for being cheaper than the competition. It's not hard when they were already way overpriced and it's also not that big a deal because the only people buying gas guzzling high maintenance sports cars are those with money to burn.
>>7934333
They started it.

>>7934340
Making reusable rockets IS revolutionizing
Though some of the other stuff they are doing seems like scams, like hyperloop

And elon musk is himself a dirty leftist.

>>7934285
>most of the proposals around for manned missions DO have astronauts weightless for months at a time.
Only because we haven't done any experiments on artificial gravity, the sort of thing we should have been doing with the ISS resources.

We didn't need this useless additional experience with long-term weightlessness.

>What experiments weren't permitted on the ISS but would have been okay'ed on a smaller (but still inhabited) station?
>a [single]
>inhabited
>station
Stop imposing arbitrary restrictions on alternatives. When considering alternatives to the ISS, it's not relevant that it was a single inhabited station. It's only relevant that they spent $150 billion on it.

Let's try this again:
>What experiments weren't done on the ISS but could have been done within a $150 billion budget?
- artificial gravity
- beyond-LEO station (GEO, lagrange point, lunar orbit -- any of these would put you in an interplanetary radiation environment)
- inflatable habitats
- wet workshops
- growing food

>>7934356
Have you ever considered that all of this would cost too much? Engineering isn't linear you know. Double the money =/= double the technology

>>7934380
Come on. Nothing he listed there would cost that much.

>>7934340
>merely dropping the price by a bit
Why do people keep repeating this? They have stated their goal of building large, fully-reusable, low-maintenance rockets which operate, like airliners, for near the cost of propellant. This isn't "merely dropping the price by a bit", it's reducing it by about 99.9%, shifting manned spaceflight from the realm of crazy symbolic government programs to vacations and business trips for ordinary people.

Falcon 9 is not that rocket. BFR is that rocket. Falcon 9 is their platform for developing the technologies they need for BFR.

They don't aspire to moderately lower the price. They've already moderately lowered the price. They aspire to keep lowering it, over and over again, with increasing reuse and reduced operational overhead, until they're approaching the limits of chemical rockets.

All of these, "I don't understand why everybody's all excited about SpaceX" shitposters seem to actually not understand the goals SpaceX is pursuing or the plans they have to achieve them.

>>7934356
Strange that the ISS has sat up there so long and yet they have not done any of the practical experiments that would allow/develop manned exploration of the rest of the solar system.

>>7933256
the moon is for faggots.

the only thing that belongs there is mining robots.

>>7934394

The ISS does though, namely though medical tests given to astronauts aboard. A Mars trip is at least a two year thing. From a pure "can humans even tolerate being in a confined space for thing long" angle, there's a lot of valuable research there.

>>7934405
Except theres no reason why we need to be in confined spaces for space travel, first stages are huge seal tanks that could be orbitted & pressurized.
Nor is there any reason why we need to be in extended 0g

>>7933419
If we have a sufficient industrial base on moon and translunar space, it would make sense to assemble ships up there.

The cost to get stuff into orbit from the moon is way cheaper than from Earth's surface. Plus the moon is hard vacuum so you can build stuff like mass drivers

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>>7934404

>without the moon life never would have thrived on Earth
>>the moon is for faggots

>>7934405
>A Mars trip is at least a two year thing.
A trip from Earth to Mars is going to be a 3-6 month thing, and the trip back will take about as long. A typical there-and-back mission would be about three years, with most of the time spent on Mars.

>"can humans even tolerate being in a confined space for thing long"
Totally unnecessary to do this in space. Also, they won't be confined on Mars, and any astronaut would happily tolerate a few months cooped up when they know they're on a grand adventure to another planet, or on the way home from one.

What we need are experiments on the long-term effects of living at low gravity, not zero gravity. We should have decades' worth of centrifugal tether data by now, at simulated lunar and martian gravity.

We know zero gravity causes serious health problems, and that the workarounds are not very satisfactory. We don't know if lunar or martian gravity is sufficient to avoid these problems. We desperately need to know that!

>>7934407

Look, the point is that there's a lot of biological and psychological things mission planners have to take into consideration. The ISS gives them a "baseline" of data to work with.

>>7934419
There are other reasons than astronaut health to have artificial gravity on long interplanetary trips, as well.

Nearly everything we do with liquids and powders is based on having some gravity, on open-topped containers containing, on bubbles rising, on pouring working. Gravity is really fucking convenient.

It'll be way easier to keep things like long-term life support and food production working in some gravity, even if it's less than Earth gravity. We'll be able to test them far more on the ground, and use more familiar processes. It only needs to be possible to pack them up for brief periods of zero-g, and to have zero-g-compatible short-term systems.

>>7934432
The ISS lacks artificial gravity, long-term life support systems that can operate for years without resupply, food production, radiation shelters, and interplanetary flight-weight systems in general.

As such, it doesn't resemble a practical interplanetary habitat, and the data accumulated from operating it is of little relevance.

Like all of NASA's post-Apollo manned efforts, it's a stepping stone to nowhere.

>>7934466

>and the data accumulated from operating it is of little relevance.

>studying the long term affects of zero gravity on humans is of little relevance

>>7934419
Underrated post

>>7934474
If they set up Mars bases or Moon bases that'll be low gravity, not zero-gravity. 0g experiments are only valid if you're going on some Voyager 1-tier trip, honestly.

>>7934474
>>studying the long term affects of zero gravity on humans is of little relevance
It is. Artificial gravity is:
a) not all that hard,
b) extremely beneficial for a variety of purposes.

There's no reason we'd keep people in zero gravity in the long term except for lame excuses about needing to research the long-term effects of zero gravity.

>>7934507
It's so easy that we haven't done it even in LEO.

>>7934524
We never tried!

That doesn't mean it's hard, that means our space program is run by cock monglers.

>>7934524
Theres nothing stopping them
They just haven't done it for whatever reason.

>>7934529
Just seeing how much shit they burn up in the atmosphere should tell you the space programs are run by clowns

>>7934529
>>7934524
To understand what's going on with manned spaceflight, you first have to grasp that the primary motivation of the people in charge is to avoid humiliation.

Just keeping people in orbit for longer was an incremental step that was unlikely to fail, after they put people in orbit at all. Was there much reason to do that? Not really, but they could make the excuse that it was important for scientific reasons, to learn things that would be useful for long trips.

So this was a way to spend lots of time on something ostensibly necessary before moving on to larger goals, with a very low probability of embarassing failures.

Now that they've done that, now that they've spent decades and over a hundred billion dollars on it, the last thing they want is a series of inexpensive missions demonstrating that it was unnecessary.

Take, for example, what SpaceX is doing with reusable boosters. It's very rational and efficient to develop reusability incrementally, by failing over and over with very low cost recovery attempts. But nobody in government would do it because of the fear that their opponents would use the footage of the crashes to humilate them and destroy their careers and cause them to be remembered as fools. And nobody else involved in launch would want to let them succeed, and make *them* look like fools.

This is the central problem with manned spaceflight as a national prestige program: nobody wants any results that are embarassing for their current effort, or their past efforts. Once they make a little progress, they don't want any big leaps forward, only the most gradual improvement can be tolerated, and only in tiny risk-free steps.

The SLS has only 4 planned launches in the next 10 years...
The 2 manned mission seem to be completely makework

I suspect they won't happen

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>>7933603
>All dat silicon and oxygen

It's just fucking sand m8

>>7934703
lunar soil =/= sand

>>7933603
>>7934703
>>7934713
What you really want on the moon is the volatiles in the polar craters. There's lakes worth of water there, with ammonia and carbon dioxide trapped in it. You can make basically any propellants you want, and fill habitats with the elements necessary for life.

There's also peaks of eternal light at the poles, so you can set up places that have constant solar power, aside from occasional eclipses.

There are probably also deposits buried elsewhere on the moon similar in composition to carbonaceous asteroids. It'll be a job finding them, though.

I used to like SpaceX but now I really want to see them crash and burn just to shut up all the smug fanboys. They are now the Apple of space launch companies.

>>7934770
>I used to support SpaceX out of knee-jerk contrarianism when the common wisdom was that they were dreamers and would fail, but now that people see them making good progress toward their goals, I feel a need to swim against the current in the other direction.
Lowest of the low.

>>7933603
would probably cause a war on earth if one country decided to mine the moon

>>7934791
No he has a point. When arrogance surpasses competence he has a right to be skeptical.

>>7933456
my iq is high very you fägit

>>7934837
This. When they said they were going to land a rocket I supported them however since then their claims have gotten more and more outlandish.

>>7934837
>arrogance surpasses competence
Oh, fuck off, you're just another contrarian asshole.

You worthless shits always try and act like you're the superior reasonable ones. You can never argue your position worth a damn, you always just have vague implications and huge egos. You're incapable of realistically assessing evidence, you only say things that make you feel like you know better than the people around you.

So what you end up doing is shitposting, "hurr, can't even land on a barge! use a real rocket company like ULA!" and when somebody explains how little sense that makes, you've got nothing better to say than, "fuck these fanboys, always sucking Musky dick, who else hates them with me?!"

You're garbage. Stop being garbage.

>>7934900
>Call out SpaceX on their bullshit
>"C-Contrarian!"
How is this not an Apple-tier cult?
>hurr, can't even land on a barge! use a real rocket company like ULA!
It's called criticism, If you fail you get criticized and SpaceX initially failed a lot. Deal with it. Again cult-like behavior, if you say a word against the "chosen company" their followers sperg out completely.

>>7934900
Like I said. Look at how rabid you're getting over some words on an imageboard. Elon Musk is a god to you, isn't he? You can't even take some simple criticism without tying to fling insults all over the place.

And it's funny how they get excused for fucking up a barge landing while NASA gets shit for their shuttle program. Hypocrites all around.

>>7934817
This is so true it is frighting.

In treaties and such the wording strongly implies WWIII if someone builds moon base for military reasons, and paranoid military official would believe there is any other type of moon base.

A moon base offers huge strategic advantages, so much that China, US and Russia actually have standby plans to attack the moon with modified long range missiles should anyone be caught trying to build a base. First person to build moon base can orbital strike the planet with near impunity as it is super easy to defend.

>>7934922
>Call out SpaceX on their bullshit
>It's called criticism
Let's see...

>>7934770
>I used to like SpaceX but now I really want to see them crash and burn just to shut up all the smug fanboys.

This time, you shitbuckets came right out and ANNOUNCED that your motivation is just to be contrarian. You're just mad at the "smug" and "arrogant" people who like what they're doing and expect them to succeed. The fact that they can back up their position with good arguments only makes you madder, because the thing you like about being a contrarian is feeling superior, and having your comments shot down as idiocy makes you feel inferior.

...which, of course, you are. Deeply.

>>7934414
>>without the moon life never would have thrived on Earth
>mfw, retard thinks the moon did anything
wew lad

>>7934941
Because we've had enough of all your nuts claims. You've pushed me into outright contrarianism with your constant smug attitude If SpaceX doesn't do the planned Moon flyby in 2018 I am going to laugh so hard at you.

>>7934955
The Moon’s tidal forcing causes significant heating and dissipation of energy to take place. With no large moon to stabilize the Earth's rotation seasons would be chaotic. This has changed the way life evolved on Earth, allowing for the emergence of more complex multi-cellular organisms because no abrupt severe climate changing. Also nucleic acids wouldn't have formed in primordial tidal pools in the first place with no tide, hence no chance of life

>>7934923
>And it's funny how they get excused for fucking up a barge landing while NASA gets shit for their shuttle program. Hypocrites all around.
How simpleminded do you have to be to see it this way? The point of reusability is to save money, to reduce costs.

The space shuttle ended up costing $1.5 billion per flight. That's the cost to the people doing it.

SpaceX charges $61.2 million per Falcon 9 flight. That's the price to the customer, on which they intend to make a profit, while flying the Falcon 9 as a non-reusable vehicle. They intend to start lowering that price as soon as they start reusing stages (it sounds like the price of a reused Falcon 9 will initially be about $45 million).

The entire Falcon 9 launch history has been provided to customers at less than the cost of one space shuttle flight. Even if they never succeed at reusability, they're meeting the goal of providing cost-effective launch better than the space shuttle did.

Their explicit plan for developing reusability was to do so incrementally, starting from an expendable vehicle. When they fail to recover the booster, but learn something, that's not "fucking up", that's the intended development process. It's part of the plan. The barge in particular is a stopgap. Flyback to land is the primary intended mode of recovery.

The space shuttle plan was to build four shuttles, do five hundred flights with them in ten years, never have any failures, and save lots of money.

>>7934961
>If SpaceX doesn't do the planned Moon flyby in 2018 I am going to laugh so hard at you.
There's no planned 2018 moon flyby for SpaceX. That's SLS/Orion.

SLS/Orion is a system with no other apparent use than moon flybys. They're supposed to do an unmanned moon flyby sometime this decade, then a manned moon flyby sometime next decade, then a flight to lunar orbit and back (where, hopefully, JPL will have managed to park a boulder-sized piece of asteroid for them to visit, and plant a tiny LEGO flag on), and then nobody has any idea what else to do with it.

You might have heard someone talking about how Falcon Heavy and Crew Dragon could do everything planned for SLS/Orion, because although Falcon Heavy will be less powerful than SLS (about half as powerful), Crew Dragon is also lighter than Orion (about half the mass).

Falcon Heavy and Crew Dragon should both be flying routinely before SLS has its first test flight, five years or more before SLS has its first manned flight.

>>7934923
>>7934941
>>7934961
>>7935037
>>7935079
Please stop flooding the thread with this shit.

I watched an over-dramatic documentary about the moon recently, and they made the point about permanent solar fields being set up there. As usual, they said that the power could be "transferred via microwaves" without actually expanding on that.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireless_power_transfer#Far-field_radiative_techniques
Yes I know, wikipedia etc.

>Under experimental conditions, microwave conversion efficiency was measured to be around 54%

Is the loss in efficiency due to diffraction through air? I know it would be pretty hard to transmit the energy all the way to Earth accurately in the first place, but how much of the loss is avoidable if it's done in a vacuum (i.e. space)?
If the atmosphere was a significant problem, space elevators set up to receive the power at the edge of space could help solve that.
I just don't know much about microwaves and how badly they diffract in travel.

How much stuff can you put on the moon before it affects its orbit?

There's really no reason to RIGHT NOW. What we should be doing right now is sending a manned mission to Mars to search for signs of life. That's the obvious thing to do and essential before opening it to long-term colonies.

>>7935152
probably 1000x the total amount of stuff humans have on earth

>>7935152
>How much stuff can you put on the moon before it affects its orbit?
Far more then we could ever launch.
The moon weighs ~7×10^22 kg

>>7935156
>There's really no reason to RIGHT NOW.
Sure there is. Any construction is going to take a long time, so we ought to start early.

>>7935158
More than that.

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>>7935156
Yes you are totally right!
Instead of having a trial run using the moon for orbital insertion, deployment, descent and landing, and set up of materials/construction of habitat, we'll just fly a group of humans and supplies 250 million kilometers to an alien world using technology that hasnt been invented on a type of mission thats never been attempted using skills never tried or tested and hope for the best!

If you actually think having Humans walking on mars picking up rocks and looking under them for microbes is realistic in the next few decades get fucking real.

>>7935037
OH FUCKING WOW YOU WERE CHEAPER THAN THE FUCKING SPACE SHUTTLE THE MOST INEFFICIENT OVERPRICED LAUNCH SYSTEM IN HISTORY. SPACEX IS TRULY THE FUTURE

>>7935079
Pretty sure SLS is doing it's Moon flyby in 2022
SLS is being built to send men to Mars and larger science payloads to distant planets. Jupiter for example; sending a lander and rover to Europa will need two Atlas V rockets. With SLS you just need one launch and that's the plan.
>You might have heard someone talking about how Falcon Heavy and Crew Dragon could do everything planned for SLS/Orion, because although Falcon Heavy will be less powerful than SLS (about half as powerful), Crew Dragon is also lighter than Orion (about half the mass).
Pretty sure the rocket equation isn't linear, you can't offset having half the power by halving the mass. SLS is a far more capable rocket. Either way the fact that Crew Dragon is half the mass is likely proof that it is not suitable for a Mars mission. NASA plays it safe, SpaceX pushes the limits because they have to keep investors happy. This will be SpaceX's undoing. Once Crew Dragon blows up with humans on board SpaceX is finished.
>>7935175
They said that about the Moon in the 1950s. You can't wait for technology you have to just do it.

>>7935178
>>>And it's funny how they get excused for fucking up a barge landing while NASA gets shit for their shuttle program. Hypocrites all around.
>>The entire Falcon 9 launch history has been provided to customers at less than the cost of one space shuttle flight.
>>Their explicit plan for developing reusability was to do so incrementally, starting from an expendable vehicle. When they fail to recover the booster, but learn something, that's not "fucking up", that's the intended development process.
>OH FUCKING WOW YOU WERE CHEAPER THAN THE FUCKING SPACE SHUTTLE
That's your takeaway?

>>7935175
I was with you until:
>If you actually think having Humans walking on mars picking up rocks and looking under them for microbes is realistic in the next few decades get fucking real.
You think it's unrealistic to put people on Mars any time in the next few decades?

The Curiosity rover weighs a ton. If there's a way to land cargo a ton at a time on Mars, sending people and the stuff they need to survive and come back is just a matter of doing that repeatedly.

Similarly, modular space station construction is an established technology, along with storable propellant.

There's no technical obstacle to sending people to Mars. We could do it by throwing money at it, or we could develop technology to make it cheaper. It might take as much as ten years, depending on the approach, but we don't need multiple decades of preparation.

>>7935202
>You can't wait for technology you have to just do it.

It took them the better part of a decade of countless hours of R&D, construction, testing, human costs,prototypes, dozens of missions and $110 billion in today's money to put men on the moon. They had to basically invent what is now modern computers in order to develop the lunar lander guidance computer. The technology didnt exist.

They didn't "just do it"

>>7933256
Prolonged Moonquakes

>>7935225
That's what I meant you have to just do it as in invent the tech yourself instead of waiting for someone else to do it.

>>7935225
Don't forget the constant fear of complete nuclear annihilation from the soviet union. That provided the real incentive to go to the moon.
Without some kind of geopolitical driver, there is absolutely no pressing reason to go to Mars. Just to "explore" doesn't mean shit when Humans are involved.
Thats why we have robotic probes.

>>7935257
Nukes could still fly today, I dunno about you but I'd rather be on mars when that happens.

>>7935202
>Pretty sure the rocket equation isn't linear, you can't offset having half the power by halving the mass.
Obviously "power" isn't a precise technical term here (the literal meaning of energy per unit time would be absurd to use as a measure of launch vehicle performance), but what it's generally used for in regards to launch vehicles is for the vehicle's payload capacity to a certain trajectory. So in this sense, then that's exactly what it means: you can offset having half the power (capacity to a trajectory) by halving the payload mass.

SLS is a big rocket so it can throw big payloads. It's not particularly good for throwing small payloads to high delta-V. For that, you'd want to add a stage with a low empty mass. SLS will have big upper stages with high thrust and high empty mass.

The difference between SLS and Falcon Heavy gets larger as their payloads are sent on higher-delta-V trajectories, since SLS will be using LOX/H2 propellant.

SLS Block I is supposed to have a capacity to LEO of about 70 tons, while Falcon Heavy's is about 53 tons, to Mars transfer (a larger delta-V than a moon flyby), their numbers are ~20 tons to ~13 tons. SLS Block IB is supposed to be more capable, with 105 tons to LEO and ~30 tons to Mars transfer.

Cargo Dragon has a dry mass of 4.2 tons (expected to be similar to that of Crew Dragon), and is self-sufficient, while the Orion capsule is expected to have a dry mass of about 10 tons, and be reliant on a service module adding about another 5 tons of dry mass. Additionally, Orion will have a ~7-ton launch abort system, that will be dropped on the way to orbit, while Crew Dragon's is integrated, with its propellant available for use on missions.

Dragon on Falcon Heavy can clearly be thrown anywhere SLS Block IB can throw Orion, including lunar orbit. For some missions, a propellant tank and thruster might need to be added in the Dragon trunk, to match the maneuvering capability of the Orion service module.

>>7935283
>>7935202
In addition to this is the potential for multi-launch missions. With (non-reusable) Falcon Heavy priced under $100 million, and flying multiple times per year, and SLS cost estimates ranging from $1.8 billion to $5 billion per flight and no realistic prospects for flying more than once per year, SLS has to do whatever you want to do with it in one flight, while a number of Falcon Heavy launches could be used for a single mission.

Whereas SLS/Orion is incapable of doing a moon landing in one launch, with Falcon Heavy and Dragon, it could be done as a multi-launch mission, in three or four launches, for instance: a lander/ascent module, a space tug, and a Dragon capsule which all rendezvous in lunar orbit.

>NASA plays it safe, SpaceX pushes the limits because they have to keep investors happy. This will be SpaceX's undoing. Once Crew Dragon blows up with humans on board SpaceX is finished.
NASA doesn't play it safe. They've had the most deaths of any space program.

Their plan for the first Orion manned mission is to send the crew on a lunar flyby using a configuration of the SLS which will have never been tested, including a new, never-before-flown upper stage, and the first flight of a complete Orion (the uncrewed test article will be stripped of parts such as life support systems so it can be launched with the less powerful SLS Block I configuration, and will be constructed in a different manner, due to schedule pressure).

Orion was not designed to fly on SLS. It was designed to fly routinely to the ISS on Ares I, and for BEO missions, to rendezvous with a mission package launched by Ares V (a rocket meant to be about twice as powerful as SLS). The plan was to test Orion thoroughly in LEO before risking lives with a BEO mission, but that caution has been cast aside.

Even in the rush of the Apollo Program, NASA took time to do crewed testing of the Command/Service Module, with its crew capsule, in LEO.

>>7935178
>>7935202
>>7935283
>>7935324
Jesus Christ.
Stop.

>>7935324
>with Falcon Heavy and Dragon, it could be done as a multi-launch mission, in three or four launches, for instance: a lander/ascent module, a space tug, and a Dragon capsule which all rendezvous in lunar orbit.
I believe that, taking proper advantage of Falcon Heavy, Crew Dragon, and Bigelow inflatable habitat designs, a small moon base could be established by 2020 and sustained indefinitely with funding of under $3 billion per year: the current budget used for the ISS program.

The combination of low-cost heavy-lift launches and light-weight inflatable habitats is a real winner for a moon base.

Greater economies might be seen with the RL-10 used for its originally-intended purpose: as the engine for a large, efficient lunar lander.

>>7935324
>SLS cost estimates ranging from $1.8 billion to $5 billion per flight
Total and utter bullshit. It's $500 million ackchually. And one SLS launch can certainly do a Moon landing in once go. It's more powerful than the Saturn V after all.
>Orion was not designed to fly on SLS. It was designed to fly routinely to the ISS on Ares I, and for BEO missions, to rendezvous with a mission package launched by Ares V (a rocket meant to be about twice as powerful as SLS)
What the fuck are you talking about? Ares is long dead, Orion is certainly designed for the SLS and it is definitely for deep space.

>>7935386
Oh so your god is making a moon base too now is he? What next? A McDonalds on Mercury?
>inflatable habitat
C'mon get fucked, that is nothing more than an idea that has floated around since the 80s.
>The combination of low-cost heavy-lift launches and light-weight inflatable habitats is a real winner for a moon base.
No, the actual need for a moon base is what will make a moon base happen. If nobody wanted to spend $100 billion on a moon base nobody will want to spend $3 billion on a moon base because it's still not very important. The problem with autists on /sci/ is they think that coming to market with new technology = everyone immediately adopting it. Fuck no, go take a business class sometime, so many "ahead of their time" ideas flopped simply because people weren't interested. We are only in space now because some some guy got really desperate to win a war and let another guy play out his Jules Verne fantasies for real. Nobody gives a fuck about space unless things get desperate on Earth and right now things are not desperate so SpaceX will be just an echo in a stagnant century for space travel

>>7935391
>It's $500 million ackchually.
The $500 million estimate is an incremental cost figure, so it doesn't reflect the program cost or launch rate limitations, which means it's not really a cost figure, so much as the potential savings of not doing a launch.

They're spending a couple billion dollars a year on it, and not doing any launches, so when it starts doing operational flights in the mid 2020s, there's already going to be a cost of tens of billions of dollars to amortize, and nobody thinks this thing will fly more than once a year.

$5 billion per flight is probably being generous.

>And one SLS launch can certainly do a Moon landing in once go. It's more powerful than the Saturn V after all.
SLS Block I and Block IB will both be considerably less powerful than the Saturn V.

SLS Block II is unlikely to fly before 2030, if ever. It is purely a concept. NASA has no actual plan to build a version of SLS more capable than Saturn V, but they have to say it's in the plan because Congress wrote a law requiring SLS to be more powerful than Saturn V (they also wrote a law requiring SLS to fly no later than 2017, and requiring SLS/Orion to be usable for crew rotation to the ISS, but NASA has openly given up on doing either of those). It's not a real thing.

SLS Block I is actually a thrown-together half-assed version designed just to meet the 2017 launch requirement, and never be used for anything else, but NASA's already saying they won't meet that target, so it's pretty much pure waste.

>Ares is long dead, Orion is certainly designed for the SLS and it is definitely for deep space.
The Orion that's supposed to fly on SLS is the same one that was supposed to fly on Ares I, and go on moon missions using Ares V. It is way overweight for launch on SLS beyond Earth orbit. Compared to the Apollo capsule on Saturn V, the Orion capsule on SLS is twice the capsule on half the rocket. Orion's also only designed for missions up to 3 weeks. Just for moon flybys.

>>7935411
>Oh so your god is making a moon base too now is he?
>If nobody wanted to spend $100 billion on a moon base nobody will want to spend $3 billion on a moon base
I'm describing an option, not saying this is the plan.

Falcon Heavy with a Crew Dragon will fly for a considerably lower price to NASA than a Soyuz, and be capable of going to a high lunar orbit (where it could meet with a space tug to low lunar orbit, which could take it to a lander) and coming back. This is a huge advance in cost effectiveness, making moon landings a feasible option.

>>7935425
That's development costs you dickhead, it's separate to launch costs. I don't see you adding development costs to Falcon Heavy launches
>nobody thinks this thing will fly more than once a year.
And why will Falcon Heavy fly more than once a year? How many people need heavy lifters? Sure Falcon Heavy is cheap enough for even LEO but there is no reason not to choose the Falcon 9 when it is still half the price.
>SLS Block I and Block IB will both be considerably less powerful than the Saturn V.
This is not true, it's more powerful with 15% more thrust, I've seen the data, please stop talking shit
>SLS Block II is unlikely to fly before 2030, if ever
Biased opinion, no proof whatsoever
>Compared to the Apollo capsule on Saturn V, the Orion capsule on SLS is twice the capsule on half the rocket
Yet more BS, the Apollo spacecraft weighed 29,000 kg, Orion is 25,000 kg.
>Orion's also only designed for missions up to 3 weeks. Just for moon flybys
That's what the block II is for, to send up extra modules to increase range. Right now the Dragon Crew can't do any better, you really expect to fly all the way to Mars in a single 4 ton spacecraft?

>>7935436
Great and NASA can use it for that but for deep space it doesn't hold a candle to Orion. Crew Dragon cannot go to the Moon. it is an LEO shuttle vehicle and nothing more.

Now, I don't want to shill for spaceX, but the launch rate for SLS is scary low.

>>7935456
So why doesn't NASA focus on the payload and just submit a bid for heavy lift rockets? Surely there are other companies besides SpaceX who could make such a thing.

>>7935468
What you just said is perfect proof that there is no market for the Falcon Heavy. If NASA submitted a bid for a heavy lift rocket not even their lapdogs ULA would do it because NASA would be their only customer and extremely rarely at that. The only other people who could seriously mount a Mars mission are Russia and China and they sure as hell won't be using American rockets. SpaceX are just fantasists, the only way a private company can afford a Mars mission is if it was commercialized. The first person will be sent by a national, possibly international effort that costs billions. NASA does a lot of deep space work so it needs SLS. it wants to put landers in the Jupiter and Saturn system, Atlas V is not enough.

All moon landings are fake. Proof is the analysis of stereo parallax of official photos conclude that it was filmed in on a stage. http://www.aulis.com/stereoparallax.htm

>>7935529
The biggest hole in the moon landing conspiracy theory is that if there really was any serious evidence that it was faked the Soviets would have shouted it from the rooftops. These people were desperate to undermine the USA, had a top-tier spy network and were experts in space. No way could NASA have fooled them.

>>7935540
That argument is always thrown and can be easily debunked. Alot of information on trajectory and ballistics is still classified today as it was when the landings happened. NASA never gave the Russian ballistic information track the events.

>>7935451
>That's development costs you dickhead, it's separate to launch costs. I don't see you adding development costs to Falcon Heavy launches
First of all, it's not just development costs. It's program costs. SLS is a big program with lots of facilities and salaried employees. NASA has to pay for them whether they launch anything or not.

The advertised "cost" of a Falcon Heavy launch is the price to the customer, not the cost to SpaceX. They have to amortize their development costs into those prices if they want to survive and make a profit.

NASA will have the option of using Falcon Heavy regardless of whether they use it. They didn't ask for it, they're not paying for it. It's being developed primarily to serve the GTO comsat market, with lots of surplus capacity to make reusability work. They're getting Falcon Heavy as a launch option for free whether they ever use it, and whether they continue to fund SLS or not.

Even disregarding the funds already invested, if NASA cancels SLS now, they'd save over $10 billion dollars between now and what would have been the first working (non-test) flight of SLS (which will happen no sooner than 2023). So they're giving up over 100 Falcon Heavy flights in order to get the option of using SLS, before they even pay for one useful flight of SLS.

NASA has no equivalent option to stop the development of Falcon Heavy and put savings in their pocket.

You have to consider the whole cost to NASA to make the launches possible, not just some arbitary part which you consider the "launch cost".

>>7935482
>> not even their lapdogs ULA would do it because NASA would be their only customer and extremely rarely at that.
Why the fuck wouldn't they do it if NASA is paying them? NASA has payed lockheed martin and other big companies to do rocket development.

Take for instance the X-33:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_Martin_X-33

it was a joint NASA Lockheed Martin initiative.

Let's face it, SLS is nothing more than a vehicle to keep those old shuttle bucks flowing to congressional districts.

NASA does not need to building rockets, they should be building payloads.

>>Mars mission
oh so we are talking about getting shit to Mars now?

NASA is not getting people to Mars anytime soon.
http://arstechnica.com/science/2016/02/space-experts-warn-congress-that-nasas-journey-to-mars-is-illusory/

Neither is spaceX

>>7935451
>And why will Falcon Heavy fly more than once a year?
For satellite launches on the conventional market, SpaceX expects to fly Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy each about once a month. Falcon 9's a little undersized for the GTO market, particularly if they want to fly back the first stage for reuse. Falcon Heavy only costs about 50% more than Falcon 9.

>>SLS Block I and Block IB will both be considerably less powerful than the Saturn V.
>This is not true, it's more powerful with 15% more thrust
Ugh... I meant the payload is lower, not that the thrust on lift-off is lower. I explained this already. SLS launches on low-Isp, high-empty-weight solid-fuel rockets. The thrust isn't useful to compare to liquid-fueled rockets.

>>Compared to the Apollo capsule on Saturn V, the Orion capsule on SLS is twice the capsule on half the rocket
>Yet more BS, the Apollo spacecraft weighed 29,000 kg, Orion is 25,000 kg.
I said CAPSULE. The entire CSM was much more capable than the Orion spacecraft. 18.5 tons of that 29 ton Apollo spacecraft mass was propellant, while only 9 tons of Orion's 25 will be propellant. The Apollo CSM had nearly twice as much propellant as dry mass, whereas Orion has nearly twice as much dry mass as propellant.

The Apollo CAPSULE was ~5.5 tons, with a ~23 ton service/propulsion module carrying 18.5 tons of propellant. The Orion CAPSULE is ~10.5 tons, with a ~15 ton service/propulsion module carrying 9 tons of propellant.

Orion is not capable of going down to or coming back from low lunar orbit, let alone taking a lander with it. It only has the delta-V to go to and return from high lunar orbits. It is a spacecraft for moon flybys, not landings.

>>7935529
Moon landing deniers are so retarded.
The lunar reconnaissance orbiter even surveyed all the apollo sites. The equipment and even the astronauts footprints are still there. Someone even posted it in this very thread

>>7934042
>>7934045
>>7934046

>>7935564
My point is they didn't need it. It's not hard for the Russians to track a fuckhuge rocket.

>>7935595
thats not how it works.

>>7935565
The Falcon Heavy is not good enough for NASA. You just trashed the SLS for apparently not being powerful enough to launch the Orion spacecraft yet you are now recommending a launcher with half the thrust?
>It's being developed primarily to serve the GTO comsat market
Oh so you're changing yoru story now? First ethe Falcon Heavy was for Mars now its "merely for GTO". Do we really need a heavy lifter for that? Plenty of satellites already in GTO don't see why Falcon Heavy will be so crucial to this market. Falcon Heavy is the real rocket without a purpose, it's not powerful enough for Mars yet way overpowered for orbital launches. And then there's the plan that Musk doesn't actually have a serious Mars mission plan beyond "I'd like to go to Mars one day"
>>7935578
If X-33 had worked it would have been useful to many other markets.
>SLS is nothing more than a vehicle to keep those old shuttle bucks flowing to congressional districts
This is just cynicism. I don't see why you are completely and utterly trashing NASA just because their shuttle was mediocre and Constellation flopped. That's engineering for you, some things go well others fail. It's really pissing me off how you keep acting like SpaceX is perfect and will never fail as much as NASA has.
>NASA is not getting people to Mars anytime soon.
http://arstechnica.com/science/2016/02/space-experts-warn-congress-that-nasas-journey-to-mars-is-illusory/
So NASA is being fucked over by their paymasters not because they are incompetent.
>
Orion is not capable of going down to or coming back from low lunar orbit, let alone taking a lander with it. It only has the delta-V to go to and return from high lunar orbits. It is a spacecraft for moon flybys, not landings.
I never said otherwise, my point was that Dragon can't even do that. And it's not hard to upgrade the service module for a Moon landing. The Orion is heavier because it carries more people

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>>7934046
>>7934045
>>7934042
I'll back ye with animootion. (Kinda sad to see moonfoils on /sci/ though.)

>>7934456
All that you can deal with, and we've created various methods of dealing with the mechanical difficulties of survival in low and zero gravity.

None of which counter the fact that your capillaries start bursting if you stay in zero-G too long, which, eventually, is fatal.

Though like the guy says, IDK if they've done any experiments to see if Moon/Mars gravity is sufficient to mitigate that medical phenomenon.

>>7935650
strange.

because gallium arsenide melts way below 3600f in the thermosphere, how do satalites get their power? I cant imagine being on the moon with NO ATMOSPHERE and the SUN heating your shit up non nonchalantly.

>>7935657
>because gallium arsenide melts way below 3600f in the thermosphere, how do satalites get their power?
What?

>I cant imagine being on the moon with NO ATMOSPHERE and the SUN heating your shit up non nonchalantly.
Just use reflectors + radiators to manage heat flow, same as anywhere else in the inner solar system outside an atmpsphere.

>>7935456
>NASA can use it for that but for deep space it doesn't hold a candle to Orion. Crew Dragon cannot go to the Moon. it is an LEO shuttle vehicle and nothing more.
There's no reason to think this. Orion has no capabilities that Crew Dragon lacks. SpaceX has talked quie a bit about the Crew Dragon's advanced capabilities, particularly its ability to propulsively land on Mars.

Orion isn't some special, highly-advanced design. It's a very conservative, clunky design. It's not costing way more and taking way longer than Crew Dragon because it's full of special stuff, but because NASA and its usual contractors for in-house projects are slow and inefficient.

Orion's not as big as it is (twice the pressurized volume of Dragon) for the sake of deep space missions. It was originally designed for ISS crew rotation and resupply. More volume means more cargo space. The large size, and consequent high mass, makes it less suitable for deep space missions. It's harder to send it places, but it's not better at its essential function of keeping the people inside it alive in space and during atmospheric entry.

The size of Orion was set as part of the Constellation Program. When Ares I was cancelled, Orion's function as a LEO shuttle vehicle was abandoned, and the design compromises for that purpose became purely wasteful. When Ares V was downsized into SLS and burdened with carrying its own capsule (deep-space Constellation missions were meant to go in two launches, with the mission package on Ares V and Orion on Ares I), the ability to send Orion anywhere interesting was lost.

Now Orion just doesn't make sense. Because Orion can't go anywhere interesting, they took the place Orion can go to (a high lunar orbit), and decided to put a boulder there for it to visit. Nobody has a plan to get this boulder yet, and nobody has a reason why it would be easier to put it in a high lunar orbit and go visit it than to bring it down to LEO.

>>7933256
President Bush did but of course Obama canceled that.

>>7935631
Constellation didn't flop, it just turned into the space launch system despite the recommendations of the Augustine Committee.
https://www.nasaspaceflight.com/2010/09/nasas-senate-bill-passes-dramatic-debate-vote-congress/

http://blog.chron.com/sciguy/2014/06/five-years-after-augustine-how-does-the-panel-feel-about-nasas-space-launch-system/

>>So NASA is being fucked over by their paymasters
This is exactly the case. Congress wants to keep space shuttle bucks flowing to their districts, so they said NASA had to make a heavy lift rocket that used a certain amount of space shuttle parts instead of leaving the decision to NASA:

http://www.competitivespace.org/issues/the-senate-launch-system/

NASA is perfectly fine, it's congress that is the problem.

It's because of aliens using the dark side of the moon to experiment on humans.

>>7935631
>The Falcon Heavy is not good enough for NASA. You just trashed the SLS for apparently not being powerful enough to launch the Orion spacecraft yet you are now recommending a launcher with half the thrust?
Unlike SLS, Falcon Heavy will have the launch rate to be capable of multi-launch missions. Furthermore, it's compatible with a much lighter, more advanced, and more useful capsule, which will get thorough testing on LEO missions.

>half the thrust
Please stop being this stupid.

>>It's being developed primarily to serve the GTO comsat market
>Oh so you're changing yoru story now? First ethe Falcon Heavy was for Mars now its "merely for GTO".
>>primarily to serve the GTO comsat market
>"merely for GTO"
>>primarily
>merely
Seriously, you have mental problems. Falcon Heavy's capable of lots of stuff, but the main thing SpaceX is developing it for is to launch comsats to GTO, because that's where the money is. That doesn't mean it's "merely for GTO", it means GTO is the most important market for a launcher more powerful than Falcon 9.

>>Orion is not capable of going down to or coming back from low lunar orbit, let alone taking a lander with it. It only has the delta-V to go to and return from high lunar orbits. It is a spacecraft for moon flybys, not landings.
>I never said otherwise, my point was that Dragon can't even do that.
...but it can.

>And it's not hard to upgrade the service module for a Moon landing.
...but then you have to find something much bigger than SLS to launch it on, like Ares V. Orion's way too heavy to fit on SLS with the necessary stuff for a moon landing.

>The Orion is heavier because it carries more people
Where do you even come up with this stupid shit?

>>7935695
You guys should cite your shit

>>7933807
This. I don't even watch tv anymore. I keep a facebook account that follows the major science news sources, as well as several scientists. There is so little legitimate news on tv that I just cancelled my cable altogether.

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>>7933447
>mfw you're the only person here who doesn't understand them

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>>7933444

>>7933256
If the moon is constantly barraged by asteroids...some of which rich in precious materials... Why doesn't it have space mining potential ?

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>>7933444
kek

>>7936453
The only real benefit to mining the moon is to aid in construction of moon bases. Regolith can be processed to make mooncrete, a type of concrete they could use for building.

But can you imagine the geopolitical mess of countries setting up mining claims on the moon.

>>7936458
>mooncrete
This is one of those dumb ideas like He3 mining that just won't die.

The basic idea is that if you had lunar regolith here on Earth, you could just mix it with water and use it as concrete, because it contains substantial amounts of calcium oxide, also known as quicklime, the base material for concrete, which sets in air due to a chemical reaction with atmospheric carbon dioxide.

Two rather obvious problems with this: water is very scarce on the moon, and carbon dioxide is very scarce on the moon. Water and CO2 aren't the problem on Earth. They're everywhere, so free concrete would be pretty neat (and pretty close to impossible to find because it would react with the CO2 and water that are everywhere). On the moon, free concrete is useless, because to make it set, you have to use precious scarce materials.

What you do have is lots of regolith and lots of sunlight, so you can focus the sunlight on the regolith to sinter it, and do something like a big 3d printer for ceramics, or you can make a bunch of bricks or fiber.

Another thing is melting the regolith in a flux and using electrolysis to make oxygen and metal.

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It's a real shame that the triumph of apollo program is lost in todays world.
We need to go back.

>>7937630
>We need to go back.

To the Cold War? Because that's the reason a lot of scientific breakthroughs happened.

>>7937640
fuck off retard

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>>7937650
...ok I guess? that came out of nowhere.

>>7937630
Apollo was kind of neat, but way too expensive for planting flags and picking up rocks.

People talk about whether the moon landings were faked, but even believing that they were real, they were still fake in an important way.

The moon landing was important as the prelude to establishment of a moon base and the general progress of mankind to live beyond the world we were born on. But the Apollo Program was unsustainably expensive and made no real progress toward lowering costs enough for a base to be built.

We "put a man on the moon" but that was the limit of the technology. Just as the rockets were thrown away after one use, the technology was thrown away after a ruinously expensive token gesture.

The Apollo Program wasn't what it was presented as. Even before the first moon landing, the Saturn V factory was shut down, the tooling scrapped, and the workers scattered to the four winds. They had no intention of going beyond winning a dick-measuring contest with the USSR. Ridiculously, they did so by infringing on the freedom of Americans, forcing them to pay for this project, which was neither for their defense nor a service for the public, but instead simply meant as a demonstration of the greatness of the state that ruled over them.

Like the V2 program, the Apollo Program may be admired purely for its technical merits, but should be reviled as an act of tyranny, one state sucking the lifeblood of its subjects just to humiliate a rival.

>>7937640
Don't ever fucking reply to my posts again unless you have something to contribute for this thread.

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>>7937676
>Apollo was kind of neat
>kind of

Drop your ostentatious bullshit you nigger. You aren't nearly as insightful as you think you are.

>>7937683
Apollo was mostly just a country piling up more money than anyone else and burning it to show off that it could.

Even at the time, there were lots of people who were unimpressed. It was obviously very expensive and not useful. Less obvious but equally true was the fact that it wasn't pioneering or paving the path, it was demonstrating a method that was too expensive to use, which would have no meaningful connection to any economical method of transportation to the moon and back.

Nobody else has done a moon landing because nobody else has been stupid enough to spend so much money on something useless.

>>7937701
>Men literally left the gravitional hold of the Earth and travelled 4 days though space to visit and land on an alien world
>>Apollo was unimpressive and stupid

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>>7937701

>it wasn't pioneering

All of the technology was basically built from scratch. The lunar guidance computer utilized the worlds first integrated circuits for one example. Not to mention the Saturn V is still the most powerful machine ever built by Humans.

>>7937710
It was a ridiculously expensive stunt, which served no practical purpose. Someday, travelling to the moon will be a routine trip, and they won't look back in awe at the Apollo Program, it'll just be a footnote about how space travel was initially done with bizarre, impractical methods as a form of political posturing, and how decades and the lifetime production equivalents of hundreds of thousands of people were spent doing silly things in ways with no relevance to practical manned spaceflight.

>>7937719
>>it wasn't pioneering
Pioneers aren't just people who go somewhere first, they're people who prepare the way for others.

The technology developed for Apollo was abandoned after they had performed their symbolic gesture. It was too expensive to use for anything else.

They weren't preparing the way for anything, they were just putting on a show, doing a stunt. After it went to the moon, it went nowhere for decades.

>the Saturn V is still the most powerful machine ever built by Humans.
That's not even a claim that has a meaningful interpretation.

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>>7933568
True as that may be it's not like anybody else has anything radically better, at least if we're talking about actual physical crafts that are actively being used to launch shit into space. All the better options are stuck on some engineer's drawing board somewhere.

At this point I'll take what I can get because the stagnation is smothering.

>>7934093
It's a silly toy compared to where we should've been by this point. It's time to take off the kid gloves and stop pretending that it's anything to be proud of in 2016.

>>7937768
>The technology developed for Apollo was abandoned after

Too bad it actually went on to become modern computers

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possibly the only good idea Prezdent Bush ever had

>>7938025
Except nothing went according to that timeline

>>7938025
Every president creates a huge show of how they will achieve things in the next 20 years, this is a setup as when they don't get elected the man who inherits the responsibility has to scrap it.

For something like returning to the Moon, a president must promise it in his term, only then can you honestly trust that statement.

>>7937768
>Pioneers aren't just people who go somewhere first, they're people who prepare the way for others.
But Apollo DID prepare the way for others to get to the Moon. It created and showcased a huge list of technologies, trained pilots and engineers in how to land and rendezvous at the moon, and built up the infrastructure and knowledge needed for more advanced missions. It even developed and tested a luncher with a respectable payload to TLI, significantly lowering the cost of future missions.

Apollo did prepare the road to the Moon - it's hardly fair to blame it for that road going unused.

>>7937640
To the cold war. If the cold war was still going on, we'd probably have Moon bases, cyborgs, and killer robots.

>>7938025
But he didn't fund it.

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holy shit i never realized the moon was so fucking far away

>>7938515
or we would all be dead and Earth trapped in a nuclear winter

>>7938522
why is Saturn so qt?

>>7934312
>thousands of plebs wanting to go into space

Why do you think this is such a reach? Launches are going to become incredibly cheap in future years. There's already thousands of BILLIONAIRES, not to mention the hundreds of thousands of multi-millionaires. You really find it that hard to believe a small percentage of these people will spare few million to take the trip of a lifetime? There's already been hundreds of people who have publicly stated they'd be willing to pay a solid price for a space flight. And as more and more people pay to fly, technology improves at an accelerated rate and prices continue to go down, thus widening the market even more, and so on and so forth.

>>7934575
This. Technology is a slow and gradual process because there's a lot more that goes into it than pure engineering feasibility. Unfortunately this is a concept basement dwelling neckbeards have difficulty understanding since it involves knowledge and experience with social systems, something they fail to incorporate in their science fiction fueled wet dreams

>>7938516
Presidents don't fund things. That's up to Congress.

People run for president as if they're going to be king, but it's only an executive position. Executive: as in executing policies that others set. Congress can even remove the president, although it takes a supermajority.

The president basically says, "Hey guys, I have this super neat idea for what to do with NASA!" and Congress says, "That's nice, but instead just keep giving money to our friends."

>>7937676
Why the fuck is everyone on /sci/ such a cynical contrarian asswad? "Everything is being done wrong, nothing is good enough". Like holy shit you sit in your basement calling the Apollo Program mediocre when the pinnacle of your life has been passing calc III?
>>7937701
Aaand he's still continuing with his "I'm so clever that Apollo doesn't impress me" routine. Is there anything more odious than the neckbeard?
>>7937753
>James Cook's mission to Australia was a dumb stunt
This is how stupid you sound like holy shit shut up already
>>7938668
Russians have been selling space tickets for $70 million for years and hardly anyone has taken them up on the offer. If you consider the pool of people with money who are also interested in going to space it's not as high as you think. Plenty people are too scared or just plain uninterested in space. And then there's the issue of repeat customers, it's really a one time thing, not like jet plane flight.
>>7934575
This is very true, big leaps forwards leads to many failures and the public notices the failures more. This is why governments generally don't do edgy things except in wartime

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>>7938270
>significantly lowering the cost of future missions.
It lowered the cost, but not significantly.

Continuing the Apollo Program was too expensive, let alone expanding it. It was not the development costs that made Apollo expensive, but the operating costs. Enormous amounts of highly skilled labor were needed to build each set of single-use hardware for one symbolic moon visit.

It wasn't the services of a handful of clever eggheads that America couldn't spare (indeed, it would have been hard to stop them thinking about space travel all day), it was thousands of the best welders, precision machinists, production engineers, test technicians, and job bosses, who needed to get back to building and maintaining factories for consumer goods and military hardware.

Figuring out how to scale up expendable rockets wasn't helpful for developing reusable rockets. If anything, it painted NASA into a PR corner where it would be embarassing to work on smaller rockets.

When Apollo was done, the serious space people were like, "Okay, we beat the Russians, can we build something useful now?" and got told, "Only if it's, like, Saturn V size and works right on the first try. Oh, and you have to use our favorite solid rocket contractor, and spread the work around a bunch of different states."

"Well, fuck."

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>>7939054

>>7938942
>Russians have been selling space tickets for $70 million for years and hardly anyone has taken them up on the offer. If you consider the pool of people with money who are also interested in going to space it's not as high as you think.
1) You have to go to Russia. That's a whole other category of risk on top of going to space.
2) You go crammed in a shitty little capsule up to a shitty little station with shitty space food, where there's no simulated gravity bedroom, bathroom, or dining room or zero-g party room.
3) You can't carry on to the moon or Mars or anything. It's just a dead-end trip to LEO.
4) You come back by falling somewhere in the wilderness.
5) It's $70 fucking million for this low-grade industrial crap.

The number of people who can afford prices in the tens of millions is far smaller than the number of people who can afford prices in the hundreds of thousands, or even in the millions. The intersection of people who can afford to spend tens of millions and want to go through this kind of baseline astronaut experience is, apparently, seven people:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Adventures#Clients_who_have_flown_in_space

>>7938942
>James Cook's mission to Australia
Differences:
- didn't cost a significant percentage of a national budget
- did not require the design of a new ship
- ship was not expendable
- ship was not purpose-built for the trip
- could not look at Australia with telescopes
- could not send robots to Australia
- was actual exploration
- purpose was to find land and a route to it
- made obvious sense to start regular traffic after the first successful trip
- potential for the trip to be directly profitable on its own, if valuable goods/plants were returned
- set out with a full ton of raisins

>>7939054
Wait, are you seriously trying to argue that Apollo was a dead end, because it relied on expendable rockets?
What the fuck?

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>>7939054
Why are you such a bitter asshole though
Everyone knows why the moon missions were cancelled and how expensive they were

Does the idea of going to alien planets with people not excite you? Probably not because you are smug fuckface keyboard warrior

>>7939456
Expendable and very costly to manufacture, yes.

Saturn V and the Apollo spacecraft bore no resemblance to a suitable method for routine transportation to and from the moon. They were only good for this kind of flag-planting stunt.

It's natural that the technology was abandoned immediately after it was demonstrated. It was orders of magnitude too expensive and offered no incremental path toward being less expensive.

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>>7939689
>too expensive
>omg so much expense
>magnitudes of expense

>>7939688
>Does the idea of going to alien planets with people not excite you?
Of course it does, but Apollo cost the modern equivalent of about $200 billion and set NASA on the path of crazy bullshit.

$200 billion on Apollo. $200 billion on the shuttle. Another $100 billion on ISS, aside from the shuttle flights. I think SLS/Orion is up around $20 billion now, with another $20 billion to go before they run out of shuttle engines.

Project Mercury cost $2 billion. Project Gemini cost $8 billion. Voyager cost $5 billion. These are big costs, they are not insane costs.

Imagine a half trillion dollars spent on sensible things. Imagine that instead of Apollo and the shuttle, they went straight to work in the 1960s on pursuing a variety of development strategies for minimum-scale reusable and low-cost expendable launch vehicles, deliberately diversifying their efforts between VTVL, spaceplanes, parachute recovery, and mass-produced modules with a focus on developing low-cost technologies for private space industry and the military.

X-15 was a reusable spaceplane that flew in the 1950s! Dyna-Soar was being developed at the same time! Sci-fi was full of VTVL rockets.

Sensible, gradual progress fell prey to the Apollo mentality of spending everything on huge symbolic programs.

>>7939767
Are you a retard? Stage recovery only works today because of computer technology. Regardless I'm still pretty sure that recovery isn't cost-effective on super heavy launchers. Falcon Heavy is only barely in the category, Saturn V and even SLS is a class above.
>X-15 was a reusable spaceplane that flew in the 1950s
Sub orbital you mongoloid.

You are seriously irritating with your smug "I know better than every single aerospace engineer who ever existed" attitude. This is why nobody like autistic people.

>>7939767
>Sensible, gradual progress fell prey to the Apollo mentality of spending everything on huge symbolic programs.

There was this thing called the cold war, anon. Not letting the Soviets get the ultimate high ground was top priority.

>>7939779
>Stage recovery only works today because of computer technology.
There are other ways to do it.

The Falcon 9 reusability program is operating on a shoestring budget with a vehicle that wasn't designed to be landed. The Merlin engine was designed for Falcon 1, which was sized to the minimum useful payload, to keep the costs down on their early development efforts, since it was started with only about $100 million in funding and had to be generating revenue once that was gone. When they got a shot at NASA funding, they designed a rocket stage that would fit under Interstate overpasses, and stuck as many Merlins on the bottom as would fit. When parachute recovery repeatedly failed, they decided to try for flyback reuse.

Modern computer technology lets them try this without adding any engines, landing on just one engine, with a thrust-to-weight ratio over one (so they can't hover it and then come down slowly, but have to stick the landing perfectly).

In the 1960s, a VTVL flyback booster would probably have used:
- radio remote control
- pressure-fed hypergolic (or pseudohypergolic) propellants for the landing
- a thrust-to-weight ratio allowing hovering
- fast-throttling vernier thrusters for attitude control
- a straight up-and-down trajectory, just lifting the orbital stage to space

Then the reusable orbital stage (and any middle stage) would either be a spaceplane or use parachute recovery.

When they got it right, pound for pound the fully reusable system would probably only take about one tenth of the payload of an expendable rocket to orbit, but it would also only cost about a thousandth as much to fly.

>recovery isn't cost-effective on super heavy launchers
Better tell SpaceX that, because they see Falcon 9 as only a stepping stone toward their real launch vehicle, a fully-reusable super-heavy (bigger than Saturn V).

>Sub orbital you mongoloid.
Every stage of a multi-stage rocket is suborbital.

>>7939779
>Are you a retard? Stage recovery only works today because of computer technology.
You could have just put a man in the first stage and have him fly it to a landing
Recovering stage 1's regularly in the 60's easily possible.

>Regardless I'm still pretty sure that recovery isn't cost-effective on super heavy launchers.
There is no need for super heavy launchers, and they only become expensive because NASA sets out from the beginning to build an expensive super heavy launcher, that only launches once every couple years, while paying salaries to 20k+ employees year round...

Nasa has spent half a trillion dollars with NOTHING to show for it
Literally nothing at all

>>7939791
>There was this thing called the cold war, anon. Not letting the Soviets get the ultimate high ground was top priority.
There isn't any higher ground than orbit. It wasn't practical to put anything on the moon.

>>7938522
Imagine seeing Jupiter from space on the first ever mission to Europa
>It's never going to happen dipshit

>>7939810
>>7939779
They did some clever automatic things without digital computers in those days, too.

Even the V2 was guided. It had to use thrust vectoring (with vanes) to keep pointed in the right direction as it built up enough speed for its fins to work.

There were also radar-guided, propulsive soft landings on the moon before the manned landings:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luna_9
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surveyor_program

>>7939865
The Jovian system is so steeped in deadly cosmic radiation.

I can't see how a manned mission there would be successful.

>>7939887
It's just solar wind. They're relatively low energy and easy to shield against. You'd need that shielding to protect against solar flares for any reasonably long mission (for Apollo, they just hoped there wouldn't be one once they were beyond the protection of the Earth's magnetic field).

>>7939902
It would be great if you actually knew what you were talking about though.

>>7939887
Who said anything about going home?

>>7939935
I do, though. It's just solar wind radiation, trapped by Jupiter's magnetic field, not the more penetrating high-energy cosmic rays (or rather, when cosmic rays are trapped, they get slowed to these lower energies).

You can get really intense bursts of radiation at these levels on a trip to Mars (or to the moon, if you're really unlucky), enough to cause acute radiation sickness and short-term death, not just cancer risk, so you need shielding to almost completely block it even to travel around the inner solar system.

http://www.defensenews.com/story/defense/air-space/2016/03/17/mccain-urges-dod-investigate-disturbing-statements-ula-exec/81905786/

rip ULA

>>7938942
>implying spending $70 million on a shitty Russian spaceflight is a comparable economic model to what will be offered in the next decade

see >>7939072
We're talking about ten times the experience for a tenth of the price. There's no comparison to be made

>>7939830
You can't be serious... We've already established it has nothing to do with practicality, one-upping the Soviets was enough motivation and going to the moon is significantly more impressive than putting something in orbit

>>7939823
>you could have just put a man in the first stage and have him fly it to a landing
>literally nothing

You have invalidated your ability to contribute any further, please leave

>>7940452
He probably felt like it was true, even if, when he rationally examined the issue, he knew it wasn't.

ULA is corrupt to the core. Corrupt people always find a way to feel entitled. They believe everyone else is just as bad, and they're just getting their fair share.

>The company, a joint venture of Boeing and Lockheed Martin, is even considering completely transitioning from Atlas V to the much more expensive Delta IV for satellite launch.
The reporter says this like it's a problem, but this is why they got paid to maintain the Delta IV capability. Atlas V is only cheap because they're using Russian engines, made in Russia at Russian wages. Going to Delta IV is the natural means for ULA to comply with the sanctions.

The dodgy shit was when ULA announced the discontinuation of the Delta IV rocket just as these sanctions came in. Then they were dismissive of the Air Force initiative to develop a drop-in domestic replacement for the Russian engines, and announced they were going to completely replace Atlas V with a new "Vulcan" rocket instead.

ULA is a company born in failure, to operate the uneconomical EELVs on a defacto cost-plus basis when Boeing and LM painted the US government into a corner with their "heads we win, tails you lose" plan to compete in the commercial launch market, knowing the government would have to bail them out if they didn't reap the free market profits they hoped for.

They should be acting with due humility, behaving like an old-style launch contractor, not proclaiming some glorious future and trying to go off in their own direction. LM and Boeing should have just accepted Rocketdyne's offer to buy ULA for $2 billion, and let the EELVs carry on serving the US military under vertically integrated management with no conflicts of interest.

>>7940534
>Sen. Richard Shelby, an Alabama Republican and a senior member of the Senate appropriations committee, spearheaded legislative language in the fiscal year 2016 omnibus bill that allowed ULA to keep buying RD-180s from Moscow until a domestic alternative is available.
This is the move: this is why they don't want a new Rocketdyne engine from a billion-dollar Air Force R&D contract.

ULA doesn't believe in NewSpace. This isn't a rational judgement, it's something that arises from social dynamics: if these new rocket companies are going to do it better, then ULA is a dead end. If you talk about SpaceX, Blue Origin, and all the little rocket start-ups as if they're not going to fail and fall apart, you'll be constantly offending the people at ULA. So you learn to talk as if they will fail, and little by little, you come to think the way you talk.

They know developing Vulcan will take a long time. They expect Blue Origin to fumble on delivering the engines, because "lol newspace". Anyway, these big technology projects always have delays and cost overruns. This is their way to say, "We're doing something!" until the Russian situation straightens itself out and the sanctions are lifted.

Vulcan's their way of basically not doing anything. Blue Origin's developing the engine on their own anyway, and they have to wait for the engine. They've somehow managed to get the Air Force to commit over $200 million toward Vulcan development, while ULA is only kicking in $134 million. The total Vulcan development cost is expected to be around $2 billion (and nobody knows where that money will come from), whereas simply replacing the engines on Atlas V is expected to be around $500 million (a project which is already underway because everyone knows ULA is full of shit).

why not a skycity in Venus ? it's easily feasible with current baloon technology, nearly 1g, nearly 1 bar of pressure at the right altitude, plenty of oxygene at this altitude too, only downside is no land.

>>7940598
>it's easily feasible with current baloon technology
No, it's a bitch. This would be a very hard development program.

>plenty of oxygene at this altitude too
Only in the form of CO2. There's oxygen pretty much everywhere, if you're okay with it being bound up in various non-O2 chemical forms.

>>7940598
>easily feasible
>only downside is no land

Bro...

>>7940598
fuck of with your damn cloud city rambling

>>7940602
>various non-O2 chemical forms.
hurr and muh gmos are evil satan spawns and science is evil satanism praise god do not eat chemicals eat real food be healthy !!!!

>>7940653
Are you trolling or really this retarded?
He was just saying the oxygen wasn't easily accessible, this had NOTHING to do with whatever bullshit you just managed to spill out on your keyboard

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>>7940623
Well, there are some major advantages. Instead of having to pull off some precision landing, you just inflate your balloon and bob.

You can get hydrogen from the clouds, so with carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, and hydrogen to work from, you can make a lot of stuff, including balloon material and lifting gas.

Ultimately, to be self-sufficient on Venus, you're going to need to get stuff from the surface.

It's also very hard to leave Venus. The launch to Venus orbit from Venus is as demanding as the launch to Earth orbit from Earth, without the advantage of solid ground to build your fuckhuge rocket on. You'd need a VERY large balloon to launch from, or very small rockets.

Lots of fun robotic exploration things to do, though. You can fly around in your blimp and look at some amazing clouds. Winged aircraft, helicopters, and little multicopters should all also work fine, and the clouds reflect light from all directions, so you can put solar panels on the top and bottom of your venuscraft. Building probes to the surface capable of returning to non-hellish altitude would also be an interesting challenge (we have long since sent probes to the Venus surface -- the Soviet Venera probes).

Hopefully as launch gets cheaper we'll see more robotic Venus exploration.

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>>7940684
>900 degree surface temp
>>we'll see more robotic Venus exploration

>>7940691
>>Instead of having to pull off some precision landing, you just inflate your balloon and bob.
>>Lots of fun robotic exploration things to do, though. You can fly around in your blimp and look at some amazing clouds.
>surface temperature
Why does that matter?

"Oh fuck, we can't explore Earth! The depths of ocean have crazy high pressures and are too cold and dark!"

Anyway, surface probes have been landed and sent back images. If they can be made to last for an hour, they can last longer. 900 degrees isn't all that hot, as material science goes. You can make structural materials, electronics, sensors, and actuators to work at those temperatures and pressures indefinitely, although it's challenging.

>>7940691
Fuck, I forgot about that law of physics where you can't make a probe that can be in 900 degrees. Silly me thinking it had more to do with current technology

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>>7940712
>If they can last for an hour they can last longer
>Why does that matter?
>900 degrees isn't all that hot

>>7940720
>Why does that matter?
Can you stop memeposting for a second and talk like a person?

You know perfectly well that by this I was referring to the possibility of avoiding the surface entirely by having a probe inflate a lifting balloon after entering the atmosphere.

Think of how interesting it would be to have some good cameras floating around Venus, sending back high-res pictures and video of the clouds.

>>7940534
>>7940580
I expect the whole company to just go bankrupt in a few years
Or maybe the government will keep them in operation and force spacex to build rockets for them.

>>7940720
is that bear ok?

>>7940737
I think ULA's doomed, but the US government needs them to carry on launching rockets for a few more years.

Then, even when SpaceX is launching on time, they'll still want a second option. Maybe the hope is that ULA will be bought out, officially (with LM and Boeing's approval) or unofficially (by all the useful personnel taking new employment), by Blue Origin. Jeff Bezos can certainly afford it, with a personal fortune over $50 billion.

The ULA / Blue Origin combination could be effective competition for SpaceX, starting with being the incumbent defense launch provider, with established reliable rockets that fly on time and crew that know how to work with the Air Force, and continuing with reusable rocket technology every bit as ambitious as SpaceX's.

>>7940720
>green text random statements
>thinks it makes you look as though you are of higher intelligence
>actually makes you look like you can't actually formulate a viable argument

Your retard is showing

>>7940752
Perhaps, but blue origin doesn't have anything close to an orbital rocket yet

>>7940781
Getting to space reliably with a substantial separable payload (i.e. the function of a first stage) is most of the challenge of getting to orbit.

Scaling up isn't all that hard. Falcon 1 had its first orbital flight in 2008. Falcon 9 had its first orbital flight in 2010. The Falcon 1 loaded upper stage mass was about the same mass as the initial Falcon 9 orbital payload (which was a space capsule). Falcon 9 was made by using the Falcon 1 engine for the larger upper stage.

Blue Origin's New Shepard is built to lift a space capsule. It's very comparable in capability to the Falcon 1 first stage, but fully reusable. Their initial orbital vehicle will use an upper stage based on New Shepard, minus the reuse hardware. This is a LOX/H2 rocket, very suitable for upper stage use. Their orbital booster will be a straightforward scale-up of New Shepard, with the BE-4 LOX/CH4 engine.

To people who believe this stuff about how going to orbit is way harder than going to space, Blue Origin's orbital vehicle is going to seem to appear out of nowhere.

Blue Origin, with the advantage of Bezos's Amazon fortune, went straight at the harder problems of efficient reusability and manned spaceflight, rather than establishing a revenue stream with expendable rockets. They'll take orbital flight in stride and probably hit full reusability at the same time SpaceX does.

>>7940827
They still are planning for a 2019 launch

Assuming no setbacks.

>>7940720

Does your oven turn into a puddle of molten slag every time you put it on high?

Solar Probe Plus is going to be shielding itself from temperatures around 2,500 Fahrenheit. It's not an insurmountable challenge.

>>7940903
ovens don't go to 900+ degrees
Nor such high pressure
Eventually the heat gets inside.
Really not much point putting people on venus other than for the hell of it
Maybe if orbital/space industries are already established and supplying raw materials is cheap.

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>ROCKET LAUNCH T-50 MINUTES
http://spaceflightnow.com/2016/03/18/expedition-47-mission-status-center/

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>>7940903
>Home ovens go to 900F

>>7941005
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-cleaning_oven
>A self-cleaning oven is an oven which uses high temperature (approximately 500 degrees Celsius or 900 degrees Fahrenheit) to burn off leftovers from baking

I guess you're one of these guys who only argues anonymously, because you're so consistently humiliated when you can't just drop a meme image and leave, pretending that you won the argument.

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>>7933256
Soon.

>>7940973
let's see if they have a pad abort like the last Soyuz launch. (That was the first Soyuz abort since 1997!)

>>7941068
>dat pink owl

>>7941077
3rd stage sep, all nominal so far

>>7941068
>>7940973
What's this "Slava Russia!" is it like "vive la France!"?

Also: have they got a finglonger in there?

>>7941077
reminds me of the mascot in Planetes

>>7941056
>literally quoting Wikipedia
How pleb can you get

>>7941087
yep, saw the fingerlonger!

Soyuz separated, solar arrays deployed, in orbit!

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ayy lmao

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>>7941111
nice pird (again)

You can see Moscow control center screen but you can't hear anything
mms://193.233.61.171/live

>>7941096
Still does more to back up his argument than >>7941005

>>7933256
>Why does nobody talk about new manned Moon missions
Normal rule of action:
those who talk, do not,
those that do, do not talk.

>>7942680
Well, that makes no sense at all.

>>7942705
He means those who talk all the time do nothing about it and those of action rarely speak superfluously. But he worded it like a tool.