The number of people watching was steadily rising, but now it's dropped a bit. I guess people have decided they can squeeze in dinner and a movie before the launch.
Yes, they use TEA-TEB (Triethylaluminum-Triethylborane) as their first stage ignitor and this mixture is hypergolic, but no, they don't ignite one engine and let that one ignite all the others, they would want to ignite them all at once. Problem with one engine igniting others is that doing so wo...
@kimholder yea sorry I didn't reply, I hit "mark as unread" and put it behind a number of those delayed replies... Alex's stuff is always very dense, he is not a fan of trimming things down unfortunately!
I still haven't had a chance to talk to him in person, but I'm sure I will at ASTRO 2016 in May, so I'll bring up Moonwards and see how receptive he is, you can always send him an email to bug him (of course you can mention me) since he loves to talk about this stuff
@Hohmannfan haha true, not exactly perfectly smooth, but I think they just meant the abort was not during the countdown, they made it to t = 0 and then the abort happened during ignition, probably t plus 0.0001 seconds or something
i.e. a very short mission after a smooth countdown...
While looking for arguments to reopen this question I searched for a clear definition of outer space on SX. And up till now I think this definition is not made.
If we can agree on space starting after the troposphere I think the question should be reopened, since it is in the scope of "Systems w...
The multi-center, multi-partner effort is continuing to piece together the key hardware elements that will return NASA to deep space exploration. Recent progress has been made on items... Related posts: SLS on track for successful PDR conclusion
you know, Copernican revolution isn't about the center of the Universe, and now that we know that the Universe is expanding from everywhere in all directions, it can even be said that we are the center of the Universe from our point of view... it's just nothing special in that every other point of view is equally as valid in this regard :P
grafting trees would be so much easier on the Moon :)
@duzzy you know what I find the funniest ... the darn thing is now dull gray, it couldn't look any uglier if we tried really hard and make it tacky LOL
wanna look at the Moon, hold hands and be romantic about it... wouldn't it look so much better if there was something to see on it?
it would also mean that if something happens with the Earth, there's our backup so to speak
I find that a lot more "romantic" than "we're fowked"
anyway, those arguments before that David pulled out seem like some attention seeking blogger nonsense ... reminds me of some animal cruelty protesters in my city that I didn't recognize not one of them as activists actually doing something, and when I pointed out that they all wear leather shoes and belts, I was like almost blacklisted on Facebook LOL
I kinda wish Kim replied with more force :)
@kimholder ... there's no resources available to an orbiting space station unless you bring those resources there ;)
on the Moon, you just pick up a rock
damn, I feel like back when I was watching matches on the telly LOL
I think one of the market issues here is that the lunar economy can not contribute to the Earth economy. It can only provide resources and products for itself.
Not that I am against separated economies, I think that if a thing can be produced locally, the industry should not have to compete with the rest of the universe. Even if you exclude space, even Earth should be more cell based.
@Hohmannfan OK, so you have this "dumb" sail, or millions of small ones ... you can't really "build into them inertia" to combat radiation pressure effects can you?
@TildalWave Another point: Because both gravity and radiation pressure scales with the inverse square of distance, you can just think of it as the Sun's gravity being "weaker"
OK, so if you aren't exactly at L-point (and inertial to it), or have active propulsion for stationkeeping, how are you gonna control your node so it stays synchronous with an orbital period of a higher orbital altitude object?
From a co-rotating frame of reference (for Mars and the Sun), the LSO satellite is stationary, making it effectively a "radiation pressure compensated L-point". Even if it can also be considered a regular orbit,
