It only took that long because MGS was aerobraking into orbit and wasn't designed to survive the stress of lower atmosphere turbulence, so only used the uppermost layer of the atmosphere for braking. If your going to land, obviously you get to use all the atmosphere and also can use parachutes. Something a problem braking into orbit can't do. Surface probes do direct descent trajectories. There is no extended series…
> If your going to land, obviously you get to use all the atmosphere and also can use parachutes. Something a problem braking into orbit can't do. Also, you can use lithobraking.
I just got a new laptop and hadn't got around to installing uBlock yet. I'm comfortable saying the mainstream web is literally unusable without ad blocking. I watched the download notifications in the status bar iterate through dozens of ad servers, for 1-2 minutes, per page. I could barely scroll at all. I couldn't tell where the actual content was. All 3 columns full of ads. You have to hunt for isolated paragraphs…
> a festering petri dish of promiscuous cookie-sharing Shouldn't that be impossible? What browser lets one site access another's cookies?
It's because the Moon lacks an atmosphere. CO (and then CO2) form at high temps, so elemental carbon doesn't have much chance to condensate to a "rock" form in regards to non-stellar celestial bodies. These float off into space, no atmosphere to contain them. At the temperatures/pressure of the moon, Nitrogen rapidly boils off and floats away as well. Not sure about Phosphorus and Sulfur, but I'm sure they can be eit…
Wut? Pretty sure phosphorus never goes atmospheric
Exactly. Hence why I didn't want to specifically comment about phosphorus on the moon, as I have no idea.
> The survival of my loved ones -- and that's a category that can go across species -- is absolutely important to me. The survival of evil space Nazis? Eh. The idea is that if it's between all people dead, or all people except evil space Nazis, I'll take evil space Nazis. Just because they are evil space Nazis now doesn't mean they will be hundreds of years from now, but they'll never get that chance if all humans ar…
If it's up to me between no humans and evil space Nazis? I'll take no humans every time. We're a stain on the face of existence, we pollute and destroy our environment, we abuse our own species and others as a matter of course, and we're just overall destructive. The only thing that changes that is that sometimes one or two people rise up and decide that they will resist that status quo and do something about it. To…
I think you are deeply misjudging the complexity of the human experience and being particularly blind to or biased against our collective history. If you spend any amount of time talking to people or even just reading the personal writings left to us by the ages you quickly realize that everyone who has ever lived is no different from yourself, we simply made different choices based on the information available to us, for good or evil. Anyone, given the right conditions, is capable of being a monster or a saint.
Per glindahl's comment from earlier, if we established a space elevator for the moon[1] it would make the delta-v issues moot. Drop off an pick up supplies at the elevator while swinging by on an continuous Earth/Moon translunar orbit. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_space_elevator
The space elevator even on Earth in GEO is a hopeless, fool's dream.
A lunar space elevator is feasible with today's materials (just a whole lot of them, way too much for current technology to transport to the moon). Here's a nice talk by Markus Landgraf, a mission planner at ESA, at 33c3: https://media.ccc.de/v/33c3-8407-an_elevator_to_the_moon_and...
Your assertion about getting to Mars with less propellant is super interesting. Can you provide a source for me?
fewer than twenty five seconds of googling: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delta-v_budget From LEO to the surface of the moon is 5.9 km/s From LEO to the surface of Mars is 4.1 km/s
Unless I'm misreading something, both the text and graphic of that page seem to indicate it's 4.1km/s from low Mars orbit to the surface of Mars. I can't find anywhere saying it's 4.1 from LEO.
From the article: "the glass beads contain only 0.05 percent water."
It is much drier than Sahara sand where soil moisture can reach 1%. Dune's scenario would be a piece of cake compared to what you would need to do to feed a colony off of this water. I suspect that energy-wise it would be cheaper to import water from Earth and recycle like crazy.