461–470 of 513 posts
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It's not a greater achievement than the Apollo moon landings (it's basically the mission flown on Apollo 13, swinging around the moon without going into orbit and then coming back), but it's still something that hasn't been done since the Apollo 17 mission in 1972.
Hopefully more like Apollo 8 than 13!
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Also Polaris, a little bit earlier (deployed 1960) had a very small transistorized guidance computer which was the design root of the Apollo Guidance Computer. Polaris was much more of a DDA (digital differential analyzer) than real computer though.
ICBM development is basically a space program with a different budget code though, right?
(There at least used to be a Minuteman silo with the door painted like a pizza box with that slogan)
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Which seems to imply that military spending is pretty beneficial for humanity as long as it's spent on researching new cool ways of killing each other, and not on actually using them .
Military spending in WWII led to the invention or development of (to name a few) penicillin, radio navigation, synthetic oil and rubber, jet engines, nuclear power and computers. However some of these were pretty close to being invented even before the war, so it's hard to say how much the war progressed technology.
Penicillin, for one, was discovered over a decade prior to WWII. A method of mass production was developed in 1940, but have no idea how much that had to do with the war.
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Historically rocket research has been funded to develop the capability to deliver bombs.
Which seems to imply that military spending is pretty beneficial for humanity as long as it's spent on researching new cool ways of killing each other, and not on actually using them .
The sixties-era DARPA method: throw a bunch of defense money at a bunch of really smart people without getting too specific about how much of the research should proceed.
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Hopefully more like Apollo 8 than 13!
I understand that SpaceX is not proposing to orbit the moon. Therefore it is more like Apollo 13. Apollo 8 orbited the moon.
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The necessary implication of individuals with power enough to rival governments is that, well, they can rival governments. Do you think this is a bad thing? Personally I quite like the idea of having enough wealth / power to rival a nation-state, since I trust the average nation-state exactly as far as I can throw it.
An elected government, at least i theory, is tasked with doing good by its people. That isnt always true, but at least there are elections. An individual person suffers no such limitation. That can act purely in thier own interest without even a tueoretical check. If they want to ride a rocket to the moon, while children on earth starve, there is absoluely nothing we poor can do about it.
That isnt always true, but at least there are elections.
The last of which got us Donald Freaking Trump, Jeff Sessions, Kellyanne Conway, and the other Stooges.
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Liquid fuel rockets use Surface tension against the slosh baffles to hold fuel in partially full fuel tanks in place. Ullage motors are used to settle the fuel at the bottom of the tanks, so the main motor pumps can get to it. Once the main motor starts providing acceleration, the ullage motors are no longer required. For cross tanking, keeping the ullage motors running for long enough to transfer all the fuel, witho…
I didn't know about ullage motors, thanks for the link. The link also says that only very tiny accelerations are needed - so this shouldn't be a big problem for a tanker. Like I hypothesized, the problem has been solved.
The saturn 5 used small solid rockets as ullage motors. Alternatively you could use externally pressurised bladder tanks for a range of non-cryogenic fuels. Cold gas or possibly h2o2 as a monopropellant come to mind. Either option has a comparatively low specific impulse, so even running them at very low overall accelerations for extended time periods is likely to be cost-prohibitive.
I like the suggestion elsewhere of spinning the tank. You could also dock, then spin the whole combination ship. If you abandon the fuel station idea, you could just take the extra fuel tank with you, transferring fuel to your internal tank during a main engine burn, then abandoning the empty tank in a wierd orbit.
Wow. This sends so many thoughts cascading through my head that I'm dizzy. Some things to consider, China has been working up to getting a space capability to send people to the Moon with the full backing of the government funding, by 2035[1]. They started in 2003. SpaceX was founded in 2002 and they are saying they will fly someone around the moon next year? Dragon has the deltaV to land on the moon (not sure if it…
* Why are we not placing a DNA/Seed-vault on the moon
* Why are we not depositing resources on the moon
* Why dont we plan, plant, place autonomous robotic pods on the moon that can be called down/up carrying various resources
* what happens to the moon if we transfer water/create water on the moon
* Why cant this be a global effort, in the sense that we are talking about colonizing/visiting mars, but we can't even colonize the moon? What/Who is blocking this effort?
* Why aren't we actually practicing mars colonization on the moon first???
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There are so many questions that I have about moon colonization/exploration that are so flippantly replied to as cost...
It feeds my tinfoil: there are things on the moon they dont want us to see??? (I know, just as flippant - but c'mon humanity, get your shit together and put some known colonies on the freaking moon!)
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Which seems to imply that military spending is pretty beneficial for humanity as long as it's spent on researching new cool ways of killing each other, and not on actually using them .
> Which seems to imply that military spending is pretty beneficial for humanity as long as it's spent on researching new cool ways of killing each other, and not on actually using them. The sixties-era DARPA method: throw a bunch of defense money at a bunch of really smart people without getting too specific about how much of the research should proceed.
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I believe the technology that will benefit humanity significantly is in the batteries.
That's why we need battery-powered rockets. http://bart.volgers.eu/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/Dilbert-El...