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Oh boy! 3 pilots and 3 control suites! This version will be seen cartwheeling across the sky!

O boy, mothership which drops a daughter craft. There's new idea... in fact, I feel something coming on!

So how many flights has this had to establish a safety record, again?

Bren wrote:

Well, Spaceship One went up there enough times to nail the Ansari X prize.

Not many. And this is Two, no?

Anyway, sturner was joking about your photo, which is about the launch phase. Most of your post is about other things... and just for more fun, I think it's less akin to Pat than Toonces, The Cat Who Could Drive A Car.

My link was about how the whole daughtercraft idea isn't new, and to bedevil you with more Right Stuff.

Given the number of manned launches (around 130 each for STS and Soyuz) the fatal accident rate is pretty similar. (2 each)

The shuttle carries more people.

mo' ron wrote:

Bren wrote:

Well, Spaceship One went up there enough times to nail the Ansari X prize.

My confidence in Spaceships One and Two is based on the fact that their elegant, dare I say ingenious designs eliminate the hazards which caused both Space Shuttle disasters:

On the way up, instead of being strapped to the equivalent of I-don't-know-how-many-tons of TNT, Spaceship Two fuels its rocket from two separate tanks, one containing nitrous oxide, and the other containing something like asphalt or rubber, the two of which are only forced together into a volatile mixture right before they enter the rocket's combustion area. Hence, the likelihood of a Shuttle Challenger-style explosion is dramatically reduced, if not eliminated.

On the way down, instead of slamming into our atmosphere at many thousands of miles per hour, Spaceship Two temporarily transforms itself into a giant shuttlecock (their terminology, not mine), and gracefully floats back through the upper layers of our atmosphere at a slow enough speed that the vehicle is never exposed to the super-heated gasses that entered Columbia's wing due to a damaged heat shield.

Space Ship 2 isn't designed to reach the ISS though. The differences in the designs are primarily due to this factor, not necessarily because the other guys did it "better" than NASA.

Private space crafts will keep getting better ,like everything. There's now an X Prize competition to send an unmanned mission to the Moon, roll around, take pictures and send them back.

http://www.googlelunarxprize.org/

sturner wrote:

is the return of the astronauts optional?

huh? no?

Uhm... actually, somebody did propose a suicide mission to Mars.

http://gizmodo.com/364282/a-one+way-one … o-wants-in

Bren wrote:

Here's another:

American space ships.

They worked pretty nicely during most of Apollo, other than the Apollo 1 disaster.

Then, along comes the Space Shuttle, which was supposed to be a big bus, but wound up being a big, expensive, unsafe cargo truck with a tragic death toll. American astronauts probably breath a sigh of relief when they think about hitching a ride on a Soyuz instead.

The Shuttle is essentially late 1970s and 1980s era technology. Sure, there have been upgrades, but putting a new stereo with iPod port in your '84 Renault Fuego doesn't change the fact that it's a Fuego.

Now, in the modern era, for about what it would cost to give the Space Shuttle a lube, oil, and filter, Scaled Composites and Virgin Galactic are giving us a proper space bus that won't explode on the way up like Challenger did, and don't burn to cinders on the way down like Columbia.

http://www.igorstshirts.com/blog/concep … wo_art.jpg

Only problem is that it's suborbital, so it's only technically a "spaceship" and ain't worth much except for the "OMG I'M IN SPACE" tourism factor.  Show me a privately built orbital craft and I'll stop yawning.

ukimalefu wrote:

jkahless wrote:

Bren wrote:

Here's another:

American space ships.

They worked pretty nicely during most of Apollo, other than the Apollo 1 disaster.

Then, along comes the Space Shuttle, which was supposed to be a big bus, but wound up being a big, expensive, unsafe cargo truck with a tragic death toll. American astronauts probably breath a sigh of relief when they think about hitching a ride on a Soyuz instead.

The Shuttle is essentially late 1970s and 1980s era technology. Sure, there have been upgrades, but putting a new stereo with iPod port in your '84 Renault Fuego doesn't change the fact that it's a Fuego.

Now, in the modern era, for about what it would cost to give the Space Shuttle a lube, oil, and filter, Scaled Composites and Virgin Galactic are giving us a proper space bus that won't explode on the way up like Challenger did, and don't burn to cinders on the way down like Columbia.

http://www.igorstshirts.com/blog/concep … wo_art.jpg

Only problem is that it's suborbital, so it's only technically a "spaceship" and ain't worth much except for the "OMG I'M IN SPACE" tourism factor.  Show me a privately built orbital craft and I'll stop yawning.

Just to make things clear, suborbital means "not a full orbit", but still up and over the official limit of space: 62 miles or 100 kilometers. So yeah, they DO go to space, if only for a short while.

Exactly, thats what I mean, it's technically a spaceship, but not practically.

Bat wrote:

::sells the moon::

::: remembers that the moon is a harsh mistress :::

::retires to his crooked house on friday::
::is seated::

Buzz Aldrin thinks your ticket to Mars should be strictly one way, though he does hope you'll live out something like the rest of your natural life-span once you get there.

In last month's issue of Popular Mechanics, there was an opinion piece by Buzz Aldrin, in which he detailed his thoughts on how we should proceed if we want to land humans on Mars.

What really surprised me was what he had to say at the end of the piece, when he said that NASA should recruit astronauts who would be willing to become permanent residents of Mars, because the whole trip would be much easier and cheaper if we didn't have to worry about bringing them back.

Say what!?

He envisions a new breed of pioneering colonists going to Mars and never, ever being able to come home. He just barely touches on the idea, almost as if he wants to the reader to just take it as an afterthought, or something he kinda slipped in there in passing.

The ramifications of this are pretty huge, especially if the only justification is one of logistics and economics.

Think about it: Somebody volunteering for a one-way trip to Mars would have to either have no family ties that mattered to them, or they'd have to take their families with them.

So...

Permanent settlement on Mars, therefore, means an entire community, doing all the things people in communities do, such as marrying and making babies and raising new generations. And a new generation of people born and bred on Mars, with its small fraction of Earth's gravity, would surely have a very hard time of things if they ever tried to visit Earth, assuming that rockets traveling from Mars to Earth might some day become a part of the equation.

So, what Aldrin's advocating is that we essentially create a new branch of humanity, who would branch off from Earth humans and possibly evolve in genetic isolation from us? I suppose, of course, that there'd be nothing to preclude additional flights from Earth to occasionally keep the gene pool diverse, but still...

This is such an extreme notion that I have to wonder what Aldrin isn't telling us. Earlier in the article, he mentions the asteroid that might hit Earth in 2036, and what we might do about it. Like the one-way-ticket thing, he doesn't dwell on the subject, but I wonder if his real agenda for planting in our minds the notion of folks going to Mars and not coming back might be less about exploration and more about survival.

Aldrin does assert that NASA would have to select a personality type of Mars colonists that would be different from their traditional astronaut profile, and he specifically says they'd have to be "survivors." Could he be privy to inside dope regarding the likelihood of impending worldwide calamity, and could he be looking at Mars as a back-up storage device for human life; the ultimate Noah's Ark?

Here's the article:

http://www.popularmechanics.com/science … 22647.html

Drum sticks are much better today than they were back in the good old days.

Bren wrote:

Buzz Aldrin thinks your ticket to Mars should be strictly one way, though he does hope you'll live out something like the rest of your natural life-span once you get there.

In last month's issue of Popular Mechanics, there was an opinion piece by Buzz Aldrin, in which he detailed his thoughts on how we should proceed if we want to land humans on Mars.

What really surprised me was what he had to say at the end of the piece, when he said that NASA should recruit astronauts who would be willing to become permanent residents of Mars, because the whole trip would be much easier and cheaper if we didn't have to worry about bringing them back.

Say what!?

He envisions a new breed of pioneering colonists going to Mars and never, ever being able to come home. He just barely touches on the idea, almost as if he wants to the reader to just take it as an afterthought, or something he kinda slipped in there in passing.

The ramifications of this are pretty huge, especially if the only justification is one of logistics and economics.

Think about it: Somebody volunteering for a one-way trip to Mars would have to either have no family ties that mattered to them, or they'd have to take their families with them.

So...

Permanent settlement on Mars, therefore, means an entire community, doing all the things people in communities do, such as marrying and making babies and raising new generations. And a new generation of people born and bred on Mars, with its small fraction of Earth's gravity, would surely have a very hard time of things if they ever tried to visit Earth, assuming that rockets traveling from Mars to Earth might some day become a part of the equation.

So, what Aldrin's advocating is that we essentially create a new branch of humanity, who would branch off from Earth humans and possibly evolve in genetic isolation from us? I suppose, of course, that there'd be nothing to preclude additional flights from Earth to occasionally keep the gene pool diverse, but still...

This is such an extreme notion that I have to wonder what Aldrin isn't telling us. Earlier in the article, he mentions the asteroid that might hit Earth in 2036, and what we might do about it. Like the one-way-ticket thing, he doesn't dwell on the subject, but I wonder if his real agenda for planting in our minds the notion of folks going to Mars and not coming back might be less about exploration and more about survival.

Aldrin does assert that NASA would have to select a personality type of Mars colonists that would be different from their traditional astronaut profile, and he specifically says they'd have to be "survivors." Could he be privy to inside dope regarding the likelihood of impending worldwide calamity, and could he be looking at Mars as a back-up storage device for human life; the ultimate Noah's Ark?

Here's the article:

http://www.popularmechanics.com/science … 22647.html

Why is the continuation of humanity so important to those whose families or descendants wouldn't go?

If seven billion of us are going to die why is it important that ten of us survive to live on Mars?