I'm generally for private ownership, but I see nothing but trouble coming from the situation of private citizens having the technology and capability to launch rockets capable of carrying a heavy payload into space. If you can put a rocket into orbit, you also have a ballistic missile you can drop on pretty much any city you want. Yeah, I know, second amendment rights and all, but still. It doesn't make me feel safer.That's kind of ridiculous. 9/11 was done with ordinary passenger jets, you don't really need a rocket. What made cold war ballistic missiles so dangerous wasn't so much the rockets, but the nuclear bombs strapped to the tips.
As screwed up as the global business scenario is - it's probably generally accepted as common sense that wiping out a city with a nuke on a ballistic missile isn't very profitable or good for business in the long term.Plus, if you already have the nuke, what do you need the missile for? Just put the nuke on a truck, or a boat, and drive it in. With the cold war, the US/Russia wanted to be able to wipe each-other off the map, or at least completely neutralize the other party, not just blow up a city.
I'd say yes. We live in a country where people can make great fortunes and do great things with it. Elon Musk did not do either in South Africa.
Why would anyone be "embarrassed" at buying Soyuz seats from the Russians? It is an INTERNATIONAL Space Station. Everyone does their part.Yeah, the international space station, but the only way to get there (until now) was to ride on Russian rockets.
Delmoi, you are simply wrong. Ten minutes of your time could provide quit a few examples of "practical space tech" by people who are not Russians. Have you seen the Amine Swingbed project? The Canadian manipulator arms? The ISS combustion facility? The SSHDTV cameras? That's NASA, CSA, ESA, and JAXA for you.When I say Practical Space Tech I mean tech that can actually get you into space - not stuff that gives you something to do while you're up there. All of that stuff is nice, but it won't have any way of getting into space without being lifted there on Russian rockets, until this Dragon Capsule is ready for everyday use anyway. All that nice tech isn't actually needed for the ISS to operate
And, as of right now, there's no way a Falcon 9/Dragon is cheaper. We've dumped a ton of money into SpaceX , and so far, what we're netting is we're about to deliver 520kg of cargo to the ISS and bring 660kg back. These are very unimpressive numbers (STS would bring on the order of 10,000kg) but this is a test flight, and given that it is a test flight they brought forward, this is still an impressive performance, provided they do successfully dock and the Dragon held pressure.See, that's exactly the problem with the shuttle idea. You don't need to carry 10,000kg of stuff with your astronauts. There's no point. You can launch that stuff separately. That's what Russia did with their space stations. That way, you can plan for a more reasonable failure rate (like 1/100 or something) and save a lot of money on the heavy lifter. For the astronauts you have a lighter, smaller craft that's also less expensive.
if you're going anywhere other than LEOThen most of the mass you need in LEO is fuel, which is almost the poster child for "can be launched separately". And since fuel is infinitely divisible, you don't even need a heavy lifter, or necessarily want one. It's not clear whether you get better cost-per-pound savings from having a bigger rocket or from sending the same mass on smaller rockets with a higher flight rate.
The shuttle cargo bay is without peer for the task of bringing things back down from orbit, which might be a frequently useful task some day, but sadly not any time soon.The original idea was to use them to bring spy satellites up and back down. Remember, in the 60s and 70s they worked with regular film, which they would drop to earth. But with CCDs, that aspect became completely pointless.
Scotty was onboard, or his remains at least.
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posted by egor83 at 12:57 AM on May 22, 2012 [2 favorites]