Capsules go up and shuttles come down!

Are you Borg?
Now is it Andre or Phil ?

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Why land there, to expend energy taking off again? That's a pointless thing to do.

Why would ships 'linking up' increase speed at all? What does mass have to do with velocity in this scenario?

Seems you haven't thought this through.

 

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Megabrain, he's right and you are wrong, so pack up your ego and take it elsewhere.

 

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Long distance space travel is achieved by ACD plots In order to perform the third operation you need to carry fuel on borad. ACD(Acceleration, Constant Velocity, Decceleration). The space shuttle only uses a tiny proportion of it's fuel to lift the orbiter. In flight refuelling is neccessary if the carbon units are to spread further. - All has been thought - all has been solved.

 

Ok fallacies, bad speliing and general craziness. You must be Dwayne L Rabon. Go away again eh?

 

Megabrain is not Dwayne.

 

Megabrain talks a lot of shit like Dwayne, I think you're Dwayne.

 

I don't know if you're Dwayne or not, but that's exactly the sort of nut-ball thing he would say.

 

The boosters and their propellent, and the tank and its fuel, are needed to help lift the tank, its fuel and the shuttle, until the tank and it's fuel and the shuttle can lift themselves.

The combined mass of the boosters, their propellent, and the tank and its fuel is considerably greater than the mass of the shuttle. So most of the fuel/propellent must be expended to lift themselves and not just the shuttle.

 

Why was Saturn V abandoned so easily considering it worked so well?

 

Politics. Many Americans thought they had won 'The Space Race' by getting to the Moon first, and once it was done, what was the point doing it more? Public interest in the Apollo missions was dwindling, and they were very expensive, so got cut.

It is a shame, because a Saturn 5 and a Dynasoar system could have led us to a better Shuttle system if developed, but those ideas got canned too.

 

Of course when you're launching a rocket you also have to lift the fuel as well - but most people consider that to be part of the rocket. Trying to talk about the amount of fuel needed to lift the orbiter without considering also lifting its fuel is pointless, unless you have a way to teleport fuel into the shuttle's engines.

 

I beleive the all up weight at launch is around 20million pounds, the weight of the orbiter is around 4million pounds. Most of the initial thrust is required to lift the fuel off the ground. It is NOT bullshit.

 

Sorry it took so long to answer your question, didnt see it until now, my value estimate earlier was way low, asteriod details:

Asteroid 3554 Amun is the smallest known metallic asteriod in among the Near Earth asteriods it is 2 KM wide (about the size of a large open pit mine), has a mass of thirty billion metric tons, inclined 23 degrees to the plane of the earths orbit and worth in in todays dollars:

$8 Trillion--Iron and Nickel
$6 Trillion--Cobalt
$6 Trillion--Platinum Group including: platinum, osmium, iridium, palladium, etc
$20 Trillion--Total Market Value based upon values on earth

It also has non-metallic carbon, nitrogen, sulfur, and phosphorus

Of course getting that all down to the surface would be a bit of a challange, and depress the value of the metals but still even devalueing it 90% it'd still be worth 2 trillion.

This is a small asteroid. There are millions of asteroids that can be mined.

A nuclear-electric drive (nothing else has enough delta-V) could push it into L4 or 5 for easy earth access and form the core of a thriving orbital economy.

A nuclear-electric drive is a reactor powering a electric drive that spits out ionized reaction mass, like zinc or lead or even water.

 

one slight mis-calculation and we could end up like the dinosaurs!

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Hi Vega,
Possible, but not likely... it would actually be very difficult to maneuver something to actually strike the Earth. A miscalculation would just mean that it ends up in the wrong orbit, and significant extra expense to get it into the right place.

The "Space Cowboys" thing where Tommy-Lee-Jones strapped himself to a bunch of rockets and flew to the Moon ("Just get halfway and let gravity do the rest") was crap.

 

That would be a great engineering project!

The most efficient way would be to use the asteroid itself for fuel and exhaust mass, I guess, but that introduces its own logistical issues. There are so many ways to attack this one... a big issue is human vs robotic miners. Robotics isn't up to the task yet, but sending humans is so much more expensive.

Maybe human occupied processing stations at L4, L5, or LEO, with robotic miners sent to basically rip asteroids to bit and throw the bits back home?

Or remote refineries at L4, L5 with human operations at LEO, GEO, or Lunar?

Some combination? Something else?

Maybe robotic technology will take off to make completely remote operations viable?

Who knows... but this is really exciting stuff. It could actually be something I see in my lifetime.

 

Perhaps NASA's trip to the moon would be a stepping stone in the right direction if they are planning to setup mining bases!

 

I read of the possibility of sending small, programmed robots to the moon that would convert the silicon there into solar panels. Rockets could be sent up with supplies, followed by people. A base could then be constucted on the moon, and mining operations there could be used to build stuff to be launched into space.

The coolest bit, though, was turning the surface of the moon into a solar panel. They're trying to figure out how plausible it is, but we don't have much moon dust to experiment with here on earth.

 

You can't just say 'only uses a tiny percentage of fuel to lift the orbiter' as if the fuel required to lift the fuel to propel the latter stages is somehow not involved in lifting the orbiter!

That is just barmy! You must be dwayne!