Posts by Spherical Cow 670 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Aug 2018
I'm not taking that bet. Between NASA, SpaceX, India, and China, at least one of those four (and possibly most) will get people to the Moon by 2034. I'd say NASA is the least likely.
p.s. I've listed SpaceX separately from NASA due to the possibility they will get there independently of Artemis.
No, that's a common misconception. While it is true the Sun exerts a stronger gravitational force on the Moon than Earth does, and also true the Moon never travels "backwards" relative to the Sun as it orbits Earth, these things do not mean the Moon is orbiting the Sun instead of Earth. The Earth-Moon system is a bona fide satellite system in its own right, and because the barycentre of this system is inside Earth it is correct to say the Moon orbits Earth.
"Step 1 : eliminate the incredibly abrasive influence of Moon regolith on railroad tracks.
We'll continue when you've solved that."
Tunnels. Bore a tunnel and sweep it clean, it will stay clean so long as you don't let in Charlie Brown's friend Pig-Pen.
A long walk yes, but a short drive. I live in Canberra and I've been to the deep space complex many times. They have a great visitor centre with lots to see, and plenty for the kids. I've touched a real moon rock there, and seen one of the space suits used by Apollo astronauts to walk on the moon. They also have the telescope used to receive the footage of Neil Armstrong's one small step (it's been relocated there from Honeysuckle Creek where it was at the time).
The Apollo landers used 4 tanks, 2 for fuel and 2 for oxidiser as you described, and they were short&wide (the bit that was left behind on the surface anyway). So we know that configuration works.
Yes the laser range finder stuff-up was astoundingly bad.
Solar sails use sunlight (photons) with almost no effect from the solar wind (plasma), so the heliopause wouldn't make a difference. What definitely makes a difference is distance from the sun due to the inverse square law for light intensity, and in interstellar space no single star has a dominant effect.
"One is romantically named the "Vehicle Evaluation Payload-4" and weighs about as much as the kind of payloads future H3 launches are hoped to hoist. It includes acoustic and temperature sensors, plus accelerometers, to help JAXA understand the launcher's performance."
That sounds like a very sensible piece of kit to send up on a test launch. I'm kinda surprised this isn't already done for pretty much all new rockets. It would be particularly useful if the flight data is recorded in a recoverable RUD-proof box such as the ones used in aeroplanes for many decades.
Did you notice that Neil and Buzz completely missed their large target landing area, and even as recently as last month it was considered an impressive achievement when a rover landed within 100m of target? And that's just the moon, our nearest neighbour. If you want to fly past a distant body like Titan then 100km accuracy is probably good enough. Meanwhile GPS can get me close enough to my destination that 1.5m social distancing is an issue.
"(Plus I hope there are no cruise ships in the area - that's prime cruising territory)"
Depends which part of the South Pacific. The aussie-wards half is prime cruising territory, however the other half is pretty much empty and is home to Point Nemo (the place on the planet furthest from any land) which is also the site for the Spacecraft Cemetery (where I'd guess they are probably sending this spacecraft).
Agreed. We need a system which can feed fuel in continuously (rapid pulses are ok) and harvest the energy continuously. One idea is using an electrical dense plasma focus with hydrogen-boron-11 which could work in theory, but development progress is painfully slow and I'm not yet convinced it will ever reach commercial reality.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
