Orion flight test from Kennedy Space Center this morning
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petrolero
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With enough LOX you might even be able to use lox as a propellant. Kinda like the salami rocket episode of Mythbusters.
MAKG1
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The Space Pen is not a recent development.
It also is not a spinoff. The Space Pen was never a government project for any government.
There are a number of recent medical spinoffs such as ingestible sensors.
Kritchlow
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I don't think it would be as bad as you think. The cost would be spread out over the 10 years it would take to put the program together, plus there would be a lot of ROI in the form of jobs.
A structure built in space to take even a 100 million people will require a revision of the economic system and how we handle natural resources on a global scale.
To build a mining/smelting vessel that has a couple hundred people to send to the asteroid belt to pick up and process the supplies to build enough supplies to build enough structure(s)to get 5 billion people off the planet we could probably manage. From that point forward though, nope. Heck we decided that building an LHC was too expensive on our own, and we already had a bunch of the work done. Instead we added to the pot at CERN building that one.
Kritchlow
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Whoa...!!! I'm not talking about all of humanity moving to Mars.. Lol!!
I'm just suggesting an Apollo style trip. Maybe four guys as Orion is designed for?
nddons
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There is no purpose in humans visiting other planets in our solar system really. We have the technology to do that, and we have the knowledge that it will be more expensive and less practical to go colonize an unlivable planet than just build space faring colony ships. You need all the same support systems, but if you build it all into a major vessel and you don't need to pack it tight and make it light enough to land, you can do it much more efficiently using common, heavier materials and a stronger, simpler design. If you look at the Orion Rocket (completely different subject than the capsule) that uses nuclear bombs to drive it, the higher mass structure is actually favorable.
The whole reason man looks at the stars and wants to go is because that is in our programming. We are meant to evolve and spread through the universe same as the planet. This planet had enough resources to allow for our development and to get off the planet and spreading in significant numbers. However we have screwed up our evolutionary destiny with greed and have squandered huge amounts of natural resources that took hundreds of millions of years to bank up. We need to quit wasting oil on 25% efficient power sources and bank it in reserve for polymer supplies to robotic 3D printers building these massive structures in orbit. We should have been at that by the time we hit 3 billion people and it was obvious we were quickly heading in the direction of a population load earth can't provide for.
If we aren't going to move, and keep moving, vast quantities of population off the planet permanently, there is no reason to spend the money to get a person out of the atmosphere, it's just a huge waste of resources.
There will come the point though where we have sufficient knowledge to manipulate the force that time propels through space exciting Dark Matter into Cosmic matter, at that point we will learn how teleportation works by manipulating that reaction. We won't gain that knowledge until we prove ourselves to not be an infectious virus of hate and fear. The proof of that will be when we can cooperate on this one planet well enough to be able to get populations rather than a few people of the planet.
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