Recent content by IT Minion

One single launch of the new generation of SHLV could put 12 tons onto Mars surface with a soft landing. No one thinks a Mars mission would be a single launch from earth.

That's from their documents. The Mars entry for curiosity was aerobraked until it could deploy parachutes then used some little rockets to hover whilst it lowered the lander and then fly off to the side a bit. They hit the atmosphere at transfer speeds and no rockets fired until they'd slowed...

Those rockets were tiny. 400kg of propellant to land twice that mass of payload.

I doubt we're planning on landing 100 tons at a time on Mars any time soon. 100 tons in low earth orbit probably means around 50 to transfer orbit, then maybe 12.5 landed on Mars using Curiosity as an example of around 1/4 mass to vehicle. A mars ascent vehicle probably starts at 22 tons, so...

The sky crane was to land the package softly and make sure the landing stage didn't squash it. I just checked, the aero braking took the velocity down from approx 5,800m/s to 470m/s. Then the parachutes brought it down to 100m/s. Then the sky crane took it the last 1km to the ground.

It makes the target you have to aim for narrower and makes the sums a lot harder. They have to make sure they're getting enough braking without using regolith braking instead, burning up or squashing the pilots through too much G force, or just failing to brake enough and flying off into the black.

There is atmosphere, it's just thinner.

It's a very big algorithm with psuedo random noise added.

Which is why you have extensive testing especially of new versions of hardware, like doing a moon flyby. And for mission critical equipment you have backups.

We've kept people alive on the ISS continuously for 26 years. That's built with leaky 1990s Russian hardware. Shipping sufficient food and air is nice and simple. We've kept people in space for over a year multiple times. The danger for long stays in space is prolonged zero G, so in theory...

What breakthrough would that be? Are you just worried about travel times?

Nope, that's a fringe benefit at best. It's because it's cheap and it burns cleanly and it is easier to work with. Hydrogen burns cleanly and gives good thrust per kg, but it's around 25-30x more expensive and it's a pain to store or use. Kerosene is even cheaper amd gives reasonable thrust per...

We already send robots and there is no theoretical blocker to sending people. It's only a matter of time.

It's mostly good for Satellites. Starlink is a technical masterpiece and has significant commercial and societal benefits. Also for small sats, the Falcon 9 ride share program has dropped the price to get cubesats into orbit by a factor of ten or more and more or less eliminated schedule...

Green has nothing to do with it. Methane is less efficient as a rocket fuel, but it's easier to work with and cheaper to use. It is moving away from trying to make rockets as perfect as possible and moving more towards brute force engineering and ongoing costs assuming a higher flight rate. And...