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4 years ago @ The Space Review: essa... - The Space Review: In t... · 2 replies · +1 points

It seems more likely to me that if NASA failed to beat the Soviets to the Moon, they'd get raked through the coals in Congress and lose most of their funding (as well as having mission cancellations).

5 years ago @ The Space Review: essa... - The Space Review: Spac... · 0 replies · +1 points

LEU is the way to go. It's just going to be vastly easier for missions to develop and utilize LEU reactors on missions than HEU, where there's always going to be political problems with actually launching it because of the HEU.

King's estimate of "twice the mass" is assuming some pretty hefty reactor moderation, which would drastically reduce the fuel mass but increase the shielding and complexity. It would also reduce the reactor's useful lifetime, but you'd still probably get a decade out of it at least. If you want to go with no moderation, you get the long reactor life-time but it has 7-10 times as much mass in fuel.

It becomes less of a problem the bigger and more powerful the reactor is. Not good for a 1 Kilowatt system (although you could probably just use some improved RTG for that), but probably okay for a 10 kW electrical power system and up. More of an issue for spacecraft versus ground installations.

5 years ago @ The Space Review: essa... - The Space Review: Ekip... · 0 replies · 0 points

Very interesting stuff. I'm just grateful they're putting a lot of work into space nuclear power systems.

5 years ago @ The Space Review: essa... - The Space Review: Revi... · 0 replies · +1 points

Exactly this. I sort of take it in stride - if people don't emotionally connect with a movie, then complaints about technical inaccuracy and plot holes tend to be one way they express their dissatisfaction.

5 years ago @ The Space Review: essa... - The Space Review: Revi... · 0 replies · +3 points

I didn't think it was confusing. It's thematically similar to Gravity, where "space" is being used as a metaphor for isolation and alienation, and "returning to Earth" as a metaphor for reconnecting with one's humanity and fellow people. It has realistic touches in the aesthetic, but "scientific realism in space" is not what it's about.

I really liked it, too. There's a bit of a "less-than-meets-the-eye" twist with Clifford McBride near the end of the movie, and it works extremely well. The only real problem for me is that it wasn't really intense enough in the action sequences to offset the dampening effect of a quiet, emotionally reserved protagonist (both First Man and Gravity did a better job with that).

5 years ago @ The Space Review: essa... - The Space Review: Who ... · 0 replies · +4 points

The "what about light pollution?" argument kind of misses the point, too. Light pollution is concentrated in cities, and it still leaves areas with really dark skies for professional and amateur astronomy. But with the full StarLink constellation up (never mind other such comprehensive LEO constellations), there might not be any part of the night sky that will be unaffected.

All that said, it sounds like the worst of it will be in the high latitudes in summer. That would at least leave the major telescope locations in Chile, Hawaii, and La Palma less disturbed except during dusk and dawn (unfortunately also when they need to calibrate their telescopes, but at least they'll have extensive dark skies afterwards).

5 years ago @ The Space Review: essa... - The Space Review: Crew... · 0 replies · +2 points

That schedule is a killer, especially with the decision to pursue it this year. The budget probably isn't there for it, but it'd be smarter to land a longer-duration habitation on the surface for them to rendezvous with, along with a spare lander landed "dry" that they could transfer propellant to from expendable robotic landers. If trouble happens, it'd be a lot safer if they could wait it out on the surface through the lunar night and have supplies for a couple of months until supply missions and eventually a rescue mission could be sent (assuming the refuelable lander fails to fire as well). We have

5 years ago @ The Space Review: essa... - The Space Review: Revi... · 1 reply · +3 points

There's probably more money in it because of Apollo, if only because it pushed the NASA budget level up higher. I don't think they'd be getting $5-6 billion/year for uncrewed space research if an alternative Never-Apollo World, at least.

5 years ago @ The Space Review: essa... - The Space Review: The ... · 2 replies · +4 points

The push towards LEO satellite constellations might get the launch rate up, assuming SpaceX and the others can make it profitable enough (there's no guarantee of that, and earlier attempts at this have failed).

5 years ago @ The Space Review: essa... - The Space Review: The ... · 0 replies · +2 points

Hopefully the best ones survive in the smallsat launch market.

With the big launchers, I figure that at least two of them will get a cut of the government launches, regardless of whether one is much cheaper than the other (IE if SpaceX actually manages to find enough launches for Starship Super Heavy to get the cost per launch down significantly, meaning basically if its plan for LEO satellite internet constellations works out). The rest won't do so well, except for Ariane 6 - which they're openly saying will probably get the EU launches so they're not wholly dependent on a foreign launch system.

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