Narz
keeping it real
If we can't even survive on Earth how likely would it be to survive on Mars?
The thread for space cadets!
- Thread starter hobbsyoyo
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If we are not surviving on Earth 'cos of an asteroid impact we may be better off on Mars.
hobbsyoyo
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In the long run, all life in our solar system is toast. Either from asteroid impact, nuclear war or just the sun giving out in a few billion years. These things can play out in an instant or over billions of years but in the end the result is the same. We have to get ourselves and life off this planet. Mars would be a great first step out into the unknown.
Lexicus
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The raids on German cities were largely ineffective, they wore away the edges of the German industrial capacity but when the US and Britain began to systematically destroy the Germans' petroleum infrastructure, that actually had a huge effect on the Germans' ability to continue fighting the war.
r16
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true but readily omits really burgeoning American industrial output . Increased numbers of escort fighters attrited more of the Luftwaffe which simply could not ignore defending syntethic oil facilities . A full 1942 effort against oil would not miraculously produce the same results , and yes RAF had the numbers of planes and the like .
A bigger impact of American strategic bombing of Germany was the redeployment of German fighter and anti-aircraft units from the Russian front. Soviet air forces paid an immense price against German defenses in their efforts to attack German ground forces in the war. But where that price really began to pay off was that the withdrawal of German fighters and anti-aircraft units gave Soviet ground attack air units a real opportunity to make an impact on the war. And this made the Red Army more effective in the field.
Broken_Erika
Play with me.
Lev Andropov knows how to fix this problem!
Thorgalaeg
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hobbsyoyo
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The leak is from a fastener hole in the Soyuz that is docked with the station. Pictures show the hole was not due to a micrometeor damage and instead it looks like a fastener was attempted to be installed in the hole which eventually fell out or was removed. You can see the chatter marks of the tool used to put a fastener in this hole. There have been a lot of conflicting reports on how the situation was handled that don't put the Russian ground controllers in a good light. However, given the confusion that surrounds this incident it's hard to say whether or not the actions of the controllers were appropriate.
A narrative I've been able to piece together is that the leak was detected while the astronauts slept and they decided to do nothing as it was relatively slow. Then when the astronauts woke up, the Russian ground controllers rushed the astronauts through a patch without letting them study and understand the problem. While it may seem that patch the hole is an obvious solution, there are a lot of implications surrounding a missing fastener that need to be understood.
It appears that this hole is in front of a plenum, or air space in the soyuz vehicle, and that this plenum itself has a leak - otherwise air the wouldn't get out to space. By immediately patching the hole they have made it harder to get an endoscope through the hole for further inspection.
The Russians are being tightlipped about it and there is still some speculation that it may have been a micrometeor impact. In my opinion it looks like a case of shoddy QA and a failure in the outer mold line of the vehicle which is allowing air to escape through the plenum which in turn is pulling air through this hole that shouldn't be there. If the hole wasn't there then the leak in the outer mold line wouldn't matter.
The part of the Soyuz that has the whole won't survive reentry to be inspected by the ground, unfortunately.
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In another development, International Launch Services, the American sales office of Russian-produced rockets, has cancelled the Proton Medium variant. This version of Proton eliminated a stage and cut the payload capacity of the rocket. Since the rocket was overpowered for most GEO comm sats, this allowed them to target the same market at a lower price point. This move was seen necessary to keep that product line open given the shrinking amount of Russian military launches and the complete collapse of their civil exploration program. This governmental contract slump has only added to the challenges they face of heightened international competition from the Europeans, Chinese, Indians and Americans in the international launch market.
ILS marketed the Proton Medium as the answer to the Falcon 9 but it won't ever make it off the pad to meet that marketplace challenge. Proton Medium's cancellation follows the cancellation of the Proton Light variant which was intended to target smaller, polar-inclined missions.
There are a few reasons for this cancellation. This should allow the Russians to spend all of their development money on finishing the decades-overdo Angara series of rockets. It also means the Proton itself will be phased out eventually which means that the Russians will have removed dangerous and polluting hypergolic rocket fuels from their stable of rockets. This would make Kazakhstan (where Protons are launched) very happy as they have brought it up multiple times since the breakup of the USSR. Russia has had to pay increasingly higher fees over time to the Kazakhs to keep access to Baikonur and hypergolic fuels have always been a contention in negotiation. Finally it's probably true that at this point the Russians can't afford to maintain as many rocket lines as they currently have and would be best served by consolidating in a more flexible launch vehicle platform like Angara.
My only worry is there will come a critical point where Angara either shows up and takes over as Proton (and eventually Soyuz) wind down or it won't show up and their will be a long painful pause much like what happened with the US and manned orbital launches with the retirement of the Space Shuttle.
I don't want any country to stop making rockets, even temporarily. I'm kind of a globalist rocket man that way.
A narrative I've been able to piece together is that the leak was detected while the astronauts slept and they decided to do nothing as it was relatively slow. Then when the astronauts woke up, the Russian ground controllers rushed the astronauts through a patch without letting them study and understand the problem. While it may seem that patch the hole is an obvious solution, there are a lot of implications surrounding a missing fastener that need to be understood.
It appears that this hole is in front of a plenum, or air space in the soyuz vehicle, and that this plenum itself has a leak - otherwise air the wouldn't get out to space. By immediately patching the hole they have made it harder to get an endoscope through the hole for further inspection.
The Russians are being tightlipped about it and there is still some speculation that it may have been a micrometeor impact. In my opinion it looks like a case of shoddy QA and a failure in the outer mold line of the vehicle which is allowing air to escape through the plenum which in turn is pulling air through this hole that shouldn't be there. If the hole wasn't there then the leak in the outer mold line wouldn't matter.
The part of the Soyuz that has the whole won't survive reentry to be inspected by the ground, unfortunately.
Spoiler the leaking hole :
---------------
In another development, International Launch Services, the American sales office of Russian-produced rockets, has cancelled the Proton Medium variant. This version of Proton eliminated a stage and cut the payload capacity of the rocket. Since the rocket was overpowered for most GEO comm sats, this allowed them to target the same market at a lower price point. This move was seen necessary to keep that product line open given the shrinking amount of Russian military launches and the complete collapse of their civil exploration program. This governmental contract slump has only added to the challenges they face of heightened international competition from the Europeans, Chinese, Indians and Americans in the international launch market.
Spoiler Proton Medium and Light :
ILS marketed the Proton Medium as the answer to the Falcon 9 but it won't ever make it off the pad to meet that marketplace challenge. Proton Medium's cancellation follows the cancellation of the Proton Light variant which was intended to target smaller, polar-inclined missions.
There are a few reasons for this cancellation. This should allow the Russians to spend all of their development money on finishing the decades-overdo Angara series of rockets. It also means the Proton itself will be phased out eventually which means that the Russians will have removed dangerous and polluting hypergolic rocket fuels from their stable of rockets. This would make Kazakhstan (where Protons are launched) very happy as they have brought it up multiple times since the breakup of the USSR. Russia has had to pay increasingly higher fees over time to the Kazakhs to keep access to Baikonur and hypergolic fuels have always been a contention in negotiation. Finally it's probably true that at this point the Russians can't afford to maintain as many rocket lines as they currently have and would be best served by consolidating in a more flexible launch vehicle platform like Angara.
My only worry is there will come a critical point where Angara either shows up and takes over as Proton (and eventually Soyuz) wind down or it won't show up and their will be a long painful pause much like what happened with the US and manned orbital launches with the retirement of the Space Shuttle.
I don't want any country to stop making rockets, even temporarily. I'm kind of a globalist rocket man that way.
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Lexicus
Deity
Yes, but only because by the time the oil strategy was in full swing, the war was already pretty much over.
The masses approach space colonization from the wrong angle, which hinders political support when the scientists burst the imaginative bubbles in the Senators and Representatives on the budget committee.
Mars will not become a trading partner to Earth, for it has nothing to export that Earth needs, nor the infrastructure to produce any good. Mars will not become a suburb of Earth, nor space as a whole for that matter, until mankind produces many space elevators or some type of stable megastrcture such as a Lofstrom Loop which is either outright impossible or just infeasible for the foreseeable future. And even then, most won't go unless they absolutely have to.
The only real excuse is to spread mankind around, to spread our biosphere around, in some context of a grand game of life where DNA proliferation is our key agenda (but with a human focus, of course, making some altered bacteria to do the work simply won't do by itself!) but then you need hundreds if not thousands of Martians at least in various separate polities with advanced self-sufficiency: not just food production and mineral extraction but first world post-industrial nations. Even the most optimistic guess has a timetable of several decades for this, with untold billions being spent every year: a price-tag a nation or a group of nations can afford, sure, but can one be confident the checks will flow year after year?
Technological innovation, second-hand economic benefits arising on Earth due to inspiration, the employment of a technological intelligentsia, the political considerations of having space-related facilities in backwater provinces, et alia aren't just good enough, and the problem is that 'spreading (a small, little itty-bitter slither of) mankind around' isn't attractive overall.
The scifi hack writer always posits a asteroid slamming into a city to cause this mindset to change, but relying on impacts whose timetables hinges on geological timeframes is no solid ground to build public policy. As well, no potentially hazardous object to my immediate knowledge has a date with a megalapolis. There was a chance for Apophis and Caracas in 2036 but that was always minor and Cupid has set his mark elsewhere.
We'll be lucky to have a few scientific bases by the mid-century on Luna and Mars at best; with manned missions ala HOPE in the same timetable. Even asteroid mining or ISRU extraterrestrial production might be minor to non-existent: no Lunar-made interplanetary cruisers or Martian made observatories.
It might take those bases working extremely hard and locally and utilizing indigenous resources to really push the horse out of the stable. Mankind on Earth will almost certainly never care or invest enough.
Lets hope those few small bases succeed, if this is the scenario that plays out.
Mars will not become a trading partner to Earth, for it has nothing to export that Earth needs, nor the infrastructure to produce any good. Mars will not become a suburb of Earth, nor space as a whole for that matter, until mankind produces many space elevators or some type of stable megastrcture such as a Lofstrom Loop which is either outright impossible or just infeasible for the foreseeable future. And even then, most won't go unless they absolutely have to.
The only real excuse is to spread mankind around, to spread our biosphere around, in some context of a grand game of life where DNA proliferation is our key agenda (but with a human focus, of course, making some altered bacteria to do the work simply won't do by itself!) but then you need hundreds if not thousands of Martians at least in various separate polities with advanced self-sufficiency: not just food production and mineral extraction but first world post-industrial nations. Even the most optimistic guess has a timetable of several decades for this, with untold billions being spent every year: a price-tag a nation or a group of nations can afford, sure, but can one be confident the checks will flow year after year?
Technological innovation, second-hand economic benefits arising on Earth due to inspiration, the employment of a technological intelligentsia, the political considerations of having space-related facilities in backwater provinces, et alia aren't just good enough, and the problem is that 'spreading (a small, little itty-bitter slither of) mankind around' isn't attractive overall.
The scifi hack writer always posits a asteroid slamming into a city to cause this mindset to change, but relying on impacts whose timetables hinges on geological timeframes is no solid ground to build public policy. As well, no potentially hazardous object to my immediate knowledge has a date with a megalapolis. There was a chance for Apophis and Caracas in 2036 but that was always minor and Cupid has set his mark elsewhere.
We'll be lucky to have a few scientific bases by the mid-century on Luna and Mars at best; with manned missions ala HOPE in the same timetable. Even asteroid mining or ISRU extraterrestrial production might be minor to non-existent: no Lunar-made interplanetary cruisers or Martian made observatories.
It might take those bases working extremely hard and locally and utilizing indigenous resources to really push the horse out of the stable. Mankind on Earth will almost certainly never care or invest enough.
Lets hope those few small bases succeed, if this is the scenario that plays out.
hobbsyoyo
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Excellent post!
The Russians are engaging in a very public and mean-spirited witch hunt to find out who drilled the hole. This is to the point where they've actually suggested a Cosmonaut on the station did it in an act of sabotage.
You want to finish gutting your limping space agency? Public witch-hunts over something like this is exactly how you do it.
The Russians are engaging in a very public and mean-spirited witch hunt to find out who drilled the hole. This is to the point where they've actually suggested a Cosmonaut on the station did it in an act of sabotage.
You want to finish gutting your limping space agency? Public witch-hunts over something like this is exactly how you do it.
Berzerker
Deity
Turns out another reason for getting away from SpaceX, Elon is having a meltdown.
https://news.avclub.com/elon-musk-smokes-blunt-wields-samurai-sword-during-bat-1828885281
https://news.avclub.com/elon-musk-smokes-blunt-wields-samurai-sword-during-bat-1828885281
Eh, we will have to see whether there will be a majority of astronomers that cares about Pluto enough to add at least 10, maybe 100 or even a few hundred objects to the list of planets in the solar system. I doubt that there will ever be such a majority.
Berzerker
Deity
when you put it like that, I'm afraid you're right
hobbsyoyo
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To be fair, the argument has shifted from 'make Pluto a planet on this technicality' (which inevitably results in that technicality being valid for hundreds of other bodies in the solar system) to 'make Pluto a planet on historical grounds'. The problem here is that being a planet for about a hundred years isn't really that historical and also fails the sanity check that before asteroids were understood to be asteroids, Vesta, Ceres and a bunch of other bodies were promoted to planethood before being demoted as we realized they weren't actually special. The same applies to Pluto.
In other news, Russian media outlets are now rolling out the theory that American astronauts purposefully drilled the whole in the Soyuz while on orbit to sabotage it. I have not been able to determine if these media reports are widely reported or if they are coming from the Russian equivalent of Brietbart or whatever.
This was reported by "Kommersant", reputable newspaper. They wrote referring to their sources in Roscosmos that this is being considered as a "priority version" by investigation commission. But there was no official comments from Roscosmos and most of Russian commentators reaction to this was "what the hell are they smoking?".
The only official statement from Rogozin was "The situation is a lot more complex than we thought before" and a promise to give results of investigation when it's completed.
