Comic Discussion > QUESTIONABLE CONTENT

WCDT December 1-5, 2014 (2845-2849)

<< < (50/61) > >>

BenRG:

--- Quote from: DSL on 06 Dec 2014, 06:23 ---I hold on to the hope that the various vehicles under private development play some role in the earth-to-orbit link of a multilayered program ... a quick ants relatively cheap way of getting people to space. What we had with the Shuttle was a semi truck that was occasionally uses to run to the corner store.
--- End quote ---

The only missions carried out by the Shuttle that were really in line with its original intended purpose was the construction of the ISS and the various satellite recovery and repair missions. Everything else was more-or-less filler developed and flown because the space station project was delayed around 20 years; it should have been amongst the first major programs but kept getting de-funded.

DSL:
Oh, people have thought of it, and will probably think of more. It just involves more delta-vee, and therefore more fuel/reaction mass, than you can realistically carry if you have to load everything up at the starting point.
It's got to be easier, once the infrastructure is in place, to decelerate to parking orbit and ride a shuttle down than it is to scream in from deep space and aim it so you don't bounce or burn.

KOK:
What kind of infrastructure would help slow the ship down to parking orbit speed? And what has this got to do with QC?

DSL:
1.) Having a way to gas up at mission destination so you have the fuel to do so without having to load it all at the start and carry it around (spending more delta-vie to do so) until you need it.
2.) QC forumites have lots of interests and talk about them until drowned out by other interests. There's a space station in this comic ...

cesium133:

--- Quote from: DSL on 06 Dec 2014, 06:48 ---Oh, people have thought of it, and will probably think of more. It just involves more delta-vee, and therefore more fuel/reaction mass, than you can realistically carry if you have to load everything up at the starting point.
It's got to be easier, once the infrastructure is in place, to decelerate to parking orbit and ride a shuttle down than it is to scream in from deep space and aim it so you don't bounce or burn.

--- End quote ---
The speed when you're coming in is such that you have to worry about that no matter what. A shuttle isn't really much better in this regard (in fact it was a major problem for the Space Shuttle; the heating on reentry destroyed the Columbia). If you're reentering the Earth's atmosphere from low orbit, you have to burn off a bit under 8 km/s of delta-V, regardless of whether you're in a shuttle or a capsule.

Navigation

[0] Message Index

[#] Next page

[*] Previous page