Recent content by Hevach

Excepting things like direct ascent lunar/deep space launches (which aren't really the norm) most of the velocity you need to stay in space is horizontal, not vertical. Modern rockets start pitching over towards horizontal basically as soon as they clear the ground structures. There is still an...

It would have been bad, but winning was almost as bad. The US government was treating NASA like a horse in a race, and the thing with that mentality is... At the end of the race the loser goes home and the winner goes home with a smile on their face. The Apollo program lost political support as...

Because that's where NASA's perpetual sliding timeline landed last time any kind of detailed idea was written up. These plans are always dependent on a lot of things, with things like new technology not panning out and key contractor failures being common break points. But the real killer is...

They are quite brilliant. They have a much flatter performance curve with ambient pressure, so a single engine can perform viably at both sea level and in a vacuum. This isn't impossible with a bell nozzle, but where the RS-25 archives it with a deceptively complex novel geometry an aerospike...

SSTO (single stage to orbit) has been a dream for decades. It's been a pipe dream, so far the tyranny of the rocket equation has killed every concept, and every technology that was hoped to make the difference, like aerospike engines, has fallen short.

During WWII the German V2 program did achieve a couple suborbital flights, but these were very basic, and there wasn't really a path from there to orbital flight, the fuel wasn't very good, the engines were bad, and the guidance was basically nonexistent. Sputnik and Explorer required engine...

As I said, there's not really stealth in space. We do see payloads release secondary payloads either into co-orbit or into distinct orbits, and those get their own COSPAR/NORAD IDs. This is quite common in classified launches as well, but there's no additional IDs for this launch. The blue...

https://www.n2yo.com/satellite/?s=63350 COSPAR ID is 2025-060A, NORAD ID 63350. 1019.1x1206.5 km orbit at inclination 63.4, 107.4 minute period. There's not really "stealth" in space. You can classify what a payload is and obfuscate what it's doing but where it is is easily trackable.

That's the power source, not the output. The output is 300kw, but as you say is not continuous.

I find a laser weapon extremely unlikely for two reasons: 1. Power. The Navy's anti-drone laser is 60 kilowatts, which is over 70% of the ISS's total solar panel power output, or three space shuttles worth of power cells, let alone the X-37b's systems. Which are technically classified but...

This isn't necessarily better. The mass and thermal energy is still released into the atmosphere. Tunguska is an example of an object completly burning up.

Being military and not NASA we can make some educated guesses and weigh what's more likely. Unmanned long term missions where the added cost and weight restrictions for returning to earth are acceptable. Small size substantially limits deployment and capture, and it hasn't been observed to do...

Most square roots are irrational. That does *not* mean all irrational numbers are square roots or can be represented by some function of square roots. They are turtles and tortoises. The square root of any integer which is not a perfect square is irrational. From 1 to 100 there are ten numbers...

You're not the first one to notice this, interestingly: https://oeis.org/A045546 There are more exceptions as you get higher, including increasingly long chains of exceptions. There's actually a lot of polynomial arrangements that frequently produce primes. For example x^2-x+1 looks quite...

Possible? Sure, at the far end of the Kardashev scale a lot of things might be possible. Practical and useful though? I doubt it. The problem with weaponizing sheer gravitational mass in this way is that this is about one of the lowest energy thing you can do with a given amount of mass...