Recent content by LKK

A difference between glory for an individual and inspiration for many. I think it's the most important reason precisely because I too am not sure that the often stated reasons are justification enough.

The official line is of course that "boots on the ground" yield far more poductivity than current robots. To myself the real value of the grand adventure into space is , well, the grand adventure itself. It touches the souls of many of us, what's more important than that?

I know where you're coming from! Coming of age in the 60s I def thought we'd make a lot more progress by now. Despite Musk I think any planet colonization is very far in the future. I'm not that into planets (for colonization) anyway, I think habitats are the way we'll live in big numbers in...

SSTO is an old pipe dream and makes no sense without something like metallic hydrogen

The semimajor axis and eccentricity give the shape of an orbit,perigee is as low as it gets and appogee as high as it gets,period is how much time it takes to make an orbit,inclination how far off the equator it's angled,that final term is the argument of periapsis It doesn't give the exact...

I'm not familiar with their format the top right might still be the launch time if some of these are showing multiple satalites per launch, and I just looked , that is the case. The epoch just gives start of ephemeris

Actually I'm used to astronomical ephemeris, I think the epoch on these is the launch time

That's the ephemeris of the given object, plug it in to a computer and it will give you location at any given time

If starship is as advertised your arguements are good ones, and have been made often. Of course starship is as of now unproven. That Musk is huge on big promises is obvious,things are confused because He does bring some of it to life, It will be very exciting if Starship lives up to the hype.

Actually dark matter is only known through it's gravity interactions

It's not actually a secret that nuclear propulsion is being considered for Mars missions. Having said that that is mostly because of the big payloads needed for Mars. For a given mass the fuel to get to Mars isn't that much more than to land on the Moon, it just takes a lot longer.

I def understand the question, this was my first thought on hearing starship plan, I guess I have to believe that NASA has an understanding of and confidence in how this can be done.

Don't get me wrong I think there are a lot of extreme challenges to this idea

It's assumed the mass of the counterweight will be aquired in space then using gravity maneuvers to move it into place