All I really want to know is: Does your ship work better when you kick it?

You think that’s bad? Try being the one responsible for designing exhaust ports.

As an engineering manager who works in an industry with a lot of government regulations, I don’t buy this argument. With the new diesel emission standard being released in 2009, this had to be a pretty big project on their radar with high visibility. No single engineer decided this was the way to beat the standard.…

At 17k mph entry speeds for Low Earth Orbit re-entries, and at 24k mph re-entry speeds for Moon return trajectories, you can't really create movable control surfaces with high levels of control without beefing them up so much that you need to add millions of pounds of fuel to get the vehicle off the ground in the…

constellation was the "umbrella" program to return to the moon and then to mars. Portions of the program stayed alive that could be used elsewhere. Hence why Orion survived (also Lockmart has pretty good congressmen in their pockets)

Another giant thing to look at is the funding levels, the US gov poured alot of money into NASA to beat the Soviets. Compare the 60s funding to the 0.05% that they get now, and you can see why so much less is accomplished, not to mention how poorly some programs are run and how some civil servants are retired in place…

You mean surfacing soon.

I thought Sub Blog was actually going to be about sandwiches?

It seems you're wrong. A lot of us do in fact want a 3D Futurama...

The Shoshone are great — their pathfinder in the beginning is a very useful unit especially when stumbling on ruins. And that extra territory is just fantastic when it comes to getting an early lay of the land.

They were busy filling in all the knowledge gaps that they glossed over during the space race. Like, when John Glenn first went up, NASA physicians weren't really sure if his eyeballs would explode out of his head on account of the change in pressure and loss of gravity. They were really only fairly certain that it…

Bah, in Civ IV I was landing on Andromeda in 2015. Take that NASA.

The biggest reason why we use a capsule and not a vehicle that doesn't "shed liftoff apparatus" is because of a simple reason:

Once again, I reiterate the fact that the shape is the best design for protecting a crew, at least until we have something safer than chemical rockets. The laws of physics are the same now as they were in 1969, which drives the design of the shape. It's the same reason boats are shaped like boats and cars are shaped…

Actually, the shuttle shed a lot of the equipment used for liftoff. Granted, the two boosters got re-used, but the bog orange tank was disposable. And really, the capsule design is the best route to go from a physics perspective. Good aerodynamics, which means more stable during reentry and easy to pull of the booster…

Let us know when you come up with it brother.