Recent content by Lord Flasheart

It is much easier to build the station over there, after we have an areoestrial base. Sending a station from Earth-orbit to Mars-orbit is pretty damned expensive, fuel-wise and economically. The gravity well of Mars is much less steep than ours, meaning less fuel (and less cash!) is needed to...

I would advise you to take -extreme- caution when building liquid-fuel rockets. When, not if, something goes wrong, you'd best be behind sturdy concrete. John Carmack is http://www.armadilloaerospace.com/n.x/Armadillo/Home and he has plenty of information regarding the construction of rockets...

Funny, I always thought that the main cause of trouble has been the shuttle-orbiter. It is mostly useless, dead weight. Get rid of the orbiter, you get rid of a whole series of problems. http://www.safesimplesoon.com/default.htm If the boosters exploding is your concern, notice that the...

I dabbled a little in solid-fuel rocketry. I managed to make a compressed form of potassium-nitrate from TreeStump Remover(™) and confectioners sugar, but I opted for a simplistic uncompressed mixture of both chemicals in the end. The flexibility of nitrous oxide as an oxidizer is stunning...

http://www.safesimplesoon.com/default.htm Indeed, the elimination of the orbiter vehicle itself seems to be quite an advantage. With the SRBs you have a nice Apollo-esque man-rated launcher, not to mention heavy lift capability that rivals the Saturn V. Is it just me or did Luna and Mars...

Pursue it? Hah! I'd need to have access to nuclear facilities, not to mention ludicrous amounts of money. I started this topic more than a year ago, in a time when I was naive and didn't understand how complicated such a device was. I'm surprised this topic is still going strong, despite my long...

You could consider Project ORION a nuclear-piston engine, without the engine-proper. :-p

If I recall correctly, the only thing that can make a black hole explode is another black hole. I am unsure of the parameters, or the variables involved, but I'd guess they would have to be around the same size. Hmm. I'm wondering if 1-dimensional singularities (cosmic string) will do the...

Space is space. Mechanical/acoustic waves cannot travel through a lack of material medium. I'll avoid an obvious cliche.

Cheer up! Vacuum is great for long-term storage, and I sure hope that by the end of this century someone will catch up to the Voyagers and Pioneers and give them each a swift relativistic kick in the rear.

If there is Zero-Point-Energy, no. I need to check that up myself.

I've been reading some of Stephen Baxter's Manifold and Xeelee Sequence stories, and quite a few of them deal with the "upcoming" Heat Death. What a depressing future. Personally, I've always felt a bit skeptical about the Heat Death. Although the surviving particles are still rather far...

What exactly is a bolid? Is it some sort of vehicle? If so, then read the following text. If not, ignore everything I said. A small CO2 cannister will work, though I'd recommend you have someone qualified to supervise your integration of the can into your bolid. Mind that CO2 cans should...

Sounds a lot like Moonseed, by Stephen Baxter. His novel has a desperate trip to the Moon in only a matter of weeks, using current-market rockets and equipment. I'd suggest giving it a read. I would also recommend looking into nuclear pulsed propulsion. There is a book by George Dyson (son of...

Burt Rutan of Scaled Composites runs a civilian aerospace firm out in the Mojave, and he just recently won the X-Prize. I am unsure if he is hiring, but it might do you well to take a look into it. In fact, I think most of the former X-Prize competitors are worth looking into: Non-military...