The Space Review

Thanks!

note - I can't verify any of the following, it's more - for lack of a better term - aerospace nerd fan theory at this point.

Post-collapse, people think that the Buran justification was paranoia. But based on what I've read / seen (though this is getting hard to source, so I might be just good ol' hallucinating here), they weren't entirely wrong. The subtext around that large payload bay had to do with the Soviet pursuit of systems like Fractional Orbital Bombardment System (FOBS) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fractional_Orbital_Bombardment_System that weaponized space.

Again, there's a reason for those ASAT tests. There's a reason for the weird specifications set in the early 1970s for the Shuttle. And I don't think deploying a spy satellite alone is it. But this is speculation. AFAICT, nothing was put on paper.

It would have been an incendiary WW3 starting act to capture a Soviet asset. But I think it is understandable if certain people within the American blob wanted that capability at hand.

I wish I was immortal. I'd drop everything for a decade and try to find people from the time who're still alive (and some still are!) and ask them these questions directly - on the record – for posterity's sake. I suspect, we came much closer to war via space than most people think. And because we didn't, we'll eventually repeat these mistakes.

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Oh and then there was the documented attempt to capture Salyut-7 https://www.thespacereview.com/article/2554/1

Somehow all…

There were not thousands of F-1 engines manufactured. There were a bit over a hundred manufactured between flight and test models.

The whole "we can't make them anymore" meme has a tiny kernel of truth but it's been blown way out of proportion the more it's been repeated.

When the F-1 was manufactured a lot of the actual assembly of parts was done by hand. That meant Rocketdyne's engineers and machinists had a lot of tribal knowledge that was lightly or partially documented at best or not documented at worst. NASA and Rocketdyne maintained all of the designs and documentation and knew everyone involved in the engine manufacturing.

In the early 90s a lot of these Rocketdyne people were interviewed [0] and asked to review F-1 manufacturing techniques as part of the Space Exploration Initiative [1]. Restarting production of the F-1 would have been practical but more expensive than the alternate plan to go with an SSME derivative.

While the F-1 is an impressive engine it has downsides. It's enormous and heavy. The Saturn V's first stage (S-1C) was 10m in diameter while the Space Shuttle's external tank was 8.4m in diameter. The Shuttle's ET was going to be the core of the proposed SEI rocket (and SLS). With a 8.4m tank diameter it would be more difficult to mount more than two F-1s.

With only two engines it would be more dangerous of a vehicle for manned missions as a flame out in one engine could be disastrous. It would also make it more difficult to throttle the engines…

I'm always fascinated by the lack of "space" like exploration projects for the ocean. Seemingly closer access, as if not difficult technical problems, but with greater access to actual resources. Thoughts as to why?

http://oceanexplorer.noaa.gov/

Meh link:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/george-spyros/colbert-report-dr-robert_b_166979.html
One of the biggest issues facing the oceans is a lack of awareness. You can't see what goes on in the ocean the same way you see what happens in a forest or in an African savanna. So people don't know that we waste 54 billion pounds of fish every year while 8 million people die of starvation. They don't know that every single fishery will have entirely collapse by 2048. Or that 90 percent of all large predators in the oceans are gone. And if people could see that. If people could see the amount of waste and destruction in the oceans they wouldn't stand for it for a second.

It should be noted however that perviously Dr. Ballard has, in the process of drumming up enthusiasm for increased funding and interest in ocean exploration, touched on the rich bounty of resources yet to be tapped beneath the sea floor. As always, the needs of man and nature are not mutually exclusive should we choose. Balance between the amazing scientific and educational benefits often described by Ballard and the interests of commerce can be achieved if we keep our eye on the prize.

http://roastedpinebark.hubpages.com/hub/Ocean-Exploration-Needs-More-Funding
“The…

> All his talk about getting to Mars to "maintain the light of consciousness" (...) is actually BS

While I hate Elon's politics, I love space exploration, and I believe his motivation with SpaceX is sincere. From the start he made SpaceX with the goal of getting to Mars, and after all these years SpaceX is actually getting near the capability of sending tens of tonnes of cargo to Mars. He's been talking about getting to Mars for more than 20 years, he became a member of the Mars Society in 2001 and wanted to fund a small (unmanned) Mars mission[0], when he wasn't yet a billionaire, but very rich from PayPal, and before SpaceX was founded. Then he invested a big part of his fortune in SpaceX, which was a very risky bet. Even in the early days of SpaceX he planned to make a big rocket capable of getting a big payload to Mars[1] (the "BFR" that the 2005 article is talking about is today's Starship). I wish he had stayed focused on Mars, instead of making Earth's dirty politics even dirtier.

[0] https://spaceref.com/status-report/marsnow-19-profile-elon-musk-life-to-mars-foundation/

[1] https://www.thespacereview.com/article/497/1

> by Jeff Foust [...] (jeff@thespacereview.com) is the editor and publisher of The Space Review, and a senior staff writer with SpaceNews. He also operates the Spacetoday.net web site.

So not bad. Just in case anyone else hesitated to look, after the bad taste of today's NYTimes front-page SpaceX hit piece trash. I wish we could leave behind the journalism concept, that ill intent and cluelessness can be fixed by low-level wordsmithing. You get "if you know the topic well, you can see there is a way to closely read and interpret this bit so it's not quite incorrect... even if most everyone reading the whole will be misled". Ah well.

Under Avoiding apocalypse, I might have mentioned LEO vs MEO drag lifetimes (years vs millennia). Under Ukrane, IIUC, that all starlink service is geofenced on borders, and finding your export unexpectedly a weapon system can be problematic.

[] https://www.thespacereview.com/ [] https://spacenews.com/

> Alternatively, advanced megaprojects are only achievable through sophisticated large-scale cooperation.

In that sense, war is a megaproject. War organized the Manhattan Project, which is still the metaphor we use for any massive scale, sophisticated project. The space race was a cold war endeavor to make ICBMs that weren't obviously ICBMs, and the Soviets were terrified that the Space Shuttle was a nuclear dive-bomber (actually it was for deploying and returning recon satellites) [0]. Cooperation does not necessarily imply peace or post-nationalism: war is strong cooperation on each side of the war, with competition between the two sides. In fact, the cooperation is so strong that actions taken against that cooperation end up being punished as treason much more strenuously than in peace time.

[0] https://www.thespacereview.com/article/3855/1