I posted a query similar to that on the linked site... like, 'splain, pleeze?
That phrase made no sense to me!

I still have many of the items you mention. In boxes or corners around the house. At this point, they are transitioning to 'memorabilia'.

Jan

High school students taking college tests aren't allowed phone based calculators but can use standalone ones.

Well, they're already turning it into medicine.

Ooops.

Or overtone.

Cycles are a wonderful idea in theory, not so much in practice. Further, why burn nearly the same amount of fuel to get from Mars to a cycler as it does to get from Mars to Earth orbit, as opposed to a direct return without the added complexity and risk of trajectory and velocity matching and the risks which go with it? Not to mention the risks of fuel transfer & longer transit times.

This isn't about SpaceX or the MCT. Musk wants to land on Mars not wave at it as he flies on by.

Nor is this a privately funded operation:

"In addition, the foundation has formed a partnership with NASA via a reimbursable Space Act Agreement between Paragon and the Ames Research Center to conduct thermal protection system and technology testing and evaluation. "

Furthermore SpaceX and "Space exploration engineering corp" are not the same company.

The development and production of a booster capable of sending a lone pair of elderly people to fly by Mars will take longer than flight ready by 2018. The statements they make regarding how only during this time is there such a "short" journey are demonstrably false. Anyone even partially versed in the material knows this to be true. With tech from Apollo a low energy conjunction mission could do it approximately ever two years, and in a under 180 days transit time for a total round trip of about one year. With some desire to go faster, ie. burn more fuel, 150 days is relatively easy.

It is a privately funded effort to colonize Mars. Elon Musk and his Spacex company are very much involved in this.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Coloni...

Remember Flair pens? Flair hardhead, created when Flairs were THE pen but multi-part forms were the norm?

Windup watches > self winding watches > LED watches > LCD Watches > EL watches

Calculator displays - Nixle tubes (AC only) > LED > LCD > EL

And in that vein, who still uses standalone calculators instead of their phone?

B&W Tvs (tubes ) > Color tvs (tubes) > B&W solid state > Color solid state > CRT > Plasma > LCD > LED

Portable transistor radios powered by a 9V?

Reel to Reel > 8 track > Cassette > CD > MP3 player

Blue ink mimeograph (still remember the smell) > photocopy and xerox becomes a common usage verb instead of a company name.

So much technology changes in the last 40-50 years. Shocking when you look back on it.

There is a Powerpoint for sale on eBay:

http://www.ebay.com/itm/Vintage-PaperMat...

I do not see kids playing jacks any more. I suppose that they are still around...

Of course there is all of the music media: 78 records, cassette tapes, 8 track tapes...

Jan

Interestingly, actually landing on the planet and spending a year or more there would be less complex.

Regarding air and water, you send an advance craft which takes hydrogen feedstock and begins stockpiling air, water, and fuel. You have a habitat and return craft fully stocked for the return trip before you ever leave Earth. And we don't need to use the soil to do it - old technology allows us to convert the CO2 in the atmosphere and the hydrogen we take into fuel, oxygen, and water.

Sure, it's proven, basic, "boring", and reliable; but that is what you want.

Fun fact: to ship 1,000 gallons of water from the asteroid belt, the surface of Mars, or from Earth which is the cheapest origin?

The surface of Mars. The required delta-V is the lowest thus the energy cost is the least. Due to the way orbital mechanics works (among other factors), asteroid mining won't be a going concern until we are already on Mars. One of, if not *the*, dominating factors in an economical asteroid mining industry is your mass-ratio. Launching a mining expedition to, for example, Ceres from Earth would cost over 50x as much as doing it from Mars. That doesn't include regulatory and environmental costs on Earth - just the basic mass required to do it. Propellant is fairly cheap to produce on Mars.

Mars is the cheapest place to send goods from whether you consider the belt, a planetary surface, orbit, or a lunar surface - excluding dilithium crystal -driven antimatter warp cores, impulse drive, and warp drives of course. ;)

Of course as water is effectively abundant on Mars it won't likely be a huge market for them initially. Only once we were to begin wholesale terraforming would martians be interested in large quantities of water.

Honestly the shielding bugaboo is funding hype. Spend a year traveling between Mars and Earth (these guys' 510 days in flight is suspect right from the onset) via a basic low-energy conjunction mission and you won't even hit 40 rem of total exposure (assuming a solar flare event which is an average of the three worst solar flares in history hits you enroute) . An average trans-atlantic airline pilot, at 5 trips/week, receives about a rem per year. Since this alleged mission can happen once every 15 years or so you're not looking at much exposure, really.

Even if you suffered that entire year's worth of radiation in a single dose you wouldn't get sick from it.

What's a boon to one often is a doggle to someone else - and vice versa.

With the proper remote control system, a ship could ferry passengers to Mars, return with no humans on board but a supply of whatever is mineable on Mars, leave the cargo in orbit around earth for an orbital factory to process, and return to Mars with another batch of colonists. Elon Musk is likely working on this, since he's all about reusable rockets.

That is my guess as well.

The French has a nice lilt to it, as well: merde battante. Personally, I like the term, space crap, or perhaps, Astrocrap.

With poop shields, the command "Up shields!" takes on a whole new undertone.

I would be willing to bet any sum that there would be an overabundance of volunteers for a one way trip. If nothing else it would speed development tremendously.

I think the engineers know what they're doing. The PR people haven't mastered the science well enough to hype it properly.

Rumor: the holder of the Astroturf trade mark has trademarked Astropoop. They think there will be many uses for it.

They've mastered the art of recycling the water in pee and poop. Next step: recycle the organic material into manufactured food pellets.

A fly-by would be a "proof of concept" flight. It would prove that we can get there and back. The next stage is to land and establish a base, then start ferrying colonists. Elon Musk, I believe, has colonists in training now and is actively recruiting.

Someone told me that the ersatz definition of "asteroid" is an astronaut's hemmorhoid.