Astronomy and space exploration

Bepi has been a long old slog. I knew people who were working on it, and that must be the best part of 20 years ago. It kind of became a standing joke "will Bepi ever fly?". I'm pretty sure it came close to being cancelled, maybe more than once.

Good to see it on top of a rocket at last. I hope it survives the next seven years.

 

Castle in the Sky pls.

 

I would love another mission to venus whens the last time they went 1976 IIRC and sent back those wonderful greenish photo's the most amazing otherworld photo's ever, better than anything taken on mars. with todays tech we could maybe even make a rover that could survive there a few days

 

Mebbe. AFAIK the problem is that the heat cooks the electronics. Building mechanical stuff that can work at a sustained 450C might be do-able with modern techniques, electronics I'm not so sure.

Anybody here have any insights?

 

I imagine it would be possible, just not what we do. Designing one off electronics that are going to be super low performance as well just seems like an insanely expensive undertaking. Entirely new process would need to be developed.

 

Onboard view of Soyuz failure

 

Moon Direct is a much more interesting idea than the luna gateway. Hopefully some form of it gains more traction than Mars Direct!

Probably not. He needs a better pork allocation appendix.

 

This vid explains what actually happened

 

Because orbital velocity is really really fast.
Min orbital velocity is about 25,000km/h.

Why try to slow down with a huge amount of fuel thats extremely expensive to get into space when you can just use drag/friction to bleed it off on the way down nearly for free?

The only way to really do a slow reentry would be a Space Elevator but even if possible to build who wants to sit in a car/pod for a 'slow' 36,000km journey down from geostatiionary orbit?