Space Forum / Space Flight / September 2003

I recently read Gerard O'Neill's "The High Frontier" (the latest version
from Apogee Books with the CD-ROM).  The text doesn't really go into much
detail on the design of his Island One/Two/Three cylindrical space
colonies, besides "X miles in diameter by Y miles long".  Yet ...

Daarpa's new toy?
http://aviationnow.com/avnow/news/channel_awst_story.jsp?id=news/09223top.xml
Cheers,
Richard

Is there a formula or rule-of-thumb for making a rough
estimate of the rate of air loss in a space craft for a
given size air leak?
- James

When a stuntman jumps off of a build, he lands on a large airbag.  The
idea of having a reusable capsule land on a huge airbag seems interesting.
If the capsule has some lift (like Apollo) and a parafoil, it seems
we could get a capsule to do a pinpoint landing and even flare at ...

Meteors hitting Sun (KST?)
(C.omments O.pinions W.elcome  wholy COW)
I assume meteor strikes are proportional to Area x Mass.
(Area seems obvious, and Mass is proportional to gravity,

Are there any revisions to the NORAD TLE format planned? At the moment it
uses two digit year dates. This will stop being viable around the 2060s,
when it's feasible that some satellites launched in the 1960s might still
be in orbit. Is there currently anything built into the TLE ...

I have grown up thinking some day there will be large
orbital space stations of the type suggested by von Braun
serving as staging points for journeys to the moon and points
beyond, similar to the moon trip in the first part of "2001".

I was thinking about the possibilities of building a water cooled
reentry shield.
Back in the 50s or 60s there was a test where they reentered a solid
sphere of copper. The copper conducted the heat away fast enough that it

I have a question about something I saw in the photos of this week's Titan
IVB launch.  It is a phenomenon I've also seen in pictures of Titan III
launches going back to the first Titan IIIC in 1965.
In this week's launch the two liquid propellant core stage engines were not

Has much research/design work been done on really large airlock doors?
A quick search finds references ranging from real doors around a
meter in size to fictitious vehicle-sized doors (details not
included).  I'm speculating that a reasonable design might look

I've been wondering, just what is the minimum protection you can get
away with and still be able to function effectively in a vacuum?
Say you're breathing pure oxygen at 2psi.  That's a partial pressure
of 1/3 below sea-level, which should be adequate providing you site

I need help in calculating the gravitational drift at L1, 30,000+ km above
lunar near side.
I'm curious how much stationkeeping fuel, per period of time, a SPS located
there would require, per ton of SPS mass, with an ISP of 369. Something like

I was just thinking, if you can get a balloon to 50 kilometres above the
earth, beyond 99% of the earth's atmosphere, whether you could harness the
earth's electromagnetic field to push it further into space by releasing the
balloon above the North Pole. You might be able to use ...

I am not a particular fan of SSTO, but it appears to me that SSTO has
long been within our grasp.
The best figures that I could get for the Titan II 1st stage
(based on Rusty Barton's reply to my earlier post) are a

I have been contemplating various reentry options for my imaginary air
breathing SSTO vehicle. If I can solve the problem of going to orbit
by using an air breathing engine in the beginning until mach 8 and
switch to hydrocarbon (propane-LOX)rocket propulsion to go to orbit it