Space Forum / Space Flight / January 2005

I was wondering what happened to Armadillo aerospace? I haven't seen
an update on their site since 6 Jan 05. Surely they are not giving up.
Also, even though the xprize is won, there should still be some very
interesting thingss happening with Scaled composites. I suppose they

Would it be feasible to use aerobraking at Titan to facilitate a Titan
orbiter? What about deployment of a long lived balloon within Titan's
atmosphere, can some sort of balloon survive and operate in the cold?

How difficult is it for a non-government group to build an effective
ion thruster? The only ones that I'm aware of have been built by NASA
or the ESA.
I'm particularly wondering about this in the context of JP Aerospace,

Is anyone aware of ANY freeware packages to track and control
satellites?

I was wondering what communications protocols have been used in the
past with probes traveling beyond the earth-moon system?  I've read
that G-tor was used for voyager, but would be interested in learning
more about what protocols/hardware was used in the past, as well as

What if (for the sake of discussion) there were a follow up to the
Huygens mission in the works.  What, given what we've learned so far,
would we want on the new probe?  
It sounds like a nuclear power supply is required for anything more than

Is it true that Huygens ceased transmission less than 2 hours after
touchdown? Whilst it was a magnificent achievement to travel so far and
land perfectly, it seems a great shame that the probe was so short
lived.  I'm suprised the designers didnt make it rugged enough and

I have no one to ask this question of, so seems the Usenet might work ;-)
Does anyone think that it might be possible to surround a vehicle with
sodium ions held in place by their charge and a magnetic field (Generated by
the vehicle) as a form of shielding for a long term ...

Some days ago I have been studying a way to get trust, but without
throwing any propellant to space.
Last day I saw the last Indiana Jones film and in the scene where nazis
chase Indy and his father in motorbikes, and when Indi kills the last

Hi, I ran some of the images from the Titan probe through a terrain
generation program. The results are quite cool. The source images were a bit
noisy and so I had to preprocess them a little in Photoshop. I also had to
guess to a degree about the colours although the one probe ...

Has anyone here ever tried building a small liquid rocket engine?
Preferably from this website: http://www.risacher.org/rocket/
I am building one from that website, but I am making it 50lb-thrust
rocket instead of 20. I know how to use all the euqations, but I want

The files now at http://esamultimedia.esa.int/docs/titanraw/index.htm 
are 176-by-768 JPGs. Where the same terrain is in five or 10 frames,
it seems conceivable unprocessed bitmaps could somehow be combined
to yield a little more resolution, but I guess JPEG compression would

The interior of liquid rocket combustion chamber
is usually cooled with the so called "curtain cooling,"
which is a spray of hydrocarbon fuel. The fuel protects
the chamber from the hot exhaust gas by cooling it and

What is the difference between Delta 4 and Titan III-type launch vehicles?
IL of FI

In looking at a ramjet/scramjet diagram, it seems that the burnt gas would
want to go in both direction: towards both the inlet and the outlet. Since
there is no valve to prevent a back flow, why wouldn't this push the air out
of the inlet and stall the engine?