Stack Exchange network consists of 183 Q&A communities including Stack Overflow, the largest, most trusted online community for developers to learn, share their knowledge, and build their careers.
It depends upon whether the party considering breaking the treaty regards the UN as a useful entity to keep empowered. Its basically just a debating society that can be replaced at a whim, so eventually it will fall by the wayside.
More accurately "The shuttle wing damage was over a steel antenna instead of the aluminum skin, steel being better able to withstand the heat of re-entry".
To add some specifics, the booster structure is designed entirely to resist vertical forces, not horizontal. So not only would you have hypersonic drag heating an aluminum/carbon fiber structure not designed to deal with it, that heating weakens its structure further while also applying a significant horizontal force.
This answer just makes me wonder why you wouldn't just make Methane/LOX at the poles and launch rockets from there. It's a short hop from anywhere on Mars with a methane rocket.
Great answer. One minor quibble, massive cheap new supplies of any useful metal don't "plummet the economy", they increase its wealth. In the example of platinum it will dramatically reduce the cost of its uses (computer hard disks, thermocouple, optical fibre, LCDs, turbine blades, spark plugs, pacemakers, catalytic converters, dental fillings, etc) and it will create vast new uses for it a replacing less effective materials previously used only because they were cheaper.
This is a poorly written question. At this moment SpaceX has landed 166 boosters, and re-flown 144 of them. The only boosters that aren't regularly landed are Falcon Heavy core boosters, while the "wing" stages have all been recovered. SpaceX is committed to reuse, and it's #1 priority isn't Mars, it's lowering the cost of spaceflight, because if they can't greatly reduce the cost of getting large payloads into orbit, they'll never be able to afford to go to Mars.
Yes, if you could magically teleport your space ship 200 km above your head, without the ability to accelerate to orbital velocity (roughly 7 km/sec at that altitude) all you end up doing is falling 200 km to the ground.
@Cornelis Falcon Heavy has a nominal payload capacity of 70 tons vs. SLS 95 tons. And the fairing can be enlarged pretty cheaply. If FH can only fit 50 tons in a large fairing thats still only two FH launches at \$300M total to replace a single \$3B SLS launch (not including Orion). And FH is likely lower risk than SLS, given SpaceX has 150+ launch streak, can likely launch FHs every week (2 planned for January). SLS can only launch once per year and hydrolox booster launches have lots of problems and delays. In orbit assembly is easily doable, but was rejected for Artemis to justify the SLS.
On the other hand, resource values are determined by supply. During the 1500s the gold prices are estimated to have declined 80% because of gold captured by the Conquistadors. And most gold is in storage, only a small portion is traded at any time. If an asteroid brought to earth doubled the total world gold supply it would likely drop gold prices 90%+. For a long while the value of most asteroid resources are likely to be far higher in space (for building orbital, lunar & possibly martian structures) given the up-mass costs of getting earth based resources to space.
One reason estimates of costs made 15 years ago could be substantially over-estimated is the massive decline in launch costs. Shuttle payloads cost \$80M per metric ton of payload to LEO (2022 dollars), and commercial launchers like Ariane 5/Atlas V were over \$20M/ton. A reusable Falcon 9 costs \$4M/ton, a Falcon Heavy under \$3M/ton. If Starship is ever able to meet its performance objectives it would be \$150K/ton. So up-mass costs should have declined by at least 80% based on which 2007 launch system the estimate used, and up to 99% in a future timeline in which Starship actually works.
Isn't the percentage of atmospheric gas loss trivial over periods as long as tens or even hundreds of thousands of years? Would the introduction of heat (say from atmospheric entry heating of large nitrogen ice balls launched from Titan) change it enough to increase the rate significantly?
