Comments by "Asbestos Muffins" (@AsbestosMuffins) on "Curious Droid" channel.

  1. kinda like how the airforce quietly paid for lots of infrastructure to test spy satellites went into building out the public space program.
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  2. this is the same story with the osprey. Its neither helicopter or plane and congress couldn't figure who got to buy it
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  3. I don't know what will happen first, self sustaining fusion, or reliable wireless printing
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  4. graphite also burns in an oxygenated environment, though the soviets used nitrogen oxygen in their stuff so not really as much of a problem there
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  5. I never knew the pratt-wright connection
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  6. thought the bigger problem with the Ares 1 was that if they tried to escape it either would require so much g-forces it would kill the crew or they would be melted by burning propellent afterwards
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  7. doesn't seem like it would be useful even in 1941 since its fuel consumption was very bad according to what we know anyways, so it would only have been good for 1940 at best
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  8. tbf, I don't think there's a lot of productive work being done by STS contractors considering the shuttles are all in museums, but we're still paying them for SLS which should launch aaaaaaaaannnny daaaaay now
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  9. the congressional mandate is so ridiculoutly dumb, SLS is not using the shuttle's main tank for anything, its a core stage constructed of carbon fiber and is basically an entirely new tank structure externally and internally to accomidate the larger storage needs and account for the different fuel flow pattern, yet its "a shuttle tank" to lawmakers because its orange
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  10. outside of industrial risk aversion, aerospikes just don't bring enough benefits in large staged rockets since the lower stage and upper stages can be designed to work in two separate altitude envelopes. Maybe with the growth of small single stage to orbit launchers we might see a resurgence of them as the efficiency gains are the only way to do that without added stages
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  11. sounds as promising (and as useful) as the xf84H thunderscreech
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  12. well in terms of james webb, that's not viable. but for hubble the NRO's keyhole satellites from the same vintage are near identical to it in design at least from the outside
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  13.  @TheShrike616  for a capital ship, the colorados were very novel having 16" guns, turbo electric drives, and electric fire control, they also stuck around a long time and probably would have stayed in service if the iowas weren't built
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  14.  SaltyBrains  not really. its pretty much the opposite, with the dod having things like VR simulators and the internet before turning that tech over to the wider world
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  15. interesting the queen lizzy is a modern take on a turbo-electric drive
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  16. there is nothing small about this plane. you enter that hanger in Dayton and you are surrounded by the plane which thanks to its rediculously long landing gear, towers above the collection
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  17.  @eternalreign2313  you can't legally own moon rocks but the law isn't very clear on moon trash
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  18. if this was so advanced I do have to wonder why lockheed decided not to develop a commercial variant or at least license the technology
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  19. missed the other important ramification, if you can make gravity on demand then you can build a nuclear bomb that uses next to no fuel and needs no initial stage to compress it
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  20.  @coderock_666  no, they were passed out from the gforces and shock. they were dead on impact
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  21. saw the only prototype left in dayton, it towers over the entire prototype collection
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  22. what an interesting time when the government was funding development of massive IC engines
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  23. strange that the NRO satellites are similar in design to hubble.....just a coincidence obviously
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  24. its not a bell its a de laval nozzle which just happens to be the most efficient shape of that geometry, aerospikes are sort of an inverse of that thougj
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  25. they could just send up a regular dragon mission with a purpose built docking adapter, the last service mission left a docking adapter on it. servicing it would be much more difficult without the service bay but NASA could think of something, like even putting a deployable scaffold in the trunk. the thing is NASA has a pair of keyhole satellites sitting around somewhere which if you don't look too carefully you could swear are identical backups to hubble
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  26. guy builds gravity pump, turns it on, pump shoots off at thousands of kilometers an hour
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  27. "Congress would have spent billions with nothing to show for it." Ya, that actually happens all the time, like the tens of billions looted from the dod to build a wall in the middle of a desert, on a flood plain, that gets washed away whenever it rains
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  28. I feel like remote controlled construction on the moon would be much easier to pull off than free falling satellites, you can count on a few known things like gravity and solid ground, only having to maneuver in 2d space
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  29. the luddites happen to be a reliable voting block
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