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At 15,000lb of thrust two SuperDracos could easily lift a full dragon capsule (also about 15,000 lb if my maths are right), meaning that as long as two (opposing) of the eight SuperDracos fire it could still land propulsively, assuming that the smaller dracos are sufficient for attitude control...

The most fun (albeit not necessarily the most efficient) way to find out, imho, would be to load up a Delta Glider and try it :) A pretty good approximation is to assume that power output (Power=Thrust*Exhaust Velocity) remains the same. So thrust would be inversely proportional to Isp...

I like this system. Naming plants in order of discovery so that you don't have to change them later makes a lot of sense. The only change I think I would make would be to add some punctuation to make them a bit easier to read, i.e. instead of HD 178911 Bb use something like [HD 178911] (B)-b or...

I've noticed that over constraining parts can make things very unstable very quickly. The trick is to be very minimalist with them, use just enough to triangulate the part and no more. The struts are also still relatively flexible, and as far as I know they have no rotational strength at the...

Successful (so far! It's like counting chickens before they've hatched whilst juggling the eggs...) launch of yet another exploration mission, today is a good day. :hailprobe: I also think it's an interesting historical coincidence that the first Chinese Mars probe is named "Firefly"...

This is an old video but I don't think anyone's posted it here: Great vision of what might have been. The only obvious flaw is that the crew appear to spend the whole 160 day trip out in the Apollo CM :blink:, adding in some Skylab footage would have been a pretty good stand in for a wet...

That's exactly what they're worried about. After all it happened on Mir, and that was with an already proven spacecraft. Collisions in space are extremely dangerous and nobody wants to take any chances. That said, I think the main reason why they planned for three flights was so that there...

http://www.nasaspaceflight.com/2011/08/atlas-v-wins-boeing-selects-launcher-cst-100-capsule/ One SRB...and I thought the Shuttle was the most ungainly looking LV ever designed...:P

In point of fact, so far it's only flown without a service module. Granted it was an unmanned and very preliminary test flight, so it might be more complicated with a fully functional vehicle carrying people, but AFAIK it's been designed to function that way, like you said. Easy integration with...

Absolutely fantastic launcher, I can already tell this is going to be one of my favorites. Gave her a test run and put the Navigator probe (Hail the prophet of the one true Probe!) into a trans-jovian orbit with no trouble. I can confirm the issues with the first stage gimballing and killrot...

This project keeps looking better and better, I can't wait to try it out! :thumbup: A thought: Since this is looking like it'll be such a nice general purpose LV, it might be nice to have a no-fairing version (or an option to select no fairing, etc, etc) for launching particularly large and...

Obviously he was using a cheap point-and-shoot, and it auto focused on the Earth in the background...although since at the time he was probably frantically searching through his flight plan for the "Accidentally pressed Ctrl-D" contingency, I suppose we can't really blame him for sloppy camera...

That was amazing! Very beautifully done. :thumbup: Except now I really wish we could get DOF effects in the sim...

I like that one, Pilot; it really sums up Orbiter in a nice, artistic way. :thumbup:

Once I finally got it tweaked so it would run for more than two minutes without crashing:compbash2:, did some jumping around and found a nice little gem: an Earth-like planet with life orbiting a G-type star in the Sagittarius Dwarf with an incredible view! This is a really cool program, I could...

Where has this thread been all my life?

Absolutely no idea of this is legitimate or not but I ran across this site that sells the poster for $10 (+shipping). http://www.ultimax.com/rockets.html

Hmm, I thought it looked like only the reentry capsule separated in the live feed. I wonder to what extent, then, can this really be called a flight of a complete Dragon? I suppose if all the trunk section really provides is solar panels, storage space and maybe larger fuel and consumables...

Oops, I did forget Shenzou. Historical hyperbole retracted :P (ATV is also a good point, although I'm not as hopeful about a manned ATV ever becoming reality, sadly)

And the first orbital test flight of a (potentially) manned spacecraft by anybody since Buran in 1988 We're finally moving past the shuttle era and actually flying new hardware for manned spaceflight. Congrats Spacex and keep em' coming! :cheers: