News Elon Musk wants to put millions of people on Mars.

[Col_Klonk]

He is delusional - "fly from city to city within minutes" won't ever happen because it takes 3-4 hours to go through the security and customs.

Besides the bored weirdos at customs... I'll be interested in his multiple re-entry thermal insulation plans for a sub-orbital craft.
Dammm I've just given space-x and idea to work on !!

That Making Life Interplanetary.. is very revealing of Elon's pressure pot.

Space-X has up till now been very 'visible' in their promotion of Elon's ideas - Yuppy do goody flag waving stuff.
It's now dawning, and all the Yuppy do's are now beginning to realise things are not going to ..plan.
Now Elon's/Nasa's mars plan is not looking good after all, Nasa/Gov funding is 'drying up'.. and we need to 'crowd fund' the mars trip for the very big untested idea of a rocket.

Besides.. we want to nuke mars and then send an occupying force on a one way trip to a very unfriendly, non-life supporting, Pre-Nuked planet.

Dammm!! WHY didn't I think of this before.. I'll pay megabucks to be the worlds most stupidest idiot in the front of the queue... The prestige that Dale Carnegie promised me...

 

[Kyle]

The big takeaway for me was that the MCT is basically SpaceX's idea of what the Space Shuttle should have been: reusable, able to retrieve and deploy satellites, service the ISS, but can also land on the Moon and Mars. I wonder how NASA feels about that one.

 

[Col_Klonk]

The big takeaway for me was that the MCT is basically SpaceX's idea of what the Space Shuttle should have been: reusable, able to retrieve and deploy satellites, service the ISS, but can also land on the Moon and Mars. I wonder how NASA feels about that one.

Space shuttle was 'invented' long before MCT if I'm not mistaken.
Besides the MCT is too big to be functional... it's a nutjob idea. :hello:

It's better to use smaller, stronger craft, that if necessary can be built in orbit

 

[Andy44]

Nope, the idea of a really large, VTVL space shuttle is not new, either.

 

[Urwumpe]

Besides the MCT is too big to be functional... it's a nutjob idea. :hello:

It's better to use smaller, stronger craft, that if necessary can be built in orbit

I am not sure there - considering the planned refueling in orbit, its maybe exactly large enough to be functional.

 

[Thorsten]

He is delusional - "fly from city to city within minutes" won't ever happen because it takes 3-4 hours to go through the security and customs.

:lol:

Indeed, I suspect that made the Concorde significantly less attractive in the years before retirement, the time advantage wasn't just that pronounced any more.

Well, actually, if you 'fly from city to city within minutes' on a regular basis, you have to settle Mars soon, because you'll screw up this planet pretty badly.

I've had the pleasure of reading through an atmosphere dynamics book not so long ago, and the chemistry of the stratosphere is pretty interesting - and fragile. Bring too much stuff in, and the ozone layer goes for good, there's lots of catalytic cycles just waiting to eat up ozone. At one point people estimated how many supersonics in the stratosphere the planet could take, and the number was about ten times the Concorde fleet if I remember correctly.

Now, shoot rocket ships through there with some regularity, and you get the same problem reloaded - massive aerosol deposition into the stratosphere. Bye bye ozone layer, welcome Mars.

Wait - Mars also has a bit of a radiation problem... Maybe Mr. Musk should invest in a company manufacturing radiation protection gear next?

 

[Wolf]

:lol:

Indeed, I suspect that made the Concorde significantly less attractive in the years before retirement, the time advantage wasn't just that pronounced any more.

Well, actually, if you 'fly from city to city within minutes' on a regular basis, you have to settle Mars soon, because you'll screw up this planet pretty badly.

I've had the pleasure of reading through an atmosphere dynamics book not so long ago, and the chemistry of the stratosphere is pretty interesting - and fragile. Bring too much stuff in, and the ozone layer goes for good, there's lots of catalytic cycles just waiting to eat up ozone. At one point people estimated how many supersonics in the stratosphere the planet could take, and the number was about ten times the Concorde fleet if I remember correctly.

Now, shoot rocket ships through there with some regularity, and you get the same problem reloaded - massive aerosol deposition into the stratosphere. Bye bye ozone layer, welcome Mars.

Which brings me to the next question: will we ever see a truly environment friendly Company on this planet? If you build spaceplanes and rockets sure you will contribute to pollution but knowing that your project will kill the stratosphere is a different story.

 

[RGClark]

Nope, the idea of a really large, VTVL space shuttle is not new, either.

It might work also to use a horizontal landing system as a single stage point-to-point transport.

Base it on the X-37B:

You could even give it jet engines to give it greater flexibility where it could land, even for example at standard airports. This was the original idea for the Soviet Buran, though the final design eliminated the jets for simplicity:

http://www.comtourist.com/history/technik-museum-speyer/photos-technik-museum-speyer/

Bob Clark

 

[Thunder Chicken]

I wonder if SpaceX has considered the potential effect of passenger-carrying ICBMs on nuclear armed nations with early warning radars?

Direct flights from North Dakota to Moscow are probably out. :dry:

 

[Artlav]

I wonder if SpaceX has considered the potential effect of passenger-carrying ICBMs on nuclear armed nations with early warning radars?

Such things don't exist in Musk's sci-fi reality.

 

[Andy44]

I wonder if SpaceX has considered the potential effect of passenger-carrying ICBMs on nuclear armed nations with early warning radars?

Direct flights from North Dakota to Moscow are probably out. :dry:

I thought of that, too. I imagine that single flights on scheduled routes would be handled the same way jetliners are distinguished from bomber formations.

Which then made me wonder...what's to stop someone from disguising a bunch of bombers as jetliners, with transponders and so on? There are so many jets in the sky on any given night and nobody is visually identifying them.

Maybe I read too many techno-thrillers? Sometimes my imagination runs dark, especially on days like this...

 

[4throck]

I guess there are spies on the ground or dedicated 24/7 satellite surveillance of airbases, so that you know when the bombers take off.
Radar detection is a bit 1939

 

[Thorsten]

Which then made me wonder...what's to stop someone from disguising a bunch of bombers as jetliners, with transponders and so on? There are so many jets in the sky on any given night and nobody is visually identifying them.

As you can find out by calling a flight tracker page in your browser, for airliners it is basically always known where they are at any given moment - any deviation from the flightplan that was submitted in advance - and they have fighter escorts (happened two times in Germany recently as planes had com problems and diverted to an emergency landing) - any vanishing acts and they have fighter escorts

So, logistically this is pretty hard to pull off - you'd need to swap your bombers at a civilian airport for airliners (if they take off at a military airport, the game is off already) - while nobody should actually notice anything.

You can't fly them in formation, only one by one, because that's what airliners do.

You have to submit the flight plan in advance (so the target knows where you'll be going) - routes never lead over 'interesting' targets for fear of a crash.

You need to avoid being seen in the air - other airliner pilots do maintain situational awareness and look out for airplanes, and you can see a jet well over quite some distance at cruise altitudes.

You need to be able to match radar signature and performance of the airliner you're supposed to mimic near-perfectly.

And so on.

All in all, it's probably much easier to fire an ICBM or a cruise missile.

 

[Urwumpe]

You can't fly them in formation, only one by one, because that's what airliners do.

You have to submit the flight plan in advance (so the target knows where you'll be going) - routes never lead over 'interesting' targets for fear of a crash.

And now the reality - you can actually pull this off. Disable the transponder, and your bomber fleet appears on civilian radar like a group of birds. Of course, modern military radar won't get fooled if it is really manned by someone skilled. Even flying in close formation 100s of km away from the radar is no reason to not count your bombers in formation, even if its just one big blob for the radar. If the operator is able to make use of the technology around him. If the military radar is just operating in peacetime mode without somebody watching the indications for discrepancies, nobody will be able to notice you before you are already minutes away from dropping bombs.

The more aircraft are around you, the easier it gets. Fly below civilian traffic at high speed, and military radar might not detect you soon enough.

Its the same with sonar. Modern passive sonar can detect a single penguin fart 1000 km away. But if you have hundreds of civilian ships around you in a narrow strait, somebody undersea could play Beethoven and you won't be able to find him.

 

[Thorsten]

Seems you missed the topic - this was about bombers passing themselves off as airliners with transponders on not about bombers using any other penetration strategy like flying low or without transponder, sorry.

 

[Urwumpe]

Seems you missed the topic - this was about bombers passing themselves off as airliners with transponders on not about bombers using any other penetration strategy like flying low or without transponder, sorry.

No, I understand the topic as: Would a ballistic passenger transport be somewhat a risk to national security by making ICBMs easier to penetrate (any existing) defenses?

 

[Thorsten]

*sigh*

Well, my post, which you quoted (and to which you according to usual convention hence refer to) specifically quoted for clarity as to what I am replying to:

Which then made me wonder...what's to stop someone from disguising a bunch of bombers as jetliners, with transponders and so on?

(emphasis by myself).

So either you are in fact off-topic, or you have very non-standard quoting habits by answering this with And now the reality - you can actually pull this off. Disable the transponder

In other words, you seem to say that you can in reality pull off disguising bombers as airliners with transponders on by switching transponders off.

Which, you'll have to admit, sounds a teensy bit odd. :lol:

Edit:

As a side note, I also don't see how Fly below civilian traffic at high speed, and military radar might not detect you soon enough. resonates with your belief that ballistic passenger transport [is] somewhat of a risk is the topic I am writing about - surely ballistic transport craft would not fly low?

 

[francisdrake]

Maybe we should make a BFR addon ...

 

[Astro SG Wise]

Maybe we should make a BFR addon ...

Totally, man! Maybe the Dragon V2 first, though? :lol:

 

[RGClark]

[Moved]

Bob Clark