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Supposedly when JPL proposed using balloons inflated by gas generators as a landing system, Victor Singer worked the math out on a table napkin. Thatâs the legend, anyway.
I once made a Wikipedia page for Singer, but the editors said heâs ânot notable enough for Wikipediaâ. Not enough room for pioneering spaceflight engineers when thereâs all those notable Kardashians to document, yâknow. 
Gotta prioritize.
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Do they have any plans in the works for the kind of rocket that can take off and reach orbit again?
I know people are understandably gung-ho about sending humans to Mars, but if the first manned mission ends in tragedy it could set exploration back a couple more generations. Iâd like to see a fully robotic mission load one of these rockets up with rocks and bring them safely back to Earth as a test run for the technology.
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Mars 2020 is essentially the Mars Curiosity rover platform but with a different set of instruments and objectives. One of the objectives is to collect samples for possible return to Earth by a later mission.
More important for later manned missions, itâll experiment with producing oxygen from Martian atmospheric carbon dioxide. Which can be used to support life and produce rocket fuel for a trip home. (Using the oxygen to burn carbon monoxide or methane produced by the same process.)
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Practice makes perfect!
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Yes, producing water from rocket fuel - indoors - with large amounts of hydrogen as a byproduct - is a tad more dangerous.
(Watney lowered the oxygen in the hab, but forgot to account for the unused oxygen he was exhaling through his mask.)
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Thatâs the single worst bit of info concerning Wikipedia Iâve ever come across.
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Donât so much care about that compared to how many late-stage capitalists we can cram onto a one-way Mars mission. 
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Full Fist!!!
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I donât get why he had to do that. Water is available in the ground and from the atmosphere. It certainly wouldnât come from Earth. The existing water farming equipment should still have been working.
Weâve found evidence - most of it very recent - of permafrost. But that doesnât mean itâs available everywhere - especially away from the poles -, and youâd have to dig for it. With the atmosphere being 1% of Earthâs, that availability is very low there too.
Nonononono, I donât want those motherfuckers having the strategic high ground. If anyoneâs getting kinetically harpooned, I want Murdoch et al to be first.
While I fully support private industry as merely a carrier of science packages in space, when the conversation turns to harvesting things in space (comets, asteroids, planetary mining, etc.), we get into all sorts of complex issues (Slate):
In her view, the bill fails to address basic issues, such as who would license and regulate asteroid mining operations, as well as larger issues, such as the legality of mining operations under international law. However Congress might decide to interpret the Outer Space Treaty, she says, failing to make sure other signatory nations are on the same page could lead to geopolitical consequences. If other space-faring nations interpret the Asteroid Act as the United States playing loose with the Outer Space Treaty, they might decide to do so themselvesâand in unpredictable ways. China, for instance, has declared its intention to send humans to the moon, and hinted at possible mining operations. If China sees the United States as having already violated the terms of the Outer Space Treaty, what version of the rules will China be playing by in its own operations? âThe point here is recognizing that itâs not just a matter of law,â Gabrynowicz says, âItâs a matter of political strategy.â
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Thus the ongoing tension between the Belter and Flatlander governments in Larry Nivenâs work.
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Well, I apologize, but Iâm gonna do it again, then.
Wikipedia also rejected a page for Yardley, although he is mentioned on several pages other people put in later.
The main reason I wanted to put a page in for John Yardley was so that I could record the value of a Yardley, which is an extremely obscure aerospace measure of atmospheric pressure - one dyne per acre.
According to legend, at some point it was insisted that a slot in a requisition form had to be filled out (because rules) specifying the limits of resistance to vacuum for some particular part. The actual right answer was âas vacuum resistant as is possible at time of manufactureâ but somebody - I think the Air Force? - insisted that it had to be a quantifiable number or the form was wrong. So Yardley put in âone dyne per acreâ to satisfy their bureaucratic requirements. Some of the working engineers thought this was very funny and for years theyâd work it into conversation - âyouâll need to test that to one Yardley before the bird goes upâ. This usage was dying out by the time I heard it, because all those guys were retiring.
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Is a dyne even a thing?
Itâs a CGS unit of measure, pre-SI. Ironically, I learnt that from Wikipedia.
Google saith âDyne: a unit of force that, acting on a mass of one gram, increases its velocity by one centimeter per second every second along the direction that it acts.â
So it was a ridiculously archaic way of saying super-hard vacuum, even in the 60s. One Yardley is 2.47105381 Ă 10-9 pascals (again according to Google).
My car gets forty rods to the hogshead and thatâs the way I likes it! â Abe Simpson
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None, the invisible hand helps it along.
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SpaceX this week announced plans to send its unmanned âRed Dragonâ spacecraft to Mars as soon as 2018
âas soon as 2018â does not mean âby 2018â. In fact it means the exact opposite.
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