Space thread

Alright, I think I know a lot about space. I've read everything, not the theoretical. But just stuff about our cosmic address, I'd like to cheers the Epic success of Orion splashing down in the Pacific. We are riding the second wave of space exploration. England wants to send a man to the moon soon, India just sent a successful orbiter to mars for a fraction the price anyone thought possible, Europe led by Germans just did a rendezvous with a comet. SpaceX, Virgin galactic, Lockheed, Boeing, Sierra Nevada, and NASA contracts.

http://techcrunch.com/2014/11/22/space-x-x-wing-rocket-drone-landing-pads/
This pic is what all rockets will look like in the future. This is a fuel tank with fins designed to alter pitch/roll directing it down toward earth upon re-entry making it reusable. These projects cost $1B or more and cannot afford to throw away their work every launch.

We have like 7 other planets in the solar system some with promising moons. Our moon is a 3 day field trip distance that could become a getaway for the wealthy in our lifetime. Everything else has no feasible return flight whatsoever.

I'm stoked Elon Musk is the catalyst on Mars.

As for the most valuable places in our solar system Saturn and Jupiter have the moons Enceladus, Titan and Europa all containing frozen water. An American spacecraft flew through Enceladus' geysers found liquid salt water and high nitrogen content (literally snows back to the moon making it nearly skiable). There is plenty of frozen water in our solar system, Saturn's rings are snow. Enceladus is exceptional and exciting because is there is evidence of possible oceans of water from thermal heat and is the best bet for containing life in our solar system, Earth has ecosystems that survive entirely on geothermal vents...

If you flew in Orion today you would be going almost 4,000 miles an hour in 180 seconds. 180 seconds is nothing, and 4000 mph is just Mach 5, at this point the spacecraft is so high it only weight half as much, causing it to propel in the next 3 minutes to insane speeds that can get it out of the atmosphere. Rockets are and will always (it seems) be the only thing we know of capable of going the threshold of 7 miles per second, the minimum presise speed to exit earth's gravity, Mach 22 or so. The voyager spacecrafts going 70,000 and 50,000 mph or so are at this point the fastest vehicles we humans can produce. We can only do so by using rocket stages to get us to 17,000 mph then as the vehicle passes by a planet a 90 minute thruster fires sending it around the planet. Multiple times the vehicle passes, reaching high speeds. This is why there are short windows of time which you can send people between planets. Trip to mars is feasible only every 18 months.

If you want to talk about telescopes, that's cool too, telescope progress has made leaps and bounds in the past 100 years, 3 telescopes are being built with mirror arrays much larger than what's around even today

anyone with any INTERESTING INFO on all things space. Anything Carl Sagan, etc. please feel free or I can just go on. Thx and bless man kind