lol

So, you've applied power to a heat pump to extract heat from the cold side (where your CPU is) to the hot side. Now you have a hot side that needs something to do with all that heat, or your system will run away. You cannot cool a spacecraft without off-gassing, evaporating, sublimating, or radiating, period.

That explains the drivers down here on I-10, slowest I've ever seen on an interstate.

... that fired on every single landing ever done by any space shuttle, since not getting the gear down falls in the way-not-good category for crew survival. You're right that they were technically a "backup," but they weren't contingency based, they fired every time.

Your idea needs a new island... I don't think there are any Hawaiians too keen on putting much of anything on the big island.

Well, it _was_ on the top from the start. Then budgets got cut, structures had to be lightened, and the only way to make the damn thing go up at all was to put it on the side. The amount of smug coming from your post should at least align with the amount of fact contained therein. Reference: Chris C. Kraft.

If the space shuttle landing gears were deployed pneumatically they wouldn't be the space shuttle landing gears. While there is redundancy in the system, they're actually pyrotechnically actuated. Explosions are still the most reliable way to actuate anything because all that needs to happen is to manufacture a part correctly, not damage it/make it damage tolerant, and then release potential energy. Likely any landing gear needed for a spacecraft such as the Falcon would be similarly actuated, as there is no reason for retraction to occur outside of preparation for its next launch.

Championship mule breeding rights?

"... GW Bush ...." "...1999...." trollface.jpg

Guilty until proven innocent in Texas? How so?

Burma shave?

Puu.

Really more of an anarcho-syndicalist commune.

The trouble with this is if you pacify those hundreds of people without roofs by giving them roofs, and their response is to now be a lot of happy people not doing their part to move the country forward. Then eventually they don't have to come burn down your roof, because the country, and everyone's roofs, die of lack of funding.

I actually hadn't read your post, I was just replying to ianare's assertions about thermal storage in rock.

With regard to using lunar regolith as a heat sink, you'll find that lunar regolith has incredibly crappy thermal conductivity, even compared to rock. It's very loosely packed, and consists of lots of silicates and metal oxides. It also has a very high solar absorptivity and IR emissivity, making it very hostile to radiative devices that face it, as it emits a large portion of the solar flux that it sees (around 85%) in the IR spectrum; exactly the spectrum that spacecraft radiators are good at emitting and absorbing. I mention this for a frame of reference, as it allows the regolith on the surface of the moon to heat up quite a bit, and yet, just a few inches down (less than a meter) it's cold enough to freeze water in a vacuum. For several lunar lander and rover applications, a "heat spike" has been considered, that is, something that can pipe heat, as you are suggesting, into the moon. Every time that trade has been done it's come out largely in favor of radiative heat rejection being lighter and more efficient.

The only concern currently with radiators on the moon, is dust occlusion. Even a 10% coating of a radiator with lunar regolith shows indicators of drastically reducing thermal performance (10% coverage is less than you can see with the naked eye). Perhaps for something that was going to be in the sun, on the moon for decades, a heat spike of some sort could be more viable. Anything near the equator on the moon should be roughly 14 days sun, 14 days dark, though, so again you have to contend with a radiator and phase change thermal storage being lighter and more efficient than a gigantic heat sink.

Source: This is my job.