** The Official Space Flight Thread - The Space Station and Beyond **

Designed to protect from the 2200°C heat produced when the Orion space capsule is re-entering Earth's atmosphere. The heat shield is covered with a material called Avcoat and the coating burns away as it heats up:

 
SideWinder said:
What are the 'moon landing was a hoax' people saying about Rosetta?
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Presumably....

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Hot off the press, taken by Rosetta:

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Credits: ESA/Rosetta/NAVCAM – CC BY-SA IGO 3.0

This mosaic comprises four individual NAVCAM images taken from 42.0 km from the centre of Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko on 17 November 2014. The image resolution is 3.6 m/pixel and thus each original 1024 x 1024 pixel frame measured 3.7 km across. The mosaic has been slightly rotated and cropped, and measures roughly 5.0 x 4.1 km.
Click to expand...

http://blogs.esa.int/rosetta/2014/11/20/cometwatch-17-november/
 
Some exciting stuff in TW@N. I hope they get funding for asteroid redirect mission. 3d printer in solace is just awesome, surprised they went plastic rather than metal sintering, I wonder what the reason was, unless it literally zero g meaning metal would float everywhere. Although surly use dome sort of temporary binder till the laser works and a vacuum to regather anything that hasn't stuck.
And that composite robot looks awesome.
 
Keeping my eye on it.
Have two big issues with it.
The extremely long time table(which just seems to miss the boat, between china doing a lunar sample return mission in the coming years and spaceX want to go to mars in a decade, it just seems underwhelming for the time scale purposed) and the massive cost.
One news article said they will need another 3bn, now the news article might get that wrong. I can't see anything on actual costs unless I'm being blind.

Why can't a company send a 3d base printer, green house and robotic Gardner to the moon, now that would be a mission, actually testing ideas that have been around for ages. Not that lunar one isn't a worthy mission, it just seems like they should be done within 5 years not 10.
 
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The kickstarter phase is about setting up project planning from what I can see, there is some information on their website about further funding;

"We’ve undertaken market research in the UK and the USA which demonstrated a strong interest in the mission and the digital memory boxes. Based on the findings, we are able to predict around 15% of the global population would be able to afford the product. And about 1% of that group will purchase a digital memory box. This delivers a mid-point projected revenue of £3billion (around $4.7 billion)."

So I suppose it's a kickstarter to set up a private space program, and more of those can only be a good thing in the long run. I've certainly wasted money on more pointless endeavours.
 
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