Work for Senior Citizens on Mars Maybe

It'd certainly be insane to trash the ISS so soon. If we can't keep groups of people alive & well while doing something useful for extended periods in low Earth orbit, then that surely prejudices any longer flight plans.

I think nuclear material & methods need revisiting. To move in space you need energy and mass to react against. The energy density of nuclear fuel is unrivalled, and you also have a ready made thermodynamic cold load ( the vacuum ) to do other useful work. For 'heat engines' you need a hot spot and a cold spot. The efficiency is better the wider the difference in temperatures, so the low ambient of space is good. And you'll never heat it up by our activity - the ultimate cold bath. The Voyager craft are still doing exactly that on decades old Plutonium.

Various ion drives have already operated well, that way you throw a small amount of matter really fast. Alot of donkey work could be done by such unmanned machines to haul material up and down the gravity wells, laying provisions/facilities at the better Lagrange points, say. Such unoccupied 'camps' could station keep for years with simple methods like ion drives, conducting tethers and light sails. Get the human occupied craft to raid the caches enroute later on. It takes planning and patience which may exceed our tolerances though.

The chemical rockets, throttle-able or otherwise, are still required of course. Their energy density ( available Joules per kg of fuel ) is lower than nuclear, but the specific impulse ( available thrust force per kg of fuel ) is much higher. It would be great if we could make rocket fuel on the Moon, that is : where is the water?

Cheers, Mike.

ISS is inside the Earth's magnetosphere - so most nasty rays from the Sun at least ( high energy protons generally ) spiral into the poles. Thus Aurora. But once you cross the ( Van Allen ) belts you're on your own. That's about a half a dozen Earth radii away, thus well within the Moon's orbit.

Cheers, Mike.

It's an Apollo 7 gag. Gunter Wendt was the white room chief ( where you get into the capsule before launch ). Apollo 7 was the first flight after the Grissom/Chaffee/White fire. The astronauts, Wally Schirra especially, threw their weight around and demanded many changes. Gunter was their personal choice because of his Gemini program work - they trusted him as he was a very exacting man. Safety obsessed. So before launch, after they are belted in, hatch closed and counting down, there is no one else on the pad - one of them said the above line with a German accent. It broke the ice well.

A particular issue with that launch was the design of the couches. There was a significant chance with a land impact ( upon takeoff abort say ) of spinal damage from the collapse of the couch frame. Destructive testing had shown that amply. Wally Schirra insisted upon the insertion of a mission rule to not launch in certain wind conditions ( onshore and too fast ). The winds were exceeded on the day. Nonetheless Schirra was asked to OK launch anyway, despite that it would break that exact mission rule. The flight controllers were under considerable pressure to launch as the Apollo program had been delayed some 18 months by that stage. TV cameras were rolling etc.

So this is the sort of thing Wally Schirra was crappy with NASA management on. He had announced retirement from the program before that mission in any case. Brave man. He OK'ed the launch. We have of course since discovered issues with NASA ( upper ) management in a far worse vein.

Cheers, Mike.

( edit ) The other line I especially like is, I think, attributed to Neil Armstrong but never quite officially confirmed. When asked about what he thought about the flight's safety he replied something like : "How would you feel sitting atop 20000 parts, each of which was supplied by the lowest bidder? ". [ This morphed into a similiar line by Steve Buscemi in the movie Armaggedon ]

Yeah, same here. He's sorely missed.

If I remember rightly 'ribbon cable' and similiar groupings of wiring & insulation was pretty well invented as a response to the investigation of the Apollo 1 fire. Instead of the tangle of wires any old way .....

Cheers, Mike.