DDE

Emphatically. It's a major immaterial good that cannot be effectively commercialized, hence taxpayer bucks. Consider all the added GDP from the millions of US engineers and scientists recruited by this guy right here on one fateful evening.

I don't want to start that thread again, but remember that FTL missiles are now not entirely physically impossible. Thanks, Rian.

Well, it's survived since 1997, so you could call it... a mammoth among clickbait.

OK, clickbait titles abound. It's actually about the characteristic ecosystem known as the mammoth steppe, although the people involved have repeatedly stated their willingness to deploy mammoths or even a cheap gene-spliced knock-off. https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.kommersant.ru%2Fdoc%2F3819067 http://www.pleistocenepark.ru/en/background/ And... err... their Kickstarter (mods, don't kill me). TL;DR: unlike the modern moss and tree-dominated tundra, the mammoth steppes covered much of the Northern Hemisphere during the last Ice Age, mutually supported by large grazers - such as the mammoth. The hypothesis here is that the biosphere was a massive boon to carbon sequestering, and there was an additional benefit of all the trampled snow being a better insulator, further fortifying the permafrost. So now, all of that is gone except for two tiny enclaves deep in the Eurasian interior, while global temperatures rise and threaten to launch a vicious cycle of permafrost thaw. And the counterplan is to aggressively reintroduce as many grazers as possible to restore the ecosystem. The Pleistocene Park is currently a chunk of some 160 km2 with a bunch of imported bison and deer. Their claims of ongoing overt environmental transformation are hard to independently verified - for once, they did pick the cheeks end of nowhere for their park. But the only thing most people care are the mammoths, and it helps that Republic of Yakutia now has a gene lab dedicated solely to working with animals conserved in permafrost.

But that could reduce a different type of noise, along with releases of aerosolized or evaporated vinegar. P.S. Who knew that the global and apparently both Zionist and Freemason conspiracy is a member of the Sky Team Alliance?

Is that Gwynne Shotwell with coloured contacts?

Yasss. Salyut 7 is now legally available on YouTube in its entirety. For free.

Actual image of @kerbiloid's trunk.

@XB-70A, oh come on! How do you think Russian airstrips are cleaned? Actual answer: not well! But Siberian oil drillers really want to go home. Bonus: the most reliable engine on the Kuznetsov!

This looks like something that came later, something meant for... a redder planet. The Soviet Union never lost hope for a Marsokhod; I don't see why the Lunokhod team would be retired. Hell, they were going nuts: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nF2gU3_9WC4&feature=youtu.be&t=203

Does that look like a Lunokhod rover to you? Transmash only built the wheeled chassis for the Lunokhod; the contents of the vehicle were built by Lavochkin and the other usual suspects. That's pretty much the end of connections between Klin-1 and spaceflight; it was operated in a teletank fashion, from a nearby converted BREM-1, and I only have tenuous evidence it even had onboard cameras. It appears that vehicle hardening was used instead of radiation-hardened electronics (which the Soviet Union NEVER had - see the Fobos fiascos) - the manufacturer lists radiation protection factor of 200-300 for the robot, compared with 80 for the stock IMR, 250-300 for the initial IMR upgrade, 2500 for the final Chernobyl modification of IMR-D, and 8500 for the Klin control vehicle. The design team is entirely unrelated. Furthermore, there's a distance of 20 years between the production of documentation for the Lunokhod, and the Chernobyl accident. Looks like we have another myth on our hands.

We’ll have to, all the time. I’ve been hearing a lot about the critical condition of early Western nuclear waste dumps, such as Hanford.

Who do you think built the first shelter after the initial clean-up, while the interior was still capable of causing prompt radiation sickness?

Elon Musk is a supervillain, can’t he just make it cooperate? Immediately relevant: http://www.aoml.noaa.gov/hrd/tcfaq/tcfaqC.html

Chernobyl showed that telerobotics are less resistant to radiation than expendable humans and especially human-piloted heavy armour like the off-the-shelf IMR series. The robots were getting fried constantly, whereas the liquidators at least did not keel over immediately even when recovering fuel rod fragments or measuring the radiation from reactor lava. Ultimately, the most reliable bot there was Klin-1, which was just the usual 50-ton IMR, but optionally manned. Measurements and sampes from this corium slab were taken in this manner by the guy in the bottom picture continuously since about a month after the explosion.

The terminology aboke “leaking” is somewhat misleading, even if proper. Even in the course of normal operation, a practical aviation reactor with a directional shield would be spewing gamma rays and neutrons all around itself, and that would only slowly decrease following operation. Furthermore, I’ve found a singular mention of the 72-ton Object 805 “protected manipulator” developed in the mid-1950s under the warhead programs Geranium (for R-2) and Generator (for R-5) - before RDS-1 the Soviet Union developed and apparently tested several types of true dirty bombs (along with air-dropped tanks) loaded with various fission fuel production waste products.

Wrong. As my own earlier, vague post implied, I’d checked Rockot launch history and the July 2014 and September 2015 launches, complete with an identical or effectively identical civilian Gonets satellites, did not feature any surprise hitchhikers. So it’s not every time the old Naryad launcher flies that it has a space warfare mission. Furthermore, none of the usual suspects seem to have come up with Kosmos numbers yet. MoD has instead posted videos of another A-235 test to dominate the headlines throughout the weekend. Is there any direct way to sheck with the UN?

Oh, it is more fun than I thought.

As I said, they seem to be making every amateur mistake in the book. Similar to how many people...interpret NASA statements to sound like Orion can go to Mars on its lonesome. Plus their selection process includes no serious physical prep, and has died at the Skype call stage. Purely theoretically they could be selecting people now for a mission ten years down the line, assuming they want incredibly elite tailor-trained specialists, but that’s now what their plan looks like.

It is, or it seems to be among the less knowledgeable people that come across r/space. Plus they had contracted LockMart for a lander study and tried to get Musk-senpai to notice them, but He said “nah”. They sound amateurish (“just build us a different-diameter Dragon!”) but committed.

After the earlier landers imploded, Babakin had the thing overengineered for 150 atm and stripped off of anything but the thermometer; they used Doppler shift of the comm signal to measure the velocity of lander remotely. Later landers has their own impact accelerometer and an antenna dish that worked primarily as an aerobrake in lieu of parachutes - in this case the parachutes appear to have melted, plus the descent through the souposphere was dreadfully long.

It’d be worthless. At orbital velocities, a completely different set of impact effects is in play, and the material used is often quite irrelevant. What you need is a Whipple shield.

Beware the angry alligator. I’d agree with @tater, you really can’t put them in the same sentence. SpaceX can into space Excalibur Almaz can into used capsule MarsOne can into Skype calls

They never were the ones to build them, but now they’re taking a completely hands-off approach to spacecraft design. Although I really do wonder how many of these will fail and how many of those that succeed will be bought out by certain familiar names, as happens to start-ups in other industries.

Have there been any other Rodnik/Gonets launches since inspector sat tests, I immediately wondered. Per Wiki, yes, including between the second and third experimentals, so we should not necessarily expect any added orbital shenanigans for Christmases.