Kryten

Burn time was shorter than the successful may test, so seems to have been an engine failure. Exactly how much shorter is not really established, but probably 10 seconds or so given trajectory.

The FAA have just approved a launch licence for the NS system, allowing commercial flight of 'active and passive payloads'.

It doesn't really mean anything, a missile of this range is going to break up on re-entry. All that matters is if the RV survives. We've no word one way or the other, but based on how it handled the HS-14 tests it probably did.

The analysis is based on questionable assumptions. This article goes through better than I could.

Project pilot attempted to produce an orbital vehicle by attaching OTS motors together like this; it did not go well. Most either exploded or suffered catastrophic structural failure.

Most modern fairings have a rounded 'ogival' fairing, it's just a lot of rockets use old designs. The atlas 5 pointed fairing is a direct descendent of the original atlas-centaur fairing from the 60s, and the DIVH fairing was designed for Titan IV in the eighties.

I doubt the GSE is the sole problem they noticed during the flight. For a start they said before the launch that the next two rockets were already ready, so why the wait to at least October?

Solid fuel needs to be under pressure to burn quickly and completely enough to be useful propellant; that's part of why their dry mass is so high, the casing needs to contain that pressure. If you end up with any holes, and it would be very difficult to avoid them in a situation like this, you're not going to have a useful engine anymore. If you do manage to avoid holes, you've just reinvented the casing.

Given there've been thousands of scud combat launches, nitric acid/kerosene is quite possibly the most used liquid prop combination ever. It's either that or ethanol/lox from V-2 launches.

Boeing's ALASA used a monoprop mixture of nitrous and ethylene. It ended up being cancelled because they basically couldn't get it to not explode in ground tests.

Delta IVH had a partial failure on the first launch due to resonance effects with the fuel; the fuel sensors were exposed prematurely, causing early shutdown.

Why would it require some fundamentally different mechanism to any other canyon? The length is just a factor of the shape and relief of Greenland.

Also the supposed EM drive thrust is far higher than would be expected from a photon drive of the same input energy.

http://allthingsnuclear.org/dwright/new-north-korean-icbm This launch demonstrated enough range to probably hit New York, and maybe hit DC. The re-entry was successful. We know because it was close enough to the Japanese coast that people saw it; http://www3.nhk.or.jp/news/special/northkorea_provocation/ (RVs tend to be very bright upon re-entry, so it's probably not as close as it looks.)

Pegasus uses three stages, and the rocket you're thinking of also had three stages.

Has anybody successfully fired a rocket engine with gel/liquid prop combination? Trying to do stuff that hasn't been done before doesn't seem sensible for an amateur effort.

Arabsat-6A isn't your average payload either, it cost somewhere in the region of $300 million: about twice as much as Amos-6. There could be quite a kerfuffle should it end up in the Atlantic.

They make shiny mockups, take money from rubes, and occasionally launch solid fireworks. A big liquid propellant rocket, even monoprop, is vastly outside their realm of expertise. EDIT: They just put up a post on facebook saying their stock price is likely to rise, but cannot fall regardless of the launch outcome. That's the kind of people we're dealing with. I'm not even sure they can legally say that, they certainly couldn't in this country.

It fits with their prior track record. If they actually get anything to space I'll eat a hat.

The Geneva convention only covers warfare. Tear gases are considered CW and banned in military contexts.

Laser weapons for permanent blinding are banned. .

What are you basing that on? There's a Blue presentation that calls the upper stages 'initially expendable'.

Your average mirror is only about 90% efficient, and the reflective layer is fragile enough that the 10% not reflected is enough for it to stop being a mirror pretty quickly.

The CDR assumed the methalox version. The kerolox is in dev, to an extent, but it's clearly getting nowhere near the resources of the methalox version. Hell, have ULA even released an official image of the kerolox version?

And there's much more to get hit with nowadays than there was during most of the shuttle era.