Kryten

They announced the entire space station program as part of project 921 in the 90's, and all the planned phases of the uncrewed lunar exploration program well before Chang'e 1 launched. Pulling a major program out of the blue just doesn't fit.

They have no officially stated program, likely because they have no actual program.

His attitude is that VG can't lead to anything more than that; and without complete changes to their approach, he's right. Neither the hybrids nor the feathering mechanism scale up or have any utility for orbital spaceflight.

You just answered your own questions. In a chemical engine, the vast majority of the heat is generated within and carried away by the reaction products, you just have to worry about the small proportion radiated into the combustion chamber and nozzle. In a nuclear engine, much of the heat is generated away from the propellant and can't be easily removed by it, limiting the power levels that can be reached without the engine melting.

Space is both a major military asset and big business. Wondering why it might be 'weaponised' is like wondering why nations have navies.

Sats smaller than that are catalogued all the time, e.g. 1U cubesats.

Tiangong 1 has reached it's limit for visits for a number of reasons, and T-2 require CZ-7, which requires a new launchpad, which requires Wenchang. New rockets, launchpads and especially space centres are always going to take years no matter how much money you throw at them.

There have been repeated mentions of a near-operational ASAT system by Russian officials, but it's usually been thought to refer to the Naryad system that was under test in the final days of the USSR (and for which Rockot/Briz-K was developed).

There were no integrated tests. Also, they planned to have passengers onboard after just five flight tests of this engine, and they barely avoided another explosion after a fire started in fuel scraps they'd stored around the main NOX storage tank. This is the fourth test under power, with a completely new engine and major structural changes.

This isn't Change 5, it's an engineering test vehicle for Chang'e 5. The next mission is still planned to be Chang'e 4.

The switch to plastic also included the addition of two tanks in the wing roots-one methane to lower the likelihood of hard start, one helium to steady out the end of the burn. These could have led to a weakening of the engine structure, which would lead to bad things if combined with higher-than-expected oscillations in thrust. From the in-flight photographs, the wings came off very early and were nearly complete.

What's Pyrios?

There is no chance for progress here. The shuttlecock doesn't scale up past SS2 scale, the hybrid didn't scale up past SS1 scale despite Branson banking that it would-there's nothing else new. Lynx and New Shepard have more mature technologies and more growth potential.

There's little public information on the engine change, as VG didn't want to rattle customers/investors, but SNC's official statement today is pretty unambiguous; Edit: er, so basically what Ignath said.

SNC was dumped by VG in May, this was the first flight test of a new, in-house engine. I'm not sure they built the tank that caused the fatal accident, either.

Their new engine and/or the structural modifications necessary to support it caused the vehicle to fail, outside of a very unlikely coincidence, given those were the new factors on this flight. The new engine that they had to put in because the old would literally shake the ship to pieces during a full burn, connected to the replacement NOX tank they had to put in because the old one killed people if filled to the design pressure, and the methane and helium tanks needed to stop the engine destroying the vehicle just as quickly as the last one... I could go on and on. The entire vehicle is a kludge of barely plastered over design issues, fundamentally built around a scaled-up engine that simply didn't scale up. They hit the practical limits of the basic SS1 design a long time ago: they need to admit that, and start over again, or sink without a trace.

A waste of what? If this thing gets cancelled, it's not going to have any effect on Lynx or New Shepard so the industry will survive, the engine technology is a dead end, nobody else is interested in the shuttlecock system-the only major effect is Beardy Branson doesn't get to make even more money by putting other people in danger.

Tank was in the debris, basically the only thing left intact. I'll see if I can find the picture again... EDIT:

'China's returning lunar orbiter shoots out the parachute to land on earth'-Xinhua twitter Not sure if this is really confirmed, or they're just putting updates out at the predicted times.

You don't honour somebody by putting more people in the same flawed deathtrap. This thing has taken enough lives, let BO or XCOR have their go.

Capsule has separated from the bus, reentry should be within the next hour.

It seems SS2 left them rather than the other way around. Largest bits found so far are half a wing and the tank, and the deceased pilot was still in his seat.

The new component on this flight was the solid portion of the motor, not the tank. It being the cause would be a pretty big coincidence. EDIT: Reports are that the tank is intact. They swapped in a wound carbon-composite one after the accident, it was probably one of the strongest parts of the whole plane.