Kryten

Well, worldwide release is in ten minutes either way. Any bets on whether it'll take down PSN?

The tripods were stated to be aluminium; a new wonder-material in Welles' time, but not very effective armour. It's not implied to be very thick either; they shrug off rifle fire, but when one got hit by a shell it was obliterated. Something like a maxim pom-pom would seem to have a reasonable chance of disabling one.

If you don't have a source that's not the express, I'm going to say it's probably based on a misunderstanding of something. Their journalistic standards aren't exactly stellar.

Because apple fanboys think they're technology enthusiasts.

It's not coming to any console. Here's a life tip; spouting 'console war' memes where they make absolutely no sense does not make you look smart.

China do have existing re-entry capsules of the right size; they just look nothing like Shenzhou.

'Experimental propulsion module' sounds like it could be the 'advanced space tug' being developed for BLEO missions, mostly launches of next-gen Beidou sats. It was supposed to debut towards the end of this year, and is a hyperbolic stage basically comparable to fregat. EDIT: or not, that only has about a seven hour design life. Xeno, are you sure the sources talking about an orbital mission are reliable and not simply based on misinterpretation?

If Sony had exclusitivity-any kind of exclusitivity, even timed-they'd be shouting it from the rooftops. Just look at how much marketing effort they've put into highlighting the timed exclusivity of some small DLC packs for Destiny.

ESA has a lot more magnetospheric specialists than astrobiologists compared to NASA; to them, Ganymede (with it's own magnetosphere) is a tempting target. Callisto allows them to add another moon's worth of science return without having to face the more intense radiation of the inner parts of the system.

EDIT: Just to clarify, that's the total from 6 days of near-europa return for the flyby mission and 30 for the orbiter. It's roughly similar to the Van Allen belts, just thousands of times denser, and covering basically anything in the epicliptic.

Again, Luna-24 through 27 are funded.

The researchers seem to think so, otherwise it'd be on the ISS. In that case it's more likely an expense issue than anything else. The rest of the payloads are the exact kind of materials science studies the ISS was supposed to do in the 80s but wasn't capable of due to issues such as vibration. That's what I meant. 'Build on' is a metaphor for expand, expanded capabilities require new designs. The driving motor is NASA; it's their project and their money. Almost all scientists working on Orion are LM employees, almost all workers on Apollo were MD employees, and so on for the rest of the projects. NASA sometimes works as a systems integrator, but it has no manufacturing or detailed design capability. EDIT: Indeed, but their strategy (buy up anything not majority state-owned, place under centralised integrator) is rather dubious. It will either destroy the program entirely or allow them to regain ground, but it this point it's impossible to tell which. DOUBLE EDIT: Oh who am I kidding, it's Rogozin, of course it'll be a disaster.

The Russians did pay for Mars-96 and Phobos-Grunt. They failed miserably. They're paying for Luna-24-27 and Venera-D, and they're being delayed roughly a year a year. They're paying out of the nose for PTK-NP and the SHLV project, they just aren't going anywhere. The problems are structural and technical, not financial.

You've pretty much reached the limits of the crewed platform. Why do you think things like Foton or Bion exists? Human presence ruins most experiments sensitive enough to have to be put into space in the first place. Exactly my point. All it's done is put itself on a Mars intercept trajectory; that's more than any Russian probe has ever done. Don't forget they had Chandrayaan 1 as well; it may have ended prematurely, but it successfully entered lunar orbit and returned months of science data;, whereas Russia hasn't even reached 'make spacecraft respond to commands'. The Gecko sat was an ancient Vostok-based design, and Spektr-R was literally designed 30 years ago. I'm not saying they don't have the capability they have, I'm saying they've lost the ability to build on it. CCDEV is still on track for 2017/early 2018.

Why would anybody's definition include the ISS? It's in one of the most heavily exploited areas in existence, to the point it's regularly threatened by dead sats. There's very little useful left to do there. Think about that yourself. MOM is already more successful than anything out of Russia since '88. What does that tell you about relative capability? They've got five under development. Right now it's looking like the gap will be on the order of five-six years, and by the end of it they'll have developed at least one new crewed spacecraft; another thing the way Russians only have limited capability to do. At the current rate, the Indians will have their own crewed craft ready before the Russians.

That's is no such thing as 'manned space exploration', unless you stretch the word 'exploration' past breaking point. The US has retained actual exploration capability, Russia has nothing but Soyuz and various communications and weather sats.

This design is just one proposal, made by CNES. The other major one is one proposed by the major subcontractors of the Arinae 5, Safran and Airbus; they propose basically an Ariane V with smaller solids and a smaller core stage. Right now it's looking quite likely theirs will be selected over CNES's.

Whether it goes depends on the architecture; orbiter or multi-flyby. The radar produces considerably more data than can be transmitted in real-time, and lifetime for an orbiter mission would be short (about a month) due to radiation issues, rendering it pretty much impossible to actually get a useful science return. The multi-flyby option results in less time at Europa, but means all the data can be downloaded in the downtime between passes.

Get some cheap stamps, lick a bunch, attach to piece of high-quality paper or parchment. Bam, instant gene vault.

As of right now, 2,377, and last 15 includes Vanamonde and KasperVld. Not surprising really, given there's no reason for anybody other than mods to actually go there.

That would work, except none of the N1 explosions actually killed anybody. What do you expect from the channel that publishes Ancient Aliens?

NASA already have a design for ice-penetrating radar, it's part of the reference Europa mission (Europa clipper). It might not end up on the actual probe because there are issues with transmitting the massive amounts of data produced at those distances.

Except the last Soviet Moon mission was in 1976. Every single planetary mission since then has been at least a partial failure, and all since 1988 have failed completely. Their current capability is behind India, never mind the US.

If you're using a real definition for 'exploration', then space exploration has been led by the US, unquestionably. Russia's orbital scientific programs are few and far between, and the planetary exploration program hasn't successfully put a payload out of earth orbit since before the collapse of the USSR.

The spacecraft landed yesterday. All the geckos are dead of apparent hypothermia. Seems they forgot to tell Rogozin that bit...