Kryten

You must have messed up a conversion somewhere; UK contribution to ESA is roughly 0.5 billion Euros, JAXA budget is roughly €2 billion.

Not many providers would let you put a bargain-basement chemical thruster system next to their primary payload. Nobody sane would allow you to bring one onto the ISS, which is what the cheapest launch option entails.

There's already a company that offers orbital space tourism; they've only been able to arrange nine flights, and two of those were the same guy. It's simply not a market big enough to justify development of new craft.

That's not going to happen. Just how rich do you think Musk is?

Or ESA, given they have an operational Mars orbiter. One capable of taking stereo images even, which should remove a good part of the ambiguity from lighting conditions. So what does it see? Well...

I was about to post 'back in two days', but it seems you proved that point for me. Back in less than 20 minutes...

Actually take a look as it; that's the same mesa with slightly different lighting. It's still no more face-like than your average 'jesus in wood grain/bird poop/cheese on toast' sighting.

A better resolution image of the same hill;

There's a lot of bloat, but there's some good stuff in there. The music player is certainly a lot better than Play Music for local content.

We could all just literally ignore SpaceXray and try to have a reasonable conversation about phones. It's not as if he comes out with anything worth reading.

SSTL is a private company.

Britain is a founding member, but there was no unified civilian program until UKSA was set up in 2010. It's higher than all other civilian space programs combined. I highly doubt it beats the combined total of military+civilian ones, particularly with the NRO's fondness for $1 billion+ sats to contend with.

That's a list of launches for NASA; KSC is a multi-user spaceport, it also hosts commercial and USAF launches.

'Made in Korea' samsung devices are made in samsung's own works in Gumi; they cut costs through vertical integration rather than cheap workforce (although SK labour is still pretty cheap compared to Europe or US). The vertical integration is exactly why they have the infrastructure to make chips for the iphone.

As far as I can tell it's not specific models as such, but a certain proportion of each model. I just checked my own Samsung phone (an S3 mini) and it's marked 'made in Korea'. EDIT: It seems some are also made in Vietnam. Again, as a portion of the run rather than specific models.

Quite a few Samsung models are still made in South Korea, which means they come ahead by his own standards. Other than that there's manufacturing in India and Russia, but neither of those involve phones that are actually sold outside of those countries.

Luna 6 had airbags as part of it's landing system.

Obviously, the best thing to see is a launch. The launches scheduled in 'a few weeks' are a Falcon 9 with a comsat on the 26th of August, another Falcon 9 with another comsat on the 19th of September, and an Atlas-V with something called CLIO on the 16th. CLIO is basically the closest you can get to a black launch (there's not even a statement of what government agency it's for, nevermind what it is or what orbit it's going into), so I'm not sure if the viewing areas will be open for it.

How does the reaction wheel spin up?

Dragon and one other for redundancy reasons; otherwise they'd be dependent on Atlas V. The other will probably be CST-100; the experience with Kistler in COTS means they're wary of the risk that comes with small, less diversified competitors. SNC going belly-up requires a lot less disruption than Boeing doing the same.

3. They may or may not do a very short-term six person period as a stunt, and the full station will have six during handovers (like Mir).

Explosion due to combustion instability isn't going to happen to any rocket that has already got past the ground testing stage and isn't being shaken to pieces already. Most failures are due to quality control errors; as an example, tens of rockets from multiple countries have fallen to cleaning rags being left in pipework.

Evolution by natural selection, on it's own is not a theory that can be disproved; it's a mechanism, which will occur given a specific set of conditions. If you have competing entities with mutations and heritable traits, populations will shift towards traits more suitable to their environment, whether those entities are animals or computer programs.

And with this expanded crew, we may again see 13 people in space for a brief period, depending on Chinese plans.

Not all radioisotope dating is radiocarbon dating, and does not work in the same manner, that was my whole point. You don't seem to understand what you're talking about.