Kryten

It was an EA single-player game.

The idea simply doesn't work with the market for payloads as it is. Look at sea dragon-it might have had a low price per kilogram, but it would be completely unaffordable. Why? Not enough demand to even fill out a single launch. Even if there was (let's some some government decides to send up a massive space station with it), there would not be the regular business required to pay for maintenance of all the equipment, to pay off the cost of producing all of that equipment in the first place, for paying the launch crews, et.c. et.c.

It failed, what ten seconds later? It certainly didn't return any useful data.

The Soviets had plenty of Mars probes, but none completed their missions and most were complete failures. Other than those and Venus, all they had were the Vega probes that visited Halley's comet.

The panels don't undeploy.

^You're looking at $135 million in repair bills.

That's nonsense. What would it be putting up that's already reasonably standard? 6 KH-11s? Two whole iridium constellations? It's vastly outsized for LEO demand.

SLS is not intended to carry payloads to LEO, it's optimised for higher-energy orbits.

Anyone trying to get updates on this launch is advised to keep an eye on the twitter of the 45th space wing, the USAAF unit responsible for the launch site. You know you're messing up your PR when the USAAF is saying more about your launch than you are...

The US tried this approach in the 50s with the NOTSNIK program, but the payloads were under 10kg. I don't see how you could do 100kg with anything that could feasibly fit on such a small aircraft.

I like how you're implying that you aren't in fact a geek. On an internet forum dedicated to a video game about little green men flying rockets...

Yahoo's take: NASA is considering sending a quadcopter to Titan, the largest moon of Mars. That's not just a typo-watch the video.

We can now at least console ourselves with the fact we're not as bad as the swiss. EDIT; And seconds after I say that, they score the first of two goals.

Where do you get the 2kg figure? I can't find a source right now, but I think it's closer to 20.

Correct. Here's the full spacecraft configuration; note docking ring on top of the return capsule.

This is the Chang'e 5 precursor mission; the actual Chang'e 5 mission isn't scheduled until 2017. This is just a systems test of the return capsule and orbiter bus using a lunar fly-by. It's a free-return trajectory, so more like the soviet Zond missions. It even has the same capsule shape, if scaled down;

MGM, given that exact plot point appeared in their 2001 sequel, 2010.

Falcon XX isn't falcon heavy, it's a super-heavy powerpoint rocket (or 'preliminary unfunded design concept' in spacex's words). Of course spacex haven't actually revealed any cost estimates for developing or producing it, so where the '40 times the cost figure' is supposed to come form is anybody's guess.

Only with a massively cut-down SM.

I don't really get this attitude. Surely SLS will be pretty much exactly the same? The only difference is an extra SSME.

It's never been the case. The fittest organism to survive in an environment wouldn't have the kind of sexual display structures many organisms have, it wouldn't have deliberately-hindering fitness markers-it wouldn't even have reproductive organs.

Yes, because that's what fitness means in an evolutionary context.

This is backwards-Proton was initially a two-stage rocket, they added more stages because it had the extra capability.

Liquid hydrogen is already bad enough, a rocket that would have to run on gaseous hydrogen would have an incredibly low mass ratio.

If a spacecraft isn't intended to rendezvous, in all likelihood it will never go close enough to another spacecraft for anything like this to be visible; there'd be no point.