Kryten

There seems to have been some confusion over the purpose of the project-while it is a 'space station' simulator in a general sense, it's a lunar base rather than an orbital station. EDIT: Good info available here and here. Salient points are; A sub-scale experiment was run in 2012 that successfully supplied oxygen for two people from 15m2 of plants, second month-long experiment with food and oxygen involved 36m2, no figure for long-term experiment but is probably longer rerun of the 36 The program's a basic feasibility study, it doesn't mean an actual base is planned any more than MARS-500 meant Russia is doing a crewed Mars mission It's being run by China Astronaut Research and Training Center, who also ran the Chinese participation in MARS-500

Given 'they' are the persons preventing people having fusion reactors in their cars, I'm going to guess it's 'everybody with the slightest lick of sense'.

This is about to get deleted anyway, but I hope a few people see this and avoid this kind of thing in future. There are two issues here; 1) There's a disclaimer at the bottom saying there's absolutely no warranty and they're not connected to steam or valve 2) They're claiming to offer a dollar per page view. Use your head, that's economic insanity. If something sounds too good to be true, it probably is.

A neutron converts to a proton through antielectron/positron emission.

Even if you manage to produce pure 11B as fuel, you're going to get neutrons from the 11B + p → 11C + n and 11B + α → 14N + n side reactions. Then there's the issues with power density and Bremmsstrahlung losses.

A round from a tank gun is not a good model for this kind of impactor; you're still only looking at about 2km/s relative velocity. At 8+ km/s, vapourisation (of impactor and target) and liquefaction (in metals) can't be ignored.

One of those was an explosion during first-stage flight, for which there's not really any other plausible explanation; and the first stage is also 'all that is common' to the models of Angara.

That would just make the problem worse. It was low enough that it was going to deorbit very soon anyway, and the test greatly delayed this. That it did ultimately decay is just an artifact of it's initial extremely low altitude, and hitting something that low for debris mitigation would be pointless-it would destroy itself without intervention in a matter of weeks.

Yes, a number of tracked pieces of debris ended up with higher apogees than they started with, and lasted a lot longer then they were supposed to. 'A lot longer' in this case is a year rather than a few months due to the very low orbit involved, but it still demonstrate the point.

Given Angara's track record (2/3 launches failed), that might not be the best of ideas.

That debris from destroyed objects in LEO will stay in LEO is easily demonstrated by looking up anything about the 2007 Chinese ASAT test and the 2008 US test that most certainly wasn't a response to it. Both cases involved sats being hit by missiles with very low orbital velocities, and both created debris with significantly higher orbital velocity than the initial sats.

That's been being done for over fifty years.

As for the Duna visibility and twinkling stars thing, actually boot up KSP, go into orbit, and look for it; it'll answer both of your points.

Proton is actually highly reliable-as long as the right person is paying for it. All six of the failures in the past five years were on federal launches, despite the other launches (commercial through ILS) using the same crew and equipment. Federal space agency pays less, and it's thought they're just getting what they pay for in terms of quality control.

Hence the US having had a moonbase since the late 70's. Oh, wait.

Roscosmos is now reporting that it burned up over China, and that 'one can confidently say that nothing has reached the Earth'. The Chinese might have something to say about that... Compare to the fuel tank from the sat. For this to happen, it must have already been badly off course by the time the reported failure happened.

Third stage flight ended about twenty seconds too early, probably engine problem of some sort. Proton doesn't have a self-destruct system. First parts of flight were streamed, and were nominal. This third stage is too high and faint for practical coverage. EDIT: Here's the video, but as I said there's nothing to really see. Rocket leaves sight, announcer repeats 'xxx seconds - pitch, yaw, roll are nominal', then 'off-nominal situation has occurred on the rocket, end of coverage'.

They recently admitted SS2 won't actually reach 100km, at least without very major changes to the design. Right now they're only aiming for 'at least 50 miles', the altitude in the actual contract signed by the ticket-holders.

I don't remember 'getting one guy to be able to look at Mars out of a window for a few minutes' being added to the NASA act.

The 'first step by NASA' was sanctions by the state department on Rogozin, which ended up effecting much of the space sector. Hardly NASA's fault you decided putting one guy in charge of multiple areas and letting him forge direct financial links with industry was a good idea.

The design is ultimately a stretched ballistic missile, so I highly doubt it'd have any cryogenics, particularly something as hard to deal with as liquid helium.

There are two different engines involved here; NK-33, a set of antiques imported to the US en mass by P&W, and RD-180, new-build engines produced by Energomash and imported a few at a time by LM. There are rumours that NK-33 requires certain parts from Russia shortly before launch and/or maintenence by Russian engineers, but even if this is not the case the stockpile will run out within a few years at the planned launch rate. The RD-180 stockpile is set to last a couple of years at most, but LM do have plans and a production licence; the problems are time and cost.

Rogozin might be, still nothing from Putin or the Duma.

Of those, only JAXA does not have a near-full launch manifest for the next few years, and ULA are severely threatened by the engine issue. They have large numbers of government and internal commercial launches. The Chinese industry survives with very little western money, the Russian one should too, although downsizing would be inevitable. The only way to guarantee that is to stop export, especially given most Atlas flights are military. EDIT: Rogozin himself, via interfax;

ISS was already agreed to get an extension to 2024, and one to 2028 was considered practically inevitable. As for the rockets-spaceflight involves a lot more than crewed, as a lot of people on this site tend to forget. Atlas is vital for basically all government payloads right now, and Antares is needed to keep the ISS supplied.