Kryten

At least according to statements by deputy PM Dmitry Rogozin. This is going to have pretty serious consequences if true-ending Russian participation would end the ISS completely, and Antares and Atlas V depend on Russian engines-but Rogozin has a habit of making overblown statements and not much actual power. At the moment we can assume this isn't necessarily true until repeated by the Duma/Putin/Medvedev, but it's still very concerning.

Then it's a good thing there wouldn't be any gamma, isn't it? Fresh reactor=no fission products=only alpha emitters, this has been pointed out twice already. Comparisons to Chernobyl are ridiculous.

If the counter-rotating docking port design is used, crew transfer could be by a sort of 'airlock' chamber in the hub-simply a small room that switches from rotating to non-rotating and vice-versa.

NERVA was an american program. Try actually reading the thread before pulling out a strawman.

How exactly would a small reactor full of fresh fuel be 'equivalent to a dirty bomb'? There'd be no fission products, all you'd have would be widely-scattered alpha-emitters. The best actual equivalent would be the K-431 accident-that resulted in a dockyard being unusable for only a few months, with much higher concentrations than would be present in your scenario.

Then I suppose that makes the engineers of both the US and USSR NERVA programs 'stupid'. Remember we're talking about a rocket engine, weight and performance are far higher priorities than a few particles in the exhaust.

Smaller variables will be involved in survival, but not many will be too relevant to the question of 'can life survive on Mars, in general'. Peroxide levels, temperature, composition of the atmosphere are all general, but if you try to go deeper than that you're looking at stuff that would vary significantly between locations anyway. If the question was 'can life survive at Galle crater' or something like that you'd be able to meaningfully include amount of dust storms or exact spectrum of charged particle radiation or whatever, but it isn't.

Not many of these variables are likely to actually have a significant effect on microbial survival, so there wouldn't be much point.

Jas, your experiment would work exactly the same in a low pressure chamber with UV lamps and the right soil and gas mixtures-and probably for a good bit less money than sending this stuff to Mars with the equipment to monitor it, even if you disregard the ethical implications. This approach also means you can scale the conditions up to Martian conditions, as anything being immediately able to survive all of the various challenges of Mars initially (peroxide radicals, UV, temperature, pressure, et.c.) are extremely slim.

We have no way to get to the surface under Europa that'd actually fit on an affordable spacecraft-attempts to reach subsurface lakes in Antarctica, under much less ice, have required buildings full of equipment-and trying to do it before we've determined if there is life already there would be unconscionable in the extreme.

It's without mass, but momentum is dependent on energy content, not mass.

Curiosity's 'hand', the 'arm' of which always ends up being edited out because it can't take useful (i.e. not extremely distorted) pictures of itself. There's usually a nondescript grey blur where the mounting point actually is, and you can sometimes see the reflection of it in the camera lenses on the mast.

The effect of the asteroid on GSO sats will be far lower than that of the moon or irregularities in the earth, both of which they already deal with fine. Satellites aren't just placed in GSO and left there, they have to be able to maintain position or they rapidly start drifting.

Nobody has ever actually built a ClF3 rocket, never mind launched one. The closest anyone got was a soviet NH3/F upper stage project, and that was cancelled after a few ground tests.

I think there's a few slightly different designs knocking around. But more efficient, certainly.

Khrunichev have been waving around a design for a resurrected Energiya for a while, 'Yenisei-5', with a top-mounted cargo bay; it uses only three RD-120s and gets the same to LEO.

All the tooling is gone. It'd be no easier than producing a completely new rocket, and the basic design is very inefficient due to the side-carried cargo location carried over from Buran.

It's a company. It's a proposal by CAST with no government support, same as the CZ-5 was for several years. SLS has an actual design, a schedule, and is actually being built. This thing has no actual design, is to take off from a launch site that's a hole in the ground, and there's no schedule more precise than 'first launch in the the 2020s'.

...a company waves about plans with no government backing. It doesn't exactly mean much. I mean this specific 'new' proposal. It's been public and part of official policy since 2012.

They've announced this about four times already. In all likelihood no actual progress will occur until SLS flys, if then.

Except nobody says 'what's that causes'.

And make the rest of it even ganglier.

Wander around and dig up as many fossils as you can.

There've been four launches of 1.0 and five of 1.1. You'd have to be psychic to get any meaningful reliability figure from that kind of sample size.

It's not something I'd ask about, but that wasn't my point. You're assuming all vegetarians are like that because they're the only ones you'd know about. Obviously the most extreme members of a group are going to be the most vocal, it doesn't mean all or most are extreme.