Kryten

That's something of an understatement; the antennae themselves are thousands of kilometres long and require an area several km on a side. They also require extreme amounts of power (something like 10MW), and have very low bandwidth, single digit bits per minute. Oh, and all of these are for the transmitter, meaning this would all have to somehow be put under 40km of ice.

We're talking about 40km of ice here, there'd be immense amounts of pressure near the bottom. A shaft isn't going to survive unsupported, and probably neither would a probe.

If it was just 'space shuttle hype', why do ESA still show no real interest in indpendent crewed flight programs? None of the post-shuttle studies have got past the concept stage, and right now there's no work occurring even on concepts.

Why is everybody assuming this thing would have worked? We can barely get aerospike engines to work even now, and a shortfall of a few percent ISP in them would render the whole rocket practically useless.

I highly doubt an NTR reactor could feasibly be made 'high-impact shielded' like RTG fuel elements; the mass penalty would be enormous, and all of the channels for coolant, movement of moderator et.c. would severely compromise the armour.

Here are some photos including the upper two stages from the bottom, which seems pretty rare.

Does anyone have suggestions for apps they find useful? Any games that are actually games rather than microtransaction-based skinner boxes? It's a 2013 Nexus 7, so there shouldn't be any compatibility issues.

JP-10 is a specialised fuel blend for missiles, it's a precise mix of a few synthetic hydrocarbons. Almost all hydrocarbon-using space launchers just use something like JP-1 instead, which is a mass fraction of crude oil containing dozens of natural compunds in varying ratios. The only one I can think of that used a pure synthetic fuel is the Soyuz-U2, but it's fuel (Syntin) doesn't appear to have been similar to the compounds in J-10.

They did. It's called 'ESA'.

It's real colour. In some of the photos you can see the colour calibration thingy.

Military effectiveness isn't proportional to manpower. It's mostly dependent on military development budget and the state of the arms industry.

How would it help small nations? Superpowers would have overwhelming numbers of autonomous robots the same way they have overwhelming numbers of tanks and planes now.

It's a similar prize, but it's not at any point actually connected to the Nobel committee.

Again, the 5-segment SRB was not new. It was a resurrected part of a pre-Columbia upgrade program, one was tested all the way back in 2003. - - - Updated - - - Ares I and Ares V were pretty much completely unrelated.

Polyus. Why? Giant space laser, that's why.

Solids can be shut down just fine, with blowout panels. They just can't be shut down and restarted, but neither can most liquid rockets.

Von Braun died in '77, Saturn was long dead by then.

The actual program associated with that is Flagship; it's (so far) MSL, Cassini, Galileo, and Voyager's 1 and 2. I'd say it's a pretty serious contender.

I mean the discovery program. Not every NASA program involves people in a tin can.

Discovery, hands down. Only one of the ones on your list even left earth orbit, and that visited precisely one other body. Discovery has already resulted in excursions to no less than eight.

But for an LEO taxi, Atlas V would do, so it would still make no real sense. Atlas is already most of the way to being crew-rated with far less money than was put into Ares-1.

The 5-segment srb is more powerful as well as longer-burning, and had already been developed as part of a shuttle upgrade program. It just simply wasn't good enough.

The lander is still operational. The rover is also operational, but can't move or change the orientation of it's solar panels, so it's pretty much useless.

Atlas-centaur predates Saturn 1...

Where do you get this from? The first N1 didn't fly until 1969 ;by which point Saturn V was considered operational, and had already put people into lunar orbit.