Kryten

Whut? Ariane 5 has eleven contracted launches this year-they're launching them literally as fast as they can.

It 'righted itself' solely due to some straps burning through at the right moment. If they'd held on a little longer, the cosmonaut would've cooked.

Considering the fact the shuttle has never spent a good part of it's re-entry going backwards, leaving the crew unable to reach the controls while being a few seconds from fiery death, it's obvious which one is safer. You could make that kind of statement about any incident with either vehicle.

It takes more energy to produce antimatter than you can get from annihilation of that antimatter-at least twice as much, as the process also produces equal amounts of matter.

Again, NASA has to pay Russia for cargo on progress and seats on Soyuz. It isn't like the situation with Japan or ESA, Russia legally owns it's half of the station and has no obligation to give the US anything for free.

By that definition, you're a star.

Depending on exactly what budget breakdown you're looking at, there's a good chance that's an 'ISS operations' item and doesn't actually include the construction activities. If it is, it makes perfect sense; they simply had less to run back then. EDIT: The US pays for a good portion of the progress and soyuz flights, simply because they use a large proportion of the payload capacity/seats. Don't forget to factor in stuff like astronaut training, and the cost of keeping trouble-shooting teams on standby pretty much permanently.

That just makes it worse. Most of the copies have gained mass relative to the prototype-but does mean the prototype has lost mass, or that the others, (most of them being less well-kept), have gained mass? Or even that they've all gained mass and the prototype has just gained less than most? Nobody can tell.

I'd say the major thing that does need changing is the definition of the kilogram; right now it's simply the mass of a specific lump of metal in a basement in France. If anything happens to that lump of metal, then the mass of everything in the universe changes; it's already changed by a few micrograms since being created.

Most Western news outlets reported they already had after the chang'e 3 landing (of course in reality it's some unfunded engineering proposals, but nobody lets stuff like that get in the way of a good story). Response from the American public? Diddly squat.

Adoption of electric propulsion for orbit-raising is causing that trend to reverse. Boeing has started producing an ion-propelled bus small enough for dual-launch to GTO on Falcon 9, and two companies have already ordered pairs and contracted launches.

The concept isn't to have 'private space programs' at all, it's simply for NASA to take a much more hands-off role in development. There's not a large enough non-government customer base for human spaceflight for it to attract much traditional investment, and it's far too expensive an endeavour for all but the richest people to attempt to self-fund (think Gates or Bezos, not Musk).

'Vision for space exploration' was the document that set out Bush's constellation program; the names are sometimes used interchangeably.

The British launched three from Cuxhaven in October '45 (operation backfire), but there's no way anyone launched anything from Peenemünde; by that point it was rubble.

It'd at least be in the news a lot more in Russia; from what I've been able to gather, coverage of foreign spaceflight in the US is minimal at best.

The only reason we know it can survive some 'difficult rentrys' is because it went through them-due to failures in the core design: you're trying to use failures to argue for safety. Volynov only survived through sheer luck, and TMA-5 showed the issue was never fixed.

He's talking about the Soyuz spacecraft, not the Soyuz rocket.

Shuttle had two loss-of-crew incidents in 135 missions, Soyuz has had the same in less missions (114), as well as two loss-of-mission incidents due to launch failures, compared to zero for shuttle. There's also the two incidents of improper separation before re-entry, leading to crew injury (Soyuz 5 and TMA-11), and the one where the landing retrorockets failed, again causing injury (Soyuz 5 again), neither of which have any kind of equivalent in shuttle missions. More people being killed on the shuttle is purely due to the larger crew size.

It has the same number of weapons as the '1000-2000 ton' version, but would require a few orders of magnitude more total impulse. Given the pulse units were supposed to be able to transfer energy with over 50% efficiency even in the small units, not much of it can be from an increase of that, so it has to come from yield increase.

Yes, but it's not exactly a complete design, is it? It's what happened when somebody took a previous design and set the parameters to 'insane', ignoring actual limits from stuff like maximum practical weapons yield, or the whole ridiculous thing just collapsing under it's own weight.

8 million tons? That's pretty impressive, given the pyramid of Giza comes in at about 5 million tons-which would incidentally make this ship the heaviest man-made object ever. The heaviest figure for a worked Orion design I can find, payload and craft, is 20,000 tons.

If you want to put something into a polar orbit, you have to cancel out the 'free orbital momentum' from earth's rotation; this is less of a factor at high latitudes.

Kodiak has three launches despite being exactly what you're proposing here; a specialised high-inclination launch site. Athena, and thus it's kodiak launch site, was handily outcompeted by launchers based at much lower inclinations (Minotaur and Delta II from Vandenburg, 34 degrees North, Dnepr from Baikonur and Yasny, both about 50 degrees north); why would you Peenemünde be able to do any better, especially given the range issues? Almost all high-inclination sats are military, and therefore extremely unlikely to be exported to a foreign site, and the rest simply don't justify the expense of a new site.

There are thousands of people on Kodiak, and a large USCG base; it's not as if we're talking about Antarctica here. It's certainly got a lot more relevant infrastructure than Peenemünde, unless you're proposing reusing Prüfstand VII.

I don't think the norweigans, finns balts or russians would would. Given the length of time the first stage on a falcon 9 burns, the drop zone would probably be outside the baltic; definitely so for a polar launch.