Kryten

It's WorldView 4.

E=mc^2, so m=E/c^2; and light is a form of energy.

Define 'militarise space'.

There's a pretty complex story behind that. Initially, the plan was 8 ton Tiangong-1 to test rendezvous, 8 ton Tiangong-2 to test life support, and ~20 ton 2-port Tiangong-3 to test resupply and long term habitation. After Tiangong-1 operations had ended, the Chinese said that it had been more successful than expected, and they would be able to complete the plan without flying one of the previously announced stations. Most people at the time assumed the original Tiangong-2 was cancelled, but we now know it was Tiangong-3.

And if they can't convince the NASA or the USAF that they've got the risk down, they aren't likely to get permission to fly from their bases. Same applies to FAA and the launch licence. Sure, this incident didn't end up injuring anybody or damaging non-leased property, but it did require emergency measures to keep OSIRIS-REX safe, and it put a lot of USAF emergency response personnel in great danger.

Launch successful, confirmation of SC sep and array deployment. EDIT:

Pressurised ammonia. Doesn't go through a chemical reaction, but you get extra energy from the phase change from liquid to gas. Performance is somewhere between a conventional monoprop thruster and a cold gas thruster. EDIT: A few minutes left till the launch.

Looks like special coverage has already started on CCTV.

The Tiangong-2 space lab is set to launch today at 14:00 UTC, or just under three hours after I'm making this post. Coverage should start on CCTV English at about 13:30; Tiangong-2 is intended to support a two-man crew for a month, testing out life support technology in advance of the Chinese modular station set to begin construction in 2018. Tiangong-2 will then receive a visit from the first Tianzhou automated cargo vessel, testing the basic Tianzhou design as well as procedures such as fuel transfer. Tianzhou is intended to be the main logistical support for the modular station. Tiangong-2 is carrying a secondary payload called BanXing-2; this will provide external images of the docking between Tiangong-2 and the Shenzhou-11 crewed spacecraft, as well as act as a general tech demonstration mission for smallsat maneuverability. Banxing-2 can be seen in the image below. Tiangong-2 is also carrying a number of experiments, including a quantum key distribution experiment similar to that on the Mozi satellite launched earlier this year. I'm pretty sure it's the thing on the left in the above image.

Payloads on this flight are four Skysat commercial imaging payloads for Google subsidiary Terra Bella (~1m max resolution), and the PerúSat 1 imaging sat for the government of Peru (0.7m max resolution).

He's assuming the stage timing is comparable to Falcon 9 so it can do RTLS, but we know from the launch site planning docs that RTLS is not on the table and return is to be on a barge waaay downrange. So, more like +/-150%.

The arms are also a big part of the reason why Soyuz pads are so gigantic and expensive. With a more conventional system, the pads could probably support a vehicle twice the size.

There's no Saturn tech on SLS.

It's not going to not be orange, that's for sure. That's the colour of the spray-on insulation, and it's really rough; painting over it would cut off a good chunk of the payload.

A couple well-timed announcements from other providers; ILS (who handle the commercial side of Proton launches) have announced two Proton variants, Proton-Medium and Proton-Light, to fly in 2018 and 2019 respectively. Proton-medium would have a comparable capacity to recoverable F9, and could potentially get a few payloads soon given SpaceX's current issues and ArianeSpace's packed manifest. ULA have also just announced what they call RapidLaunch™, a system to allow them to put up payloads as little as three months from customer order, and that they have space on their manifest for 2017. It's easy to imagine a few providers taking them up on their offer, especially as their prices have been improving; they have two commercial launches set for this year already.

Launch is from LC-36/11 at the cape, and landing is to be on an 'ocean-going platform' 750 nautical miles downrange.

Apparently not.

Your snarky half-wish is my command; (also I was bored).

Did a quick-and-dirty add of NS to that comparison image; Really puts into perspective how much of a leap this is.

We got our sneak peek of the orbital booster, and... wow. I'm just going to paste in the email from Bezos, because I'm still having trouble processing this myself.

They've received a whack of money from NASA and DARPA; NASA for development of the orbital vehicle, and DARPA for use of the Vector-R first stage as an XS-1 upper stage. They've also started ground systems testing with an engineering model of Vector-R; Not sure what's going on with the branding though, I must say; the rocket's gone from Vector-1 to Vector Wolverine to Vector-R within a couple of months, and they don't even say what the R in Vector-R stands for.

I suspect this is related to the mysterious 'non-hydrolox orbiter' option that was part of Martin's Titan-Shuttle studies, but in the absence of any illustrations or detailed descriptions of it it's impossible to say for sure.

It's not likely that the sounds he's talking about are the same ones from the public video. What we have was taken about 4km away, and even the explosion sounds muffled; there's no way we'd be able to hear something relatively quiet. The sounds in the vid are probably either ambient sounds from the junkyard area the vid was filmed in, or the sound of the explosion itself transferred through the ground.

I've now had a good look at the planning docs for the CCAFS expansion. LC-36 and LC-11 (which are adjacent to each other) are to be merged into one large complex for launch, integration, engine testing, vehicle refurbishment (both capsule and first stage) and 'spaceflight participant preparations'. Not landing, however; that's to be done on an 'ocean-going platform' 750 nautical miles downrange, off the coast of Carolina. There's no hint of a landing pad in the application that I can see, so it looks like barge landing is the plan for the indefinite future. Landing of their crewed Space Vehicle is to be on land in Texas.

I know the above quote is pretty messed up, but I can't fix it, there's something wrong with the quote function. I can't edit it, only delete the whole thing.