Kryten

It's on the front page of the BBC, haven't really checked out other british news outlets. Given what they're typically like, they're probably focusing more on which z-list celebrity supposedly slept with which and pumpng out xenophobic editorals about romanians. EDIT: Yup, they are.

It's most likely just been uploaded again with less aggressive image compression. The bandwidth is the limiting factor, especially as they didn't have the directional antennae working earlier.

CST-100 development is going fine. It's certainly doing better than dreamchaser, given CST-100 prototypes have managed to do drop tests that ended with survivable landings.

A much better lander picture; I'm not sure if it's an engineering/science camera difference or if it's just properly calibrated now.

Nope. Look at the arm patches or the foil on the LM.

Chang'e 4 is literally the Chang'e 3 backup. There might be some slightly better instruments, but it's going to be almost identical. The biggest change is likely to be the terrain at the landing site, now -3 has proven the approach with a low-risk (i.e. very flat) area. The sample-return mission is Chang'e 5/6.

From watching chinese-language news reports (for the pretty pictures, I can't more than a few words of chinese), it's pretty much 'chong-uh sohn-how' (SÄÂnhào=number three), all spoken rapidly.

Of course, otherwise we wouldn't be able to produce iron in the first place. The usual method is to mix it with carbon monoxide, which has a higher affinity for oxygen than iron does.

He's referring to the fact that the picture you hotlinked has been replaced with an advert for whatever site you got it from. This may not be apparent to you due to browser caching.

Well, it isn't. There are pretty much pristine crater ejecta-ray systems hundreds of kilometers across, that'd disappear within hours in a 'writhing mass of ice'- in fact all of the observed surface features are stable over time. Europa's surface might well be described as 'active' or 'in flux'-but only by geological standards.

We know it'll be landing some time not much after 11:00am UCT-because that's when the coverage starts on CCTV.

The reasoning was simple. If JUICE was sent to orbit Europa instead, it would rapidly fail due to the radiation levels-Ganymede is pretty the closest galilean moon they can safely study, at least without a lot more money to send a more heavily-shielded craft. Juno is able to stay much closer to Jupiter because it's in a polar orbit (most of the damaging radiation is in belts in the plane of the ecliptic), and because it's aimed at a short mission duration anyway (1 year). NASA's main Europa mission concept is a multi-flyby probe rather than an orbiter, for similar reasons.

This isn't a severe enough issue to warrant evacuation, situation is now considered 'stable'-however, it looks like this is going to be extremely hard to fix. The assembly with the issue is outside, and doesn't have the fixtures necessary to be serviced via robotic arm. The US spacesuits still aren't cleared to be used since the water leak incident a few months ago, and there's nobody trained both to work with US segment equipment and the Russian's spacesuits.

There's no actual leak involved, it's a bit more complex. The coolant system regulates the temperature of the ammonia running through it by mixing 'cold' ammonia (from the radiators) with 'warm' ammonia from a second circuit that bypasses the radiator system. The valve that controls input of 'cold' ammonia is stuck open, and the whole system is now too cold for proper use. There's a redundant backup coolant loop (loop , but it's starting to overheat due to the large loads being moved onto it, hence equipment shutdowns.

And Russia, given the massive increases in Roscosmos funding in the last few years. And Brazil. And Ukraine. And South Korea. And Iran. And Turkey... The world extends further than the borders of the US. Even the ESA budget has expanded for the past few years.

I don't even see how that would apply in this situation, to be honest. Democratically or not, the top leadership in China changes every five years or so-I'm not sure about the situation in Canada, but that's more frequently than usually happens in the US.

Another factor is that it's not actually that expensive to get things built and launched by foreign suppliers, at least on the scale of national budgets. This in turns results in nations simply purchasing launches of whatever they feel they actually need, rather than trying to produce their own spacecraft or launch infrastructure. As an example, take Azerbaijan's (not exactly the largest or richest of nations) first satellite, launched this year; a full-size GEO comsat built by Orbital in the US and launched by arianespace.

Not a lot of coverage in most foreign media. So far from what I've seen it's got more coverage than your average space launch, but that's not exactly saying much. Just wait until it lands...

Probe is now in 15*100Km orbit. Four days to landing.

We've no idea how much outside investment they have, only guesses; they might have been able to attract a major investor, someone eager for the kind of publicity funding something like this might bring. There are rumours that exactly that has happened, some of them explicitly naming Carlos Slim, but they're unconfirmed. That's likely to stay true for now unless this announcement involves some real contracts or showing off of test hardware.

EM-1 and EM-2 do. The rest are too far in advance for funding allocations right now to be meaningful.

There are a few concepts that use conventional boosters initially, but in most concepts they are, simply because the ship is too huge for anything else to work.

Crewed NEO visits and ultimately crewed Mars missions. You know, the ones specified by congress.

'Fuel' in english means two different things in rocketry, in different contexts. In chemical rockets it does indeed refer to the part of the propellant that's oxidised, but in rocketry in general 'fuel' can refer to the material used to deliver the energy to the reaction mass (what actually leaves the rocket and causes thrust). For example, in NERVA type nuclear-thermal rocket uranium is the fuel and hydrogen is the reaction mass. By this definition, both the oxidiser and fuel of a chemical rocket are 'fuel' and the reaction mass is the combustion products.

Nope. Given the Moon is effectively made out of Earth crust material, that'd be pretty much impossible.