Kryten

Orrr they hadn't picked a landing site yet. Which is pretty plausible, given they'd have to know the capabilities of the N1 to be able to know what kind of delta-v they'd have left over, and no stage of the N1 was ever successfully test fired.

Arianespace does what a company is supposed to do; it launches, and the monetary return on those launches is enough to actually run the organisation. Same for ILS or Sealaunch. ULA is a complete failure as a commercial organisation in that it simply doesn't return any kind of profit. It can't even attract customers except ones that have no other choice.

Shuttle led to the major gap in capability in unmanned that led to Arianespace becoming ascendant, it left the US providers unable to catch up. The government certainly did not fill up their schedule, as shown by the previously mentioned payments rendered for various ongoing costs (e.g. pad maintenance); if we assume the government did fill their schedule, the payments mean we have to assume Boeing and Lockheed designed two launch vehicles that they were literally impossible to make a profit on. ULA is at this point effectively a branch of the DoD, they have no commercial aspects apart from their management structure, which given the amount of subsidy required appears to only make a difference of terms of paychecks to managers.

What business? Atlas V, as I mentioned, hasn't launched a non-gov payload since 2005. Delta IV hasn't launched one since it's first launch in 2002, meaning it has never launched one on a full-price contract.

Non-competitive US government contracts. US government payloads being put up by rockets developed as part of a US government program, and via a 'company' that survives through US government funding independent of services rendered cannot be called 'commercial' with anything like a straight face.

How many times am I going to have to do that until you start responding to the post I actually made?

Don't forget the intensely addictive qualities. Symptoms of withdrawal include coma and death...

The USAF is not capable of using foreign launchers due to various regulations (mostly related to technology transfer control). NASA is subject to most of the same agreements. In terms of actual commercial launches, Boeing (or rather the ILS assets they've developed) hasn't launched one since 2006, Lockheed hasn't launched one since 2002, and ATK, uh, well, ATK isn't actually a launch provider. The decline started long before that; when it was decided the shiny new Space ShuttleTM would be used to launch all US payloads. Having an industry suddenly stop, and then start from scratch a few years later, isn't terribly good for it...

Wasting an enormous amount in the process, and destroying the US commercial launch industry.

Actually, space shuttles are only capable of one mission; serving as museum exhibits.

What he's trying to get across is that life requires a suitable solvent for the various reactions that comprise life to occur in. A huge number of the reactions in the life we know about would be impossible in a non-polar solvent, making it very hard to see how an organism could survive utilising such a solvent. That organisms may be able to use various non-polar substances in other ways is completely irrelevant.

Apparently there was a liquid oxygen leak prior to the hotfire. Not in the rocket itself, but that's the same plumbing they need for fuelling for the real thing.

The kind of core he's talking about can't use fuel as moderator, as it's not in direct contact with the core. In all honestly I've no idea how closed-cycle cores are supposed to be moderated. EDIT: Looking at a few concepts, none of them make any mention of moderation. They all also seem to use very high-grade fuel, so I think they're just intended to be 'fast' reactors.

PTK-NP is 'nothing new' to you? Or OPSEK? Or Yenisei-5?

If 'launching people in a can' is as easy as you're trying to imply, what does it say about NASA that it can't do it?

It's the usual choice for gas-core, which is what's he's talking about here.

The idea you're proposing has already been thought of, the closed-cycle gas-core NTR (aka 'Nuclear lightbulb'). Usually the material proposed is quartz. And no, the temperature of the reactor doesn't effect reaction rate (and so stuff like chance of prompt criticality) unless you're talking millions rather than thousands of degrees.

If you're referring to my picture, that's not what it is. It's what happened when someone took a fish from the bikini atoll lagoon, shortly after the crossroads baker nuclear test, and left it on some x-ray film overnight. Notice the scales are producing an image independently of the stomach contents, showing assimilation of radioisotopes into the body. Also notice nobody's been making similar artworks around fukushima lately, as they easily would be able to if certain people in this thread were correct.

If it does hit the target of the 15th, that gives us a launch a day for the next four days; EPSILON, Falcon, Antares, then Atlas.

You can't just mix CHON together and expect to get life, you need to have plausible precursor molecules, probably RNA bases. RNA bases are known to be reasonably common, showing up frequently in chondrite meteorites, but the formation requires UV irradiation of simpler organics, which is not good for the prospects on places like enceladus' ocean with minimal exposure to the outside environment.

When we start getting stuff like this; that's when there's something worth worrying about. Just worrying whenever something is 'radioactive' in a completely unquantified way is pointless. It's like the people saying Fukushima is as bad as Chernobyl because people are getting 'radioactive particles' in Tokyo-with a bit of actual quantification, we see it's about the same level people got in Sweden after Chernobyl.

I'm not sure it's possible. Looking at the instrument summaries linked here, the remaining instruments use about 20W of power, summed together-the imaging system uses 35W on it's own.

The cameras were deactivated after the 'family portrait' pictures in 1990 (including the 'pale blue dot photo), partly for power conservation reasons, and partly because there's simply nothing left to image any more.

And the engineers have spoken. The DoD now doesn't have a single development program for chemical lasers, they're all electrical. Electrical lasers are able to see exactly the kind of progress you're talking about, but chemical lasers have hit more fundamental constraints in terms of reaction rates and conditions.

The apparatus needed for that 'chemical reaction' is huge, it'd be very unlikely to offer a weight advantage when you'd likely need a large generator of some kind for a warship anyway. As an example, the laser generating apparatus in the 747 airborne laser takes up almost the entire plane.