Kryten

It's the second-largest on the BBC website right now, at least.

China doesn't have a monopoly on rare earths because other countries ran out; it has a monopoly for reasons of cost, mostly due to economies of scale. There are plenty of deposits elsewhere that have been considered economically viable to mine in the past, and it won't take major changes in price or cost of extraction to make them so again.

There's no stealth in space.

That makes no sense whatsoever. The total impulse will have to be the same for a certain orbit change, whatever the thrust, so the amount of off-centre impulse will be the same, leading to the exact same problems.

That's like asking why people use gunpowder to propel bullets instead of throwing paper cartridges at people. In space a nuclear bomb is almost useless unless it reaches point-blank range, and it may not be terribly useful even then, depending on the level of shielding in the target craft.

There should be a stream on SpaceX's own website; there was last time.

You have a space station right now, I'll grant you that; but by the time the modular station is complete, you'll have some debris at the bottom of the Pacific-and no plans for a replacement. Incidentally the Russians will have the PTK-NP program in full swing at that point, and are extremely unlikely to bother keeping the production equipment for Soyuz.

There's also the rough Soviet equivalent, the 'Spiral' program. Vaguely similar in goal, but intended to air-launched from a large supersonic aircraft, fitted with a jet engine for powered landing, and various other things. The program lasted longer than X-20, with a full-sized aerodynamic test vehicle flying and sub-scale test vehicles flying in space (BOR). As with most Soviet/Russian space projects, Anatoly Zak's website is very useful.

There's only one problem with bomb-pulsed x-ray lasers; when they tested the concept, they couldn't get it to actually work.

An NSWR isn't going to be emitting 'radioactivity', it's going to be pumping out fission products that are intensely radioactive in themselves. While still not an issue in interplanetary space, it's going to make any kind of rendezvous with orbital infrastructure quite hazardous.

There's no imaging system of any kind. More than enough lunar probes have done that already; if you want HD closeups, look up SELENE.

Yeah, L1 is one of the unstable Lagrange points; anything not exactly at the spot tends to get 'pushed' away. It's L4 and L5 that allow stable orbits.

India are already developing their own crewed rocket-GSLV Mk. III. The test one scheduled for launch next year even has a dummy LES on top. Although, ISRO are relevant in this topic for another reason; their diagrams of the planned crew vehicle appear to include a docking port. Whatever they plan to dock it with, it probably isn't the ISS...

To answer the question in the title, it's simply not. The senate won't allow it. They have already done co-operative missions with Roscosmos and ESA (Yinghuo-1/Phobos-Grunt and Double Star respectively). ESA are looking at further co-operation with CNSA; most notably, they're considering supplying CNSA with docking ports for the modular station, possibly in exchange for ESA astronaut visits to it. Relations with Roscosmos aren't doing as well, particularly after the aforementioned failure with Yinghuo-1, but Roscosmos will probably work hard to keep their options open, given the state of their finances even now.

Very doubtful. DNA (or RNA or PNA, or any other theoretical precursor) will chemically break down over long periods of time. Even without taking the heightened radiation environment into account, the upper limit for a viable genome is probably in the region of tens of thousands of years, the record being thirty-thousand.

But we know exactly what the process is; a combination of summation of action potentials in neurones and neurotransmitter release by glial cells. It's like saying physics can't explain computers because the laws underpinning transistors don't explicitly say you can hook together a few million and use them to play pac-man.

No they don't. They say net entropy (which you could describe as 'randomness' if you're looking at it simplistically) always increases. Any decrease in entropy is able to occur due to a larger increase in entropy elsewhere; in the case of life on earth, the larger increase is a result of fusion in the sun.

Positron+Electron=Two high-energy gamma rays. That's the entire reason positrons are supposed to be damaging.

One of the Delta II variants.

Five minutes.

About an hour left until launch.

Nasa tv coverage has apparently started, half an hour ahead of schedule. Although right now it involves silently watching the completely immobile rocket on the pad.

Reports are that probability of the weather being out of bounds are pegged at 5%. With no fueling needed with this vehicle, that means there's pretty much nothing that could postpone the launch.

11:30 tonight yeah, assuming you mean EDT.

Branson was looking at SS3 as an orbital spaceplane, but that lasted pretty much until somebody gave him a cost estimate. They're now looking at much vaguer plans for point-to-point suborbital.