Kryten

You'll get pretty much the same peak G-forces from vertical launch as horizontal, the limit is engine technology.

Well, launch time is set for 03:27 GMT on the seventh; you should be able to use that to get a time and date in your own timezone. Where I am, it's half four in the morning...

LADEE, NASA's latest and currently last planned Lunar probe, is currently sitting on the pad in preparation for launch tomorrow night/the morning after (depending on your location). LADEE is a relatively small probe intended to answer lingering questions about the Moon's atmosphere (what there is of it). NASA give a better overview of it than I could; http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=XyW5QiqftYE The launcher for the mission is a former Peacekeeper ICBM, converted with a couple of small extra stages into the first (and very possibly last) Minotaur V rocket. Coverage will be available from NASA TV, and possibly also from Orbital Sciences, the producer of the launcher. Those of you in parts of the US may be able to see the launch first-hand, as it'll be visible up a good bit of the east coast; for further details, see here.

That's pretty much exactly what I'm saying. People in comas suffer severe health effects due to lack of movement over long periods of time, ranging from pneumonia to thrombosis to severe muscle wasting. People in your hypothetical low-metabolism 'hibernating' state would also show lack of movement for long periods of time. Do you have any remotely plausible mechanism whereby the same effects wouldn't occur?

Neither of which are at all relevant to physical effects, which is what you're talking about here. As I said, semantics.

It's a persistent state of profound unconsciousness. The difference is pretty much semantic, at least with the kinds of 'hibernation' you're talking about here.

Artificial gravity won't help much. Just look what natural gravity does for coma victims.

Muscles atrophy. Over six months without any form of exercise at all (given you're talking use on a spaceship here, there isn't even gravity), the muscles are effectively going to be gone.

In other words up until around 2010, when the neanderthal nuclear genome was published. Chances are, if you're of western european ancestry, you've got up to about 4% neanderthal derived genes; not too much, but to be expected given their population density can't have been very high. However, there is another recent population of possibly non-modern humans; the 'red deer cave' people. The 'possibly' is because they might just be 'Denisovans'-a group from siberia with the same sort of results as neanderthals from genetic testing (except switch 'western european' with 'micronesian'), but with remains otherwise too scrappy to distinguish them from any other hominid.

Neanderthals can't really be argued to have been another species, given as it's now pretty undisputed that we absorbed their population rather than displaced it. It's probably best to think of them as a particularly divergent race.

Yes, but how exactly is it supposed to do that? Where is the thrust supposed to come from if not the net movement of air out of the device?

By what mechanism is this supposed to supposed to produce thrust in vacuum? Please try and be clear.

Your guess is as good as ours. He should have dropped dead shortly after taking his first few heady lungfuls of the rich lunar air...

Considering molybdenum production is about 200,000 tons a year, that must have been one big asteroid. Also seems rather impressive how this one asteroid managed to plant large amounts across multiple continents.

Putting enough energy into Jupiter to make a significant proportion of the atmosphere fuse would simply blow it to bits.

Five minutes to launch.

Coverage has started, at the link already given.

A Russian/Ukrainian Zenit rocket is going to be launching an Israeli commercial comsat from baikonur cosmodrome in about three hours time. Hopefully it goes better than the last Zenit launch... A webcast should be available here, starting about an hour from now.

The projects I mentioned are all part of the manned program. You're looking at it in the wrong way; yes, putting a person into orbit was done mostly with transferred technology, but that wasn't a goal in itself, but an intermediate step in the space station program, and then, well, the reason we're discussing this in this thread. The manned flight program itself is considered merely a sub-program of the space station project, project 921.

That document is badly out of date. What the Chinese have effectively done is used Russian technology as a stepping-off point to get to the more advanced stuff (i.e. the stuff less likely to be met with 'we did that 50 years ago!'); Shenzhou (excluding the OM) and both spacesuits are pretty clearly based on Russian tech transfer, but stuff after that report was published; such as the Tianlian satellites, Tiangong, BanXing et.c. are entirely new.

The highest estimates for abundance of He3 in the regolith are about fifty parts per billion; that's a very interesting definition of 'full'. It's also not anything like as useful as Zubrin et al like to say it is; the energy output is comparable to the D-T fusion most groups are working on now, you need much larger reactors for the same output (due to lower reaction rates) and it's much more difficult techologically.

Given the earth is ultimately the product of millions of merging asteroids, there's nothing here that isn't in them apart from artificial isotopes.

Three minutes.

No, he's being cripplingly paranoid, and, well, daily-mail-reader-ish. Just wait until he starts rambling about your local tofu and vitamin pill shop being a front for the illuminati EU NWO dirty forruners papists 'council of rome'.

The fire above the nozzles is on the heat shield protecting the tankage from the heat radiated by the engines. Them being visibly in flames is indeed routine for Delta IV launches.