Kryten

Did Mr. Tsiolkovsky tell you about gravity losses? The lower thrust is the issue.

Have you read a single history that wasn't A) intended for children or written before 1950?

Only the two lunar missions (the second is actually orbit and return btw) have actually been officially scheduled and had funding earmarked, the rest are essentially what NASA's hoping for.

We're talking in the context of people wanting moon bases and mars colonies here. It's not going to be doable with that peak budget, never mind what they've got now.

Or, because kerbin clearly contains so much extremely heavy, and therefore highly radioactive elements, it glows just below the thin crust of a surface, allowing photosynthesis. This means the kerbals are ill-adapted to the low temperatures and pressures of the surface, resulting in the need for protective suits.

Definitely sounds like a pair of meteors then.

You realise there's probably not one person on there that actually believes in any of it? It got so many trolls they've just taken over the whole thing.

But none on kerbin, as far as anyone's seen; just small shrubs, kerbals and grass. Maybe there's some kind of massive extinction event happening? Would explain what happened to the palms...

Moon orbiting mission has been planned almost from the start (as first and second SLS missions, the first being unmanned), but it's always been seen as just a test of the vehicle.

There are powerpoints, which is different. No funding has been released for design of any kind of lander, and the objectives for the SLS program spcifically don't include the Moon.

Yup, august 2012. Replacement's recently had it's first flight.

That's the way around I meant it; I wasn't advocating crewed flights, just trying to point out pinning the blame on environmentalists is bit wrong-headed. You get the same with orion; people moan about people not wanting fallout, but then don't think about how much a 10,000 tons spacecraft is actually going to cost...

In the vacuum of space the gases' own removed electrons would logically still be around to recombine, in most cases. If not, well, it's going to stay that essentially forever. And, uh, actually I was wrong on the second one. I can't find any actual chemicals which involve noble gases in negative oxidiation states, only ones where they've been oxididised themselves (e.g. flourine compounds.). It looks like they can't be negatively charged under practical conditions.

1. Depends entirely on what else is around and what temperatures it's at. Within a few seconds at most if not kept at plasma-forming temps. 2. Only in a few extreme cases, with a few noble gases (the heavier ones), and the result is extremely unstable

Colonisation efforts in the Americas initially survived just fine without any support (how many supply convoys did you think Cortez received?) and returned enormous sums of money. People expecting that to recur was exactly why there were disasters like Roanoke. There are no cities to plunder or natives to enslave on mars.

Inertial guidance unit conked out. Program was done on the cheap, no backup...

Early launch would not have been good for the data connections to the ground, which in Russian launches only withdraw a small fraction of a second before launch.

Well, plants (or at least photosynthetic organisms) on earth managed for about two billion years without animals just fine.

But there is birdsong, in the building selection menu.

I'm pretty sure that was come up with after I pointed out there doesn't appear to be any other lifeform on kerbin that they could have evolved from, other than the omnipresent grass. But now there's apparently birds. Or maybe kerbals just make bird noises when off-duty...

But at 0:07 the opposite engine can be seen doing the same thing, as Bunsen said. However, that one engine does appear to have a shorter plume that others, as so; Maybe we're looking at engine failure after all. That could still be a guidance issue though, those engines can be throttled for increased control authority.

I'd say guidance system failure is indeed the most likely option at this point. This was a one-off rocket; a phase-I Proton-M with the RD-276 engines from the phase-II; which would greatly increase the chance of it having some new glitches.

New video, from very close; Looks like there was definitely one engine not vectoring with the rest.

The initial plume of brown smoke is nitrogen tetroxide venting as the engines increase throttle after liftoff, it's normal for Proton launches. More smoke only appears after that after the aerodynamic forces get strong enough to start ripping off parts of the rocket. It looks more like the initial failure was of one of the engine's gimbal systems, or of the actual flight computer.

It's a hell of a lot more than two. The largest, white thing coming off is the Proton third stage. The other large fragment is the Blok-DM upper stage. The scattered bits are what used to be $200 million of glonass satellites. Russians don't use self-destruct, they simply have the rocket engines cut out. This system's disabled for about a minute after launch to prevent it falling back to the launch site.