Kryten

There's a lot more than crewed flights yes, which is why I've no idea you insist they're still behind the Russians, who are effectively incapable of anything else these days. Just look at beyond-earth exploration; China have now successfully made and launched two lunar orbit missions, one of which was capable enough they were able to do an asteroid flyby with it. In the same time period the Russians launched... one mars probe which didn't even get beyond LEO. In fact they haven't launched a single working BEO mission since the fall.

So apparently using effectively an updated soyuz means the Chinese are behind A) people who still use the actual soyuz and people with nothing at all. That makes perfect sense.

You had chemical engines able to send humans to Mars 50 years ago as well. The issue with doing it isn't ISP, thrust, radioactivity, any of those. It's money. No bucks, no buck rogers.

Because it's clearly advancing so much slower than say, the russian space program. Or even ESA, in terms of new capabilities. You don't have to go very fast to come near the top in a race where everyone else is either at a standstill or actively going backwards.

Tiangiong-2 isn't the modular station, just the next step towards it: monolithic station, 13-15 ton (small enough for CZ-7, much further along than -5), intended to be visited by at least one cargo module rebuilt from the Tiangong-1 backup module. Think Salyut 6 or 7.

It wouldn't be possible to end up with anything less than the original total momentum, at least without dumping some through e.g. RCS burns.

What's with that space station shot? That's the ISS in early construction stages...

Mostly money, but there's still a good bit of scientific and engineering knowledge missing. We've reached the point where we're already building a reactor we're confident will produce net power (ITER).

Not the poles; US tested devices over the Pacific and the USSR over Kazakhstan. But that was before the treaty.

Helium-3 is not necessary for fusion power. All plausible designs right now work on tritium-deuterium fusion; deuterium can be refined from seawater rather easily, and tritium can be produced by bombarding lithium with the spare neutrons from the reactor.

*hexadecimal

C'mon, that's obviously morse code. More seriously, well, we can't do all of your homework for you. If you're in a class you're being handed stuff like this, surely you'll know by now which code contains only numbers 0-9 and letters A-F?

Albert Einstein. "I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones."

Only problem was they'd actually mucked up their heat flow calculations; it'd have burned up on re-entry.

A debate between who exactly? Who seriously argues that mammals aren't monophyletic?

Neutral buoyancy will be difficult. As thick as the atmosphere is, it's still only about 6% as dense as water.

Pretty sure that puts up reactor weight quite a lot though. Design I posted is nearly pure metallic U235.

Isn't CO2 quite strongly oxidising at elevated temperatures? Running it through a reactor core might not be the best idea.

Smallest reactor I can find with reasonable amounts of info is the soviet Buk, flown on a set of radar sats; 3KW electrical power for 130kg weight without shielding, but with colling system. That's with thermoelectric conversion, turbine could probably get quite a lot more out of it; thermal output was 100KW EDIT: That's also including a system to eject the reactor core, and I'm pretty sure the actual converter.

How about geothermal (Well, hermethermal)?

...no, it just expanded the extreme upper atmosphere through increased temperature. With something the mass-to-surface-area ratio of skylab, light pressure is negligible.

Video of what is almost certainly the third stage from this launch re-entering over Brazil;

It's basically impossible to say, unfortunately. We can measure the area of the lakes, but we've no way of telling how deep they are.

It's part of the Kurs automated docking system. Basically it point itself at a small cross near the docking hatch, and the craft adjusts itself so the cross stays on-centre.

Have you tried looking at copenhagen suborbital's work in the area? They try to make their entire process open source, and have already produced a number of quite large, workable engines. The design documents for the large TM65 engine haven't apparently been published yet, but the report on the smaller 'spectra' on there looks like the kind of thing you'd want to be looking at. In terms of pressurisation they use fuel pumps rather than pressurised tanks; a modified ex-fire-engine pump for TM-65, and a V2-style peroxide turbopump for their larger engine in development.