Kryten

Main stage cut-off and upper stage first ignition confirmed. Everything still looks good.

It's a large supply vessel for the ISS. It does most of the orbital reboosting now shuttle's gone.

Booster sep. Looks good so far.

10 seconds

Launch in four minutes.

If the water's evaporating off, obviously what you end up with is going to be very thick.

This has happened, STS-37. An astronaut on EVA punctured their glove, blood coagulated very rapidly and sealed the hole; they didn't even notice at the time.

'Sentience' is the thing that proves there's a fundamental difference between humans and 'animals' intellectually, not just us being farther ahead on a scale. It's impossible to give a proper definition because it's something that probably doesn't exist, and of which there are only vague guesses on the nature of. There used to be quite 'hard' definitions, e.g. 'can make use of tools, and produce themselves', but they all got scrapped after people pointed out there were 'animals' could do in fact do all of them.

...destroying incredibly expensive property of most other nations in the world and starting WWIII. When will people realise countries don't act like they do in bad video games for very good reasons? Oh, and they don't have that capability. Their ASAT systems were all cancelled after the collapse, and were LEO-only anyway.

Look up something called the 'kinetic theory of gases'. You're welcome.

I don't see how his statement implies anything otherwise...

International community B, you mean. Or perhaps countries B-Ω. Countries can't afford to simply ignore the wishes of the international community, even large ones; certainly not for the tiny amount of gain 'claiming' a celestial body could ever involve.

The soviet IS system would probably fit the definition of 'weapon in space'-it was a satellite with a large (relative to itself) maneuvering engine and a shrapnel warhead, intended (and used to, in tests) to destroy other satellites.

We don't get helium from the atmosphere, we get it from reserves trapped along with natural gas deposits, and most of the helium-rich ones are nearly tapped out.

You misspelled 'ridiculously'.

Apparently twenty people have gone for exactly that...

Why do people conflate liquid salt reactors and thorium reactors? All the thorium reactors actually in operation that aren't tiny research reactors are solid fuel, and liquid designs work just as well with more conventional fuel cycles.

That's the kind of thing people say every single generation.

At least three people have donated $10,000+ each! I like how they're bigging up how incredibly fast it'll be going. As if that's not shared by every paint chip and lost wrench in orbit...

U233, which is what 'thorium' reactors actually use, works just the same way as U235 or Pu239 in reactors. There's no reason it wouldn't work in something like NERVA.

Soon, this. At the moment, just a guy doing a lot of revising...

Raw video feed; http://www.tsenki.com/en/broadcast/broadcast/live2.php ESA coverage; http://spaceinvideos.esa.int/esalive 10 minutes

Why would such a chip require any kind of network connection?

I can't find a single source that says the RD-107/8 is even capable of throttling.

A microchip to do what?