Kryten

And apparently successful, all objects confirmed in orbit, including Estonia's first satellite.

You'd also be sitting in the intake. That could be an issue.

It's a deliberate move to make it reminiscent of Saturn. The actual rockets will be standard unpainted ET day-glo orange.

Of course there's also the issue of politicial fallout should a single penny of a government program end up leaving the nation.

The configuration allows them to use shuttle ET tooling for the central core. Tooling is the major costs in the space business, it's the reason why most rockets stick to the same diameter all the way through.

Because Russia isn't a swing state.

NASA are considering boosters with F1A for SLS Block 1B.

Found the main problem with this.

And how exactly do you 'stealth' a rocket in deep space? For starters, if they're anything much above 3°K they're going to stick out like sore thumbs on the right kinds of IR sensor.

No. The main point of relativity is relative speeds above C are impossible. One ship sees the other ship moving at 96% of C because it genuinely is, relative to that ship.

What are these 'documents' exactly? Without an atmosphere you aren't going to get anything like an explosion, just a brief flash of gamma and neutron radiation.

Science has advanced. People haven't. It's going to be almost impossible to get people onto a hydrogen airship if all that that makes them think of is hindenburg, regardless of how safe it actually is.

It's a suborbital sightseer. It goes up, it comes down, nobody 'inhabits' space for longer than a few minutes. It was going to (be planned to) turn into orbital, but then somebody showed Branson the actual figures for doing so.

How exactly do you see this as having anything to do with space exploration? It's not even advancing the technology, it's a now-standard composite airframe with a low-ISP hybrid motor attached to it.

A) Military systems are EMP hardened That would require a ~25MT nuke, not the easiest thing to build or launch C) What would be the point?

The Moon is for one, single, test flight. Whether that's far enough into space for you is irrelevant, it's never intended to go back there. Six months is nowhere near enough for the operational missions orion will be doing, and in all likelihood it'll have much less e.g. power available than something docked at the iss.

I think you'll find that's the definition of deep space. The main source of the cost of orion is the very high designed lifespan for most of the systems; even while inactive and hooked to external power, existing craft can only do a few months safely.

Finally. Back in '05, Branson said this would happen in '07...

All deep-space or long-term ones yes, unless they use ion. It's not easy to keep stuff cool in space due to the unfiltered sunlight, experiments with storage of LO2 in space with sunshields have been proposed but not tried yet.

All the fuel transfer that's been done has been between space stations and supply craft, using the 'storable' fuels (i.e. liquid at room temperature and don't degrade) nitrogen tetroxide and hydrazine. RP-1 would degrade over long periods of time, and LO2 would require refrigerated tanks and much bulkier refrigerated piping.

What kind of attitude is that? Anything is progress compared to the Saturn V, because it no longer exists. There's no point stopping programs if they don't instantly produce something like you had in the 60s, no matter how bloated the budget for initially developing those things was.

It's got shuttle ET diameter tanks, shuttle engines, and shuttle srbs. How does saturn come into it?

If you wanted to make Saturn V again you'd have to rebuild every single piece of tooling for the entire rocket. SLS is almost certainly cheaper than doing that.

We now have a date for the first powered flight of SpaceShipTwo: next Monday.

I simply don't think you get liquid engines in model-rocket sizes. If you want something small and liquid, I suppose you could polish up on your serbian and try and get one of the cruise missile model 'plane sized jet engines those same fellows are selling.