Kryten

Regolith with particles below 1cm in size is referred to soil by planetary scientists (e.g. in this paper), similar to how anything heavier than helium is metal to an astronomer.

The Apollo system put the ASTP crew in hospital, and could've easily done worse.

Why would a large spaceship be any less maneuverable than a small one?

Apollo couldn't access the interesting far side areas like the aitken basin, only areas which were basically the same as areas they could reach on the near side. There just wasn't a compelling reason to do it.

It's just a matter of performance. Check the charts here; https://www.38north.org/2016/12/musudan122016/ NTO v. IRFNA gives you 200km extra range for a Musudan, effectively for free; the difference would be greatly exacerbated in a multi-stage design like this one. The chemical industry is one of the most advanced in the DPRK. Something like NTO or IRFNA is child's play to people who mass-produce VX.

It's definitely not R-27, it just uses the same OML. It's solid-fuelled and much smaller. Compare; this is Musudan, it's a stretched R-27, but it retains the same diameter This is Puguksong-1; It's maybe half the diameter, and if you look closely you can see the wound-fiber construction used for all known NK solid motors.

It'll have to be fuelled at the launch site. Yeah, it's not ideal; neither is using liquid fuel for a mobile ICBM in the first place. Ideally they'd want to use this thing by poking it out of a cave, fuelling it, and launching it, like DF-3 and DF-4 used to deployed, but modern recon systems+the size of NK+modern precision weapons makes that impossible. You can't really move a liquid missile this size fuelled regardless of what fuel you use, it just won't have the structural integrity. The closest that's actually been done are some Soviet SLBMs, but that was over short distances and used a special supportive missile container.

Yeah, at about three times the size of this one.

With this performance? That's not at all likely.

If you have to trick people into thinking what you're doing is safe, you have deeper problems.

There are US reports that they caught this being fuelled immediately before the launch. It's likely not intended to stay fuelled long term.

This performance is simply not possible with scud propellants. Plus, they've demonstrated they can get the ORSC UMDH/NTO 4D10 engine running. Why would they revert to scud tech after that?

The solid missiles we've seen from them so far have a very obvious wound-filament construction. You can see the filaments in high-res images; Whereas the HS-14 second stage is smooth metal, like the first stage. Yes. the Unha second and probably third stages, as well as the Paektusan second stage back in the 90s.

Here's a good comparison between the new HS-14 and the old ICBM designs. The truck is the same model in each image; you can see how much skinnier it is. It just doesn't have the impulse to reach 10,000km; if they want to do that, and they do, they need to go back to the drawing board and make a bigger missile with this tech. Or get KN-14 working; it's not looking likely now, but it's not impossible.

It's a confusion of the US designations. KN-14 was originally assigned to an ICBM design using a pair of R-27 ORSC engines, significantly fatter than HS-14. We've kept seeing that one over a long period of time (there are even pics of Kim Jong-Il stood next to one) but it's never been tested; it seems they still don't have enough confidence in the complex R-27 engines. Using the korean's own HS designations avoids this kind of confusion. This test demonstrated about 6,700-7,000km range. Some people in south korea are saying it could maybe do 8,000km+, presumably with a smaller warhead. Statements of 10,000km are based on the old KN-14 design.

ICBM is defined as 5,500km+, so KN-14/HS-12 falls short. It's an IRBM. Unknown but probably liquid; the way the stage is put together it certainly looks liquid.

We've already seen this engine flown and tested, it's a GG engine with four presumably moving verniers. It's the same one as on the HS-12 IRBM they flew a couple months back; the missile itself looks to be pretty much just a HS-12 with an upper stage. Here's an image showing a clear view of the engine; It's the first, 'Taepodong-2' is just the Unha space launcher. There was some assumption that Unha was a cover for an ICBM programme, but that never made much sense; the tech isn't good enough to be developed into a mobile ICBM (it's basically scaled-up scud tech), and the vehicle as it exists is completely impractical as a weapon. And, as we've now seen, they don't want to cover up their missile programmes. They want a deterrent, not some bond-villain style secret weapon.

http://news.xinhuanet.com/politics/2017-07/02/c_1121250175.htm

Launch is in about ten minutes. The payload is a large communications sat based on the new DFH-5 bus. At just over seven metric tons it's the largest ever produced in China by a big margin, and should be the largest ever by a slim margin. It also includes a quantum comms experiment and new large ion thrusters for station-keeping.

The Chinese next-gen capsule is a lot closer to flying than federation is. The ISRO vehicle does not exist as a real programme, just some tech demo funding.

Communications sats grow with market demand, not with launch capability. You could already put up a ~9.5 metric ton sat with an Ariane ECA if dual launch isn't used-and sat operators have shown they're willing to pay for that-but this has only been deliberately done once, with Terrestar-1 in 2009. It only weighed ~7 metric tons (i.e. didn't use all the launch capability by a long shot), and the company soon went bust; it was too big to be supported by the market at the time. Now sats of about that size are commercially viable, and the second sat of the same design was bought and launched by Echostar a few months back, after having sat in a warehouse for years.

Two bits of news; 1) the next launch us supposed to happen within the next six weeks; https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2017-06-29/at-18-he-strapped-a-rocket-engine-to-his-bike-now-he-s-taking-on-spacex 2) RL are going to stream the next two test flights; https://www.rocketlabusa.com/latest/progress-update-june/

We also would have trouble reproducing parts even with the plans, because back then there were a lot of little production tweaks that weren't in the plans, just in the worker's heads. This was still the case in russia quite recently, and it caused the failure of the soyuz-fregat with a galileo a little while back. The plans for fregat are ambiguous; the main helium line could be interpreted as being in two different positions. One position would put it too close to the fuel line, freezing the fuel, and the workers knew to always use the second position. Then the workers who knew this retired, new people came in, started working from the plans only, and the rest is history.

The tooling for the Saturn stages was scrapped, because the facility was re-assigned to making shuttle external tanks.

Many vehicles already re-enter intact without a braking burn; CZ-2 first stages have been documented doing so, and according to ULA the atlas 5 first stage does. Falcon isn't tough enough to do it because of it's extreme mass ratio, but it doesn't seem all that hard in practice.