Kryten

A lot of new info on Vector; http://spacenews.com/vector-space-systems-plans-2018-first-flight-of-small-launch-vehicle/ They've now fully merged with the old Garvey Space company, and can start moving forward. They're planning a suborbital launch using the Vector-1 second stage engine on the 30th (presumably the P-19 vehicle Garvey space had already finished), full Vector-1 first-stage test launches in 2017, and orbital test launches in 2018.

Rocket appears to be intact and is being recovered.

CopSub have set up a livestream, it's scheduled to start in about ten minutes. If you go to youtube, CopSub are currently giving info in the chat. At least two hours to the actual launch.

You've got big rockets pretty-well represented, but there are launchers much smaller than you've got; Japan's SS-520-4 is under 3 tons, and the NOTS Pilot was under a ton (albeit with air launch). You'll probably also want Ariane 4, given how much of a workhorse that was.

They could do a more science-focused mission for the same amount of money, and they generally don't like missions which bypass the standard selection system (decadal survey et.c.).

http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/front/archives/2016/07/19/2003651332 A little background for this; Resource Prospector is a mission concept that's been knocking around inside NASA for about a decade now. It's intended to land a rover near the lunar south pole, then test various technologies for extracting useful materials like oxygen and water from the environment. It's been in limbo because the NASA planetary science isn't interested in a non science-focused mission, and the human missions directorate which would have an interest in Lunar Resources has limited money outside the Orion, SLS, and ISS support programmes. HEOMD has enough to cover an LV and the rover, but they'd been scrabbling around trying to get somebody to build a lander for them. Now they've secured a partnership, and the mission has a good chance of actually happening.

And this sounds like you made zero effort to even read the article. Again, there's no requirement for this thing to be air-breathing or to have wings. The only thing stopping F9 S1 being a viable programme entrant is the recycle time for reuse, and all of the known competitors are using conventional rocket propulsion and vertical take-off. New Shepard is too small if that's what you're thinking, but they wouldn't have to scale up much to meet the minimum requirement. But, we know that's not what they're doing; blue's entry, in partnership with Boeing, is a VTHL stubby-winged flyback booster, probably with Be-3 engines. The other two phase 1 competitors were Northrop Grumman/Virgin Galactic, with unknown engine (VG's kerolox GG engines probably aren't suitable for turnaround this rapid), and Masten space systems with a VTVL system with a new methalox duel-expander cycle engine.

Dragon separates from the second stage immediately after orbit insertion, and the stage then deorbits itself; rendezvous is with the dracos; you don't need big engines for orbital maneuvering. I'm not sure what you mean with your second question, could you rephrase it?

The requirement doesn't actually specify a need for some kind of aircraft, that's just the programme name; it's really a reusable booster programme. Also, the velocity requirement has been cut to Mach three for the next stage of the programme, as long as it can still meet the payload, cost, and crucially reusability requirements. Air-breathing engines would not be needed to meet these requirements, and none of the proposals that are publicly known include them.

Big engines mean you need a big test stand and more development money, which if you're a commercial outfit can be a big problem. Beal Aerospace, in many ways SpaceX before SpaceX, failed because they couldn't raise the funds for a test stand for their giant single first-stage engine. They'd already done a bunch of tests on their second stage engine, which was still much larger than Merlin; if they'd stuck with clustering that they might still be around.

It isn't to any significant degree, it mostly leaves through the lungs unchanged. Longer alkanes like hexane can be oxidised to alcohols by the P450 enzyme system which is why e.g. hexane is pretty toxic.

The Russians are now starting to use 'hybrid' systems, which can be converted to act either as probe-and-drogue or an APAS-like system; AFAIK the APAS-like system is not IDS compatible, at least in current versions.

The moons Cassini has enough thrust to theoretically land on have pretty poorly characterised orbits. Add the time lag, lack of any kind of altimeter, the small size of these objects and that Cassini wasn't designed for optical navigation; and it would almost certainly simply miss.

There's a Falcon 9 launch later this year with 88 payloads, and sometime next year there should be a Dnepr launch with 100+; so it's looking more like 'within a couple years' than 'eventually'.

The smallest ground-launched vehicle currently in development is Japan's SS-520-4; able to put a single 3U cubesat into orbit for a GLOW of ~1900kg. Given that's professional solid fuel, even a 'zero-payload' orbital amateur rocket is unlikely to be any smaller. The largest amateur motors have been in the 350kg class, whereas SS-520-4's first stage is over 1500kg.

Most Chinese rocket are inline designs with no boosters. CZ-2F and CZ-3B have the boosters to deliver increased thrust without needing to increase the diameter of the core, meaning they can still use the same tooling used to produce CZ-2A, CZ-4 et.c. rockets. CZ-2F and CZ-3B are respectively the only crew-rated and the largest Chinese rockets of the old generation, so they get the most press coverage. CZ-7 is based on CZ-2F with engine change and stretched boosters, again using the same tooling. It has absolutely nothing to do with Korolev, Chinese rocket dev had been mostly independent of Russian/Soviet efforts.

We have live feed of the pad from a local news channel; http://news.qq.com/zt2016/launchlive/index.htm

We'll know from Chinese media reports immediately after, people in the public viewing area, and people in the immediate vicinity.

Payloads are a subscale version of China's next gen crew capsule, ballast, the Aoxiang-1 cubesat, and two unknown vehicles called ADRV and BPV; likely more cubesats. Aside from the test of the vehicle itself, the main objectives are verifying the capsule design and testing the new YZ-1 upper stage through a complex four-burn profile. YZ-1 has flown twice before, but only with simple single-burn profiles; this should allow to Chinese to perform more complex missions.

It's most likely thermal adhesive if you're finding it inside electronics, though if heat isn't a problem in your case I don't see any reason not to just use normal epoxy glue.

Xcor's Lynx was going to do this, and as far as anyone can tell it would've worked fine. They just ran out of money.

It involves slowing down from about 8m/s over about half a second, so roughly 2g. Would still feel pretty high because of the very sudden onset. In Volynov's case the retrorockets didn't fire, and the parachute didn't deploy properly.

We're over six months after this point, and the only thing that's really changed is it's become clear they hadn't actually selected a new LV design. We don't even have any LV designers on record as saying they would like to partner with them.

If you look back the speed indicator had a lot of lag on it, I wouldn't read too much into the readings it gave,