Kryten

Most hazardous radiation in space is charged particles, not EM. Lead doesn't do much to that, and could make it more dangerous through secondary X-ray production (bremsstrahlung).

It works well enough if you have a lot of hilly/mountainous terrain which which is difficult to farm, again like the DPRK. There are always going to be some areas you where you can't grow something more efficient.

If you really need to replace fossil fuels for vehicles use, generators for wood gas can be bolted right on, meaning you need far less infrastructure. This is commonly used for trucks in the DPRK.

The easiest way to think about the economics is this; you're using hydrogen to produce methane; currently, the economic method for hydrogen production is to make it out of methane.

Same video is here at 480p, which I suspect is the native resolution.

Will likely be required for some NASA or DoD high-energy mission.

Nobody calls them 'brown dwarf planets', they're just brown dwarfs.

I know they had an attempt at sea recovery for the Ariane 1 first stage from the Giotto launch, I've seen newspaper articles about it. I've found no mention of it after the actual launch, so fairly easy to work out what happened...

How?

The Michoud production plant was built after NASA decided on LOR, so was only built to be able to handle Saturn 5 stages. It'd have had to have been completely rebuilt to be able to handle Nova. What benefits? In the 60s when they were considering this thing, they thought industry in space was just around the corner, based on pharmaceuticals, production of 'new materials' and space solar power. In the intervening 50 years of space research we haven't found a physical or biochemical process that actually works out more economical in space, and we've shown SSP to be not or barely viable.

Who's going to pay for it? And don't say ESA and JAXA, they barely cough up the money for crew operations on ISS.

We have a launch date; May 21st.

It uses transit detection, so yes.

It uses SpaceX's numbers for the possibilities from reuse in the far future . It has no relevance to current pricing.

There'd also be lots of glass. Glass is common enough in archeological sites already, but modern flat glass or toughened glass requires some pretty advanced tech, and would be present in enormous quantities.

You're not likely to find any big artifacts after that much time, but the little things can tell you a lot. There'd be plastic pieces everywhere; you're going to get some pieces of corrosion-resistant metals like aluminium, which can't practically be refined without electricity; you'd get the ceramic insulators from powerlines, and so on.

The difference between poison and venom is the context they're used in. As an old saying goes: if it bites you and you die, it's venomous; if you bite it and you die, it's poisonous.

Mainly cold start problems.

Currently the FAA are banned from applying safety regulations to commercial spaceflight other than for the safety of non-participants. Stuff like Blue's NS test program are only for their own internal purposes, not legally required; they could put people on it tomorrow if they wanted.

It's even more complex than that, because product of simple fractional distillation (usually called naptha) won't run a modern engine, the octane rating is too low. Parts of it are sent through catalytic crackers, reformers, hydrocrackers, et.c. and then blended together until it has the right proportions of aromatics, alkenes and alkanes. The end proportion isn't fixed either, it's adjusted depending on factors like the climate of the country it's being sent to and the time of year.

As for launcher capability, direct insertion either requires higher engine restart capability and overall stage lifetime for the existing upper stage, or a small additional stage. [Sorry for double post, forum wouldn't let me edit on mobile]

Direct insertion offers the best payload mass from a given launch vehicle. Most commercial sats avoid it because they want flexibility; they don't want to be stuck on the ground if there's a problem with a specific launch provider or rocket, and they want greater choice than the few providers that could currently offer direct GSO insertion. Military sats are generally built from the ground-up to fit the capabilities of a specific launch vehicle from the same nation, so they go with the higher-efficiency option. This doesn't apply 100% of the time; military sats based on commercial buses have used GTO, and some (all Russian IIRC) civilian and commercial sats have used direct GSO insertion.

OrbitalATK now have an order for satellite servicing from Envisat, and are building the servicing vehicle for 2018 launch; formerly this work was done under the Vivisat joint venture with US Space, but that was dissolved under dodgy circumstances just before the firm order was received. The actual vehicle is basically a small GSO sat with no comms payload and enhanced propulsion, based on their GEOstar bus. The modified Ariane launch adaptor project was the now defunct ConeXpress. JWST doesn't use consumable coolant, it's dependent on the sun shield for cooling.

This is not a NASA mission, and is focused on samples from relatively deep drilling.

The actual news here is 1,284 new validated exoplanets.