Kryten

Then who are building the Antares first stages? Ghosts?

Something very similar to that has actually been tried, but the deployment sat failed. A reflight is set to go up sometime this year.

CZ-5 is a better point of comparison to Energiya-M, it has Kerolox SC boosters and an LEO configuration with no upper stage. It's even related to it, via reverse-engineering of Zenit's RD-120.

Angara was based on the same engine family as the Zenit, and partway through the competition Lockheed started ordering the exact same engine for Atlas III; the greater production kept the unit cost lower, and kerolox booster engine are cheaper in general than hydrolox. Angara could also use pads that had already been built for Zenit in Baikonur and Plesetsk with some modification, whereas Energia-M would require construction of a big brand new pad at Plesestsk. Krunichev had a design for basically a re-arranged Energiya called Yenisei 5, which they entered into the Russian competition for a super-heavy rocket; the higher-ups at Roscosmos were skeptical about their ability to economically resurrect the RD-0120 main engine, among other things, and they were reported to have already decided in favour of Progress's STK methalox rocket design before the ruble crash hit and the program was cancelled.

Currently the plan is to remove the parts that aren't currently up there (MLM, NEP, Node Module), so presumably it's been factored into their design. The russian modules generally have less plumbing than the american ones anyway, they were designed to make most connections autonomously through the docking ports.

The whole point of this thing is to last a lot of rounds. Think about it, it has most of the systems of a mid-size and high-power GSO comsat; if it only extends the life of one or two comsats, it's not going to make any economic sense relative to just buying a new satellite. One old enough to be on it's last legs and needing this sort of thing will be a decade or more out of date to start with, hanging on for another half decade or more means you end up with a worthless dinosaur.

There would be significant financial risk involved here. I really doubt it would cost them only $200 million to develop and build the fancy docking rig for the Blok D, the mission module for Soyuz, et.c.

What keyboard do you use where you have access to a proper delete button?

I think it's more likely that they'll use it support either old or malfunctioning satellites for maybe a year or half a year at a time; that means they don't have purchase a replacement as quickly, and could save them a bunch of money in the long run. It's doubtful it would make much economic sense for a smaller provider (Intelsat is the biggest, 50+ sats), but it's possible multiple small providers could share a vehicle and do something similar.

The quotes are just blank, not broken as such. I had to post that (and the one above, sorry) because I can't find any way to delete quote boxes on android, and once I've deleted everything outside a quote box I can't select anything outside the quote box again. I should note the problem is with Google's 'Android' operating system, I'm definitely not an actual android. If anybody says anything otherwise they're a dirty liar.

In a low earth orbit the drag from a sail would vastly outweigh the solar pressure.

And as with any SSTO, much of an issue in any of the other systems could easily make the whole thing unable to reach orbit. X-33 had problems severe enough to do that just designing a conformal carbon composite fuel tank, it's not hard to see how something as exotic as a ceramic monocoque airframe doing similar.

The X in 'Planet X' is for unknown, same as for the X in X-ray; it's not a roman numeral. There's no way it was even meant to have a double meaning, as the term predates the discovery of Pluto.

The Chinese tested one a couple years back that could probably reach GSO, so now we can add communications and probably navigational sats to that list.

Both are true. In the US STS system, the shuttle was an intrinsic part of the launch vehicle for the entirety of the launch; but for Energiya-Buran, Buran only provided the final injection into orbit, similar to shutlle's OMS system. This meant Buran could be replaced entirely with a small upper stage and a 100+ ton payload.

The Stern-Levison parameter doesn't depend on what else is in the orbit as such-it's just a statement on how likely an object is to dominate it's orbit given it's size and distance from the star. For example, Pluto in it's current orbit would be considered a dwarf planet even if there were no large planets in the outer solar system; it's just too small to shepherd most of the objects at that distance within the lifetime of the solar system. It could be considered a planet if it was much closer in, or if it was orbiting a much longer-lived star.

The thing with Pluto is it's been shunted into a 2:3 orbital resonance with Neptune; so clearly it doesn't gravitationally dominate it's portion of the solar system, Neptune does. Asteroids Ceres and Vesta are considered dwarf planets.

It will almost certainly have a Stern-Levison parameter above 1, which is the usual definition for 'clearing it's orbit'; it will clearly dominate the dynamics of it's region of the solar system.

Proton with Blok-D stage and Soyuz on a Soyuz, a few days apart-hence the relatively high risk. Although Soyuz was ultimately approved for lunar missions, the design was descended from concepts for military craft for earth orbit. The only real difference between current versions of Soyuz and e.g. Dragon for this application is Soyuz has more interior volume because of the orbit module.

Because it would involve untested hardware and barely-tested procedures, and so be extremely dangerous. Apart from that, $200 million isn't a small amount of money, even for him.

Still, windows are important for the experience they're trying to sell, and windows the size of the ones they're planning are a big change to the structure. A windowed capsule was seen on the factory tour a while back in an advanced state of assembly, so I'd expect it to appear soon. In other news, Bezos made a short presentation at the Space Symposium this week; the only big new piece of info is that they're planning to send up test passengers next year and paying passengers in 2018.

Sort of. Here's an internal shot of the pad abort vehicle, showing motor placement; as you can see, the recovery systems are in place, but nothing else other than what looks like an avionics bench. There doesn't seem to be an ECLSS, and there are no windows. It appears the pad abort vehicle is the one being used for NS now; photos shared before the most recent test show it being marked as having done four flights, and photos of capsule recovery shared after made it clear the windows are just painted on.

While the test was funded under commercial crew, the actual capsule was the same as the NS one. The abort motor is a big aerojet thing sat in the middle of the capsule, the retrorockets for landing are a separate system.

Sorry, skimmed the title and assumed it'd have been the thing in the news right now that actually breaks current physics models.

Here's the actual paper; http://arxiv.org/abs/1601.05806 And a write-up by Anatoly Zak on this RadioAstron operations, including this discovery; http://www.popularmechanics.com/space/deep-space/a20351/quasar-temperature/