Kryten

There's a Chinese next-gen crew vehicle in the works, but we know very little about it right now. Would involve the new CZ-7 or CZ-5 (or both) rockets becoming crew-rated. CZ-7 has been slated to replace CZ-2F for Shenzhou in the past, but it's unclear if that would happen before Shenzhou is replaced.

http://www.orbitalatk.com/news-room/release.asp?prid=137 Orbital have secured a firm customer for their satellite servicing service, and have started production of the first Mission Extension Vehicle, with launch set for late 2018.

If you watch the launch footage closely, there was some nasty plume recircularisation into the engine bay; bad enough that I initially thought it was on fire.

Not applicable. Falcon physically couldn't lift some of the modules, and many parts of the US segment required shuttle for transfer to station and it's arm for installation.

When asked where the money was going to come from for this launch, the responses boiled down to 'that's premature' and 'maybe NASA'. AFAICT there's no actual launch contract from this announcement, just a 'launch slot reservation' and some minor studies into payload integration; somebody still has to stump up the cash, and it really sounds like they want that somebody to be NASA. That isn't going to happen.

Actually orbital nuclear weapons were more of a soviet idea, they wanted them to bypass the early warning and potentially ABM systems that were being set up in the US. They even did produce an operational orbital weapons system (R-36ORB, or FOBS to the US), for these reasons-it would have stayed for less than a full orbit, so was judged not to be against the treaty.

That would've just been a test unit, the power requirement precluded using it operationally. In the end the power requirement was also so high they couldn't justify it on a single experiment. The cost figures for Sea Dragon assumed that development and infrastructure costs were amortised over at least 240 flights with a minimum of 12 a year; for just a few flights, the cost would've been monstrous. Imagine the facilities they'd have to build just to e.g. test that first stage engine, or put the thing together.

You can't just enrich reactor-grade 235 'a bit more' to get weapons-grade, you need different technology to get the concentration that high.

The U-232 which is bred out of the thorium is usable as bomb material, the US (when they were experimenting with alternate fuel cycles in the 60s) and India (currently the most invested in thorium cycle) have both tested small U-232 bombs.

No need to guess, we know from the book it's a gram. That's 50kt TNT equivalent worth of energy... but we'd need to put in 100kt worth of energy to produce that much at theoretical max efficiency, which we aren't remotely close to. It'd take thousands of years to produce that much with any near-term technology.

Theoretically, yes. In practice, nobody has actually been able to store antimatter for longer than about 20 minutes (for 300 atoms), and the actual amounts produced are extremely tiny.

And once you've done that, also try taking into account that almost all of this work is in California, where wages are among the highest in the US.

Even apart from the proposed propulsion system, the idea that the other systems of an interstellar probe could be $100 million is... not too credible. NASA's smallest interplanetary probes (those from the the Discovery programme) are capped at about $450 million.

The biggest problem SpaceX have had is keeping their launch rate up; consider they have over 5,000 employees now. If we're generous and assume their famously low pay and long overtime keeps the costs to $120,000 a person, about half the aerospace industry average, that's $600 million a year. That don't have pay that all from launches-they are getting quite a lot from NASA for commercial cargo flights and commercial crew development milestones-but it's still hard to see how they could have made any money at all last year, with only seven launches at $60 million list price. If reuse ends up saving them no money, but gets their flight rate above the break-even point (maybe 12 or 13 flights a year) it will have very much been worth it.

They generally don't, though it has been done. The British BLACK ARROW rocket from the 60's used kerosene/peroxide for the first two stages, but only recent use has been a kerolox/peroxide third stage and peroxide monoprop roll thrusters on the new Chinese CZ-6 light rocket.

As far as I can see, simply saving on the cost of first stage production isn't really what SpaceX are aiming for; they want to eliminate the time involved in producing that first stage, increasing the flight rate possible with roughly the same workforce and so amortising pay over a larger number of launches. That is why they're looking at cost savings higher than the first stage cost, about 30%.

Completely finished by time of Challenger, and had completed fit checks with Enterprise. Was even larger than the shuttle facilities at the cape;

SpaceX uses pneumatic 'pushers' rather than explosive charges for fairing separation, I wouldn't expect meaningful damage from that.

Yes, the latter. The developers refer to is as a two-stage vehicle (e.g. in this article abstract) which is probably the cause for the confusion, but the second stage is RLV-TD itself.

If we're pretending planting a flag counts as a claim, then the soviets have priority. They landed pennants on the moon all the away back in '59, as part of Luna 2.

It does. To directly quote the limited test ban treaty;

The various modules are legally owned by and registered to their countries of origin, so if it's the whole thing it'd be joint between Roscosmos, NASA, JAXA, ESA and the CSA. One more reason to dump it in the ocean.

Long-baseline radio interfereometry, and sometimes celestial navigation (e.g. NH's approach to Pluto).

That would also be completely invalid, it's not the 17th century anymore. There is no ban on weapons in general in space. There is a ban on weapons of mass destruction in space, which would include Orion, and the various nuclear test ban treaties also make Orion illegal.

This launch was originally supposed to take place in 2011. NEI say it's a booster from PSLV, which is exactly what S-9 is; Rohini is just a general term for Indian suborbital rockets. AVATAR is currently focused on TSTO, see for example the presentation in this video; https://youtu.be/AYOYE-zWpMw?t=70