Kryten

It's more complicated than that; NASA pays for seat for all US orbital segment crew members (all NASA ESA and JAXA ones), and ESA and JAXA pay them for it using a barter arrangement; HTV for JAXA and ATV and Orion participation for ESA. Both ultimately keep the money spent within their respective countries.

It's not, it's (Soyuz 5.1 anyway) been approved as the new medium launcher under the name Fenix. We have confirmation it's still in the rewritten space plan after the ruble crash.

The Exomars spacecraft buses and communication equipment, and responsibility for communicating and tracking them, are all ESA.

Fenix is not super-heavy, it's a new medium class vehicle to replace existing Soyuz variants. It does allow preservation of technology (most notably the RD-0164 FFSC methalox engine) that could be in used in an SHLV in the future.

We got them to launch Mars Express and that turned out fine. Launches haven't generally been the issue for the Russian missions either, at least since the early 60s. Money.

Problem is, your interpretation is equally wrong. Roscosmos was the federal space agency, it was (and remains, in a different form) an arm of government; it was about as nationalised as it is possible for anything to be.

Orbcomm got this launch very cheap after their contract was carried over from an order of falcon 1s; there's a good chance it's actually below cost for spacex. They're not really in a position to make demands about how or when the launch is done.

Delayed 24 hours according to Elon, to allow better weather conditions for landing.

Given this is an instantaneous window, a new rocket model, and with the difficulties during the test fire, I'd be willing to bet it won't go up on the first attempt regardless of weather.

But it wasn't a liquid engine, it was hybrid.

That was a desktop demonstrator, and used gaseous hydrogen.

Yes, USAF as owner of the base and FAA as regulator of commercial spaceflight. FAA needs to issue licenses for launch or landing (Try saying that three times, fast).

NASA has no part in this, the landing is at Cape Canaveral Air Force Base. There aren't any operational pads or other facilities at the cape anywhere near the landing pad, so the accuracy spx demonstrated during the barge attempts was enough.

Vinci doesn't exist yet, that's a target figure.

How not? We're talking the very basics of copyright law here, this is material belonging to somebody with terms attached to not share it publically, and has not been subjected to transformative work by any of these people. The only way that wouldn't be illegal is if one of those jurisdictions just didn't have copyright law. Even then, it would be blatantly against L2, reddit, imgur, and KSP forum terms of service.

Again, posting this here or anywhere else breaks the terms of NSF's copyright. They'd be fully within their rights to do a takedown request on the forum at the very least.

It is completely unethical and illegal. Look at the L2 terms of use, this guy is blatantly, blatantly breaking them.

That is not how copyright works unless you've done some real transformative work, like produced a parody. Copy and paste is not transformative. This is basic, basic stuff.

Two things; 1) The only reason the information even exists on the forum is because it's a trusted, private venue. If a newspaper printed quotes from someone who'd been told they're off the record that could be illegal depending on jurisdiction, and unquestionably unethical anywhere 2) This material being on the forum places squad at risk of getting a takedown notice at the very least. You're not being a brave scout in defense of freedom, you're placing a company in the line of legal issues because you want a little extra rumoured stuff about your favourite megalomaniacal billionaire. It's not remotely in the public interest. The fact that it's based on nothing more than libertarian BS about the potential of the frontier? It's all buzzwords, dig a little deeper and there's nothing there. Why would somebody pay millions of pounds so that they can go to Mars and scrub the floors? Spirit-of-individualism, no-such-thing-as-society, opportunity-to-be-the-first-janitor-on-mars yadda yadda yadda. The fact that it's based on nothing more than libertarian BS about the potential of the frontier? It's all buzzwords, dig a little deeper and there's nothing there. Why would somebody pay millions of pounds so that they can go to Mars and scrub the floors? Spirit-of-individualism, no-such-thing-as-society, opportunity-to-be-the-first-janitor-on-mars yadda yadda yadda.

For a start plenty of that stuff is legally not allowed to enter the public domain, and plenty more of it is only offered by people because they know it's a trusted venue and it won't leak everywhere. That's not how copyright law works, bucko.

It's a shame none of this effort is going into anything useful; just an insane one-of-those-libertarian-artificial-island-schemes-but-in-SPACE.

It's much harder to arrange safe drop zones when you've got loads of stages and they're all short-lived.

He means it's backwards. The great recession caused a slump in oil prices due to decreased demand.

Not with Minotaur; it's dropping stages like nobody's business, so it can't just do a little dogleg at the end of first stage burn like Atlas does.

Could there a super earth out in the outer solar system? Maybe. Could there be enough of them that two surreptitiously end up in ALMA data, given ALMA's tiny field of view (this would mean tens of thousands)? Probably not.