Kryten

The spray-on insulation is orange, and it's difficult to paint because the surface is rough. It's only changed now because they've confirmed they won't paint it in the latest design review, but it was never likely.

NASA would avoid creating enough debris to hinder scientific exploration, in line with the outer side treaty, but there's pretty much no way they could actually do that with foreseeable technology other than introducing life to Mars or some other potentially habitable environment.

If you think the SLS development has been anything like the Ares-I one was, you can't have been paying much attention back then. Ares was subject to huge changes at weekly intervals from the resonance and throw weight issues, neither of which were ever really fixed, SLS has sailed through various review stages and is well above target payload. That's no better than any other of the dozens of SSTO proposals zipping about in the 80s and 90s, the idea is simply unworkable.

Do you want to do an actual bet, if you're that confident?

Same foam used on Japan's H-2/2A/2B series.

You realise there's nothing stopping the army or air force from doing this, right? NASA is just responsible for civilian space exploration, it doesn't have some sort of federal monopoly on crewed spaced or BEO space. They don't do it because they've no reason to.

The whole point of the Shuttle was to replace all current expendable launch vehicles, and to do that it needed to do the air force and other DoD missions. A Shuttle without AF participation is a shuttle with even less viability through less missions and a lower flight rate.

You're acting like natural reactors are common. Getting the right physical conditions to moderate one is extremely unlikely, and we still only know of where locality where it actually happened.

It simply doesn't make sense, there's no overlap between USAF and NASA missions. The military hasn't been interested in crewed space since the 60s.

I'm not comparing Skylon to expendable rockets, but to reusable systems that use normal rocket engines. Skylon only has the air-breathing system to hit the numbers required to hit SSTO; as a lower stage it doesn't provide much extra capability in return for the extra complexity. That's not going to make much difference. It's still going to have somewhere to be inspected, an integration facility, payload preparation and fuelling facilities, control rooms; most of the infrastructure of conventional launch.

Sorry, typo.

It doesn't help that people tend to think NASA is larger than it actually is. Take the widespread urban myth of NASA destroying the Saturn V blueprints; it only works if you assume they built it on their own, with internal resources. In reality, most of those documents would've remained with the contractors who actually built it, and are now at Boeing and LM.

If you turn Skylon into a reusable lower stage, then you lose the entire point of the elaborate air-breathing rocket system. It moves it into an arena where it has to complete with more conventional rocket systems like the XS-1 contenders or probably Blue's orbital design, and in that context SABRE is just extra cost and complexity.

You can also have other pigments involved which overwhelm the oxygen carrier. Certain skinks have green blood due to very high levels of biliverdin (the same chemical that makes jaundiced people go yellow); and humans can end up with green blood after overdosing on medications containing sulphide, resulting in sulfhaemoglobin formation.

It's barely a ton, as noted on the page you linked. It has no commonality with Ye-8 other than the manufacturer.

It was originally designed to fly on GSLV, there's no way it requires any of those. Soyuz-fregat would do the job fine.

Remember they're currently working on Exomars together; the planetary science community in both nations know they've much less chance of these kinds of missions without co-operation, so they won't bring in politics unless they have no choice. However, it should be noted the dates in the article are not realistic; Lavochkin does not have the staff to have more than one mission in full development at a time, and Exomars has priority. Take into account that there's a good chance Exomars 2018 will actually end up being Exomars 2020, and this could get shunted well into the 2030s.

We can't really give a good guess until they reveal the new rocket design and who's building it, but having gone through two (possibly three) designs already doesn't bode well for their general program management. I give it 50/50 right now.

It doesn't have one, from WFRIRST results. All this is clearly stated in the paper, most of it is pretty readable.

A planet or planetesimal with a huge cloud of dust around it could do it, but that isn't going to be stable without the star still having a circumstellar disk to draw dust from, and all that dust would absorb light, give off IR, and cause a relative IR excess, which the star doesn't have. A dyson sphere, ruined or othwerwise, would cause a large IR excess.

In space, explosions occur in planes, as shown in the following figure from Lucas (1974).

The SETI institute are not inherently reliable, they're a group of amateurs who are inherently prone to jumping onto this kind of bandwagon. If anybody cares to actually read it, the paper in question is freely available here. It's an odd system, yes, but there are possible explanations for it (a large comet family being favoured by the authors) that don't require extraterrestrial life, and jumping to those kind of conclusions has only done harm to both astronomy and SETI in the past.

Soyuz 6 and Soyuz both launched from Baikonur 31/6 almost exactly two days apart.

The UK government does have a big interest in space, hence UK outfits like Avanti and O3B; it just doesn't have much interest in launchers.

SpaceX needs LC-39A for crewed dragon and falcon heavy, so that doesn't mean too much on it's own.