Kryten

SpaceX is not some kind of private space programme, they're a commercial launch provider and a NASA contractor. The only reason they're developing crew capability is because NASA are paying them to.

A pristine Martian surface sample is not 'very little reward', it's what the entire Mars science community has been trying to work towards for the past ~40 years. It allows levels of analysis far beyond what any lander could do in-situ.

My thoughts are that it was cancelled in 2010.

Before Kennedy's giant funding spike, Apollo landings were sitting somewhere in the mid-70s.

I don't mean freezing, I mean it'll collapse.

If you're actually trying to reach multi-km depths, you will not end up with a tunnel. Even at Enceladus-level gravity, it'll have enough pressure to close up.

This is for their orbital launch programme, not new Sheppard.

Same as anybody else, given there's no true equatorial launch site anywhere. Even Kourou is a full 4 degrees off.

Assuming it is successful, yes, but there's more than four hours to go yet.

Proton-M/Blok-DM-03.

Launch webcast is currently live.

No you don't, because experience has shown that isn't how emergencies in space happen. Apollo 13, Columbia, Challenger, Soyuz 11; all destroyed by failures in equipment that was not serviceable from inside the cabin. The only one a difference in spacesuits could have helped was Soyuz 11, and that's only because they weren't wearing any.

Sokol has worked fine for literally decades for 3 to a 4 cubic metre Soyuz descent module, 7 to a 10 cubic metre dragon should work fine. The only time they'd actually be required to be 'agile' in one of these is leaving in an emergency sea landing, in which case they would not be pressurised anyway.

Given they're planning to fit seven people onto the thing, and no longer have bailout to worry about, I'd expect something more like the Sokol suits used on Soyuz; extremely streamlined, with no independent life support.

Soyuz and Shenzhou-you know, the only spacecraft in operation right now-both have toilets in their orbital modules.

What kind of industrial capabilities are we looking at here?

They don't; it's for equipment that's meant to be attached to the outside of the station. They're building their own, and Boeing are commissioning a new model from legacy spacesuit builders David Clark.

The internal volume is actually the same as Soyuz, 10 cubic metres; it just looks bigger because you usually only see internal shots of Soyuz's reentry module.

Solar Hijri (as used in Iran and Afghanistan) works pretty well; it starts at spring equinox, as is logical, and starts exactly at the spring equinox every year so you don't have to muck about with arbitrarily-placed leap years. It does start at a religious event, but at least it's one that we know happened and we have a firm date for, unlike certain others. Even the months are better; they start out with 31 days, switch to 30 on the 7th, and the last has 29 or 30.

Those are probably from Digitalglobe's Worldview 3, which has 30cm ground resolution. Modern commercial EO sats tend to have pretty good rapid-slew capability. I don't have these stats for Worldview 3, but the Pleiades sats that provide the Airbus-copyrighted images can do anything within a 800km swath.

But both made up for it with large and efficient hydrolox upper stages; the Falcon upper stage is a dinky kerolox thing.

With hydrolox engines in both cases, and extremely efficient SC ones for the shuttle. Falcon has pretty average gas-generator kerolox engines.

It's from an MSL image, it's a few cm across.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orbiting_Carbon_Observatory_2 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soil_Moisture_Active_Passive https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/InSight https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glory_(satellite) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suomi_NPP

Vandenberg.