Kryten

Angara is an excellent design for what it's designed to do; replace the various ICBM-conversion small launchers for small Russian government payloads and Proton for large GSO ones, while using 'green' propellants to keep the Kazakhs happy. Complaining it isn't in the same class as SLS is like complaining a combine harvester can't hit 60.

That'd require repealing the NASA creation act-an act of congress-the POTUS doesn't have that authority. Do you not have civics classes where you are?

The Chinese demonstrated it a few years back, 'Kunpeng 7'.

Even if you accept the LEO figures as taken, it won't be matching Block I SLS, because as planned it's never actually going to send anything to LEO. F9's upper stage is anaemic even compared to iCPS, and wouldn't get you similar figures to higher energy locations such as lunar orbit.

Problem is, 'the range of ASAT weapons' is potentially all of earth orbit. They've already been demonstrated at GSO altitudes, albeit without a real target.

There's some Russian engineering in there, but it was brought in well after the design process had already started.

No. There simply was not enough reduction on cost available while still making useful missions to justify the horrendous failure rates, that's why the approach was abandoned in the first place.

All the droplet radiator concepts I've seen use liquid metals, I've no idea where he's got this idea of using water from.

Done in preparation for flights of CST-100. They had enough monitoring and redundancy built-in already that it was mostly paperwork.

Even if we set aside that the Chinese also have that capability, that is not a booster issue. Atlas V has the capability and is crew-rated.

Same for most LVs, to at least some extent. Atlas-V uses a derivative of the first hydrolox engine ever flown, Delta II uses a core design that actually predates the R-7, et.c. et.c.

If it wasn't they'd have thrown out these cores and filled the gap with more Atlas V orders.

No, the completely new stages are the 300 series, lengthened to take advantage of the extra thrust. They're literally fitting new engines to the stages that have already been built.

Excluding those already reserved for launches, one.

Orbital are literally doing that right now on Antares, so...

RD-180 production in the US isn't a solution, the legislation set to be introduced bans use of engines produced or designed in Russia.

Look at it in context; it's a competitor to Dragon, and the man on the street is likely to have at least a vague idea what Dragon is, c/o the Musk hype machine.

It could certainly do with a more memorable name; you can bet the man on the street currently has no idea the program even exists.

All that's been released so far is a tweet; https://twitter.com/BoeingDefense/status/639131909935767552 stating that name release is on Friday; we've no idea of what names have been considered, unlike the Vulcan competition. We can only hope they don't end up calling it 'freedom or 'galaxyone' this time.

RS-27 production was shut down years ago; even if AR managed to scrape together the means to restart it, you'd have to replumb the launchpad to allow two separate booster fuels. Use of depots. The other options are BE-3U, which Blue are developing anyway, and a new XCOR engine ULA have been funding for a considerable time already. Even if they aren't chosen, RL-10 aren't 'expensive as ....' enough to out-cash an entire booster stage.

ACES is designed for distributed launch architecture, Centaur is not. Also, it would likely be much more expensive.

Or properly developing a distributed-launch architecture, like ULA is trying to do.

It's an unfunded proposal ULA has been using to nominally beat Falcon Heavy payload figures in infographics.

I'm not talking about just 'techs'; I'm talking about both people in charge of the cosmonaut corps and people like Korolev who were involved in every aspect of the program. How is anybody going to be sent to a gulag in 1961? It's Stalin's ghost going to drag them off, of was his death just a conspiracy as well?

Right, so they killed everyone involved with this failed launch. Then they; -Successfully covered up the murder and/or exile of a whole bunch of people at star city, baikonur, or both -Announced success of Gagarin's launch to the world before he landed, so they couldn't do it again -Didn't bump off the people who knew of Bondarenko's death, despite it occuring in the rough timeframe of the uncrewed Vostok test launches