Kryten

And then what? Who trained these 'some people', who were so incredibly loyal they haven't said a word even now? Who prepared the LV and spacecraft? Who transported the spacecraft to Baikonur? Who made sure none of the people who were at the launchsite saw this extra rocket with the extremely distinctive Vostok fairing?

We know that they get these notifications, and that these people have plenty of communication infrastructure, because that's the main source for if something otherwise secret is about to go up. They're not like the nomads Baikonur drops stuff on, Gansu is pretty well developed, even if it is largely rural.

The people in these areas get advanced notice of launches, they don't just drop stages on people.

You realise the Soviet space program was made up of real people, right? They weren't stamped-out brainwashed clones of the New Soviet Citizen, and many of them are still alive. They'd have no reason not to mention this part of the program in the various private memoirs that have been published, and no reason not to mention it now.

That stuff started up because he was a noted test pilot, and had been hospitalised, while rumours were flying about about the first piloted flight. He wasn't involved in the space program in any way.

This is the internet age, no hoax ever really goes away anymore.

It's supposed to be the Earth return vehicle of that Mars mission NASA is required to do at some point, hence all the #JourneytoMars stuff.

It's a bunch of nonsense. It made a bit of sense while there was still the iron curtain up, but all the soviet archives from that era are now public. There weren't even any female cosmonauts until Tereshkova's group were selected in April 1962.

The UI is terrible, I can literally feel it giving me eyestrain. Way too many icons and much too dark.

There've been two successful resupply flights since the last failure, the risk of decrewing is long past.

You'll see a man walk on Mars before you see a Europa submarine.

If you want to know what else there is, look at this years Discovery proposals and the New Frontiers candidates, given that's the point of them. There's also MSR, which this would be in direct competition with and is what Mars scientist have been asking for for the past 40 years. The Decadal Survey prioritised Mars, Europa and Uranus for Flagship-class missions, but it repeatedly recommended downscoping or delaying those missions if they could not be done without affecting the smaller missions. EDIT: In fact, the Survey gave a priority list for things that should be added if they managed to get funding beyond that needed for the ice giant mission; another flagship is the lowest priority, and even then it's one to a different class of target.

It will if NASA is congresionally forced to fly these missions and has to take budget from elsewhere, which is exactly what you were cheering for in your comments about SLS. If the planetary science community really thinks there's enough unique data to justify two flagship missions it'll show up in the next decadal survey; this kind of meddling doesn't help.

I won't. A second mission to a similar destination isn't worth eating up a few Discovery or New Frontiers missions that would do new kinds of science at new targets; that's why not many people outside of Congress wanted Stern's New Horizons 2.

No, it hasn't. I've no idea what you're talking about.

The places where there's ice close to the surface are pretty close to the poles, and winter in the polar regions of Mars is not something you want to be dealing with.

Quarks have no volume, there's nothing to see.

How do you get nitrates? EDIT: Wait, isn't indicating that this thread is a 'The Martian' spoiler in itself a 'The Martian' spoiler?

...you know there are nations other than the US that have nuclear weapons, right?

Sorry, you seem to have missed that we're talking about the real world, and not some alternate history where nuclear yields and the number of weapons stopped expanding sometime in the late 1940s. True, if you've been asleep since roughly the end of the korean war. Have you? It would really help explain a lot.

Transport and handling alone would make this impractical, really. The largest missile stage ever handled in the US was the SR-118 first stage on the Peacekeeper, roughly 50 metric tons; this would be close to 600 metric tons.

The actual composition is different; they're designed for casting a few months before flight, if you left them for years the propellant would slump.

Shuttle wasn't a science project, it was supposed to be a launcher for all US payloads, including military ones. There were eight shuttle flights crewed entirely by DoD personnel and lofting classified payloads, and most of the details of those flights remain classified.

Exomars is designed more as a mobile drilling platform than the long-distance explorer curiosity is. It has a lower expected life expectancy, and is very unlikely to venture into properly difficult terrain like sandtraps.

Payload is about 100kg to a 500km orbit, given announced payloads they want to put on it. Best you're likely to get beyond that are the analyses by Norbert Brügge, here and here. That's probably the rocket immediately after Simorgh, but all we know about it is it's called Sepehr and seems to be a good bit bigger than Simorgh.