Kryten

Even aerospace technology has moved vastly on since 'the glorious space age', you just need to move past the obsession most people seem to have here with HSF to see it. Just compare the first tiny, spinning GSO communications satellites to today's 6-ton+ thousand-transponder three-axis-stabilised monsters, or the Thor-Deltas that launched most early ones to the Ariane 5 launching most today.

The design was originally a single-diameter 2.25m design, using as a first stage the booster that's been displayed for CZ-7; but that design had only about 500kg payload (so low demand), and the booster would be built at CALT with other CZ-7 components: both unacceptable to the main contractor, SAST. The new booster uses 3.35m tooling SAST already had for CZ-4, and increases payload.

It's not that much force as things go; even the largest engines have thrust forces within what an average building would be dealing with anyway. If you mean the exhaust, that's usually just directed into an earth or concrete berm.

But the 'crew launch capacity' you're trying to get isn't the reusable space lab capability shuttle did have, it's the space station ferry capability it never did.

Then whatever side takes that out would win pretty much automatically. If the stakes aren't high for that then, again, it wouldn't have been something that would lead to a real war in the first place.

The shuttle replacement flew in 2002. Shuttle was supposed to primarily be as a heavy launch vehicle, just one that happened to be crewed; EELV filled that role handily. Most of the functions shuttle served as a crewed vehicle (exposure experiments, hosted payloads, microgravity experiments with Spacehab) were taken over by the ISS itself, which again was obviously ready well before the shuttle retirement.

Only Asia has crewed spaceflight capability, if we're arbitrarily dividing by continent. Europe, South America and Oceania have never had it.

If nations can agree to settle a dispute based on a video game, then it would not have led to an actual war in the first place, it's as simple as that.

I can only assume you're clutching at straws if this is all you have left. If people were this desperate for multi-billion 'flagship' programmes for inspiration, most fields of human endeavour would be lying fallow. Why is spaceflight supposed to be uniquely deserving of this kind of stuff?

Irrelevant to your point. A good amount of people in the US think the entire space programme ended with shuttle; but there is no personnel crisis in aerospace (outside of Moscow-based Russian firms, but that's a whole different kettle of fish). Everyone is doing just fine with the amount of 'inspiration' we have now.

That's a ~1km body. The Chicxulub impactor would make that look like a firecracker, and didn't do anything remotely close to 'melting the earth's surface'.

There's nothing that big out there on a potential impact course. NEOWISE would've found it if there was.

You're the one claiming these things exist, the burden of proof is on you. EDIT: besides, the largest NEOs we know are only in the same rough class as the Chixlub impactor (~10km) which clearly did nothing of the sort. How is an object that size supposed to have been missed by the Victorians and Georgians that found the largest NEOs, nevermind modern surveys like NEOWISE?

This is only true because Ceres, Vesta and co. are still formally asteroids. The chance of something in that class being unknown and in an orbit that makes it a threat to earth is nil.

Yes, flagship programmes can help attract talent; that doesn't justify a flagship programme that has minimal benefits and has a significant chance of never even happening. Uncrewed planetary or astrophysics flagships get plenty of useful data for a lot less cost, and still attract the talent.

If you think tensions right now are worse than they were at any point in the cold war, you haven't been paying much attention. If '62 didn't lead to world war terminus, what's happening in Ukraine is barely even going to register.

The situation in Ukraine is history repeating itself, but on a much briefer scale than OP is proposing; it's the Russian playbook from Abkhazia, South Ossetia, Adjara, and Transnitria on a slightly larger scale. It didn't lead to open war then, and it's unlikely to now, especially as the intense fighting is long past.

I can't speak for this one on particular, but there's an assumption in this question that paying the ransom will actually solve your issue. In most cases, these pieces of software don't actually have a mechanism to properly decrypt or frequently even encrypt the affected data; it takes a lot less effort for the same gain on the attacker's side to produce something that just irreversibly scrambles the data, as long as the victim doesn't realise this until after they've paid.

The reason many politicians are leery about the commercial crew programme is simply that they don't see the point of it. It's a multi-billion programme to produce a domestic crew vehicle for an outpost that will be up there until at most 2028, which makes economic arguments such as the one in the OP pretty wrong-headed: it would make far more economic sense to scrap the entire programme and buy Russian seats for the remaining period than it would be to fund even one of the CCTCAP providers. The cuts are just a compromise between those that agree with the above and those that want to continue the programme. The Soyuz spacecraft hasn't had a crew loss in forty years, and the Soyuz-FG LV has had a zero percent failure rate in over forty launches. How is a brand-new US vehicle supposed to be more reliable than that?

Simpler aerospikes like the plug-nozzle design can also be useful for rockets with simple, low-pressure engines, as the gain in Isp relative to bell-nozzle designs increases with decreasing chamber pressure. That's why firefly are trying it with their pressure-fed alpha vehicle, and why a few obscure Ilse groups such as Garvey worked on them.

Too expensive to be economical for an expendable vehicle, still not efficient enough to make reusable SSTO feasible.

I think the problem in this case can be solved in a much more basic way than poking into philosophy of science stuff; making science reporters read at least the abstract of the paper they're supposed to be reporting on, rather than skimming a report in some rival publication on it. Stories like this usually come about by Chinese whispers rather than a single incompetent reporter.

Solid final stages are also very common for organisations that are just starting their space programs, and have difficulty producing efficient small liquid stages. The CZ-1 that launched China's first sat, Juno and Vanguard in the US, Paektusan and Unha-2 in the DPRK, the british Black Arrow, et.c. Motors of this type are either designed so that small amounts of propellant can be drilled out to adjust the impulse, or with blow-out panels to stop thrust.

That's probably from tests of the upgraded RD-276 for the latest Proton variants, which thankfully should be the last large hypergolic engine being developed in Russia. Vostochny is intended to use 'ecological' boosters exclusively, and the Khazaks are making taking hypergols out of baikonur a condition for renewing the lease.

200 seconds is the sea level Isp for the J2s on the second and third stages, the Isp in practice would be much closer to the vacuum value of about 420 seconds.