Kryten

No idea, sorry, I've not seen anything on AR-1 that isn't about the engine itself. It's likely still notional.

The commercial satellite market is irrelevant to ULA, because most of their demand comes from the DoD via the EELV program rather than commercially, and the DoD is strongly committed to having two providers in the EELV capability class to prevent them being grounded after a single failure. This is why both Delta IV and Atlas V are produced, despite having overlapping capabilities and now coming from the same company, and why ULA are going nowhere without somebody to replace them. The DoD simply would not allow it. It this is stuff you didn't know, then you genuinely don't have a clue about the launch industry.

There's no plausible way for a microorganism to survive the radiation exposure over very long periods of time involved with interplanetary transit. Highly radiation-tolerant organisms like the much-vaunted Deinococcus radiodurans all have active DNA repair mechanisms-they wouldn't help in a dormant state.

None of that seems to be an actual response to my post, so I'll say it again; provide a good reason the DoD would drop the assured access policy in the timeframe you gave, or that they replace ULA's role in it.

2019, although the full development plan isn't yet approved and funding is only being done a quarter at a time. ULA, their parent companies and Aerojet are still wrangling with Congress to either lift the RD-180 ban or get DoD funding for the AR-1, both of which would delay or replace Vulcan development. ULA aren't going anywhere as long as the DoD keep their assured access to space policy and nobody else credible shows up in the EELV class. If you have a reason to believe either of those will happen within the next five years, give it. If not, go away and try to read something about the space business that isn't a missive from and for SpaceX fanboys.

The evidence is the organic deposits. This is the same guy that thought microbes being found at 40km altitude means those microbes must be extraterrestrial, leaps of logic are his MO.

Here is the 2013 NASA planetary science division decadal survey, where a bunch of scientists get together and decide what NASA's priorities should be in this area for the next decade. I recommend anyone rooting for a Sedna probe to read through it to see how much interest they have in one, or to just Ctrl+f 'Sedna' if they're impatient.

It was given as a talk at an astronomy conference, which I haven't been able to directly find online, but almost all the buzz has been from this Guardian article, which a bunch of other newspapers shamelessly copied.

That would take an absurd amount of money that'd be better spent funding several different missions to other locations.

Saturn V was pretty unreliable by modern standards-just look what it did to skylab, that'd be a total mission failure for most payloads-it was just big. We don't need rockets that size, and frankly never did.

The orbit is retrograde, impossible with co-accretion.

Wickramasinghe is a man with no biology credentials, a history of making bizarre and erroneous claims about extraterrestrial life, and who provides no real evidence for this specific claim. It's not worth the time to consider it.

I strongly suspect those are repurposed Green Bay Packers cheesehead hats.

I'm pretty sure 'counterintuitive cause' is a statement that the cause is nothing immediately obvious-which, given this was immediately afterwards, means unknown.

The motors are still considered property of the US government, so it can only be used on government missions. Orbital do have a commercially available launcher in this rough class, Pegasus, but it's absurdly expensive ($20 million+). Didn't want to keep making Kestrel engines and the smaller cores for a less profitable market. They have a concept of dedicated Falcon 9 flights with various small payloads, but none are properly manifested yet.

That's exactly what Dnepr is. Smart (converted Topol) would be cheaper for roughly equivalent mass, but didn't have enough demand to support the facilities at it's launch base, so it was canned. Now there's much more demand in this size class.

If you want to put a small payload into a dedicated SSO, and many people do, your cheapest option is Dnepr at $12 million.

The situations aren't remotely comparable. NH is in safe mode and in contact, Philae was entirely without power.

The most expensive film ever cost about $400 million to produce. Even without adjusting for inflation, that's not enough for a Saturn V, nevermind the lander and all the rest of it.

Progress launches are four a year as standard.

The fact that planetary orbits aren't circular or remotely equally spaced? Slot in the real distances and it'll look nothing like that.

They will attempt to image the opposite hemisphere using reflected light from Charon, but from what I've heard they aren't too optimistic with what results they expect from that.

Government. Meat. Puppets.

People claiming to be from the southern hemisphere are government meat puppets.

The blocks are more to do with performance targets than the actual modifications; Dark Knight doesn't hit the block II performance target (130MT), but does allow enhancement to block I/Ib. That's also why you get the '70 ton' figure being bandied about for block I; that's the mandated performance target, the actual performance should be significantly higher.