Kryten

NASA have announced a media conference on June 3rd about recent Hubble observations of the Pluto system, in preparation for the flyby. Apparently they've noted something 'surprising' in the behaviour of the moons, and it must indeed be pretty surprising to warrant a press conference.

It's doubtful the tooling still exists, SpX have firmly thrown their hat for cluster launches on F9 rather than dedicated launchers for small sats. All the customers who'd ordered 1e's were transferred to secondary slots on F9.

Are STAR-63s still available? I've not seen references to STARs past 48 in years.

No, because the cellular proliferation has to have negative effects on bodily functions to be cancer. Otherwise it's merely a benign tumour.

Carcinogenesis can be caused by epigenetic changes, not just genetic ones. But the point was that even a cancer caused by a genetic mutation is not merely 'a mutation'; it's the results on the body of the cellular proliferation, which is the result of the mutation.

Privilege is the absence of impairment, so this is meaningless. Edit: Cancer is a disease resulting from uncontrolled cellular replication; mutation is a cause, and only one possible cause.

In this society, it does. Most communication is verbal, and anyone without verbal communication skills will have great difficulty accessing vital services without help, that's unquestionably an impairment.

Go say that to somebody with a physical disability and see what kind of response you get. That we don't yet have a full understanding of the physical mechanism doesn't mean one can just will away autism or it's symptoms; it's a brain structural issue, not an attitude problem. The trigger is much more specific than a phobia, and the resulting feeling, while hard to describe, is not fear. More a mixture of extreme irritation and anxiety.

It's more like a panic attack, brought about by sustained exposure to unpleasant sensory stimuli. The humming of florescent lamps is a common trigger, as are crowd noises. This would be entirely true, if we were all hermits. A disability is an impairment in a person's ability to function in society: it's a definition set by consenus, not individually.

Would you say then that this person is, using the medical use of the term, diseased?

Have you ever met a profoundly autistic person? Somebody entirely non-verbal?

It not being an orbiter has nothing to do with power, it's about radiation and bandwidth issues.

Given Proton is to set to be lofting our next Mars mission early next year, I wouldn't temp fate.

That was a typo, but ironically I'm not getting the feed after all, just the promo video. Does anyone have a direct link to the feed?

Webcast is now live. http://www.arianespace.tv/

The livestream from Arianespace is here, that CNES one is just a mirror.

Falcon heavy doesn't exist yet, NASA doesn't want to design an important payload around an uncertified vehicle. Also the performance would be marginal for this application, it would likely require a third stage of some sort.

That's the profile Swiss space systems (S3) intend to use, and XCORs Lynx Mk. III is intended to do something similar on a smaller scale without the air launch.

Small? With the sole exception of Buran, every payload orbited by anyone since Skylab has been in that class or lower. - - - Updated - - - MAKS was not Spiral; it was a small hydrolox/kerolox spaceplane with a large drop tank, using the existing An-225 for airlaunch. The tripropellant motor was successfully tested, and the whole thing was probably technically viable. Economic and political viability are different matters entirely, of course, and it still wasn't SSTO.

That's something that's possibly present anyway from abiotic processes. It doesn't give us a specific test.

This isn't terribly relevant to current priorities anyway, as we don't have any single plausible chemistry for Titan life (like RNA/protein for water-based) so we have no real idea how to test for it's presence.

It's certainly big enough, and Vesta was.

You're talking as if the only possible heat source is retained heat, but we know this is a differentiated body with a metallic core. There will be significant decay heat.

My point is the chain reaction is now impossible with natural materials. You need heavy water or extremely pure graphite for fission of natural uranium with the current ratio.

The ratio will be the same on Ceres and Earth at the same time, or indeed anywhere else in the solar system; it's been ticking ever since both uranium isotopes were produced by the supernova of a precursor to the sun. There's no natural mechanism that could heavily enrich a deposit in -235 after that.