Kryten

The previous Proton failures have mostly been on government flights; they buy them nearly at cost and seem to get what they pay for for in terms of quality control. This was an ILS flight, and will heavily erode their cost advantage through increased insurance payments. If this keeps up they could suffer Sealaunch's fate.

Looks similar to the incident last year, except without ending up far enough downrange to cause an international incident.

I wouldn't really use the word 'planned' for Dreamchaser. 'Hoped' would be better.

That explains how we got to Mars in the seventies

That clearly can't be true, or their return plans would make no sense; you can't land a rocket that can't even bear it's own weight.

It comes from somebody claiming it's in said magazine, but I haven't actually seen any pictures or scans.

Sorry, my mistake. Iran could make something similar to Sinpo given they have their own domestic subs of similar size under construction (the Besat class), but as far as I can tell there's no real indication they're attempting to do so.

They have a number of small (~300 ton) domestic coastal submarines referred to as Sang-O, and a ~1000 ton submarine dubbed Sinpo has been seen in satellite images of a shipyard. Sinpo appears to have launch tubes of some kind in the sail, similar to the soviet Project 629/Golf class; some of which were sold to them in the 90s.

Which incidentally means that the advantage given by an aerospike nozzle varies massively depending on chamber pressure. Hence there being little interest in the architecture in Russia, where engines generally have very high chamber pressures, and hence the only group actively trying to fly an aerospike (Firefly) being one that's focused on low-cost low-pressure pressure-fed engines.

That would leave payload and third stage apogee lower than normal; it was higher. As far as we can tell third stage flight was nominal until near the end.

Energiya II/Uragan would supposedly have capability in this range, but costs comparable to current systems are doubtful without high flight rates.

Falcon heavy would fill all of those requirements with crossfeed and a a slightly bigger upper stage.

Do we have an albedo now that the dots are pretty much resolved?

This really shouldn't be in the science labs.

TVC keeps engine pointed through the centre of mass. The soviet Energiya rocket was considerably more asymmetric and kept stable through the same mechanism; if you watch launch videos, you can see it tip over for about a second before the gimbals kick in.

No need.

You recall incorrectly.

There's also the minor niggling detail that the presence of ice deposits on or in Phobos is purely hypothetical.

The Landsat project only started in 1972, I don't think there were any operational civilian wide-area earth observation projects before it.

Presumably Elon would have to choose another semi-impossible idealistic-sounding dream to motivate the engineers. Probably a Europa base or something.

Space launch simply isn't that big an industry, and large portions of it aren't open to commercial demand. You aren't going to make enough money for a crewed Mars mission without a very big increase in demand.

This actually agrees with what's been the working hypothesis for a while-and fills in a lot of the holes in it, which is nice. Most people in the field already thought eukaryotes arose from a fusion between a bacterium and an archaeon-and we had a group that was a very good candidate for the bacterium. The main niggling issue was that no known archaeon was capable of engulfing other cells (phagocytosis), making it difficult to imagine how such a fusion could occur. We don't have full confirmation because we only have the genome, but given some of the genes present this looks like archaeon that can undergo phagocytosis.

The Roscosmos result is probably a lot more accurate; they have returns from radio tracking as they're still in contact, the rest just have radar.

That's all well and good, but he's not exactly going to make any money doing so. Nor is he going to make enough cash to do it even if he manages to capture the entire commercial launch market.

Only true if you believe the pyramids to not be 'man-made structures'.