Kryten

The Russians have a policy of making sure they can fly the next Progress within 45 days, in case of issues like this. It's not intended to use the same launcher, so if this is ultimately the result of a launcher issue (as seems to be the Roscosmos working hypothesis) that should be fully able to go ahead.

They're currently going into headless-chicken mode over Iran, and are doing large procurements of expensive western equipment and Chinese ballistic missiles. Russian procurement is pretty limited and is mostly from less-expensive domestic providers.

You can't drop that much without breaking treaty commitments to NATO and Japan. You made your bed, you need to lie in it.

Because that's worked so well when it's been tried, hasn't it?

Also note complete lack of welfare. Nice to see space travel is worth more than stopping the long-term unemployed from starving to death.

So no science funding that's not NASA? At all?

They will attempt to damp the spin using the manual TORU control system on the next pass.

If they do achieve control-which is admittedly pretty doubtful-the automatic rendezvous should work fine, and then they can use the TORU manual backup system for docking. It's not lost yet.

Space-Track simply reports USSTRATCOM data.

The USSTRATCOM data is definitely erroneous. It would already have re-entered with a perigee that low.

Full list here. Doesn't seem to include anything important. Oribt is a nominal Progress insertion orbit, lifespan could be anything from 3 days to 2 weeks depending on atmospheric conditions. No passes over ground control stations for further attempts to regain control until 'late afternoon' US time, i.e. in about 10 hours.

The Progress-M27-M cargo craft was launched to the ISS earlier today, and, while exact details are unclear, it seems to be experiencing major issues in orbit and likely won't be able to rendezvous or dock. From what information we do have, the spacecraft is in an uncontrolled spin, uplink of commands and receipt of telemetry are erratic, and the antennae for the Kurs docking system hasn't deployed. On the last pass over the russian ground systems before this post, no telemetry was received at all. Some video retrieved from the Progress earlier, showing rapid spin;

NET May 5th. Will be streamed on NASA TV.

Now have a go for entering terminal countdown, 11 minutes to go. Weather constraint still hasn't been cleared. - - - Updated - - - Two minutes, all green.

Webcast is now live, but launch is currently no-go due to weather issues.

Any demand for speculation will cause the price to rise, and use of gold by industry is only a small part of the demand. In Q2 2014 (the most recent figures I could find) is was about an 1/8th.

The fact that gold is used for speculation at all drives the prices up relative to what they would otherwise be.

Yes, and? Gold prices are kept high artificially due to speculation, and Scandium has few actual uses and so little demand.

Plane changes to hit anywhere not directly under the orbit path would take a lot longer than twenty minutes. That program turned into FALCON/HTV, pretty much just an ICBM with a maneuverable warhead; incidentally the program under which SpaceX got the seed funding for Falcon 1.

USAF have released some details ahead of another launch in May; it's going to be carrying materials from NASA for space testing, a new engine design for the USAF, and presumably other things they aren't mentioning. They say the previous flights were mainly tests of the vehicle itself, and this is the start of operational use. So, seems it's for long-soak component and materials testing.

Government regulatory bodies have actual literal values for this-basically showing what cost of safety measures is worth one fatality-but they disagree quite a bit. In the US, where this info is easiest to get, the Consumer Product Safety Commission says $2 million, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission says $5 million, and the EPA says $7 million.

Is this all you have? Analogies? Spaceflight is not done with electronics, Mars and the Moon most certainly are not the Americas, NASA is not Cristobal Colon, and engineering and policy are not done by analogy. If you're not willing to talk about the actual situation and the real world, you're just wasting the time of everybody here.

IVF is usable on Centaur, and will probably see use on it before ACES appears. Some individual parts definitely will, as they're useful in isolation; e.g. the GOX/GH2 thrusters for easy stage deorbit.

Commercial earth observations have now been viable for a while, but modern commercial EO sats are small enough that the effect on the actual launch market is pretty much negligible.

There's a difference between a mission that at least being proposed, and... that thing. It's not even a mission study, it's a concept study. You claim NASA missions are sent to support colonisation, I just want one objective for a mission (not some concept study that might as well be on the back of a napkin) that mentions colonisation. At all. Of anything.