Kryten

Can you not distinguish actual missions from study concepts? Show me a formal objectives list that includes anything about colonisation of anything.

Sorry, but homeopathy objectively does not work, and we have the studies to prove it. As others have pointed out in this thread, science is about forming and disproving hypotheses, not what scientists believe, and the hypotheses behind homeopathy have been disproven. EDIT: The section about this on the wiki policy page explains this quite well;

Name one NASA Venus or Mars mission with anything like that as an official objective.

A permanent moonbase will not happen in the forseeable future. It certainly isn't a NASA objective, long-term or otherwise.

Are you serious? Do you seriously think the only way we have to test the composition of the moon is to send a crewed mission and pick up some rocks?

A5-V should be viable, given interest by the Russian military in heavy GEO missions, but lunar missions would depend on the state of the economy after A5-V is ready. I don't imagine it'll be all sunshine and lollipops by that point, but there is at least a chance.

If you want to look into them, this and the related pages there are probably the best you'll find, even if they are quite snarky. There are some fascinating lessons in how not to run an online community there, but the rapid drop-off left sites with higher verifiability requirements with nothing to use.

Then you're advocating an economic impossibility. You complain about a single Atlas V: do you have any idea how much it would cost to resupply a permanent lunar base?

Can we please take the moonbase talk to a thread that's not supposed to be about actual, near-term missions?

Replacement with a SEP Phobos sample return (as recommended by the NASA advisory council) would have better scientific return than either of these missions, and Moon landing isn't feasible in the same timeframe as ARM in any case-landers aren't cheap.

That's basically Citizendium... which failed miserably, having managed to scare off all of the actual experts they'd attracted. They also suffered massive damage to their reputation by letting e.g. homeopathy 'experts' write articles on homeopathy, creating articles that were nothing more than fluff pieces.

As a reminder that most missions aren't scientific probes or space station modules, here's the payload on what's currently the next scheduled orbital launch, THOR 7; it's going up with another communications sat called SICRAL 2, but it's for the french and italian militaries so no images are being released of it.

The original article is probably literally true in the basic facts, just not the interpretation. The pertussis vaccine is very widely used, but lasts about 6 years, is about 80% effective and can be bypassed by some new mutated strains; so you'd expect most new cases to be in the vaccinated. It doesn't change the fact that the vaccine has successfully massively reduced the prevalence of and public health risk from the disease.

Science isn't done by press releases. If all you can find are news articles and not an actual study, it's generally ......... Also you'll note the original article is actually just copied from 'naturalhealth365', which, through a quick scim, promotes plenty of objective BS like homeopathy being effective; again, can be safely assumed to be generally .........

She should get replaced fairly soon, as these things go-ESA/JAXA BepiColombo mission launches 2017 and arrives 2024 with current planning. It's certainly a better situation than, say, Saturn (nothing after Cassini until at least the late 2030s or early '40s) or Uranus and Neptune (nothing since Voyager 2).

Moving plants are moving plants, it's of no real taxonomic significance. Animals are a clade, not just a term for multicellular organisms that move above a certain speed.

Unlike wikipedia?

This is just a mish-mash of obsolete strategy documents (Mostly Bush's VSE) and a few studies. None of it represents a real plan, and there's frankly no realistic prospect of this happening.

Probably Al-Li alloy, like the rest of the rocket.

If, by 'the same kind of payloads' you mean 'half as much to GTO and less further', then yeah, sure.

Unfortunately real life is not KSP, so mechanical wear is an actual thing. A thing which has recently been found to have been responsible for the Antares failure, no less.

BE-4 is already at the stage of powerpack testing, full engine should be in a testing rig next year. IVF and autogeneous pressurisation for the first stage mean you eliminate helium and hydrazine completely, with commensurate savings, and there should be much lower infrastructure costs. One pad on each coast, no need to keep two separate lines running, no need for the line to be capable of producing specialised left+right cores for heavy launches.

Estimates, but there's no particularly new tech in there (other than SMART, which isn't included in them), so they're likely pretty trustworthy.

AFAIK that range includes reusable, expendable and partially expendable versions.

SpaceX needed to develop an LV within certain specifications for the FALCON contract; exactly the same as ULA's predecessors designing Delta IV and Atlas V within certain specifications for the EELV programme. SLS is a red herring, as for the third bloody time, it has nothing to do with ULA and uses a design process that has not been in use for thirty years. A design process which still involves minimal NASA design, as NASA has no capability to design an engine or rocket stage. You might want to look up 'systems integration' and how important it is, probably using something that isn't Wikipedia.