Kryten

Just like every USOS module.

The devs said they balanced it so that it would feel like a suicide mission. They did a pretty good job of it.

There's another burn to go.

L- and T- times are not necessarily equivalent; the 10:44 time is correct for launch due to a built-in hold.

http://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?action=dlattach;topic=36399.0;attach=813257;image Warning zones for drop of the boosters, first stage, and fairing; connect the dots.

Recombination isn't going to get you far with many pets, given the level of homozygosity.

Coverage has started on NASA TV. Or at least it should have-I don't have flash so I can't personally tell. For people in my situation, ULA should soon be offering a link to a mobile-friendly stream on this page.

The GEM-40s on used on most Delta-II variants have flown ~1200 times. One has exploded. The calculation of that as a percentage is left as an exercise for the reader.

The cooling and power systems aren't very reliable and require large amounts of maintenance-neither would last long unattended.

Operational, or another ground test vehicle?

And exactly how is it supposed to do that?

We know Pluto hasn't cleared it's orbit because Pluto has itself been cleared by a planet, Neptune. The reason it doesn't approach it isn't because 'the inclination is huge', it's because it's been forced into 2:3 orbital resonance-as have dozens of other objects, the 'plutinos'.

Well, it's not really 'the government' as a bloc either, leaving aside the fact NASA is part of 'the government'. It's a poison pill inserted into a funding bill by a septuagenarian McCarthyist nutcase.

It's hardly their fault...

Payload to different energy orbits doesn't scale like that, but roughly yes, it does.

Rep. Frank Wolf, mostly.

NASA can't have any bilateral activities or agreements with any Chinese state enterprise or entity, or any of their employees, by law.

I strongly recommend Anatoly Zak.

In the old provisional plan, they would remove all the Russian segment modules except Zarya (which is owned by NASA, but also impossible to remove without dismantling the US segment). That's not being done both for cost reasons and because most of those modules have limited remaining lifetime.

The limiting factor for almost all planetary mission concepts is not throw weight, it's funding.

Nah, the official plan is for Nauka, node module, and two*NEM module now. Apart from Nauka, none of those are even under construction yet.

Human stupidity killed awareness of space exploration in a segment of the population, naming no names. Pretending that it's not real 'exploration' if it doesn't have humans is a big part of why so much money is wasted on monsters like Orion instead of something potentially useful.

Ares I and V are not equivalent. Ares I was an LEO vehicle, Ares V comparable to SLS. Orion would have been launched on either depending on mission. In practice, Ares I underperformed and couldn't put Orion in orbit without major weight savings, hence cancellation. It's about the same size as Ares V. In the initial configuration it's enough to send Orion to lunar orbit, in expanded configurations enough for Orion and more cargo (a lander perhaps). We don't.

The station is in the Mir class, uses modules that have already been designed and in one case built, and uses rockets that've already been tested; it likely wouldn't even be in the same order of magnitude as a lunar expedition. The cutting of costs relative to the ISS does allow for development of lunar hardware, but only slowly; in the current plan, the required launcher wouldn't be ready until at least 2030, and there are no funds for a lander. As far as I can tell there's also no budget allocation as of yet for the actual launch hardware-which itself is to be built in a spaceport that doesn't yet exist.

Using ground covered as a proxy for science is only useful if you're actually doing science observations every step, as MER and MSL have been doing.