Kryten

Coincidence. An ISS resupply mission from last month.

There aren't even any official national varieties as far as I can see. Not even in nations like India where other national languages do have official standards.

The 'foil' is alumunised mylar. Gold backing on windows or visors is actual gold foil. Trying to make an actual insulating covering out of gold foil would be an exercise in futility, it's nearly as soft as lead and tears very easily.

Only problem is there's no body with the authority to do that. If, say, the government did decide to convene a body that started to dictate to dictionary makers how to spell, I can guarantee you the response would be something along the lines of 'shove off'. It's just not the kind of attitude anglophones tend to have towards the language.

The main issue with English is the spelling does not represent how something is pronounced, but how it was pronounced when that spelling became reasonably standardised, mostly in the sixteenth century. 'Sword' had a pronounced w, knee and knife had pronounced k's, e's at the end of words were always pronounced, and so on.

True to form, Wikipedia has an entire page on the spelling of 'Shakespeare'.

One of the extra-fuel Progress variants would do the job nicely, although it'd need integration of a new docking system.

He's on about the next landing attempt. The next two have payloads that are too heavy, and the one after is going into polar orbit and thus the wrong direction.

BRB patenting the wheel. I'm going to be so rich.

A scrub would be very bad for SpaceX's scheduling. They really can't afford the wait.

Nowhere to land. The approval from USAF to build the landing pad only came yesterday.

No official word for either, but Turkmensat is close enough to limit I highly doubt it'll be doable. Jason 3 (built for V 1.0) should have plenty of margin.

No, it's right at the upper limit of the performance envelope. It doesn't even have legs.

Next launch attempt planned at about 23:00 UCT, or five hours after this post.

They aren't a player in the market, they're some guys with a website. GO has customers, and Stratolaunch has massive financial backing. They're not a great example-even leaving aside the issues of large air-launch projects in general, they're trying to move into a very crowded market segment while using some of the most expensive engines available and a major contractor with a habit of massive cost overruns. Yes? That's the subject of this thread. If you think pointing out issues is 'defeatist', you're not going to get very far in the real world. You can't make problems go away by not looking for them. Yes, the same as a spaceplane. You're not going to have a hypersonic anything with a simple control system, or high-performance engines that won't need to be checked after that much firing time. Read what I wrote again. Nobody expected X-33 to make money at current launchrates, but it the estimates were based on very high launchrates putting up Big LEO constellations like Teledesic. When Iridium and Globalstar went bust and the Big LEO bubble burst, X-33 died an ignoble death. I was talking about vehicles, not flight phases. If you're not going to be hitting orbital re-entry type speeds, you simply do not need wings. They beat Venturestar, Roton and Kistler, to name a few. They'll knock up a few more notches before they're gone, that's for sure. This is mostly gibberish, and certainly irrelevant to my point. There's money in buses, payloads and completed spacecraft, components... everything except the launcher. Why do you think ESA pours so much money into subsidizing Ariane? The resulting work in the rest of the aerospace industry ultimately pays for it a few times over. You really can't have talked to many people 'in the know' if you don't understand the concept of a prime contractor. I think it was mostly profit, in all honesty. The people looking to build cubesats either have the capability to produce such simple components themselves, or at least source from somewhere other than a slighly dodgy internet site-and the rest would be relatively naive uni students. You're going to get horrendously overpriced in that environment for sure, regardless of the rest of the industry. Yes, get around the lack of marketshare in that segment by moving to an equatorial country. That makes all kind of sense. Do you actually read my posts? Again, do you read my posts? Boeing and ULA were completely driven out of the commercial launch business by foreign suppliers. They sat and watched almost all of their potential payloads go onto Ariane or Proton. Do you seriously think they wouldn't have cut prices to stop that if they were able?

We mustn't forgot that DHM is also both a lethal asphyxiant and a toxin. Truly a pernicious substance.

Price per kilowatt doesn't count for much when you get an unusually calm day and the whole grid shuts down.

There's not a lot of public information available, but the MDA\Coleman aerospace have a family of ABM test targets that are dropped out the back of a C-130 or C-17, then launched. That would allow for something a good bit bigger than Pegasus, but won't get you into EELV class.

Still red on the last balloon. Scrub.

One balloon left...

Upper level winds still red.

Works on so many levels.

Lightning rods. Also double as camera mounts.

Don't need permission for uncontrolled airspace, but what little there is of that is all extremely remote. The most popular for this kind of thing is Black Rock in Nebraska.

Ballute, to stabilise between drop and ignition.