Kryten

Note that the 3-engined F9 Dev2 booster is still stored near the site, at the right.

The stream has started, launch is in just over half an hour.

Putting useful propulsion onto your sat means you're very unlikely to get a secondary slot; the increased risk to the primary is too great. Apart from that, SSO orbits only exist at a few very specific inclinations.

We're not sure if there'll be an official JAXA stream-none has turned up yet, at least-but NVS are doing their own stream here;

The existing facilities at Uchinoura, near the southern tip of Kyushu. Most commercial cubesats are for imaging, you won't get as much value out of them if you accept whatever orbits are available as secondaries. Most will want SSO, and secondary opportunities for SSO are getting quickly booked up as more companies move into the market and existing ones expand. And this expansion is *rapid*. As a case in point, there's a PSLV launch set for later this year where the primary payload only takes about half the capacity; ISRO are selling the rest commercially, and they're now up to 102 sats, almost all nanosats. Only 82 nanosats launched last year, total.

Declassified documents from US department of energy mostly, and corresponding agencies of other countries. But you can easily see nuclear tests on seismograph data, and nobody has found a test in seismograph data that does not show up in these documents. At best you can detonate several devices at once to make it hard to determine individual yield from each device, like the Indians did with their second test series. From 1959 the US has had satellites able to detect radiation bursts from surface nuclear tests; initially the dedicated Vela sats, and now as hosted instruments on GPS sats. Again, they have shown up nothing that is not on these lists. There was an incident in the eighties where they showed something like the blast from a bomb, but nothing showed up on seismographs and we're now sure it was an instrument malfunction.

The USA conducted 1,054 tests and two operational uses. 928 on the Nevada Test Site, 105 in the Pacific Proving Grounds, three in the South Atlantic (on rockets fired from a ship), three in Alaska, two in New Mexico, two in Mississippi, one in Colorado, and the remainder in areas of Nevada that are not formally part of the NTS. Russia performed 715 tests. 456 at Semiplatinsk, 224 at Novaya Zemlya, and the others in various other locations throughout the USSR that saw a few tests each. I'm not going to list them just for a forum post, but the lists are out there. The United Kingdom performed 45 tests. 21 took place on Australian territory; seven at Maralinga and two at Emu Fields on the Australian mainland, and the rest on various islands. The other 24 tests took place at the Nevada Test Site in the US. France has performed 210 nuclear tests. Four took place at Reggane and thirteen in In Ekker, both now in Algeria, with the rest taking place in French Polynesia China has performed 45 tests, all at Lop Nur in Xinjiang. India has performed six tests, all at Pokhran in Rajasthan. Pakistan has performed six tests, five at Ras Koh and one in the Kharan desert; both in Chagai district. The DPRK has performed five nuclear tests, all at Pyungge-Re in North Hamgyong province. Will that do?

There are several companies planning or operating commercial cubesat constellations, e.g. Planet and Spire.

Saturn's radiation belts aren't as strong as Jupiter's, but they're still pretty intense. If you really were as close to Saturn as in that vid, you would not be having a good day.

Tomorrow at 23:54 UTC, JAXA are set to launch the smallest ground-launched orbital rocket ever, SS-520-4; A modified version of the SS-520 large sounding rocket, it's about 2.5 metric tons; a fifth the gross mass of the current record holder. The payload is a single 3U cubesat, the University of Tokyo's TRICOM-1, to be placed in a ~180*1500 km orbit. It's unclear if any more launches of this version are planned, but Canon plans to introduce a commercialised version at some point in the future.

Iridium's agreement is for all new cores for their flights. SES are a geostationary sat operator, they have no connection to this launch or to iridium.

I have not seen any Chinese source supporting the claim that they've actually launched an emdrive prototype, only that they have a programme. AFAICT, the claim is supposed to be have been from remarks given at a press conference on the programme, but I haven't been able to find a recording of this conference, any kind of official transcription, or even a direct quote of what was said. In short, it's dodgy.

A talk by Blue president Rob Meyerson. Not much new information, but gives a good overview of where they are and where they're headed.

http://harwich-society.co.uk/old/info_rough_towers.htm Buildings tend to be heavier than is intuitive anyway, and this one's an armoured fort anchored with a giant concrete pontoon.

~4,500 tons.

OneWeb have received $1.2 billion in a new round of investment. This should be the last round they need, with the remainder of the money coming from debt financing. http://spacenews.com/oneweb-gets-1-2-billion-in-softbank-led-investment/

It's already profitable to extract resources from similarly remote and inhospitable areas of the arctic, why would antarctica be any different?

After the ruble crash, Proton is cheaper than Falcon for non-russian customers. If SES actually believed in going for the cheapest option, they'd be launching on Proton.

If you lose a satellite, you lose the revenue for that sat for the several years it would take to secure a replacement. That's going to be a far larger amount that the difference in insurance between two launchers.

It's not a fissile material thing, it's a budget prioritisation thing. Even today, with much larger military budgets, they don't have air-delivered weapons and have probably a hundred or so ICBMs.

The targeting is like that to obtain maximum deterrent value from a limited number of warheads (compared to the US or Russia), not accuracy; their policy is to maintain what they call 'minium credible deterrent', not MAD capability. As an example, from 1980 to about 1995 the Chinese strategic deterrent force was two single-warhead DF-5 missiles.

For GSO comsat launches, which are most of the launch business, you will never get to this point. A launch on even the most expensive launchers available today is significantly lower than the price of the satellite.