Kryten

Do you honestly not realise how ridiculously and blatantly fabricated this number is? If you took the entire population of the planet and assumed they watched it in the same proportion as the US population, you would get about 2 billion. If we remove the proportion of people who can't physically watch it because they don't have internet access/TV/electricity, it's going to be lower than that.

In what countries do you think there'll be another 800 million viewers?

'All life we have known to exist' is going to be a tall order; phylogenies of extinct animals have to use morphological data, phylogenies for unicellular ones pretty much have to use molecular data, and merging the two is extremely difficult.

Unless you happen to live near Woomera, thatcher doesn't have an awful lot to do with it.

Does anybody actually watch the Simpsons at this point?

My thought is this whole situation is the stupidest manufactured controversy I've ever seen.

Soviet Zenit spy satellites were being reused decades before Shuttle flew.

The american one is HTV, and the Russian maneuverable warhead vehicle is RS-26. Given it's already been tested, and is plenned to be operational within a few years, it seems to just be an RS-24 with gliding warheads.

The SR-71 never overflew the USSR or PRC; it avoided anybody with relatively modern missile systems, in other words. Given 80's soviet heavy SAMs demonstrated terminal ABM capability, they were in fact perfectly capable of hitting something moving at mach 5, or indeed 5km/s. All ICBMs are hypersonic. If you mean manouverable reentry vehicles, Russia has publicly tested those, although information is understandably scanty.

That's the first stage from CZ-3A Y24, which put up the Fengyun 2A weather sat on December 31st.

Traditionally by rail, but CZ-7 is intended to use a new spaceport that's accessed by ship. Road transport is only from factory->port, and port->launch site.

It's doubtful-you'd need to produce quite a lot of gas to overwhelm the existing mechanisms for getting rid of it (i.e. burping), and the stomach isn't really all that acidic in the grand scheme of things.

Do you have absolutely no self awareness? Read what you've written; are you supposed to be describing a businessman, or a ****ing messiah? I'm sorry, I'm not going to waste any of my time with somebody who's so steeped in newspace fanboy BS that they're convinced Elon Musk is God's secondborn son.

If you do all of your manufacturing in-house, as SpaceX at least attempts to do, there's no meaningful 'manufacturing cost' separate from raws material et.c.; only constant staff costs. EDIT: Metric tons. Metric is standard in the aerospace sector even in the US.

Last year, 10/16 sats commercially put into GTO were in the FAA's heavy weight class; >5.4 tons. Ariane lower payloads now regularly break the 6 tons mark.

Commercial imaging got their cost reduction-they got it by shrinking their sats to the point that they became negligible in launch statistics. Science missions are constrained by national budgets and tend to have very high relative spacecraft and operational costs; what else do you think there's going to be?

Have you tried any actual simulations of this scenario?

It's as close as makes no difference. Excluding transport to ISS (which is based on NASA demands, and obviously not going to change due to price, commercial non-GSO launches in the past ten years averaged less than six a year, much of that small vehicles. GSO averages over 14, and much larger rocket classes.

For the last time, the vast majority of satellites are put into a limited number of orbital slots, and are limited further by limitations on frequencies. The orbital slots and frequency allocations go for enormous amounts of money; and the operators still make vast profits, because the sats have thousands of transponders and can support tens of thousands of customers. Trying to fly cheap satellites would be throwing money away.

Because that's the vast majority of the market, current and projected, and always has been. Already has payload cost far higher than launch cost, we did all the science you could do with very cheap sats a long time ago. Modern civilian imaging sats average below half a ton; they're small payloads to low-energy orbits at slow rates, they're not going to support a huge increase in launch rates. Surveys of potential participants don't support space tourism as a large-scale activity; even Bigelow's much-lauded 'space hotels' are actually aimed at research funded by state governments. Completely irrelevent. A single Falcon 9 could put up every cubesat ever built with a good amount of room to spare, you're going to need multiple orders of magnitude of growth for them to actually support an LV. Sure, the moment we discover a way around the inverse-square law. Antennae size and solar energy issues would render any independent interplanetary cubesat effectively useless. Nobodies going to pay for that. I don't see it because when other people have tried it, it never happened. Are you seriously historically ignorant enough to think Musk is the first guy to try this? Have you even heard of Hannah or Beal?

Don't talk nonsense. The ITU is sure as hell not going to give anybody 50 slots on the Geosync ring, and nobody is going to pump in the extra infrastructure cost to support a system of fifty sats rather than a few. You're making the same mistake a lot of space enthusiasts do; focusing exclusively on launch. Payloads, ground infrastructure, ITU regulations, potential customer base, insurance costs; all these raise issues that are at least as important as launch costs. Assuming changing launch costs alone would fundamentally change the market is a mistake many have made before, to their detriment.

That was Beal's mistake, and Hannah's, and the Sea Launch consortium's, and Lockheed Martin's more than once. Because launch is almost never the majority cost of a space program, 'built it and they will come' simply does not work. Your program lives or dies based on other market forces pushing up payload numbers, and all the ones that have been tried so far have ended up in the 'dead' camp when the next recession hit.

Think. What are manufacturing or testing costs? Mostly salaries. Can they stop they paying these salaries? No because their 'vertical integration is god' business strategy means all of the people involved are SpaceX employees, and they'd lose the ability to test or manufacture rockets. It costs just as much to pay people to sit on their arses and not build a rocket as it costs to pay them to build one, and it costs just as much to maintain the factory; so where the hell are these 99% savings supposed to come from?

The Usa in Japan, or the Usa in Russia?

That's not what 'paradigm shift' means.