Kryten

They served to add to the whole Dambusters pastiche, same reason the X-wings made banking manouvers that are blatantly impossible outside of an atmosphere. 'Why would they put this in the film'≠'what half-baked justification did the fanboys come up with'.

The projected budget for Europa Clipper-excluding launch, and with a huge effort made to reduce costs-is $1.5 billion. Even the most expensive launch system on the planet (D4H) would add about an extra third to that.

except X-37, X-15, X-23, BOR, Buran, and SS1

The absolute size of the body doesn't matter, only the relative sizes of body and satellite. You could give a dust grain a moon if you were careful enough.

CZ-7 ground test vehicle rolled out to launchpad; should see a flight model doing the same before the end of the year, then launch sometime in the first half of next year.

At least one company (Lockheed Martin) has supplied both the spacecraft and LV for a Mars mission (MAVEN), and could theoretically repeat it without government funding; but they have no financial incentive to.

The best bet appears to be the **** in spaceflight (e.g.)series of Wikipedia articles, but they are heavily cluttered with suborbital launches.

There've been roughly five and a half thousand space launches. Asking for a complete history of it is like asking for a complete history of the US, it's a big ask.

Of course, if all you wanted was the ability to put a satellite in space, you don't something like Ariane 6, or even a launch site. The cheapest launch vehicle I've been able to find is the US navy NOTSNIK program; orbital launches with a six-stage solid rocket put together from weapons components, launched from a supersonic aircraft. Cost for the entire program, including four orbital launch attempts, was $300,000 1958; about 2 and a half million today. Of course, there's the minor issue that NOTSNIK didn't actually work, but that was due to component issues, and rocket motors and guidance systems are a lot more reliable today than in 1958. Poland has F-16s with better performance than the F-6 used by NOTSNIK, and I'm pretty sure they have plenty of weapons components lying around; air launch means they can do it over the north sea, away from populated areas.

Predated the formation of NASA by nearly six months. That was an Army project, specifically ABMA.

You have much to learn about the real world. Most emergency broadcast networks have SMS capability, plenty of TVs don't have RF ports, and many actual radio sets don't take analogue radio signals.

This is nonsense. It barely hits 200m.

A minor planet inside Neptune's orbit without cometary activity is an asteroid. Applying the correct definition rather than whatever the popular perception of it is the exact opposite of sloppy.

The constancy of radioactive decay is based on a bunch of much more fundamental physical constants, stuff like binding energy per nucleon in specific atoms, changes in which would be pretty obvious. If decay rates were large enough for 6000 years worth to look like 4 billion, earth would've produced enough decay heat in the past to at least boil the oceans and possibly melt the surface, which again would've been pretty obvious.

Last time I checked human waste generally wasn't conductive.

Gaseous hydrogen is a pretty poor fuel, and the equipment to liquify it isn't exactly light. The ISS already uses electrolysis for oxygen, and they just dump the hydrogen overboard.

It's composed of people that individually cannot work on those predictions for a number of different factors. TsENKI needed a specific budget allocation for that whole-stage test stands; some politburo members disapproved because they supported Cholemoi's effort, some disapproved because the cost seemed relatively high and they couldn't understand the potential costs involved without it, some disapproved of large space projects in general, et.c. et.c.

There is no single 'they', you're looking at this the wrong way. TsENKI was responsible for launchpads and other ground infrastructure, OKB-1 for vehicle structure and vehicle operation, OKB-276 for engines and engine testing; all with separate budget allocations, priorites relative to other projects, and amounts of political clout relative to competitors like Cholemei's OKB-52.

You're assuming there was a central body to make those kind of decisions. There wasn't.

I never said anything about 'calculations', I said testing and test equipment. A good example is the N-1 programme; the reason every test was an all-up test with a complete launcher is they weren't allocated money for full-stage test stands. Given the complete destruction of a launch pad, four giant rockets, and a good amount of prototype LOK hardware, it should be pretty obvious which option would have been cheaper.

The Soviets went for the 'old soviet approach' because they weren't given enough money for proper testing equipment, it wasn't a deliberate choice. They lost more in rockets, payloads, and pads than they would have gained from skimping on testing.

Or 433 Eros, it would seem.

The biggest cost isn't the launcher, it's building an orbital launchsite from scratch. How could this be done in poland?

There are plenty of species left in fragmented remaining areas of wilderness of Europe or the US, and this renders them extremely vulnerable. For example, the Pyrenean Ibex went extinct in 'first world' Spain in 2000.

How long is a piece of string?