Kryten

They're having to ship in a replacement part for the hydraulics system, so tomorrow isn't doable. It's currently NET the 14th.

It's similar to what we had in the 90s, nothing new. It was an accessory to the dotcom bubble, and it's pretty much the same situation now.

They don't have advanced enough tech to shield an ICBM warhead, that's not the same as just not having it. Given the speed a useful ICBM warhead will come in at, it's a significantly harder problem than orbital re-entry.

Orbital had extensive help from NASA for the Pegasus project. It even launched from a NASA aircraft for the first five flights.

No, it's extensively modified. Minuteman third stage is replaced with an Orion 50XL, which gives over twice the impulse; and an Orion 38 is fitted as a fourth stage.

That's a pretty standard super-synchronous GTO, and it'll reach GSO using a conventional chemical thruster, as it's the norm for communications sats.

Pegasus II was built around Stratolaunch, not the other way around. You don't need to payload integration at the same airport as the launch. Pegasus does integration at Vandenberg then does a ferry flight to whatever airport is best for the launch, and LauncherOne is set to do the same thing with integration at VG's hangar in Mojave.

And it's now official; http://www.spacex.com/news/2016/09/01/anomaly-updates

For very small launchers, air launch can give you very large performance increases. The EV-2 Caleb would've put up 7kg from about 1400kg gross weight; and later this year or early next, the ground-launched SS-520-4 is to put up 3kg from ~2600kg gross weight. That's about four times the efficiency, and it would be even higher if you had a Caleb-alike with modern fuel.

http://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?topic=41751.msg1616622#msg1616622

RTF has been delayed to January.

DoD already does a lot of purchase from commercial imagery providers though the geospatial intelligence agency, they're the main customer for the very high-res ones like DigitalGlobe.

VSS Unity has completed it's first glide flight.

The other big problem is there's not much *point* having a secret spy satellite. I mean, it's not the late 50s anymore, there's international consensus that it's okay to have military missions, and for you to give minimal details out about a mission if you want to keep it classified.

It's usual for weather sat data to be freely available; if your data never turns up, and your sat doesn't seem to have been developed through the normal channels, it's going to be obvious something's up. It is possible to conceal an object in space, the Misty sats back in the 90s demonstrated that as much, but it'll cost you. Misty were cancelled after costing about $5 billion each, about twice as much as comparable non-stealth sats.

There's no way to have a hidden launch, because of the SBIRS system. Any rocket big enough to reach orbit will stick out like a thumb in infrared, and SBIRS has coverage of the entire planet. If we assume the US is the one trying to do the stealthy launch, the Russian equivalent system US-K has extensive coverage of US territory.

Such plans are generally 'announced' annually, usually around cosmonautics day.

Progress isn't designed to be launcher-agnostic like commercial commsats are or Cygnus was, it requires a lot of specialised ground infrastructure for launch preparation that doesn't exist in the US.

This was the penultimate Soyuz-U, so it's not really that serious. It's pretty likely that they just won't fly the last one, rather than going through a whole investigation for just one launch. EDIT: Loss has been formally confirmed by Roscosmos; http://www.roscosmos.ru/22996/

The Tuvan Republic, to be precise;

Minotaur launches can only be purchased by the US government, because of a law intended to prevent the market being flooded with cheap ICBM conversions. Russia has no such law, hence Dnepr and Rokot being commercially available.

Travelling straight up with a rocket is always a bad idea, it maximises your gravity losses

Soyuz has demonstrated travel between space stations; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soyuz_T-15

On November 28th 1963, the first Soyuz rocket lofted the first Soyuz spacecraft into orbit, meaning both systems are fifty years old today. The spacecraft, designated Kosmos-133, was intended to automatically rendezvous and dock with a second Soyuz, but it quickly lost attitude control and the second was never launched. It was decided that it would still be possible to test the re-entry sequence, and the craft was deorbited on November 30th; telemetry showed that it would land off-course in China, so a self-destruct was activated. It would take three years to iron out most of the gremlins of the Soyuz design, but now it's a reliable workhorse, and likely to fly for many more years. The new Federatsiya spacecraft is set to replace it in the 2020s, but Soyuz has outlived attempted replacements many times before...