Kryten

Soyuz costs $70 million a seat, so $210 million per crew rotation. DIVH alone costs $435 million.

And until then Soyuz works just fine. It's throwing a lot of money away for no good reason.

Because that'd be considerably more expensive than just using one of the CCDEV vehicles.

Nobody's bothered, as far as I can tell. ULA have never considered a rocket with more than 3 cores.

You'd need both a completely new pad and an extensive redesign of the CBC.

Angara A5 is the main reason for the entire program's existence, and is considered a high priority by the Russian military. The 'Angara A1' launch was actually a test of A5 stages (different upper stage); real Angara A1 isn't planned to fly for at least a year, and Angara A3 is entirely unfunded.

Nope. 100 tons would be a very small rocket, smaller even then Vega.

It'll be a long while, if ever. The batteries simply won't charge if they're too cold, and they won't be significantly heated until the comet's much closer to perihelion.

Except then you hit volume and timing issues. An EDS for, say, a Mars mission simply will not fit in the A5 fairing, and will be subject to prop boiloff between flights. Given the number of Angara pads (1) and the payload capability of A1, you'd have a struggle just to pump it in faster than it's coming out.

The problem is no engine can actually handle that, at least passively. They either work on consumable coolant (propellant forced through the nozzle walls before burning) or are themselves consumable.

Yes, I meant the coma.

It already is.

Of course the whole mission is crewed. Are they supposed to knock together another of whatever 20-odd ton component failed to launch in the few months the rest of the contraption would have in a stable orbit? This is one of the major reasons nobody uses EOR.

Greg, adults are talking. Electrical universe model can't even explain why comets show jets, and the supposed carbonaceous chondrite composition is disproven by stardust results. You can either admit that and move onto something potentially useful, or pull a Hoyle and make up conspiracies that explain the results, but either way stop trying to foist this nonsense onto us, we're not interested.

The problem is the harpoons never fired at all, and neither did the thruster. The screws alone would not be sufficent in any material.

Rocket engines aren't built to take re-entry.

Bandwidth isn't exactly great at those distances. Particularly when every other mission beyond lunar orbit is dependent on the same facilities.

Slightly, in that much of the infrastructure is common to that used to produce isotopes for nuclear weapons. That in itself isn't the issue; the issue is producing that kind of infrastructure from scratch just to make a few RTGs is not remotely worth it economically. Nuclear weapons stunt hold it back, they make it possible.

Philae and Rosetta have multiple instruments for measuring 67p's ionic environment and it's interaction with the sun; so did Deep Impact, so did the Halley armada. It would be obvious if something like this was happening. It is not.

Distribution of water within the plume supports a separate layer below carbonaceous material, and your model fails to explain why there is any distinguishable distinction between comets and c-type asteroids.

On the surface yes. Sunlight causes sublimation, this is very basic stuff. If what you were saying was right, deep impact shouldn't have detected any water at all.

We KNOW comets have ice under the crust due to deep impact results. Did you think this was the first mission to a comet?

It wouldn't be anything like concrete or most stone. Pumice maybe, but even that'd be pushing it.

What would you suggest? Superglue?

The mechanisms on the feet are screws, and as far as I can tell they just kept turning until Philae stopped moving. It's unclear if they've actually 'bitten in' or not.