Dkmdlb

When/where did they explain that? Link?

Elon Musk tweeted it would be a cargo elevator: The door is the cargo door shown on the side of the spacecraft in OP's image.

You're forgetting the supersonic retropropulsion it does in the upper atmosphere.

$2.6 billion isn't the cost of Dragon V2 development. It's the price of the CCtCap contract for SpaceX to carry astronauts to the ISS aboard Dragon.

Well that's pretty cool, then. He's got some money on his hands there, and a very slick display piece.

And he said it fell through his table? It looks very much like a slag and not so much like a meteorite. http://meteorites.wustl.edu/id/slag.htm

Let's see a picture!

All living things are Von Neumann machines.

That is comedy gold. I tried to give you some rep, but apparently I've given you too much recently. Oh, that is hilarious.

Best case, they follow it up with a couple more successful F9 flights, then a F9H demo flight with RTLS on the boosters, then a release of the Mars plans. 2016 is going to be a wild ride.

Gravity will pull it all together and it will go nuclear.

How much you think one could buy a Merlin for? Couldn't be too much, Musk can sell 10 of them for $60 million.

Got a link?

My question was about how the US paid the price for not sending crew up in pressurized suits.

How would a pressure suit have saved them? That's not an answer to my question, then, is it?

When did the US pay the price for cutting corners on that?

Which question? Was it the magnifying glass one?

Pluto > Ceres

Because people feel the agency is enslaved by the will of congress - a body which is infamous for being populated by scientifically illiterate people.

That's not really a good way of measuring. The federal budget isn't some objective unwavering standard by which to measure cost. And it's not really true anyway. NASA had that size budget, but that money was split between several projects, not just the rocket. A more appropriate measurement would be dollars adjusted for inflation. Wikipedia lists the "project cost" as $41.3 billion dollars adjusted for inflation. And that includes all the launches, not just development. The SLS is projected to cost ~$10 billion through 2018 according to Wikipedia. At that link there is a link to a NASA document which estimated the cost of the SLS through the first 4 launches at $41 billion. Depending on how you want to measure the costs, SLS is sort of in line with Saturn. It's definitely not 1/8 as expensive.

Can someone run that through a de-shaker?

1 - Bet on your team 2 - Go to the game and cheer your team 3 - ???? 4 - Get arrested. This thing about how laws are de facto justifiable is nonsense.

We need a link please.

Is there something I missed about the Vulcan announcement or do you mean the Delta IV Heavy?