Nibb31

You mean something like this ? http://www.amazon.com/Unitek-Connector-smartphone-function-Notebook/dp/B00NL43JAU/ref=sr_1_10?s=electronics&ie=UTF8&qid=1417124852&sr=1-10&keywords=OTG+sd+card http://www.amazon.com/Leef-microSD-microUSB-Connector-Android/dp/B00J2D7R20/ref=sr_1_4?s=electronics&ie=UTF8&qid=1417124979&sr=1-4&keywords=OTG+sd+card

I don't see why you would need two SD cards. Just upgrade to a bigger one and recycle the old one in another device or as a USB stick. The current shift is toward cloud data and streaming. At home, you can connect to your NAS (and use it as your own cloud when you're on the go), and of course you can always attach a big old USB drive with an OTG cable.

I was talking about the offensive payload, not the means to deliver it. Your "missile" needs to get close too. A "missile" launched by a separate spacecraft makes no sense. There is no need to make it aerodynamic. All it needs is propulsion, guidance, and an offensive payload. As such, it would be more like a small drone satellite that loiters on orbit until needed. You would launch a bunch of them in one go and preposition them to different orbits, or you would launch them on demand to the target orbit. The only time a missile makes sense if it's suborbital and launched from the atmosphere, like the F-15 ASAT. But again, you can have a missile that sprays black goo, emits an EMP blast, explodes into shrapnel, or just hits the sat with kinetic energy. The method of disabling the enemy satellite is irrelevant to the means of delivery, but you always need to get up close and personal. There will be no "large military spacecraft" in the foreseeable future. The only military assets in space are coms and intel sats. The only reason for space warfare would be to disable or protect those assets. Don't be influenced by science fiction. Something like Battlestar Galactica is silly. Orbital drones would be much more cost-effective and less vulnerable.

Just spray the enemy satellite with black foam or thick gunky paint. That will put the panels, thrusters and antennas out of order and overheat the electronics to cause it malfunction. No need for missiles, lasers or turning the sat into a cloud of debris.

No idea where you picked that up from. NASA isn't building any transit modules because Congress isn't funding any expedition missions. And centrifuges and "torpor" modules belong in science fiction.

Nope. As you say, rockets are expensive and always will be. However, handling hydrazine and N2O4 proved significantly more expensive than good old RP-1 and LOX, which is what pushed the USAF to start the EELV program instead. The USAF and NASA learned from several mishaps (and big craters) that handling nasty fuels required extra precaution. Those precautions, when scaled up into huge volumes of nasty stuff, cost a lot. It was ground operations involving those propellants that made Titan prohibitively expensive, not the rockets themselves.

I thought they were really lucky that the explosion set the uncontrolled Endurance spinning exactly on it's longitudinal rotation axis. In real life, a chaotic explosion it would have put the rotation on a random axis, which would have made docking impossible.

The reason Titan was retired is because it was way too expensive to operate. Hydrazine is nasty stuff, therefore it requires enormous precautions, which makes producing and handling it very expensive.

An evading GEO sat would be put out of service temporarily, not permanently. Depending on the purpose of the attack, that might be enough, but eventually it can return to its original longitude (or a new longitude) and resume service.

Yeah, but it takes enough time to reach GEO for the target to evade the manoeuvre. It also takes perfect planning to reach a GEO target with a suborbital missile, and the rocket would have to be pretty big, so the launch would be triggering all the cold-war ICBM monitoring systems.

Ignoring the fact that it makes no sense to launch an orbital spaceplane to launch a missile when you could simply launch a missile (or dozens of missiles for the same mass). As with most of the suggestions on this thread, this one implies that the target is at least passively cooperating to allow its attacker to rendez-vous with it. In case of a conflict, anything that is on an intercept course will be detectable hours before it reaches its target, which gives the target ample time to evade to a wildly different orbit. Two or three small random burns are enough to put the target hundreds of miles away from where the interceptor thought it would be. As long as both craft have propellant, there is no way you can ever rendez-vous an orbital missile with a target that is actively trying to evade.

Both UK and Italy are members of ESA. Britain puts money in and it flows back in proportion to the British space industry. If Britain wants to get more out of ESA, they should be putting more money into it. The thing is, your government doesn't want to spend money on a space program, therefore the UK's contribution to ESA is symbolic and the UKSA is an empty shell of wishful thinking.

The entire Ariane 5 infrastructure would need to be redesigned to support manned launches from Kourou. That's not happening at this stage in the Ariane 5 program and Liberty was never a realistic proposal.

No because the CBM needs to be manually closed and all connections cut off from inside the station. It also requires power to unlock the berthing mechanism, which makes it unsuitable in case of emergency, and that also has to be done from inside the station. Because there is no need to. There is Soyuz.

That's why ESA is building the Orion MPCV Service Module: to get seats on it. You can consider that Orion is half European, therefore ESA does have a manned spacecraft.

Oh come on... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exploration_Flight_Test_1

Neither will Orion. Dragon and CST-100 will be operation before Orion, and much cheaper. How so? Without the SM it has only power and life support for a few hours and no propulsion. Not much point in putting Orion into orbit if it can't even deorbit itself. It takes years to design and build a spacecraft. If you're going to redesign Orion for the ISS, including redesigning a smaller service module for LEO operations, then you end up with a whole new vehicle and another decade of delays.

It's in their old SpaceX-Muse video from 3 years ago: Of course, that's all pretty outdated now. Falcon 9 and Dragon have changed a lot since this video was published, and reusing the second stage is still only a long-term goal. It's orders of magnitude harder than reusing the first stage.

Why was this thread closed? http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/88356-X37 The moderator cites "necroing", which is irrelevant in this sort of thread, and "conspiracy", of which there wasn't any. Speculation isn't conspiracy theory. It looks to me like an overzealous moderator. Necroing isn't bad, as long as the poster has a legitimate question and is on-topic. It's much better than forcing users to start a new thread all over again, which would be redundant and just be a repeat of the older thread. Now, if someone has a legitimate question or information about the X-37, they need to create a whole new thread and the entire argument about its purpose will be repeated.

But why would they want to do that? The whole point of a national space agency is to subsidize a domestic space industry and to gain access to domestic space technology. This is why international cooperation works with barter agreements and not upfront payments: ESA or JAXA get rides to the ISS in exchange for providing hardware that was paid to European or Japanese contractors. Everybody wins. Buying tickets from a foreign provider misses the whole point. There is little prestige to be gained by it. Just look at NASA.

Yeah, well... they don't seem to be doing away with a LES any time soon either. The point is, a LES is going to be a requirement for the foreseeable future, so you can't just wave it away. You are going to need some way to abort safely, and a separable capsule seems to be the best way to do it. A Dragon V2 with an extended fuel tank and reworked engines as I described above might just be able to pull it off.

Have you seen any other governments buying flights from private operators?

I can't see any government flights doing away with a launch escape system any time soon. And for the foreseeable future, the government is the only customer for a manned spacecraft. Even if space tourism does emerge, it doesn't make sense to build a spacecraft that doesn't cater to your biggest customer. Anyway, I don't think a reusable upper stage is going to be practical any time soon. I think a better design might be something like Dragon V2, without the trunk but with a disposable fuel tank instead of the second stage, and uprated SuperDracos (or maybe ressucitated Kestrels) doing the job of the Merlin 1D-Vac. The Merlin has 800kN of thrust, and the Dragon's SuperDracos can provide nearly 600kN (8x73kN) of thrust, but with a much lower Isp. On the other hand, this design would be much lighter because you would save the weight of the Merlin and the trunk and at least one set of staging equipment.

Most of the information since we went digital will be lost to future historians. In a couple of centuries, they will have more sources of data from the 19th and 20th Century than from our era. Newspaper articles, books, photographs and postcards are dying off and most digital content will have either disappeared or not be readable in a couple of decades. Optical and magnetic records decay, and with digital, a single bit missing can make the whole media corrupted. Our great grand children won't be able to read those Photo CDs or camcorder tapes from the 90's the way we can look at old family albums from our great grandparents.

If Philae is true to ESA tradition, there won't be any pictures before a day or two. ESA is not NASA. They usually suck at PR.