monophonic

Next problem being said gas giant should be (almost?) completely devoid of hydrogen. Otherwise the oxygen would soon combine with it to form water, which we know can and will form clouds, but that was not the question. So I guess technically yes, but conditions for oxygen clouds to occur naturally must be impossibly rare?

Well if you insist on having your ships being all-in-one SSTO lander and interplanetary+ cruisers, your best option is to have Ships That Just Do It™. The requirements of landing/launching and interplanetary transfers are just so contradictory, that any attempt at making physics of the combination vessels even semi-plausible is going to dig you into a way deeper hole than handwaving the problem away does.

Why not? The technical bits already have to keep working with accelerations towards any direction or around any axis, when the ship is maneuvering. The problem of configuring living and working spaces to accommodate two different gravity vectors was solved in 1962. (See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RP_FLIP) Now, you may have to adjust some things for stronger or longer accelerations than they would have been expected to handle before, but that's just engineering. I don't see any reason why that couldn't be physically achieved. Sounds like in-orbit assembly of a big single ship, with added complexity from having said ship be able to rebuild itself while underway. If you drop the scrapping and reconfiguring parts, you are essentially left with a highly redundant, compartmentalized vessel with ability to close off failed compartments and continue to function with the remaining compartments.

Sun synchronous orbit will fix that and still be almost polar. You could further customize the orbit to maximize tourism value, like, say have the Sun side pass happen at mid-morning or -afternoon to make geographic features stand out without creating long deep shadows that would hide other stuff. Of course any chosen orbit has to satisfy all the other million considerations that I don't even know about.

Well, yes, but, ... That F-47 was an older USAF-only designation. Last Thunderbolt was retired from USANG in 1953, so it never received an official designation under the 1962 Tri-Service aircraft designation system. However it is still an off sequence number under the current system. If the rules of the system were followed, NGAD should be F-25 (F-24 having been assigned to the Lightning II in place of the also off sequence F-35).

Here's what @Terwin wrote in picture form. (Except this one shows the Earth, but the shadow regions are the same.) (Qarnos, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons) As you can see, penumbra (partial shadow) is larger than the Moon, but the umbra (full shadow) is smaller. And sometimes the Moon is far enough from the Earth that it does not completely cover the Sun. Then we get an annular eclipse, without any full shadow at all.

"Day" and "rotation" are not synonymous, and use of the latter does imply sidereal day. That is where @farmerbens question becomes interesting. Indeed if the Earth did not rotate at all around its axis, we would have negative one days in a year. Negative to account for the opposite movement of the sun. If Earth was tidally locked to the Sun, so we had no day/night cycle, Earth would rotate one full rotation around its axis in a year. Add to this the 365 and a bit days we observe, and the answer is indeed one more rotations than solar days. Or 366.24219*360°=131 847,1884°.

Not just a Space Agency either. The Broglio Space Center was an active launch site from 1964 to 1988, and it is still in use as a monitoring and control site. It is also currently being considered for reactivation for launches. Granted the site is operated by the Italian Space Agency, but Kenyan governement is wise to have their own organization looking after them. Plus they have the perfect claim as the real world owner of the acronym KSA. In my eyes that is all the reason a country needs to have a space agency.

We have discovered cultures of bacteria living on the outside of the ISS. In the friggin outside of the ISS, in the vacuum of space. They don't need tardigrades to protect them. They will laugh at the tenuous CO2 atmosphere of Mars. Who knows how many perfect "vacuum" "resets" you can get before something like that exists in your dome? I bet not that many. This might be the same thing you are saying, but let me elaborate anyway. I don't know if it is even possible to draw a meaningful line between adaptation and speciation on asexually reproducing organisms at all. Isn't the standard line between species at whether the individuals can produce offspring that can themselves reproduce? You can't apply that test when the reproduction involves only a single individual.

If your pay slip says NASA, then yes. If your pay slip says anything else, you are a consultant to NASA instead.

There is a lot more science than that in internal ballistics of a gun. Which goes to say the opposite, using black powder in a gun designed for modern propellants, is an equally bad idea. Like, barrel burstingly bad. But I'm not really an expert on this (either), and we are getting off topic, so I'll leave this at that.

It isn't really about how much weight can angle iron hold. It could even resist pushing down into soft soil, if it hits a rock, or a root, or has any semblance of a foundation beneath the undergrowth. There is another angle iron visible at 0:52 in the BBC video. Could have been brought by the investigators, or could be a remnant from some old construction, like a fence. Latter case a foundation would be likely. See how lopsided that propping is? The support point is full one third to one side of the diameter. Round things like that are very difficult to get balanced even when you have perfect placement. Any deviation from absolute perfection and the ring will pivot to the side. Granted having the low side dig into the soil does help, but I'm still doubtful it could keep a half ton ring in place like that. 50kg? Probably as long as the wind stays calm and no-one tries to lean on it. Add to that how flimsy that ring looks, sagging like that at the sides where it is unsupported. It really does look like pressed sheet metal rather than extrusion or machined part. You can see the structure well at 0:36. Even the teething is visible on the inside of the ring. The black colour could be some sort of coating, and there are visible remains of other likely non-metal materials. How it would have looked like in an intact assembly is anybody's guess with what I have here. Anyway, I am certain that there is an engineer or three out there somewhere, who could tell at a glance what exactly that part is called, what is its inventory code, and what it is for. I am equally certain their bosses will not be keen on letting anyone outside their company know any of that.

The way it's propped up in those pics, I say there is no way that thing weights anywhere near half a ton. So my bet is on the Ariane adapter.

The biggest issue I have with quantum theory is, if my highschool textbooks' definitions are to be believed, it is not even a theory at all. It is an observation. A very thorough and comprehensive observation by now, but it can not even try to answer why things happen the way they happen. There are all the interpretations of quantum theory, like multiverse, the one with the wave functions collapses, and whatnot. They could be theories, if there have been any experiments devised that could prove or disprove them. Without those experiments, they are hypotheses. (In multiverse there are infinite universes where that is the correct plural, btw.)

All it comes down to is the non-delivery clauses in the commercial crew contract. Boeing will go whichever way costs less, whether that is pushing through with the currently contracted launches, or canceling Starliner and paying whatever fines they must. Now I do not know what sort of penalty clauses the contract includes, so it very well may be the cheaper option to break it. Even free, knowing how some governement contracts in my country are...