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Have the [elec|posi]tron move through Los Angles. It will get tagged up, and we could observe the tag (or reverse tag) on the next pass.

I wish that I were joking. SpaceX's crew access arm got tagged in LA on the way to Cape Canaveral, you can clearly see where it was cleaned off in this photo of the arm installed at LC-39A:

http://www.spaceflightinsider....

That's the point.

For instance...this is being worked on

Do you mean the "Figure-8" free return trajectory and free return trajectories invented by the noted physicist & programmer and Dr. Jack Crenshaw, who was actually using a computer?

Could you remind me how many people SpaceX has killed?

One, so far. Details are scarce, but it did not involve a rocket or rocket test.

Virgin Galactic has killed three. Boeing and Lockheed between them have killed about a dozen. I can't be bothered to add them all up, but in reference to other posts on this story, one of Boeing's accidents involved the accidental ignition by static electricity of a solid rocket booster for the Delta third stage, which killed three and injured eight others. Those damned things are dangerous even on the ground.

The IADC and its member space agencies (which I think includes the work of Drs. Lewis and Krag) are all studying the effects these large constellations will have on the space debris environment. Here's the IADC statement from last year. The ESA conference this week and IADC next week are starting to show the results.

One issue is that the existing debris-reduction standards allow a certain small probability of payload/mission failure per payload. When a single "mission" launches hundreds or thousands of (possibly identical) payloads, even those small failure rates practically guarantee an increase in failed and abandoned satellites.

The new work will help determine if the regulations should be applied per-satellite (no change), per-constellation (expensive), or something else.

According to an article on Arstechnica, there is some problem with the current design, which means the recovered boosters are only good for one or two re-launches.

There is an issue with turbopumps cracking. I suspect this issue was only detected because the rockets have been recovered after launch.

Nah, they've known about the cracking for years. They've also done at least 7 full-duration burns on one of the recovered stages. It would appear that the cracks are undesirable, but not a short-term threat.

Unlike the Russians or the Chinese.

BTW, SpaceX is planning their next launch on sunday jan 8.

ExoMars project began to materialize in July–August 2009 when ESA signed contracts with NASA and Roscosmos to develop the mission. However, due to budgetary cuts in 2012, NASA terminated its participation in the project. One year later, Roscosmos became the main partner for ESA when the agencies signed a deal obligating the Russian side to deliver launch services, scientific instruments for TGO and landing systems, together with rover instruments, for the mission in 2018.

So that's when the sharing stopped. I can't find the bit where they had to give up on all NASA derived work, it was somewhere else on the internet three or four years ago.

As I understand it, this is also the heaviest load ever delivered to ISS. Not sure that's a big deal, but...

They were selling below the cost for some time. Right now, the price tag is $23.4M per one RD-180 unit for ULA, out of which $20.2M goes to Russia. This is also an interesting number, since we were discussing the Angara above: If $20M+ were the cost (equal to or higher than the price, if the Russians are actually right about the price dumping thing) of two chambers and a turbopump, how much should the engines for Angara, with five chambers and five (somewhat smaller) turbopumps cost? $50M+ would appear to be the case if price per turbopump kW were fixed, but I find it likely that a greater number of smaller turbopumps is somewhat more expensive - after all, it's more components to manufacture, assemble, and test. And the turbopumps are definitely a significant portion of the cost. Let's say $55M-$60M? But that's just the five engines. Now you also have to manufacture the five cores, the second stage, its own engine, the cryogenic stage, its own engine, and control systems for all that. (Not to mention that two fuel systems on the pad - one of them deeply cryogenic - are quite certainly going to be more expensive to run.) All that while keeping in mind that Proton people basically say they can launch a Proton for you for less than $70M.. So if the RD-170-lineage engines are so expensive, despite having been in large-scale serial production for at least the last 15 years, how is Angara supposed to end up cheaper than the Proton?

I believe it was. I was watching NASA TV this morning and they were talking about how Orbital's craft would be arriving on Tuesday and there were some "consumables" for various experiments on board. I found an article here that mentions it as well.

I don't believe there was anything in there that was critical for space station operations--the astronauts won't starve or anything. There's also a Progress launch planned in the next 18 hours.

FTFY

I believe it was. I was watching NASA TV this morning and they were talking about how Orbital's craft would be arriving on Tuesday and there were some "consumables" for various experiments on board. I found an article here that mentions it as well.

I don't believe there was anything in there that was critical for space station operations--the astronauts won't starve or anything. There's also a Progress launch planned in the next few days.