But I thought there were no beginnings or endings to the Wheel of Time?

Sanderson's been doing a wonderful job; his stuff has probalby been the best we've seen since book five or six. (Yes, there were cool bits here in there in 7-12, but they're diamonds in a whole lot of rough.) I'm sort of sad we don't get a few more Sanderson books.

No, berthing is to be standard operating procedure for cargo flights; Common Berthing Mechanism connectors, such as the one found on the nose of the Dragon, don't have any of the shock absorbers required for docking. As it also requires the Canada arm to unberth, CBM isn't well suited for manned flights, as in an evacuation scenario, there'd be no one left on the station to operate the arm, so crewed version of the Dragon will probably feature either APAS or NDS/LIDS docking connectors. CBM is preferred for cargo transfer, however, because it has a larger hatch, big enough to move fully assembled equipment racks through them. Japan's HTV cargo vehicles are also berthed via Canada Arm.

The title of this story is misleading. It isn't the rockets that are grounded, its the spacecraft that sits on top of them.

Also, for what it's worth, the shuttle wouldn't have been help matters much if the Russian's can't fly a Soyuz. While the shuttle is fine for swapping crews (in fact, the shuttle's runway landings are gentler than the Soyuz's parachute landings, a good thing for people who have spent the last six months in 0g), the shuttle can only fly a two week mission, meaning without a Soyuz attached to the station, we'd have to leave people in orbit without an immediate way home, a risk that neither NASA nor Roscomos is willing to take. The Soyuz itself is only rated for six months in orbit, giving them a limited window to fix the problems before we have to talk about unmanning the station.

Actually, the median per regeneration seems to be somewhere around three years, ignoring the gaps between the old run and the movie, and the movie to the new run, so even if Matt Smith leaves after next year, he isn't leaving unusually early. Granted, the 8th and 9th both were exceptionally short lived, but Tennant actually had the second longest run at 4 years, 6 months, after Tom Baker's 6 years 9 months. Granted, the modern Doctors don't stack up as well in episode count. Even when you account for the fact that they are making longer episodes then they did back when, the older Doctors still were making more content per year.

If your interested in how long each Doctor lasted...

Does it need to talk to the cloud for tasks that were already available for voice control on the 3GS or 4? iPod controls, placing calls, and "What time is it?" shouldn't need the cloud. Well, other than the call itself, at least.

There's actually a "dock only" version of APAS (well, really, its successor, LIDS) in orbit already. The soft capture mechanism, with a LIDS, was attached to the bottom of Hubble on the final servicing mission, so a spacecraft can later dock with Hubble and deoribit it when we're done with it, so we aren't left playing UARS/Skylab roulette.

Wouldn't be the first time the Chinese have borrowed space technology from the Russians; the Shenzhou spacecraft is awfully similar to Soyuz. On the other hand, physics are physics, regardless of what country your in, so and there really are only a few useful hull configurations. No one is surprised when a fighter jet looks like externally similar to a Russian or American one.

By the way, the Salyut design is still alive and well. Zvezda, the ISS service module, is a direct decedent. Salyut 6, which you linked to, had a hull number of DOS-5. Mir was DOS-7, Zvezda is DOS-8. DOS in this case is Durable Orbital Station, not Disk Operating System. Salyut numbers don't match up because both civilian DOS stations and military OPS (Orbital Piloted Station) stations flew under the Salyut banner, in order to hide the military nature of the OPS program. Additionally, Salyut numbers were not assigned stations that failed before they could be made operational, in the typical Soviet style of covering up mistakes.

Actually, Ron Garan is active on Twitter, not Facebook. The last few months, he's has one of the coolest twipic accounts I've seen.

Unfortunately, Progress is one of only two vehicles that can deliver fuel to the station and the other, ESA's ATV, only has a flight rate of about one per year. While SpaceX can make up for the lost cargo, they dock (well, berth) at the US end of the station, so there's no way to transfer fuel to the Russian segment. Same story with Japan's operational HTV program (also one flight per year) and the other various commercial project NASA has contracts with. Using the cargo ship's own engines for reboost isn't the most practical option in the station's current configuration, either. You'd want to dock the boosting craft to the CBM on Node 2 forward, the nose of the station, so you'd be more or less lined up with the station's center of gravity. Unfortunately, that port is currently tied up with PMA2, the now-unneeded shuttle docking adapter. None of the upcoming space ships have plans to be compatible with the old docking interface.

Alan Shepard's Freedom 7 flight was suborbital space flight, a feat that has been repeated by a US company, Scaled Composites, on the three SpaceShipOne flights. Unfortunately, about the only use of a suborbital flight is to validate your spacecraft design before an orbital launch. However, neither SpaceShipOne nor Two were designed to reach orbit, so really they're only good for wining the X-Prize (SS1) and joyriding (SS2). It is true noone is ready for a John Glen-style orbital flight, but hopefully the three-way competition between SpaceX's Dragon, Boeing's CST-100, and SpaceDev's Dream Chaser will keep them motivated.

The Titan II booster used for the Gemini missions used hypergolic fuels very similar to the Proton. (Titan II used a 50/50 mix of hydrazine and UDMH for fuel, where the Proton uses strait UDMH; both use N2O4 for oxidizer.) Hypergolics are also used to fuel Apollo service module, the LEM, the space shuttle OMS & RCS, the Souyz service module, simply because they don't require cryogenic storage and they ignite on contact, removing the complexity of an ignition system. I don't they use of hypergolics automatically prohibit man-rating. (That said, the sooner the Proton can be retired in favor of kerolox fueled Angara 5, the better. Proton burns some nasty stuff.) I think they are, in fact, going to use the Proton. In the late 60's, the USSR was planing on using using a Proton to send a Soyuz capsule on a circumlunar flight. (Note that they weren't planing on orbiting the moon, just swinging round the dark side and heading back to Earth, similar to the course Apollo 13 used.) They flew four unmanned test flights, but they were unable to fly a reentry pattern that wouldn't have killed the crew. The plans were shelved after Apollo 8 beat them to it with their lunar-orbital mission.

The Senate can't submit a budget. All appropriation bills must originate in the House. Senators can advise House leaders what would and wouldn't make it's way through the Senate, but in the end, it's the House's job to get the budget ball rolling.

Natasha and the Backburner are also awarded for earning enough class achievements, so you don't even need to get lucky with the drop system. You just have to play the respective classes long enough to hit the achievement milestones.