Russian Proton, payload over 20 metric tonnes, uses hydrazine. You are wrong.

Others have mentioned that those combinations aren't hypergolic. This is true, but only part of the story.

Engine ignition systems are generally one (or a small number) of shots. They aren't difficult to build, but they are difficult to make have a lot of restarts, which is what you want for on orbit attitude thrusters. That is why hypergolic is good for spacecraft

The other part of the story is that they are storable (i.e. liquid at normal temperatures you will find on Earth and in orbit if you have decent thermal control, rather than being cryogenic.) This is the reason why such fuels are used on non-restartable engines as those that put rockets like the Soviet/Russian Proton and the Chinese Long March series into orbit. These rockets are low-tech, but ultimately expensive due to all the safety you have to implement around large quantities of these propellants - and in both cases are due to be phased out in favour of LOx/RP-1 based rockets.

Another, rare, storable combination is Hydrogen Peroxide/RP-1 (used in the British Black Arrow rocket). This isn't nearly as toxic, but H2O2 in the concentrations used for rocketry (>70%) can be a temperamental beast; used as a mono-propellant in torpedoes it has destroyed more than one submarine, most recently and notably the Kursk.

I think the idea is, that if we can maintain in the youth an interest in science and mathematics beyond that needed to act as passive operators of technological civilization, perhaps their generation will not utterly fail to push space travel forwards, as several recent ones have.

You don't have to embrace the right simply because you've realised that cultural relativism is a crock of shit.

There are good cultures and bad cultures, and there are cultures that are good in some aspects and bad in others. Many of the left have known this for years, they just tend to get shouted down in certain, fairly silly, forums.

Europe is objectively better than the US for healthcare (this can, and is, quite easily measured) due to universal coverage. US is objectively better than Europe for free speech (1st amendment) . Both are objectively better than the Taleban in every possible way you can think of.

Perhaps the notion is only a US perspective, because I don't know anybody with right-wing libertarian beliefs in anything that could be described as an engineering, or science career here in the UK.

Libertarianism here is largely seen as a form of mental illness. In fact we don't tend to use the term (in the way you do) much at all. We do have people like that; Paul Staines, Dan Hannan, etc. but as I said they are considered to be pretty well insane by those who know of them.

To be honest, the notion of engineers being 'libertarian' sounds like a way of trying to promote libertarianism by associating it with a career type that has a lot of geek-cred. Its an attempt to make an irrational ideology seem rational by association.

Let me get this straight. Your (I am assuming that is your site?) criticism of Cybersyn was that it was too ambitious to work, but then the only example of it in action you can come up with is when it *did* work?

Also, the idea that you can't control anything that features a time lag is absolutely laughable. Talk to an engineer for fucks sake. Or better still, take a ride in an aeroplane that has a functioning autopilot and notice how you aren't tossed around like you are in a washing machine...

Someone sensing that there is widespread institutional failure around the world isn't necessarily being dismal. I have hope for us being able to pull out of this nosedive. No fucking idea how, of course...

Ayn Rand? Seriously?

If anything, going on the comments the Russians are making, they are suffering from a lack of socialism not an excess. R-7 derived rockets became very reliable towards the end of the Soviet era.

Speaking of which, Ayn Rands most infamous brainfart, Atlas Shrugged, which claimed that only capitalists were capable of innovation, was released about a week after Sputnik was put into orbit. That is some pretty epic timing fail LOL

Nothing seems to work quite right these days, does it? The Russians can't launch rockets from a family of launch vehicles that has over half a century of heritage. The currency of continental Europe is on the verge of collapse and the French and Germans are near powerless to stop it. Stimulus packages on top of bailouts have failed to make a dent in a global crisis that has now been going on for three fucking years.

Do we have some kind of species-wide dementia or something? Why can't we do stuff anymore that we used to be able to do?

I disagree. The Chinese want to move into power projection, clearly. Not this carrier, but future ones, might well be used to slap down an African government that decides to say 'no' to China's economic plans in the region. Largely the same thing the US uses its carriers for in the middle east.