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tater

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    Rocket Surgeon
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    On the side of a mountain in New Mexico

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  1. I think it was on the schedule—maybe they had an operational problem, or maybe not on radar.
  2. There's not any ego war going on to speak of. SpaceX won this campaign a long time ago. As a business, SpaceX is fighting no war—Shotwell has been asked multiple times, and she always says the same thing—everyone's dollars are good, they sell launches to customers. Amazon bought a few SpaceX launches at the very least to protect themselves legally from the claim they are fighting an ego battle at shareholder expense. Bezos in a recent interview was pretty conciliatory WRT Musk. It's important to remember that any personal issues seemed to start with the "welcome to the club" tweet by Bezos as if a suborbital vehicle is remotely comparable to an orbital vehicle. I think competition is good, and the benefit of SpaceX can only in fact be seen once someone else can actually compete. So the sooner, the better. As far as NASA is concerned, if they—the actual Artemis customer—want to fly the BO lander, and want to fly it in 1 stack—they can ask SpaceX to do that, and I they will.
  3. useful NASA chart for considering cislunar operations. Gateway/surface RT is 5.5 km/s. A 100% propulsive Gateway/LEO RT is 7.3 km/s.
  4. SpaceX has a couple Kuiper launches, don't they?
  5. Says ">45t." Dry mass supposedly ~16t. If the Be-7 has an Isp of 450s, then it needs to be at least 56t wet to make a RT from Gateway. In short, it could easily be sent to gateway with an expended SS—with Orion docked to it in LEO. And a huge orital hab module in between for comfort (can be left at Gateway—undock lander, Orion installs module to Gateway, lander docks to module, Orion docks to another Gateway port.
  6. On one of the interviews Musk said that the booster is currently doing too much, and hence they want to stretch the ship. I think. Maybe I'm remembering wrong.
  7. Added mass to the booster is not that big a deal for a LEO rocket. back of the envelope I see a ~20 m/s difference with an added 10 tons at staging—and the total dv I'm seeing is way higher than staging velocity. That added mass on the ship would be taking out payload 1:1, though.
  8. And I ran out to the store and missed the launch:
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