Ultimate Steve

Chapter notes. Jool Expedition One was the second major flotilla mission I ever did, back in March 2016, predating Project Intrepid by a few months. If I remember right, it was my first time on Pol, Bop, Laythe, and maybe Tylo, I don't remember if I attempted Tylo on that mission. The Vall lander did not have enough fuel. This was to be followed by Jool Expedition 2, which I designed most of the ships for, but as usual, I lost interest and never flew it. I've probably said this before, but the Creativity's mission is very much a spiritual successor to the never flown Jool Expedition 2. I've decided to make Jool Expedition 1 soft canon, and it will be referenced throughout. Not exactly sure where in the timeline it belongs. If it wasn't confirmed that nobody had been to the Jool system before the Octavius mission, I'd say it was the last major thing the space program did before the Space Station Epic V disaster, which would explain why there was no Jool Expedition 2 (at least not immediately). Chapter 59 - Life On Laythe

EDIT: Accidentally posted the next chapter before I was done, darn enter button. Ignore this post. Thing is, I can't just copy and paste from google drive to here as the formatting will be messed up and I'll have to recopy all of the images from imgur as they will be the wrong size. So, I generally try to do everything in the forum editor and then copy to google drive as a backup, but sometimes that happens.

I haven't watched the video, but I wouldn't put too much stock in anything Thunderf00t says. It's possible he's changed since I stopped paying attention to him, but at least back in the day, he wasn't at all a credible source and let his opinions dominate the discussion rather than facts.

And, two chapters in one day! The previous one had been sitting in my drive for a few weeks, not sure why I didn't post it earlier, but after so long, we have another gameplay chapter, most of which was done in the past two days. University is calming down a little bit now (but don't expect it to last haha) and instead of planning ahead for life I took the weekend to play some good old fashioned Project Intrepid. Meaning mostly, that I have to put up with craft that were designed by 2016 me! I messed around with visual mods a bit, so the visuals may be inconsistent in places, but I think I've landed on a combination I like. There's another third of this play session that didn't make it into this chapter and will be in the next one. Chapter 58 - Starry Poles And Salty Oceans

Chapter 57 - Picking Up The Pieces

Wait, that's not a meme engine? Huh. Scrolled past it on reddit assuming it was a meme. I knew SpaceX was the company most likely to name their engine after a meme, but I didn't think it would be this overt. Engine turbine would be more akin to how jet engines work, but there's probably many very good reasons why it hasn't been done before.

Soyuz 10 is the one that comes to mind.

Here's my 7:39 or 7:42 run depending on how you count, in a ship I call the Pluto I as it kind of looks like a Project Pluto missile. My strategy was to try to get as close as possible to the Rapier speed limit of Mach 5. Mach is higher lower down due to the higher temperatures, so the lower you go, the faster you can go, but then you run into heating issues. I attempted to make a decently thermally resistant craft using creative though not excessive node routing, without going into straight up total thermal/aerodynamic occlusion tech. There is an additional bonus from flying low, the total distance traveled is shorter because the world is round. The vehicle in question. The Vector is responsible for rapidly accelerating the vehicle to about 1000m/s, which makes our time faster, allows the Rapier time to spool up, negates the need for landing gear, and gets the Rapier into the regime it works best at, avoiding the transonic doldrums. After it is out of fuel, the Vector is jettisoned. The fuel tanks and engine are shielded from aerodynamic and thermal forces due to being in a fairing, and the forward fairing, heat shield, and intake are routed in a way where it is pretty aerodynamic and the heat shield takes the brunt of the heating, while still allowing the intake to work, though this is a little cheesey. The first challenge is clearing the mountains and not going too high. The next challenge is heat. If you wanted to, you could probably do the run without the elevons with a redesign, but the elevons are the limiting factor right now because you can't stick them in a fairing. 2-3km seemed to be the sweet spot, but I had to constantly manage throttle to keep the elevons from melting. A few runs were ended because of this. Due to the adjustments required and the 1 degree resolution of MechJeb, at one point I tried 2 elevons in the middle to act as adjustible wings with the deploy function, but they melted very easily and were removed. I was able to keep a cruising speed of roughly 1820m/s for the whole thing, up to 1830 at times, with the elevon overheat indicator between 99 and 99.5%, although the average was definitely slower as I frequently cut the throttle in a panic when the heat rose too high, and dipped down to the 1700s for a while, taking some time to recover. The Pluto I is slowed down by blowing the fairings. I blew them a bit early here, so early I had to go to full throttle and pull all the way up to just barely reach the runway. The parachutes are deployed in 3 stages. There's a drogue, which allows you some amount of engine control if you over or undershoot (the sideways runway is a very small target in this axis), the first main, which lets you pick your landing site for good (engine control can't do much after this point), and the other 2 mains, which were supposed to be deployed right above the ground to cushion the impact. Unfortunately, I came in too fast and deployed both of them early to slow down, so there were several seconds of falling. Touchdown at 7:39. Stable on the ground at 7:42. This design can be improved perhaps down to 7:10 with better piloting - I did a very conservative approach and slowed down way too early. You can probably pass over the runway at full speed at 7:00 (no slowing down for landing). There's not much better you can do with the Rapier alone without doing actual thermal exploits and I don't think that's within the spirit. I suspect that this design is near a local maximum, and that the optimal design for the challenge is a gigantic booster pancake that goes high enough to avoid heating and drag.

This could either go here in the MSR thread (wait hold on, do we have an MSR thread?), but since we are talking MSR already I thought I'd bring it up, as the subject matter is both MSR and Red Dragon/SpaceX related. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26274117 That's an old post from someone who was working at NASA around the same time as Red Dragon was being proposed for Mars Sample Return. While it is an anonymous personal account and should be taken with at least a few grains of salt, if true, the contents are interesting. The OP discusses how company and government politics and not internal cancellation prevented Red Dragon from happening. I recommend reading the whole thing. TLDR, if the person who made this post is to be believed: SpaceX proposed (or planned to propose) Red Dragon 3 times The first attempt (2013) was not a sample return and was shot down by NASA/the government (rumor) Falcon 9 had only flown 4-7 times at that point depending on when in 2013 we are, SpaceX was very much still the underdog NASA didn't want a crew rated capsule to be seen going to Mars and propulsively landing when Orion couldn't do any of that The main rumor is that some higher ups in the government (think shelby types) threatened to withhold future CRS and Commercial Crew and other contracts (which SpaceX was very much trying to get) if Red Dragon happened The second attempt (2014 or 2015, post uses both years) was a sample return but was shot down by JPL JPL is protective of their role in planetary exploration JPL had previously scheduled their missions to assure a steady stream of funding JPL did that with MSR as well, the fact that it is 3 missions is part of that MSR going to anyone other than JPL would be a severe threat to JPL's prestige and funding JPL tried very hard to discredit Red Dragon via numerous (often underhanded) methods OP notes that neither proposal was actually submitted, and posits that there aren't many other reasons why you would prepare a proposal and not submit it OP doesn't know much about the third attempt (2016) Obviously it didn't happen This is when SpaceX pulled the plug and decided to go all in on Starship (ITS at the time)

Given the MSR news... I'm not saying this is a good idea and I'm not saying it will happen, but proposing a manned Starship mission to complete Mars Sample Return is a completely on brand thing for SpaceX to do. Would be quite the plot twist but the 21st century of space exploration has been filled with so many plot twists already that I doubt anything would surprise me at this point.

The guys making the Delta IV had to exert so much mental fortitude to resist calling it "Phoenix" after its pyromaniac tendencies, so that the superior joke of there being a Delta V could happen someday, only for there to never be a Delta V.

Really? Where specifically? Lorain County Ohio

I saw it! Clouds covered nearly the whole sky in Ohio, but they were thin and high enough that we could see right through them. Pictures coming later maybe. Was really cool watching the sky change colors, especially right before totality ended, like a really fast sunrise but in an unusual spot!

In the recent presentation Elon says they are not working on Mars propellant production yet. This almost directly contradicts Tom Mueller's claim that he spent his last 5 years at SpaceX working on ISRU. One if the negative nancies on the Discord is saying this proves that they stopped working on ISRU after Tom left. I don't want to accept this but this is the only way to reconcile both sentences if we take both statements at face value.

There were also slides showing up to date thrust numbers and such. No isp or dry masses, sadly, but might be able to reverse engineer some of those numbers from telemetry.