MinimumSky5

I'm taking the fact that their putting more and more tiles on the Starships as a sign that they're not seeing significant shedding during flight, so they're getting more and more confident with the design. I do still want to see their solution to tiling the cone, though.

The SpaceX official livestream, this is the best view that I can make out of it.

I've just gone through the video frame by frame, and it's one of the landing legs.

@Peter JY Near Future Technologies focuses on new and emerging engines that are seeing use *right now*, such as ion drives, or the VASIMIR concept, while Far Future Technologies is all about engines for which we have a *theoretical* basis, but no physical hardware.

I've got an issue with the build queue, in that it doesn't work! When I press the launch button, the game stutters for a couple of frames, and nothing else happens. This came from a heavily modified game, but I've culled out all of the mods other than KCT, Magicore, ClickThroughBlocker, and Toolbar Controller, and I'm using a completely stock vessel as an example. The log file is complaining about a missing "SpaceTuxUtilities" file, but that isn't listed as a dependency, and i can't find the relevant mod, just in case I've missed out a dependency. Log file: https://drive.google.com/file/d/15xQ5340AfiCrH0Qw7aFv8q2APHllabIa/view?usp=sharing

You can shove a huge amount of light into a perfectly reflective container without throwing out the speed of light, you just need perfect or almost perfect mirrors (and we do have perfect mirrors in labs, but their only perfect in narrow wavelengths.) Just line all of the sides of the container with these mirrors.

Hold and likely scrub due to high level winds according to NSF.

Also, you can save on cost be eliminating them. The small unused space in the pods is hardly worth worrying about.

Saturn Multibody or riot

I did not think that Scott Manley would need to update his 10 Dumbest Moments in Space video quite so quickly.

New launch target: April 2023 (/s, obviously)

Do the SAF variants of the fairings work in 1.8.1? Am I meant to use the plugins for 1.8, or 1.10?

Are there any vehicles attached to the USOS atm? I know that Dragon and HTV recently left.

There's no need yet for a space program, and I find it difficult to argue that it's a better use of money than a COVID-19 recovery fund. That's a subjective position obviously. I want to see all of us expand out into space, but not at the expense of groundside communities.

I don't think so. In the first video, the fairing lent over to the side of the net when the parachute was cut, but the second fairing lent over to the middle of the net.

I love how they built him a kennel!

Given that even current internet isn't that easy, I'll believe that when I see it.

Sadly, this doesn't surprise me. The only smallsat companies that I expect to survive are Rocket Labs (obviously), Relativity Space, and maybe Astra. There just isn't enough demand for many rockets.

I was 16 when the last shuttle launched, and not yet that interested in space, so seeing a crew manifest of 4 people is quite surreal for me.

Doesn't the Bk1 SLS core stage nearly enter orbit itself?

Wait, what? We spend 57 billion on education of all types, including things like daycare, for the entire country! How does NYC spend half of that? Surely it's population is less than 32 million?

I know that the US is a much bigger country than the UK, but this why I think that spending $2 billion on one launch is just not defendable. $2 billion is about £1.6 billion, so lets see what our government could do with £1.6 billion: Triple the fire protection of the UK (That's all fire protection practices, not just fire engines, it included smoke alarms, audits for buildings, education and outreach ect) Mostly fund our Department of Culture, Media, and Sport Increase our yearly stock of social housing by 50% Fund all of our environmental protection activities Just half of that would fund our unemployment benefits fund (to be clear, that does not include our furlough scheme) Fund all of our military R&D efforts Fund about a third of our universities. Space programs are expensive, and I know that the US has much bigger budgets for all of these things, but honestly look at that list, and then tell me that any one of these is less important that one single launch, not even including that payload, which due to the mission architecture, is almost obsolete by the time that it rolls out to the pad. $2 billion is a monumental amount of money, and I mean that in the most literal sense.

I'm not saying he's right, just that there is a legitimate reason for him to be frustrated. Like I said, he's taking it out on the wrong people.

I've seen comments on the Ars Technica news article, saying that his main bone of contention is that the other US OEM's are able to continue manufacturing, but that the Alameda county officials have put in place a much stricter lock down, shuttering the plant. I can get the frustration with that, but IMO, it's misguided. Get angry at the federal goverment for not locking down the whole country, not the local officials doing what they can to save lives.