RCgothic

Same price, half as capable, over half a decade later to market. It's honestly a little disappointing.

Fission can just be turned on and off. ~6% operating thermal power comes from fission product decay though, reducing to about 0.1% over ~40 days, so. You don't necessarily have to provide cooling for decay heat if you don't care about the state of the engine after it's finished firing (propellant exhausted, non-earth intersecting stage trajectory, doesn't matter if it melts.) Fission fragment engines avoid this altogether by exhausting the fuel, so the engine isn't going to get hot from spent fuel emitting decay heat inside the engine But there's no reason not to tap some heat off the power cycle (or decay heat cooling) for electricity generation if you don't mind bringing a little extra mass along.

Everybody falls the first time.

V2 minis (F9 compatible), not V2 (Starship only) Not heard anything new on that beyond the tweet I think you're referring to.

Tory Bruno gets a big pass for being a thoroughly nice guy. But it's a very pro-what-ULA-developed slant on the whole process for obvious reasons. I agree entirely with this Twitter thread rebuttal:

Duna Mission, had a Mk1-3 gumball with a large lander in an XL large cargo bay. Arrived at Duna, and and launched the lander by opening the cargo bay and decoupling by a large decoupler. The camera and navball stayed fixed to the original craft, but the control inputs were affecting the lander. (Impossible to pilot lander). Kerbal manager/resource manager/tracking station still treated the ship as one unit despite it being in different physics bits and drifting in multiple directions. Unable to swap between control of craft.

Eye roll at the potential date.

"no crasher stages" is a particular issue for disposal of earth departure stages. Those come in especially hot & heavy.

This "reveal" seems like a load of nothing to me, given that they're using a cover layer on the space suit to conceal the actual details.

I still don't understand why "don't build a noodle" is something you have to teach. There's no good reason for long rockets not to be a valid design. You shouldn't have to strut side boosters up like a Christmas tree just so the wibbling thrust vectors don't cause the rocket to flip despite appropriate CoM/CoA positions. These are all artificial workarounds that fail to address the root flaw: unstable rockets are frustrating, creatively limiting, and unfun.

This couldn't be stupider if they tried: STS is already the system name for the space shuttle, so this is just going to cause confusion. The whole Artemis/Orion/SLS naming has been a bin fire from the start.

"Don't build rockets that look like F9" is a bug, not a feature.

NASA has dropped an updated timeline:

Block 1B delayed to 2028.

People keep saying bendy rockets are a "feature" that younger players appreciate, and I just can't get my head around how *anyone* would prefer a feature that effectively disables the stability assist and adds this much frustration to controlling larger rockets. Who likes building large rockets? Everyone. Who likes trying to fly a wet noodle that will crash no matter the skill of the pilot? Is there even one person?

Recycling after actually firing the engines was seriously impressive, even if they didn't manage to launch.

Completed stretch challenge (land on Minmus then Mun) as far as possible. Bugs experienced: - Tanks draining radially through decouplers without fuel sharing on. - Being reset from orbital to suborbital when coming out of time warp near Mun. - Ship trajectory vanishing.

For FTS installation?

And for Artemis III:

The "for cargo missions" initially threw me, but yeah, they mean for access to cargo dragon, not for payloads inside regular fairings.

Heads up for big news:

Presumably even in the case where the propellants in Superheavy were well-mixed, the propellants in Starship would not be.

Blast Danger area is specifically delineated in Figure 2-4 of the draft Programatic Environmental Assessment. It roughly corresponds with the outer circle in Tater's second pic. The FAA is aware.

Interesting. Definitely interested in what they bid for these contracts.