RCgothic

This was a validation test though, not a development test. It was supposed to be right first time and this programme is not hardware-rich. They can't just swap in the next engine or the next booster stage. At worst, if this needs a redesign of the engine bay the programme may not survive.

Major component failure definitely not good.

In response to "how do humans train a better AI" the answer is - there's far more time available for review than there is in the moment. Also most accidents are caused by distracted idiots. AI will always be focused on the road and will always have the same capacity of decision making.

Launch! Very long hold down, about 8s. Lept off the pad, but small rockets always look fast. Camera tracking is rubbish.

Wrong!

In addition to the things other about helium people have mentioned, (low density, resistance to being a liquid, inert), probably the most important thing is that helium provides exceptional pressure per kg. The ideal gas law is PV=nRT. R is the ideal gas constant, so at similar T and V, P depends solely on "n", the number of atoms/molecules in the volume. Because helium gas has very low atomic weight, it has a very high "n" per kg, better than any other substance except hydrogen (which due to having diatomic molecules is not as ideal a gas). This means you need less mass of helium to pressurise a tank compared with pressurising it with another gas. High pressure per kg is such a key feature of rocket propellant pressurant.

https://www.nasa.gov/feature/ames/planetary-sleuthing-finds-triple-star-world It seems like NASA have detected a planet in a Trinary Star System!

Apparently they're going to overlay the existing arrays, angled out at 10 Deg. Sized to go uphill rolled up in a dragon trunk, which sounds incredible to me. This offends my sense of symmetry tbh.

Wow, ok. Wonder how they're launching and getting installed. Russian self-piloting extra modules you can kind of understand. Solar panels are something else entirely!

You guys may be a little ahead of me here, but I haven't seen it spelt out explicitly - it's not SN12 in the mid-bay. It's SN15. So looks like they're skipping 12,13,14.

It's not immediately clear where the fault lies. Yes, it was during payload integration at a SpaceX facility. But it could be a faulty customer adaptor, like Zuma. Or maybe SpaceX did do something wrong this time. Impacts can easily have dozens of hundreds of Gs of acceleration. Hope some of the peripherals acted as crumple zones!

The Transporter 1 ride-share mission is in trouble. In addition to the sats that don't yet have a license leading to Starlinks potentially being added to make up the payload at a very late stage, 2 DARPA sats have been inadvertently ejected from their dispensers.

They're going for a second attempt, so it must have been an abort.

Don't know. Could be they wanted a short one, or could be an early abort. We won't really know until they press on to flight. In other news: SN6 has had its mass simulator removed, paving the way for it to be mated to the lunar mockup.

Static fire!

Static fire alert for tomorrow:

Yeah, I got ahead of myself.

To unlimited altitude! :-O

The UK trendline is scary. Nearly 60k a day are testing positive, even allowing that we're bad at testing enough and have 1/5th the US population. The spike from being allowed to mingle at Christmas is still 3-4 days away. New year is more than a week. The spike from schools going back despite all the evidence they shouldn't is two weeks away. Our hospitals are *full* of Covid cases to the point where oxygen is starting to be rationed because the hospitals weren't designed to supply so many oxygen patients at once. We're in serious danger of a mortality spike as people start dying untreated as the system gets overwhelmed. Sure, Covid only kills 1% (and permanently debilitates another 19%), but that's under ideal conditions. The UK has for months attempted to keep things under control without a proper lockdown. We've had 4 tiers of increasing restrictions, none of which have worked because none of them have halted mingling, none of them a proper lockdown. And now the situation has fallen off a cliff because of a new virus strain that could have been avoided if proper restrictions had reduced the virus in circulation and denied it a pool of cases in which to mutate. Months and months of half-measures only delay stronger measures!

SN8 has been fully scrapped:

The UK is in full national lockdown as of tonight. A day after schools went back. These measures are very, very, very, very late.

PR's outgoing governor has committed to rebuilding Arecibo better than before with a larger aperture and more powerful radar. They've released $8m for cleanup. It's the beginning of something I guess, and I hope it continues.

SN10 is getting stacked! Nearly ready to go even before SN9's flight!

Neither SpaceX nor Blue Origin were first to land a rocket propulsively. Blue Origin was founded in 2000. SpaceX was founded in 2002. Blue Origin started hop tests in 2006. SpaceX started launching Falcon 1 in 2006. SpaceX first put a payload in orbit in 2008. SpaceX started launching Falcon 9 in 2010. SpaceX berthed a spacecraft to the ISS in 2012. SpaceX started hop tests with Grasshopper in 2012. SpaceX upgraded Falcon 9 to v1.1 in 2013. SpaceX started hop tests with F9R Dev-1 in 2014. Blue Origin started high altitude testing with New Shepherd in 2015. Blue Origin first landed New Shepherd from high altitude in 2015. SpaceX upgraded Falcon 9 to FT in 2015. SpaceX first landed an orbital class booster propulsively in 2015. Blue first reflew New Shepherd in 2016. SpaceX first reflew Falcon 9 in 2016. SpaceX upgraded Falcon 9 to Falcon Heavy in 2018. SpaceX upgraded Falcon 9 to Block 5 in 2018. SpaceX started hop tests with Starhopper in 2019. SpaceX were the first to fly a full flow staged combustion engine in 2019. SpaceX flew crew to the ISS in 2020. SpaceX started hop tests with SN5 and SN6 in 2020. SpaceX started belly flop tests with SN8 in 2020. Blue Origin has launched 3 New Shepherd vehicles a total of 13 times and landed 12 times, including 12 consecutive landing successes. NS-3 has 7 launches and landings over 2 years 10 months. SpaceX has launched rockets from the Falcon family 106 times with 104.5 successes, 1 in-flight failure and 1 pre-launch failure. Cores have landed successfully 70 out of 80 attempts, including 20 consecutive successes. Both B1049 and B1051 have 7 launches and landings with B1051 taking 1 year 9 months to do so. I hope that settles things.