zolotiyeruki

What's not clear to me is where/how the canards are hinged. They follow the curve of the nose, but there's no indication of where the hinge axis is. Or is it expected to simply be faired very cleanly?

Dredging this one up, just to update it for KSP 1.9

What is SH's projected TWR at full launch weight?

Have SpaceX made any statements about whether this booster would have been used again, had it landed successfully? IIRC in the past, at least once they've announced ahead of time that a flight would be a particular booster's last, even if recovered.

Orbital inclination of the craft in distress is going to make things difficult, though. Its not enough to have enough payload capacity to LEO. You have to have enough dV to match orbits as well. Or wait until the orbit passes over the launch site.

Maybe for rapid-er reuse? Get the booster back to base a few hours faster? They're gonna need some bigger engines to power those...

Semi-trailer-sized walk-away-safe nuclear reactors are very much possible, but I imagine SpaceX would have to outsource that to someone with more experience/expertise at the technology, not to mention the regulatory issues. Given SpaceX's rapid development pace, and the glacial pace of anything related to nuclear fission, I don't see it working out. Maybe if they somehow separated various parts until they get away from Earth, they could bypass some of the regulatory hurdles?

Isn't "preparation of the landing surface" the purpose of the landing burn?

Still worthy of being mounted on my wall.

Holy smokes, I would totally mount that on my wall.

Antitrust law steps in not on the occurrence of a monopoly, but on the abuse of one, at least in theory. If SpaceX got a monopoly and then told a supplier (say, of payload fairings) to no longer sell to Boeing or ULA, that's when it should kick in. Does the $28 million reflect SpaceX's all-up launch cost for a new F9, or is it the cost of a launch with a gently-pre-used booster? Given the likely delays in the manned moon program, SpaceX could just launch all the cargo, facilities, rovers, habitation modules, etc, etc and just leave them there for whenever NASA gets its astronauts there Or, maybe by the time astronauts land, SpaceX will have already engineered, tested, launched, and landed robots that will set everything up for the astronauts. So the manned lander is a glorified hotel shuttle!

Maybe they'll build them in LA, and the test flight for each will be a suborbital hop over to FL?

The relative velocities of those satellites at deployment are probably measured in single-digit centimeters per second, and those satellites aren't very heavy. If they can make it through launch and staging, I think they can handle a tiny little bump against their neighbors.

Someone needs to suggest to SpaceX to add some lights to the booster, near the cameras, so we can see more than just a dark, vague blob from the cameras after stage separation.

That's not quite right--you can't count the cost of both boosters. If they succeed, their cost to get from one launch to the next is (ASDS recovery + cost of refurbishment) If the booster misses, it's (ASDS recovery + cost of a new booster)

I dunno, I imagine that first stage is gonna be pretty spectacular as well.

The most recent launch was the fourth for that particular booster, if memory serves.

Is anyone else having trouble parsing this tweet? Should that be "SpaceX’s Dragon capsule will carry new cutting-edge research to the ISS in an upcoming launch."?

You know, I heard yesterday about the Iranian government shutting down basically all internet communications in the wake of recent demonstrations, and I couldn't help but think "gee, Starlink might be a big help in such a situation"

Sweet, thanks for your help!

I uploaded the new zip file to the repo, but forgot to update the release too. That's now fixed, and thanks for your patience. Is there a way to verify that I did it right?

Thanks for the help. I've merged the change and re-uploaded the zip file.

If you're looking to simply blow up a target, then boots on the ground are not what you want. As for detectability, that would be a problem in a contested area with substantial radar/AA systems, but when I think about high-value targets of the type the military pursues in the middle east, I don't see that being an issue. I just checked the first Falcon Heavy launch, and the side boosters went transonic about 30-45 seconds before touchdown, with the landing burn starting about 20 seconds prior to touchdown. That's not a lot of warning from either the sonic boom or the landing burn. Also, generally on these missions, rapid exfiltration isn't a need--they usually take a few hours to secure the site, gather any sources of intel, etc before bogeying out. If a Starship were stationed closer, say at a military base in the region, it wouldn't need nearly as much fuel, would it? If you're looking at only hopping a few hundred miles each way, would there be enough fuel to make both hops?

This has probably been asked and answered before, but... I'm sure a lot of us have launched a craft with a combination of LV-N's and some sort of LF/Ox motors (usually RAPIERs for me). I often end up with excess Oxidizer that I won't need for the rest of the mission, but which I cannot vent/jettison (without a mod). That leaves me with a conundrum: Option 1: Use the RAPIERs until all the Oxidizer is gone, taking a dV hit early, but then benefit from the lower dry mass when the LV-Ns run Option 2: Leave the oxidizer in the tanks, and only burn the LV-N's, due to their higher Isp So I put together a spreadsheet, outlining the dV from each scenario. The results are interesting, although not surprising. The short version: if the mass of oxidizer is more than about 24% of your vessel's total mass, use the RAPIERs until they're out of fuel. If you have less oxidizer than that, stick to the LV-N. As a rule of thumb, though, you might as well just stick with using the RAPIERs until they're dry. In the least-efficient scenario (about 15% craft mass LOX), you'll give up about 75m/s total, and your TWR will be a bit higher for the rest of your mission.

Good catch. Can you tell I'm new to this? I've updated the .version file and re-uploaded the zip file. Is there a way to kick off a new build attempt?