.50calBMG

He literally put that he was being sarcastic in the post. Back on topic, this should be a neat little bird to watch, what with the blue exhaust and all.

I think the booster actually survived that flip, that was too fast an explosion to be an aerodynamic breakup.

Everyone makes fun of the windows breaking from the ball, and it bothers me. It survived the test before they threw it at the actual truck windows (sure, they got rid of some of the stress by taking the clamps off). Seems to me like they are still stronger than normal, I bet that ball would have gone right through any other car side window. They stopped the ball, and that's the part that actually matters. Besides, it's not like bulletproof windows look pristine after they get shot.

Sorry if this has been asked before, but is there a way to re-enable the G limiter for PVG?

But starship doesn't fly that way. It falls like a skydiver. It doesn't have the proper control surfaces to fly like that. The only time it will be flying somewhat nose first is on re-entry, but still at such a high AOA that the lift coming from the body is a secondary side effect from coming into the atmosphere at an angle, which will happen to basically any shape moving that quickly.

You would think. The way it's being stated though makes it seem like Boeing is still going to be losing money even with the extra funding. They said they needed it just to compete with SpaceX

I believe the current MVac can throttle, but not quite as deeply as the SL versions, ~40% IIRC.

Presumably it starts sooner because IIRC Falcon Heavy has a TWR of close to 2 at liftoff, and it is going faster through a denser part of the atmosphere.

@tater finally beat you to something

Also probably doesn't have the inside pressurized like it would be in vacuum. It won't be as bad as the first EVA suits, but it will still probably have some effect on mobility

I was able to notice the difference going from a 2.5x to a 3.2x scale when I first started playing, and that's not even close to the amount that you want to change it, so I would bet that every single person would notice it. As someone who plays exclusively RSS with RO, I physically cannot play the stock system anymore because it's too small.

Yeah, I would have posted much sooner, but every time I went to do so, tater got there a few minutes before me with basically the same points. It has been pretty civil though, you paying attention, rest of the world? Not that hard.

@ZooNamedGames Thank you for not misinterpreting that as an attack and for providing a logical explanation instead of the "do as he says, but not as he does" excuse. I am well aware that it's politics that is currently drowning SLS, but I try to stay as far from politics as possible because nothing ever ends well after bringing it up. I am also not in the "Elon is God emperor of humanity" camp either. There are definitely faults with every program. For example, SpaceX is essentially building a MiG-21 as a test platform for something more akin to... Well... A space shuttle, and I am amazed they haven't had more problems than they have.

I'm not upset by it, I just don't understand it. However, there is factual evidence supporting the fact that SLS has been mismanaged, is over budget, is years behind schedule, and sucking money from other, more promising programs while starship hasn't cost a thing to any other NASA project. Also, just because I called it "old and archaic" doesn't mean I hate it. Soyuz will never ceases to amaze me that not only is it still flying, but that it meets all the requirements set for it to this day (and that it looks so good doing it). I only call SLS that because there is literally not a single new piece of technology on it.

@Dale Christopher That made me smile after an 11 hour workday with no lunch. Have a... Wait, they sill haven't gotten likes working yet... Have something that you didn't have before and is up to you to interpret. Just remember it was from me. And here's that video that basically furthers my points further. Thanks mister "fly safe" man https://youtu.be/z49eVQ6LxIE

I think SLS will be forced to fly a few times only because so much has been wasted spent on its development that it sort of has to. Look at the backlash on constellation when it got axed after the Ares 1x flew. I think starship is going to be better in every meaningful way than SLS except for payload volume to orbit, but only if the EUS gets built, which at this point seems unlikely. Even though the payload mass has shrunk vs the original 12m version, it's still twice what the block 1 SLS can do, and for a fraction of the cost. You are vehemently defending an outdated, over-budget, and arguably useless (B1) rocket that is in and of itself an old, almost archaic design against something on the bleeding edge of technology and vastly more capable, while not only being more affordable to launch, but cheaper and faster to develope. So what if the design changes a few times before it gets finalized. SLS isn't the same now as the original proposal. @ZooNamedGames I don't mean this as a post to attack you by any means, but more because I don't understand your viewpoint. I don't get why you feel the need to attack SpaceX just because it isn't SLS. What's the point of attacking SpaceX when they are not even really competing against SLS, or even NASA?

Been a while since I've wanted to like something this much

As someone on "team anything but SLS", Orion could be launched on New Glenn and have nearly the same capabilities as an SLS block 1 launch for a fraction of the cost, and use the same architecture that's already in place. The only way SLS is useful if if you cancel block 1 and go straight to 1B or 2, and even that is stretching the word useful because its so prohibitively costly and has such an anemic launch rate.

The tugs will be needed to put the modules into LO...

I personally wouldn't mind the use of the RS-25 for SLS if they were doing something like ULA so that they could get them back and use them again. The RS-25 is a pain to refurb, yeah, but I wouldn't put it past the incredibly smart people at NASA to find a way to bring that down. The way SLS is now, with a stupidly high price, under-powered first stage, and a useless upper stage (ICPS has no business as an upper stage for an SHLV. Great for a mid-sized LV like Delta IV and still useful for an HLV like D IV heavy), is not useful to anything other than... Wait... It will come to me eventually... Maybe... As far as staging arrangement goes, I remember seeing somewhere that that staging arrangement is the most efficient way to build a rocket. If it wasn't, then how are Soyuz and Ariane 5 (and hopefully 6) as successful as they are? Finally, I don't want to come across as ignorant on some of these things. I know SLS has been bogged down by politics, as are most government projects. It's a given that that's going to slow stuff down, but I also didn't feel the need to address it because it's something that was going to happen no matter what. It just seems to me like SLS is more and more like some British aircraft, namely the fairey albacore, or half the stuff they made in the late 40s, in that it was advanced at the point of it's design and promised to be better than it's predecessor, but by the time it finally made it into service it was so outclassed that wasn't even useful. I don't hate SLS, in fact, like I said earlier, I was super excited for it. I'll be excited for the first launch of something useful on it, like if it keeps Europa Clipper. I'm not hating on SLS just because everyone else does, or because it's easy. If anything, I'm just disappointed that it will never reach it's full potential under it's current program, and it won't be sustainable enough to be around for the next one.

At the risk of going off topic (and getting caught by my boss), I'll keep this sort of brief. My argument for them being at the same level is based on the fact that, even though technically SLS is an SDLV, nothing on it has been flight tested except for the launch escape tower, unless EM-1 had an ICPS instead of a DCSS, which iirc it didn't. While the difference between the two is minimal, they are still different enough to warrant a name change. Starship, more specifically star hopper, has flown twice with the same model of engine that will be used on the full scale production version. The heat tiles that they still plan on using have been flown both on the hopper itself and on dragon for full reentry testing. Starship may not have it's life support, but neither will Artemis-1. Neither ship is ready, but they are both getting close. Right now, they're both just tubes with some bulkheads in them, but nothing that they actually need to function (boosters, engines, landing legs, etc.). Starship at the very least has had the same goal since it's inception, to get to Mars. SLS has had the Artemis program for a few months, and seemingly less than half of that program, arguably none of it, needs SLS.

My problem is that not only am I tired of waiting for it to do literally anything useful, I'm tired of having to pay for it to get built at a speed that makes glaciers look fast. Sure, I don't pay that much for it, but I'm paying for it none the less. It's getting built by some of the wealthiest, biggest, and arguably most reputable companies in the US, but it's still not even ready for an all up test. I understand that large projects take a long time, but they've had time. I didn't have to pay a cent towards starship, and it's not even a quarter as old as SLS, but they are both at about the same stage in development. Sure, SLS has the advantage of a larger fairing, but we don't have anything that needs all that volume. As @tater has pointed out multiple times, the Artemis program is a make work to at least sort of justify even having SLS to begin with. Constellation was a much better program, aside from the faults with the Ares 1, than SLS can ever hope to be at this point, and it should have been revived instead of creating a "new program from scratch".

I was excited for SLS back when I was in highschool (2011-2015), but it seems like almost no progress has been made on it compared to almost anything else, and I'm not just comparing them to SpaceX. Ariane 6, for example has, if you really think about it, a lot in common with Ariane 5, and it took less then 5 years to go from the announcement to component testing. SLS has been around in some form or another since the 80s iirc, and still hasn't been fully integrated. It just astounds me how long it has taken, and the pace that seemingly everyone else is taking, especially SpaceX, just exacerbates it further.

Sorry zoo, but it's hard to get hyped about something that is moving at such a slow pace that turning a section of it can be considered newsworthy. How long until it's fully integrated?

OAP, Orbital Assembly Platform LEAP, Large Exo-atmospheric Assembly Platform