Beccab

That's very Blue Origin style

Ah, got it now. Thank you Since they were all suborbital before making it to orbit don't they count too as "first suborbital flight with tourists"?

I'm aware, I said it will have the first full civilian crew. Also, do you mean that it will be technically the first *suborbital* flight with tourists but that there were already orbital flights with tourists? I'm not sure I understood correctly

Isn't the high bay becoming a bit clogged up? It's the only place where they can stack starship (SN16), basing on BN1 the only place where they can scrap them (probably SN15), the only place to stack superheavy (BN2) and supposedly also the place where to scrap them (BN2 again if it survives the hop)

Serious question, would the crewed New Shepard flight this July give BO any first in the space industry? Not internal ones like the obvious first NS flight with people, i mean more like inspiration 4's first full civilian crew

From what I recall, neutron will land like the falcon 9, not with parachutes

Isn't it called inspiration 4? Or am I mixing up names

I mean, why? Mars has water albeit not liquid (and theoretically it could be created on site as well), and Perseverance already demonstrated oxygen production on site. I could understand if you said "in the next decade" or something like that, but it's definitely possible

Crew dragon is reusable, that's its whole point. Unlike Starliner it has also been already reused, in fact the Crew 2 dragon is the same as the demo 2 dragon iirc

Not really. Falcon 9 only launches when recovery conditions over the ocean are optimal

I really hope now it doesn't land twice

Amazing! Do you also plan on eventually doing 1.875m and maybe 5m self levelling legs sooner or later? They are currently the only sizes missing at the moment iirc, and would fit well with the expansion

True, but they aren't orbital as far as I know. That's the important part

Fantastic!

Alright last of the designs in which I plan to use the Lunar orbiter, a Duna relay. Overall I'm happy of the result, it does the trip to Duna on an Agena upper stage, enters orbit with aerobraking and a heat shield and does the rest with the onboard thrusters. I don't know the exact deltaV number due to weird staging, but the orbiter alone for sure has more than 1000 m/s, perhaps close to 1500. Since the Ranger solar panels don't retract and wouldn't have survived the aerobraking, to make it a bit efficient the thing has two separate ones: the first one for the interplanetary journey is mounted on the heat shield and also jettisoned with it after the aerobraking when the normal ones can extend. Edit: Now the tiny rover is on Duna too-and thanks to a Lunar Orbiter skycrane!

I have made three designs total with the lunar orbiter atm: First one, the original, uses four of the Ranger landing engines and no other tank (there is a monoprop tank, but it's there mostly to balance the camera's mass and avoiding to land upside down), which was very high thrust for minmus but at minimum throttle was able to land; can get 755 m/s of deltaV mostly thanks to its low mass Second design, the Lunokhod-like lander+rover, with the Orbiter's midcourse correction engine + four of the small monoprop engines (as you said they are node only, so I first added the DLC's servo and then to its node the engines) and 4 of the bigger monoprop tanks in the middle of the orbiter. The lander itself is pretty light but the rover brings the mass up to twice the previous lander, so it only gets 445 m/s of deltaV: Third, I'm working on a third design based on the Orbiter for a Duna flyby, which uses the Restock+ 0.625m tanks and semisphere as well as the original 4 Ranger landing engines. Despite being heavier than the first lander can reach an almost decent 941 m/s of deltaV: Never used it, sorry

That gave me an idea... Screenshots of the whole missions, I took a lot of them this time because I really really liked this rover: Rocket is the same fat Atlas as before but with more boosters, upper stage a weird mix between Centaur and Titan, the lander is similar to the previous one but with monoprop engines and lots of fuel and the rover is a kitbash between lots of probes and the Tantares mini wheels. Except from these everythin else is from BDB!

Thanks! I can't believe it took me so long to realise that the Ranger landing legs fit so well under the lunar orbiter

Unmanned mission to Minmus' surface, with a heavily modified Lunar Orbiter and a (very) fat Atlas:

Actually no, that wouldn't work. Lunar Starship was the highest rated of the three without including the cost, and was even awarded the contract before starting to rediscuss the dates of the milestones to fit the payment. So even if BO actually halved their cost again they would still have a lower rating than Spacex, and thus to be selected together with them would still need Congress to double the HLS founds (and which would still be half the money NASA had originally requested)

This is true. It is also true Starship is not a spaceplane, nor lands like one

Given that you said "without landing", what are you suggesting, making a full 15 meters high falcon 9 second stage just crash somewhere without burning, all this from orbital velocity? Doesn't seem safe at all

Personally, to transport them I used three ways: - For the small modules, engines on the sides perpendicular to the module, ensuring the mass is always in the middle; - alternatively, placing the thruster in the back and adding some fuel pods sideways to balance the mass, jettisoned just before landing; - For the 3.75m modules, directly with engines placed on the sides, Jamestown style (the "fuel cupola" in this screenshot is jettisoned before landing as well). To assemble them, I ended up with three ways as well: - The intended way, as in using the robotic rover and wheels included in this mod and placing the modules above them for transport (didn't work too well in parallax with collisions enabled); - A rover with moving arm, which proved useful but at the end of the day was just too light to carry full modules without tipping over; - A skycrane with grabbing arm, with lots of fuel that on minmus was more than enough for all the modules I took there after its arrival. the last two are shown in this screenshot:

The orbital refuelling part is true, that is the current plan, but it still includes Superheavy for the launch. If I remember correctly even a Starship with no payload isn't an SSTO, let alone refuelling another one and making the suicide burn