Beccab

Every ship was moved to the suborbital launchpads - S24 went there four times I believe, for instance. It's where they do cryo tests (before the cryo station was available) and static fires

And on top of that, their hoists have found a new life as the Mechazilla hoists of the Cape and Boca launch towers - while I'm not sure if that adds up to 7 millions, it's definitely a large part of it

It's actually the tallest object ever moved, the heaviest is Gullfacks C. I believe the Troll A is the second tho

Oh it's definitely coming down yeah, it'd be a procedure like with F9 S2 stages. Deorbit burn, then straight to Point Nemo. I meant that I'm not sure if they want to do the test on a recoverable ship or not, since we don't have direct confirmation yet of exactly *what* S26/27 will do

Something like that, yeah. The last part isn't required, they have intertank cameras and sensors to check that, but it would be a bonus for sure

That is one of the tests NASA explicitly said was tracking, tank-to-tank transfer in the same ship. Seems pretty likely S26 or 27 will be the one to test it

That seems right from this pic:

Not HLS, S26 is a depot/tanker prototype. The REDACTED thing comes from Senator Shelby's famous quote, where in the early 2010s he threatened to "cancel the whole space technology program" if he heard the words "propellant depot" from NASA again

The most reliable source on this (NASA blog) says there was another leak in the service module's radiators, and the hatch is open (i.e. no loss of cabin pressure)

1964: A different Surveyor A Hughes proposal for a Surveyor lander capable of surviving for 1 year on the lunar surface with a closed thermal system (keeping the experiments isolated) and an improved landing accuracy led to a completely different design top the surveyor we know: a 4-legged , mostly rectangular lander with a solar panel in the front. The source document is this: https://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?action=dlattach;topic=54383.0;attach=2048270;sess=66463 and includes some more interesting design options, like an all-liquid Surveyor: A surveyor with an RTG and a tiny Sojurner-ish lunar rover: And some more advanced Surveyor designs

New pad turnaround record!

90% throttle means the rocket has an even larger engine redundancy without changing at all the trajectory, whch helps - and as all that thrust definitely isn't needed for a test flight with no payload, it gives a higher chance of mission success overall. A second possibility is throttling up when they're a few km above the ground, where the engine redundancy has already increased by itself (you can lose more engines if you lose them later) and the GSE is safe

To add to that:

Micrometeorites have decided to have revenge on Roscosmos and will only hit the cooling systems on Soyuz service modules

And now it's confirmed It seems that after all, the "beauty blogger" is a long time reliable source of information on the Russian space program as she has been for many years

Seems that the pressure loss is in the cooling loop again

People made a lot of calculations about that stuff from time to time and SpaceX themselves provided some numbers at some point as development progressed. Of course, the earlier it happens the least of margins there are, but I'd have to search for a bit to find the hard data One last view of the SF for today:

Agreed tbh - if today's conditions were to happen on launch day, it'd be an abort and recycle to the next opportunity (with eventual engine replacement), which isn't bad

NSF's view is pretty amazing

THE COUNTDOWN IS GOING, T-20 SECONDS

I've got no idea of what's going on, but it's so exciting for some reason

That was unexpected!