Beccab

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!

Prop load complete, now we're waiting for the t-10 siren

Yep, a good amount of the LOX currently loaded is just to make sure it doesn't leave the pad

I'd say that the next sign we can expect is the siren now

From the quantity of methane loaded, I'd say there's good chances it goes straight to a static fire! We should now be around 25/30 minutes before the test

Fueling has begun! Usually, fueling takes 40-45 minutes after the frost line appears + any hold time; this can change depending on the amount of fuel they want to load of course, but I'd say that it's likely a NET of 1 hour from now from the spin prime.

After a hour long hold (SpaceX drones came to inspect the fuel lines and left), countdown has resumed with some heavy venting from the orbital launch mount

Fuel load should begin soon if they didn't enter a hold

It's weird to think that the R7 that launched Sputnik was considerably more powerful than the rocket which put Glenn into orbit

Should be maximum LOX load and min CH4 load, just enough for the 5 or so seconds they're planning to do

To be fair, they need to fill something like 5-6 hours with nothing but watching LOX condensate for the first 99% of the stream