AckSed

Do I smell the sour pickle-juice whiff of sarcasm about your comment, sir? It would be cool to see, 'tis all.

He had the same apologetic, "please bear with me as I run into more delays" energy about him when explaining Starship V1's current payload, as he did way back when he was explaining to the investors of Tesla why they didn't have their (original) Roadster yet.

It's interesting to see that the Curie kickstage will release the first sat, move up to a 1000km orbit to let the sail go, then come back down, circularise and deorbit itself. Pretty impressive. Edit: Curie engine really is tiny. Edit 2: aww, they're not covering the solar sail deployment.

https://www.space.com/rocket-lab-nasa-solar-sail-tech-launch-april-2024 This slipped under the radar, but it's highly interesting to me. While this is essentially the last whimper of NASA's solar sail missions - Solar Cruiser's funding was cut - it's still a solar sail!

As a postscript to the thread, here is Ivan Bekey in 2000, champion of reusability and SSTO inside NASA, wondering why Shuttle-derived launch vehicles are being considered as "affordable" competitors to the 2nd gen. RLV: https://spaceref.com/press-release/testimony-of-ivan-bekey-before-the-house-science-committees-subcommittee-on-space-and-aeronautics/ The other competitor was the Venturestar. We know how that turned out. :-(

Says here it was carrying a fleet-leader 1D that had done 22 flights: https://www.americaspace.com/2024/02/23/spacex-launches-record-setting-merlin-engine-returns-record-tying-booster-to-safe-landing/

Well of course. Which is why this is designed to track subtle gravitational shifts from the norm in astronomical observations.

That dark energy's a bit elusive and hard to track. I'd better use the BIG lens: https://www6.slac.stanford.edu/news/2024-04-03-slac-completes-construction-largest-digital-camera-ever-built-astronomy

Dig that wood veneer: https://www.esa.int/Science_Exploration/Human_and_Robotic_Exploration/Lunar_I-Hab_mock-up_all_set

That's genuinely impressive. I wonder why it wasn't used before - fragility?

Isn't the E-2 one of the few non-Russian engines using oxygen cooling? And don't they have a Russian propulsion engineer? That might explain it running oxygen-rich.

And this is a card in High Frontier 4 All. It's the "Nuclear Drill" Robonaut. Pretty good card.

When was the first folding umbrella? In the museum of Anatolian History in Ankhara, there are the wooden remains of a folding umbrella/parasol found in Phrygian grave goods dating to the 7th century BC. Can anyone do one earlier?

Astrolab is already testing mockups in the Australian desert. Seems it's a rover first, people-carrier second:

Found the missive; it's on how in NASA's 1993 Access to Space initiative, one working group concentrated on a hydrolox SSTO with wet wings. All hardware and structure and avionics and all that being equivalent, a kerelox vertical-takeoff, horizontal landing SSTO would have been a whopping 35% lighter, even with bulky, heavy NK-33 and RD-58 Russian engines: https://yarchive.net/space/rocket/fuels/hydrogen_deltav.html (Mitchell Burnside Clapp was one of the founders of Pioneer Rocketplane with Robert Zubrin... which also ran out of funding. 70s through to early 2000s, "US private space pioneer" was a byword for 'losing your shirt'. :-/ ) The why is interesting. For one, the structures (tank and pressurisation systems) are much simpler, more mature and need less pressure overall. For another, because you have dense propellants and lower ISP: you burn them faster and have more thrust; you grow lighter near the end of your ascent; you end up accelerating faster; and you need slightly less delta-V to reach their reference 51-degree ISS orbit. It's not much - 8,870 m/s versus 9,135 m/s - but if making a SSTO rocketplane, you take what you can get. Their improved kerelox plane was essentially the same proportions as the Boeing RASV: https://www.secretprojects.co.uk/threads/usaf-nasa-rlv-programs-from-the-past-amsci-science-dawn-have-region-etc.315/ We know a bit more about winglets these days, so lacking a central rudder might not be a deal-breaker. Can sled launch make HT work? I don't know. Consensus is that it grants about 100-500 m/s to the initial takeoff, but the shallower ascent wipes out that advantage.

Intuitive Machines' Moon Racer: near-future Aristarchus 500 rally entrant Lockheed-Martin's Lunar Dawn: TRUCK. *grunts in American* Astrolab/Axiom: About to drop some Lunar beats

Haven't heard of these people. It does seem similar to proposals I've read in the old sci.space.* USENET archives. And Gary Hudson made me prick my ears up. Ridiculous as it might seem, the Roton could have worked, its payload just couldn't grow beyond what the customer wanted, and, already on a shoestring, they ran out of money. The story of the rise and fall is told in USENET posts by the man himself: https://yarchive.net/space/launchers/roton.html I'm assuming he was contracted to design the engine, not to advise on the business. Back to the spaceplane. Thing is, the key metric of any SSTO is propellant mass fraction, or 'how much is fuel, versus how much is structure?' You want structure to be a low fraction and fuel to be particularly high. If you have a spaceplane and use 'wet wings' for the kerosene, the thinking goes, then the 'dead' weight of the wings becomes part of the fuel tanks and the mass penalty of having them is offset enough to have a workable mass-fraction. You also want a combination of dense propellants and relatively high ISP. Kerelox is perfectly servicable in this regard. Small launchers are particularly sensitive to mass; I recall Peter Beck saying Electron's mission to launch CAPSTONE was so near the limits of what it could do that the mass of which NASA logo sticker to use was significant. The larger you get the more mass your structure gains, but tank mass grows at a lower rate than tank volume... which increases your propellant mass fraction. This is the hope and dream behind every oversized reusable SSTO dreamed up since before the space program began. Do I think they have an engineering case? There's a flicker of hope there, but they need to be eagle-eyed to any mass increase. a business case? Much less confident yet.

Could they be the same mountings I saw for the second-stage engine in Everyday Astronaut's walkaround? Those looked mobile, but weren't.

Fascinating interview showcasing the motivations, past and present, behind ISRO: https://www.planetary.org/articles/history-motivations-indias-space-program

Speaking of science, here it is: The Recurrence Inversion of the rotating objects at the Space Stations is the Gyroscopic Effect

Here's my condensed transcript: https://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/topic/156515-rocketlab-discussion-thread/?do=findComment&comment=4339716 However, Archimedes is oxygen-rich staged combustion, which I encourage you to look over Everyday Astronaut's article on engine cycles to explain. Scroll down to "Full Flow Challenges". Very short summary: comparing the enthalpy of a hypothetical rocket engine with the same mass flow rate but different staged combustion cycles, oxygen-rich staged combustion has a moderate rise in temperature in its preburners, while full flow staged combustion has the lowest rise in temperature for the preburners while extracting the most amount of work, not only stressing the preburners less. So my conclusion may have been fallacious. Sorry. Funny story. Something I missed in the transcript is that Rocket Lab is also considering full-scale testing for Neutron's first flight, citing experience with recovering Electron. At 1hr 09 min: Even cautious businessmen like Peter Beck are taking the 'just have a crack at bringing it straight in' approach, thanks to their experience with reentry on their previous, smaller booster. Rocket Lab has 6 recoveries under their belt. SpaceX has 290 successful landings and counting. Your honour, members of the kangaroo science court, learned Kerbalists: this is strong evidence for full-scale prototyping and blown-up boosters being an attractive and, dare I say it, workable development process.

Then I have nothing. Maybe newer version changed something?

Think of it this way: it's a glorified grocery delivery van for in-between the islands.

I've already seen a video of the Soyuz launching in the middle of heavy snow. Not too far off.

Were it working, you'd see the active values flashing yellow as they change. Urine level now 22%. My browser is Waterfox G6.0.2, a Firefox fork. Yours?