CatastrophicFailure

Apollo used a significant percent of GDP at the time to put two dudes in a bedroom closet on the moon for a couple of days. I’d rather see all parties involved did not simply do that again, and actually expanded our scope and capabilities, for a fraction of the relative cost. Let’s not merely repeat the past, let’s actually build the future. I’m ok with a heavily-regulated player with massive oversight blowing up a few pre-prototype concept demonstration rockets to accomplish that.

PLEASE send me a postcard when you get to Mars.

Really kinda puts it into perspective… …wait fo’ it… Yes, think they started showing up around IFT-1, when everything started looking a lot more “finished” and a lot less “slapped together in a tent…”

Got a nice peek up under the skirt here (scandalous!), everything is looking very tidy and finished. Now IIRC those “cans” around the outer engines are actually around all of them, specifically to contain a failure.

Sigh. I’ma say this just one, and probably regret it, and hopefully the mods just delete this whole tangent, but anyways… X is objectively doing better now than Twitter ever was. Twitter was on a short path to bankruptcy, X is now moving strongly the other direction, and likely to break a profit next year. Certain people have been foretelling the impending dooms of Elon Musk’s various ventures for years, and they’ve been wrong every single time. Hate what X has become if you want (that’s your right, and it’s mine to say you are incorrect in thinking so), but it’s no more dying than Tesla is bankwupt or SpaceX will never fly again. /RantOff

There’s lots of factors that can determine the brightness of any given space thing. Solar panels are actually very reflective (that’s why the ISS is so bright), but the rest of Dragon is also rather reflective being white. Other satellites might have big solar arrays, too, making them more visible. Even some antennas can do that, like the old Iridium satellites that could flare brighter than the ISS, but only for a moment, if the sun hit the antenna just so from where you’re observing.

Set an alarm. Download ALL! THE! APPS! Once you’ve seen it you’ll wonder how you ever missed it before, sucker is bright.

So, basically, SLS? Have you never seen the ISS? I wonder if we might see more "goofy" stuff like this as boosters start reaching a hard wall EOL? Like, they need to dispose of it anyway, might as well give it a Viking funeral vs scrapping it. Probably cheaper, too.

From what I’ve gleaned it’s just a transfer between main and header tanks. Little to no change to vehicle, plumbing’s already there (to fill header in the first place), zero additional risk to mission.

You saw the bit about the dance-off, right?

IFT-3 should have a race with Vulcan-1. Or a dance-off.

Yeah but just imagine the flambés…

In all fairness a lot of people from the 60s don’t remember the 60s…

Or feed it after midnight. er, wait a sec…

It’s all about finding that balance point. SH started its flip almost immediately after separating, much closer, relatively, than an F9 booster. My own theory is it got kicked around faster than expected by the blast from SS, which just amplified the issues with slosh, “water hammer,” turbines, etc. If the solution really is to just wait a few more seconds, with a bit more throttle, before beginning the flip, that seems preferable to adding more mass with baffles or other structural changes. As always, they have the data, we just have armchairs. IIRC SS/SH is figured to be cheaper to manufacture than F9, or cheaper per kilo even expended, or something like that. Wouldn’t work, without a ground-up redesign. Superheavy can’t go horizontal, ever, it’s not designed for it. And wings, especially big wings, are heavy. SpaceX are the raining champs of propulsive booster landing, they’ll figure this out. And likely already have.

I just tried this in RSS, not surprisingly it confirms reality. On a less-lofted trajectory (AP=156km), destructive reentry began about 3500km downrange. Puerto Rico is about 3300km from Boca, and Starship AP=250-ish km at FTSECO. So, Math=KSP_Confirmed.

I'm betting the first "true orbit" flight is S27 as a cryo-transfer demonstrator, snag some quick contract payouts. Starship was around 3000kph/830m/s short of orbital speed. Doesn't seem like much on the surface but that's a LOT of difference in the shape of an orbit. Gonna plug this into RSS right now out of curiosity.

So those of us getting up at zero-dark-fifty-five on a weekend to watch this can just roll over and go back to sleep when it scrubs instead of waiting for a reset.

That’s an awful lot of extra delta-V there… could an X-37 survive reentry from medium/high orbit?

And if there’s even a chance of that, they’d have to have some kind of recovery/scuttling power on standby, far from their usual areas of operations. That’s a pretty significant expense for nothing if Starship never even gets that far, which is still extremely likely.

Very Kerbal. But that begs the question, why not just launch in the 1L? Not the first time the Soviets launched with no abort ability…

Why is there a separate “descent module” at the forward end, or does the Vostok not go along for the ride? I don’t believe so, certainly not with Skylab and pretty sure on the ISS. Wasn’t much need, since they all had crew tunnels, and seems very high risk.