CatastrophicFailure

On the one hand, you have a commercial space startup on its very first mission making rookie errors as, well, a rookie (and still pulling off a mission success). On the other hand, you have the agency that arguably started spaceflight and should be the ol’ hoss at it making… rookie errors. Not just once, but a pattern, which points to deep systemic troubles within said agency…

Perhaps only tangentially related at this point but dang this is an enlightening article:

Sigh. Ninjad again. But @tater I’ll see that & raise you:

Bezos is an easy target for snark, sure, but like or hate the guy do NOT underestimate him. Look at what he’s already built, he may or may not have done some questionable things to get it to that point but he is NOT stupid. He’s also got the resources as a result of that to be very, very patient. If he (and his team) say there’s an unseen market looking, I’m wont to believe that, especially when a certain other easy target for snark who’s also built impossible industries says similar. Probably easier overall. Doing everything vertical requires massive (read: expensive) buildings and cranes. Plus, there’s the added difficulty of a vertical transporter that can mount that not-insignificant incline up to the launch mount while also keeping the rocket perfectly vertical.

C’mon, this is Bezos money we’re talking about here, there’s a reason we haven’t seen it yet…

I see they bartered with the local Texan Jawas for that T/E…

WHERE are they landing, tho? They scrapped the ship idea and I haven’t heard anything about a megabarge.

Chicago Electric:

I think it’s come up before, basically it’s just little bits of soot still glowing hot from film cooling, I thinks.

Ninja’d. Sigh.

Indeed. just a bit… graditam…

Recently found out my wife has this. Kinda blew my mind, I had no idea that was even a thing. Like how some people don’t have an internal monologue. (Mine’s usually muttering on about the pictures…) Anyways, cleaning out the garage today and I found… this… Cue flashback… … and it’s not even mine.

10-15 years tops, I should be in just the right place to get a nice early retirement deal out of it. And given your average driver these days is already yakking on their phone while also watching a movie on their tablet, I welcome the day. I trust the computer more.

No. What I said was, and what the linked paper shows, is that there is no danger to Antarctica. The chart shows, very clearly, where the actual danger zone is, which is nowhere near there.

It’s the area where debris is a significant risk in the event of a complete failure. If the whole rocket going splodey poses an insignificant debris risk beyond that corridor, then a couple of batteries are even less so. Antarctica is around 3500km from Mahia, more, depending on trajectory. Battery jettison happens around halfway thru the second stage burn at over 4 km/s, almost Mach 12. There’s no way any of that is surviving reentry, let alone making it to Antarctica. Someone with more time could plug a launch into RSS for a better visual, but I highly doubt the trajectory even intersects the coast of Antarctica at that point. The risk of any real damage is, as @tater says, just noise.

It’s right there on the second page, the maritime exclusion zone. That’s the only debris risk short of a failure.

Here’s a paper from RocketLab about exactly that. There is zero risk to Antarctica, short of perhaps an upper-stage failure, which they want to avoid as much as anyone. https://www.rocketlabusa.com/assets/Uploads/RL-publicviewingrestrictions-F2.pdf You or I have reasonable options for disposing of said batteries. And if we did just set to burning them, between all the yous and Is our toasty button cells would rapidly exceed RL’s shoeboxes, likely by orders of magnitude. Another reason why so many players, RL included, are moving towards reusability. .

Do they get the neat suits too?

Step AWAY from the bus. Your S needs to get to Mars. And not as a bus driver. Me? I caught a frog. It did not want to cuddle.

Watch your language. Y’all are gonna summon up the R demon with that kinda talk, you mark me.

Pathfinder:

Though this be madness, yet there is method in't. —Billy S., esq

And then, after all that, a pressurant tank inside the core stage pops loose due to faulty struts and causes a RUD on the first flight test… because that’s exactly the kind of issue that can only be uncovered under actual flight conditions. No amount of static fires would ever find it, because it only happens under flight loading. And that’s just one more example. Oxygen. Including that rather anticipated candle they’re about to light tomorrow morning…

In that case, and also checking that nostalgia box, I humbly submit my 9000-tonne F-1A powered Soyuz. As an added bonus, the cryogenics plant (and probably the entire launch facility) could be powered by harnessing the energy of both Korolev and Von Braun spinning in their graves.