sojourner

I'm not talking about building a Falcon 5 and putting Raptors on it. I'm talking about building a whole new rocket based on 5 raptors for the first stage and scaling everything to take advantage of that. It would end up being a bigger rocket with a larger payload.

I could see them at some point in the future retiring Falcon 9 and Merlin and replacing it with a single stick 5 raptor rocket using lessons learned from Falcon and ITS. It would be a true second gen reusable.

Maybe he meant to refer to Richard Branson?

Well, unless whatever test payload they put on the FH demo is very heavy or sent beyond LEO, the second stage on that flight is going to have a healthy margin of fuel left to play around with for a retro burn. More so than on most operational flights.

Hey, did anyone see the reports of someone beating a dead horse?

I've read this booster won't fly again. SES wants part of it to put on display.

Might as well just stick a BEAM with a docking adapter instead of a berthing adapter at that point.

There might be a sketch of one somewhere. But not actual hardware.

While the Dragon may be volume limited greater than weight limited, it does have one advantage over all of the other craft you mentioned. It can return cargo to Earth. Also, it's not "over promised" if the vehicle can actually do what is claimed. The only reason it hasn't is that NASA has yet to give it a cargo that meets the weight requirements at that volume.

The helium is used to spinup the turbopumps during engine startup.

Pretty much in name only. Large parts of them had to be redesigned for SLS. Find a better wiki.

Range assets can only be reserved for so long.

OK, I'll bite. Did your post get garbled in transmission?

It's not the supplies that are critical, but the traffic at ISS. Better to get Dragon launched on time so as not to bump alot of other ISS launch schedules.

Echostar bumped for Dragon. Launch date now "mid February".

It would still take tens of thousands of years for the moon to lose it's atmosphere to space once terraformed. It would be easier just to refresh it every few hundred years than to build some rubegoldbergian roof system.

Incorrect. They wouldn't limit the success of a paying customer's launch based on an attempted landing. Also, if that were true, then ALL of their launches with attempted barge landings would require instantaneous launch windows, which we know is not the case.

It's an interstage with solar panels that can carry unpressurized cargo.

Scientifically? They're fiction.

Holy cow guys! You have to check out Nat Geo's Mars. The first episode is available on demand on my cable provider and on the website. There is some stunning footage of SpaceX facilities and hardware and the reference mission bears a striking resemblance to ITS.

I doubt that would be "simple". If it's an ongoing problem they'll have to redesign around it.

Lox is at the top on the F9 first stage.

Do you really think they waited this long to announce their plan without considering and dismissing a cycler system?

Except, according to Musk, what we've been shown is based on the engineering drawings. So it may not be that far off in overall design even if the details change.

There are rumors of a raptor based second stage in development, but nothing concrete that I've seen.