MinimumSky5

Are there any vehicles attached to the USOS atm? I know that Dragon and HTV recently left.

There's no need yet for a space program, and I find it difficult to argue that it's a better use of money than a COVID-19 recovery fund. That's a subjective position obviously. I want to see all of us expand out into space, but not at the expense of groundside communities.

I don't think so. In the first video, the fairing lent over to the side of the net when the parachute was cut, but the second fairing lent over to the middle of the net.

I love how they built him a kennel!

Given that even current internet isn't that easy, I'll believe that when I see it.

Sadly, this doesn't surprise me. The only smallsat companies that I expect to survive are Rocket Labs (obviously), Relativity Space, and maybe Astra. There just isn't enough demand for many rockets.

I was 16 when the last shuttle launched, and not yet that interested in space, so seeing a crew manifest of 4 people is quite surreal for me.

Doesn't the Bk1 SLS core stage nearly enter orbit itself?

Wait, what? We spend 57 billion on education of all types, including things like daycare, for the entire country! How does NYC spend half of that? Surely it's population is less than 32 million?

I know that the US is a much bigger country than the UK, but this why I think that spending $2 billion on one launch is just not defendable. $2 billion is about £1.6 billion, so lets see what our government could do with £1.6 billion: Triple the fire protection of the UK (That's all fire protection practices, not just fire engines, it included smoke alarms, audits for buildings, education and outreach ect) Mostly fund our Department of Culture, Media, and Sport Increase our yearly stock of social housing by 50% Fund all of our environmental protection activities Just half of that would fund our unemployment benefits fund (to be clear, that does not include our furlough scheme) Fund all of our military R&D efforts Fund about a third of our universities. Space programs are expensive, and I know that the US has much bigger budgets for all of these things, but honestly look at that list, and then tell me that any one of these is less important that one single launch, not even including that payload, which due to the mission architecture, is almost obsolete by the time that it rolls out to the pad. $2 billion is a monumental amount of money, and I mean that in the most literal sense.

I'm not saying he's right, just that there is a legitimate reason for him to be frustrated. Like I said, he's taking it out on the wrong people.

I've seen comments on the Ars Technica news article, saying that his main bone of contention is that the other US OEM's are able to continue manufacturing, but that the Alameda county officials have put in place a much stricter lock down, shuttering the plant. I can get the frustration with that, but IMO, it's misguided. Get angry at the federal goverment for not locking down the whole country, not the local officials doing what they can to save lives.

Well, I think I speak for most people here in saying that while we also like big rockets, we'd prefer to see humanity spread it's wings amongst the stars, but in order to do that, we need cheap access to space to enable people to see business opportunities off Earth. SLS is almost the antithesis of what we want to see.

SLS is cool because it's big, but sadly that doesn't mean that it's useful as a heavy life vehicle. Its in a very awkward size category where it's too small to easily do lunar missions, but too big for current LEO payloads, and it's sustainer architecture doesn't allow it to be easily made reusable. Combined with a total cost higher than many countries GDP just for one launch, and you can see why it isn't very popular.

Why did they allow those officials near to the quarantined crew? That renders the entire exercise pointless.

Given that the propellants in the main tanks will be sloshing around every which way during reentry, I doubt that they'd want to add more in, it could mess up the center of mass, and result in engine starvation during that start if the landing burn.

The circles are a representation of satellite visibility to the ground stations, yes. I doubt that it's that good though, some of those base stations are nestled between mountains.

I think that the one on the right just has its turbopump hidden from view, you can match some of the piping from the other two raptors to it to correlate it's rotation.

But if antimatter could travel backwards in time, then either: Causality cannot be conserved, as antimatter particles would constantly be arriving from future high energy events Or: Antimatter could not be seen, as it would immediately start moving at a right angle to our conventional four dimensions of spacetime, and would appear to just vanish from existence at its point of creation. Or, am i just missing something here?

Maybe not, the weight on the legs seems to be transmitted through the final bulkhead directly onto the legs, without the hinge taking any strain.

If that was an engine failure, it looks like they lost the centre engine, given that the plume still looked mostly symmetrical after the anomoly. Probably reason for booster loss, given that they land the boosters on the centre engine?

CRS-16 failed a landing at LZ-1, though to be fair, that was a hydraulics issue with the grid fins, not the legs.

Nope, no further launch attempts today. Probably due to inclination for launch. Looked like the abort was between engine ignition, and liftoff.

Unfair comparison. SpaceX are developing their hardware by deliberately pushing their hardware to the edge of what it can do, and then far beyond, to see where the limits lie, not by simulating it to heck and back to find all of the possibly failure modes. There is nothing wrong with that approach, it's messy, and has very public failures, but it means that SpaceX won't invest in true production unless and until their hardware is flight proven, rather than hoping that they have coded in all of the variables right before they test their software. The exploded vehicles were (mostly, admittedly) built to be destroyed, so it's a bit unfair to say that those failures reflect badly onto SpaceX. Only do that if you know how many virtual SLS's Boeing has sacrificed in simulations.

(paraphrased) "If Korolev knew that we'd still be flying Soyuz in 2020, he'd be turning in his grave." Well, shots fired much! (not that he's wrong)