MinimumSky5

Well, yes, but you do have to draw the line somewhere, and there was at least some scientific justification for the Karman line

Looking at that lineup, all I can say is... 9 - 5 working hours suck!

No, I get where they were meant to go, but look closely at the diagram, the artist has given that guy a second set of knees in his thighs, that bend backwards.

But, the XLR81 was a gas generator... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/XLR81

I'm sorry, but what has happened to that guys legs? Artists, take note, plan your drawings before committing to them!

Electron/VCLS1/This One's For Pickering?

The air force have requested a newly built booster, and demended that it is not recovered... because reasons. Let's hope that they were charged far beyond what is reasonable for this, it's so idiotic.

True, but developing a tug of that design is also very expensive, and surely not worth the effort, if BFR is cheap to launch. But your right, I didn't explain myself there well.

Aside from being, admittantly, spectacular if they did that, what reason would they have to cool the booster that fast? They don't seem to have had issues with temperature recently, and thermal stress would be a very significant concern, as has been noted.

The problem with these ideas is that the business plan for the BFR requires large launch cadences, to spread the lifetime cost of the system out. The idea of an ion powered lunar tug simply will not work, as SpaceX could launch many, many flights to the moon with a fleet of Starships in the same time as one ion powered Starship would take to get there. Also, the costs of developing such a module would be very large, even for SpaceX (who, to be fair, seem to be able to develop new systems very cheaply).

That would take decades, or need a much, much more powerful power source than what BFR has available now. Would you want to fly in a BFR with a small nuclear reactor meters from your cabin?

No thermal blankets necessary... I so want to see the insulation flapping around as the Soyuz undocks!

No, sorry, the RS-27's were derived from the H-1, the RS-68's were new newly built. My point was the Delta family does have a Saturn heritage, but that that heritage is now no longer flying.

There is a very tenuous link, in that the main engine of the Delta II was derived from the H-1, and the Delta II was developed into the Delta III, which was further developed into the Delta IV...

Not quite. The X-33 was going for a full on SSTO, and as a result they needed to be extremely lightweight to get to orbit. Composite fuel tanks were one of the ways to do this, but they could get a fuel tank that wouldn't crack when filled (I'm not entirely sure why the struggled). Without the composite fuel tank, it couldn't get any payload into orbit, so it was abandoned after being used to test some VTVL techniques.

I've never understood the secrecy that CNSA have towards their launches. This is either thumbing their nose at the Americans, or simple national pride, or genuine curiosity (in descending order of likely hood) and in all three cases, there is no reason to hide what you are doing. We know the design of the rockets and where they are launched, so this secrecy helps no one.

Yeah, looking at those engines, I don't think that this booster will ever go to space, today or otherwise. I suspect that it'll get torn down, and then displayed at Hawthorn. Or, maybe they'll donate it to a museum? I bet many aerospace museum curators would give several limbs to have a flight proven F9 display, especially if its the first one to ever be displayed!

Well, if saltwater has damaged the booster too much to be refurbished, at least it can be reused as a gigantic banana boat!

Yeah, @kerbiloid, rockets tend to be much more explosive than planes when things go wrong, and they are also ridiculously loud when launching.

IF he is right (and on the face of it, that seems like a decent, though unproven assertion) AND IF we can manipulate this matter somehow AND IF there is a halfway decent source near the Earth that we could use Then maybe, just maybe, we might get warp drive But as I'm a geologist, I'll leave an actual physicist to answer properly!

I cannot wait for the day that this launch rate becomes normal!

So, when are the dept of highways going to investigate the culture of The Boring Company?

That depends on the payload, the smallsat launchers can give you a tailor made orbit, in return for a higher cost. For observation or certain communication launches, that can be worth the cost.

Can customers tell launch providers to stand down to inspect the rocket beyond the payload support systems? I thought that the rockets internal systems data were only seen by the launch operator?

Just a geologists veiw here... Orbital bombardment for in situ samples is an utterly terrible idea, as you've lost all context of the sample you have, delicate structures will be smashed beyond recognition, and thermal and shock metamorphosis could have altered details of the sample you wanted to measure. Let's run through a scenario here. You conduct orbital bombardment, the rover caches some interesting white, powdery rocks, and on inspection when back on earth, we find that the rocks are limestone. Most limestone is biological in origin, but they can also form from the runoff of melting ice sheets, and Mars has had at least one episode of large scale melting. Context from the country rock would show glacial dropstones, striations from ice sheets or icebergs, or isotopic signitures of rising temperatures, all of which indicate abiogenic cap carbonates, not biogenic limestone. And no, lack of fossils do not indicate that the limestone is abiogenic, cyanobacteria form a type of limestone called micrite, which has no fossil evidence of life inside the rock.