tater

I have a feeling Isaacman has no sunk cost fallacy issues on SLS. Wonder if they keep Orion?

As far as Manifest Destiny is concerned, it has exactly nothing to do with Martians, except for the people who someday decide to stay (if that is ever a thing). The history of the words? I'm utterly unconcerned, and I would imagine that the overwhelming majority of people hearing them hear them with no baggage whatsoever. I understand the history of the US decently well, and of the phrase—and I don't see it as negative (my US history is from sources other than those aligned with the garbage history of Zinn and his fellow travelers (I use that last phrase very intentionally)). As someone who owns 2 pieces of real property in the western US, if I thought otherwise I would have to give them away or be a hypocrite. Anyone with a problem with the colonization of the Americas who lives here can put up, or shut up. Give away your property to a native, or stop with the phony virtue signalling. Anyone in this position can easy demonstrate real commitment this way, so what if you lose your house, think of the natives that were displaced 200 years ago! If the west (I can see a chunk of it about the size of Connecticut out my living room window) was subjugated—perhaps they should have developed metallurgy. When the Europeans arrived the Americas were a stone age culture, so they lost. Applying modern cushy norms to hundreds of years ago is silly. The Europeans did exactly what the Mexica, Inca, or even the Chacoans here in NM would have done with disparate technology (minus the human sacrifice, anyway). Humans are humans, and once of sufficient size, we've formed empires—even in the pre-colonial Americas. In the race to get modern tech, the Americas lost, so their fate was sealed—heck, had Europeans come and not conquered at all, just come in peace to trade then leave, the Americas would have been doomed by diseases they had no exposure to. Infantilizing the natives also bugs me. The history of the Mayflower and the Plymouth colony is fascinating to me not for the Pilgrim stuff, but for the history of the natives. The Wampanoag saw the Europeans as a tool to be used against their enemies the Narragansett, who for some reason managed to not die off from the plagues that interactions with Europeans had spread down the coast. Their machinations were very human and understandable by anyone who reads history. I recall thinking it reminded me of WW1 Germany sending Lenin to Russia—"He'll destabilize our enemy, then we can clean up his rabble later!" They were, "These guys have guns, we can increase our power, deal with the Narragansett, then we deal with the handful of Europeans—the dummies can't even farm well!"

Save the Americas for living heart removal to affect the weather (or whatever they ripped hearts out of people for)! All human history is humans knocking their neighbors over the head and taking their stuff. The people here in the Americas did the same themselves, and I'm sure each group considered their own conquests "inspiring." (even the ones who used the conquered peoples for a supply of beating hearts to rip out) Anyone who lives here in the Americas who has a problem with this who is not 100% native has a simple expedient—write the title to any real property you own over to the first native American you run into (GIVE IT, don't SELL it!), and move back to Europe. I guess you have to work back to wherever your people first came from when Europe was uninhabited. Luckily you get a pass cause we bumped off the Neanderthals. But it's more complex in recorded history given all the back and forth in Europe before the Romans conquered/killed/enslaved everyone (thinking of my Celtic ancestors here, the Romans were pretty rough on them). Meanwhile in the modern iteration of one of the civilizations than managed to come up with metallurgy in the time since we figured out stone tools in East Africa—we're apparently going to Mars now. Not sure how the timeline works here, the window is Q4 2026, then Q4 2028. Not really ideal for Isaacman to actually get this done.

Possibly Starshield were hitching a ride with Starlinks, hence the wonky stream coverage.

Entry burn happened Another routine flight to space (and back), even if stream was sorta fubar.

Stream hosed. Liftoff https://x.com/i/broadcasts/1OyKAZZBwRqGb back fairing sep No video now, had been booster vid

<blink>

Ob_Isaacman: he has been officially put forth for confirmation as the next NASA Admin.

SpaceX clearly doesn't care about leaks and wants to blow up tens of millions of dollars worth of spacecraft every mission for the LULZ. It's a deep conspiracy, and they will actively try to hide what they are doing from all the Smart People™ on the internet who are not the dupes of the conspiracy so they can successfully blow up rockets.

Hopefully much of this discussion becomes moot do to Chevron deference being rightfully eliminated.

I actually agree, and a Mars ship needs legs anyway, so it needs to be solved. But they seem intent on catching it, so...

This is surprisingly good.

I don't think it's simple, lol, I do think it's likely what they try.

He's an apostate.

I want that old SS hop video angle (that last buoy shot was close).

Nah, it's not the same as ascent. They can do a reentry burn placing the ship safely in the Gulf (even were it to blow up). After crossing land—high enough that there is a 0% chance of debris on land because of momentum, it initiates a "boostback" burn of short duration reshaping the trajectory close to the beach. Then it lands like the booster. Yes, this will take a lot more props than if they had a west coast pad. They bought 2 a few years ago, then abandoned doing that.

Yeah, I think they need to demonstrate an accurate reentry burn first—their suborbital trajectory, then EDL is clearly spot on, they landed next to a preplaced bouy.

Cool image: Crew launches are a long way off,IMO. As for a SS catch, a reentry with the terminal phase over land is required for the Gulf. This image looks like a tilt-shift image because the heat has blurred so much of the field of view. Awesome:

I'd prefer to simply talk about SpaceX stuff. It's important to notice derails exclusively come from one POV that feels the need to interject politics. Following the rules apparently means that the polite people just ignore political bombs dropped, never dropping any themselves (because we read and understood the rules). Then there will be a cleansing—the judge telling the jury to ignore what they already heard. Guess that's the playbook. ObSpaceX:

Funny, the same people here brought up the same problems BEFORE Musk had any connection at all to the President elect, and indeed while he was an enemy of the current President (who intentionally shunned/targeted his companies (EV tax credit was designed to not apply to tesla, they only got it by dropping prices since unlike their competitors, they don;t lose money on every car they sell and had the margin to do so)). An enemy for thinking people should not be unpersoned on twitter (I had my twitter locked for an unremarkable reply stating a self-evident truth back in the day that was considered wrongspeak). So these claims are BS. Not sure what any of that has to do with the FAA, the problem SpaceX—and other launch providers—currently has with the FAA is one of efficiency, not safety requirements. When it takes longer to get a 10 page ruling than it takes to build a complete Starship stack, there's clearly something wrong at the agency writing the document. What is wrong could simply be lack of staff commensurate with the current volume of launches, but regardless it needs to be addressed. That outfit whose name escapes me working on in space mfg cited the same problems with their reentry capsule. Clearly it needs regulation as they drop a capsule into the western desert in the US, but they are required to do an analysis of how the capsule might interact with buildings along the entry track should it fall short. That's a fine average calculation to do to ballpark safety margins, but the CEO said they have to redo it every flight looking at the typical houses under that particular track. So if it heads to Utah via San Diego, they need to do calcs for tile roofs, via Oregon maybe cedar shingles. Obviously they could just have been asked to do it once with calcs for a bunch of generic roof types and put the results in a table. If BO gets their act together, they need to jump from NG-1 to a current F9 flight rate if they want to get Kuiper up. FAA Space people were built up to deal with a total number of launches in a year that is exceeded in a month now. We get it, the X man has a different political POV than you, and that makes him very bad, and a unique risk. Regarding the hazard zone, I think they have an area defined where there is likely debris from a failure at the altitude aircraft operate within where they have a "keep out" for some length of time. Everywhere outside that along the flight path is ALSO a risk for ALL space launches, and always has been—and you use ATC to get aircraft out of the track should an anomaly occur. They don't make all aircraft avoid the ground track of uncontrolled Chinese boosters indefinitely—they might divert some aircraft once they know there is a decent chance of debris at <50,000ft.

Do you trust Boeing? Do you trust Lockheed Martin? Raytheon? Do you trust elderly, demented (in the clinical sense) people who have very large amounts of power? Sierra Space has said since "go" that they want a crewed Dream Chaser—we have a Sierra thread, odd that I never see concerns in that thread that one day in the future they might foist a crew version on people, and maybe someone might get hurt... I wonder if there is a pattern to what causes all the other entities to be ignored, and one to have focus?