tater

Testing this will of course be difficult, has to be simulated because the problem is at a low propellant state (mass), hence at high g. I guess they should build test rig/vehicle that somehow mimics 4 g—that's the only way! Even if such a rig requires 10 years and 10s of billions of $, that would clearly make more sense than throwing away a few tens of millions of $ on a Starship over the Gulf!

VSFB NASA launch scrubbed.

Double header tonight, wonder if I will be able to see the VSFB one from here?

Yeah, everything about Gateway is garbage that is forced by the useless capability of SLS/Orion.

I also imagine that fatal incidents involving trains are overwhelmingly with small numbers of deaths, which is quite rare for air travel (which is astoundingly safe). The total deaths on trains maybe dominated by a few huge derailments—which are still likely more survivable than air crashes (% killed). Here in NM, I think all of the 10s of deaths caused by our "Railrunner" system (famous only from being used on Myth Busters) were pedestrians, bikes, or cars hit (usually at level crossings, though I think a drunk who passed out on the track in Bernalillo was just on the line someplace). Not really the same at all as you say.

A confounder here would be that a train might carry the same number of people as a plane, but a "fatal" train trip might include it hitting a car—say with 1 death (could be the engineer at the front of the train if the car/pedestrian deaths don't count for this math). Planes (airliners) only rarely have incidents with small %s of occupants dead—tends more towards all or nothing. Per "trip" is doing some odd work here as well. You'll see people get on a Metro North train at 125th Street, getting off at Grand Central. That's a trip of 1 stop, and at speeds so slow I don't think fatality is even possible short of falling under a train car. So the number of person-trips could get very inflated.

I feel most sorry for the dog in the crate. She was already not around to suffer, and he would not remember... poor doggy dehydrating.

FOD in the hot staging ring area?

Also sorta fisheyed.

Forum stopped embedding X posts?

I frickin love X-37B

Interesting. Maybe true. The extension on Mvac is niobium, and really thin, Rvac is a regen bell extension, so more complex—more stuff to fail.

Later they decided the chance of LOC/LOM on the first several launches was ~1:9, luckily they didn't die. The Dragon capsules similarly worked first time. Exactly. No other company or entity has ever even tried to make anything as ambitious as Starship.