RCgothic

There's no surprise that with how late they started HLS it's not ready, and there's no reason to think anyone else would have done better. That said, HLS isn't the only source of the delays, because even if that was ready to go the space suits aren't. Both programmes started (and restarted) far too late.

Apollo 9 was entirely in earth orbit, as would be this.

That's certainly the direction I'd go. Or maybe Starliner to throw someone other than SpaceX a bone.

Orion to starship in LEO would be a total waste of an SLS.

Factually nothing to do with IFT-3. The dismantling was noted on March 12th and IFT-3 was the 14th. https://x.com/_mgde_/status/1767547040089657675?s=20

Or these are just teething troubles as they discover what's vulnerable and better protect those bits; pad turnaround is getting faster between each flight; and they're going to have three or more pads to launch from.

There's not a shred of evidence IFT-3 was anything other than a completely nominal flight until SECO or that raptors operated anything other than exactly as intended to achieve the final trajectory.

Ablation and corrosion are types of wear - material thickness or effective thickness reducing by physical or chemical action. I've also always found it weird that "no endurance limit" is not actually a good thing.

Isn't this basically a substantial part of the reason DIVH is getting retired? The pad infrastructure is old, complicated and creaking, and DIVH doesn't fly often enough to make it worthwhile to keep everything fully tested and operational between flights. Then when they do come to launch, something has inevitably failed and needs fixing.

It's certainly theoretically possible to protect bridge piers from collisions. But in the specifics of cost/obstruction of navigation channel/river bed conditions it may not be practically possible to adequately defend every existing bridge. If I were a security agency I'd be pretty nervous about deliberate follow up attacks right about now.

It took over 3 years for Falcon 9 to get flight cadence to under 3 months from the first flight. Starship not doing badly.

IFT-1 pad destruction was likely as a result of a steam explosion from vaporised groundwater boiled by exhaust gas penetrating the cracked slab, argues a new paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.10788

No, the causes of the losses of control on both booster and ship are unconfirmed.

I don't think even a cluster of 40N thrusters is going to be anything even close to powerful enough to manoeuvre a potentially 2,000,000+ kg refilled V3 ship.

"Constantly Exploding Nuke" is a very poor descriptive term. It's a nuclear reactor. We have plenty of nuclear reactors that deal with the heat produced by energy released. Nuclear saltwater rocket engines are a type of reactor where the fuel is suspended in the propellant and made to undergo a quick reaction in a chamber before the nozzle throat. The heat of the nuclear energy released is carried away in the propellant exhaust.