RCgothic

BN3 aft dome looks great. Then sleeved. Not sure what's happening with BN2 and BN2.1 tbh. I was right, they did finish the heat shield rectangle on SN15. SN14's thrust dome got some RVac mounting hardware installed, so still useful even if SN14 will never be fully assembled. Orbital launch tower is coming along nicely. 3 of 4 1st level steel sections installed, and another section delivered. The orbital launch table is also coming along, and caps appear to have been installed on all six supports. Also Starcat spotted.

Great logo, great photo. I do reckon someone at NASA wasn't too pleased to realise having the logo on the booster meant it would be used for non-NASA missions as well. Logo on the non-reusable 2nd stage is a good compromise.

Well I did say roughly analogous, I didn't mean identical. Artemis I is basically a high altitude uncrewed test flight of a new system. So were Apollo 4 and 6. Artemis II takes crew to/past the moon but not to the surface. So did Apollo 8. Apollo 10 had a dress rehearsal with a lander that isn't planned at this stage.

Likely.

https://everydayastronaut.com/starships-belly-flop-maneuver/

Using Starship, 100 tons of payload on Mars requires ~700 tons wet in LEO (100t payload, 100t stage, 500t props). A colony on Mars is widely estimated to need about a million kg of downmass, therefore 7 million tons to LEO. If a booster is reused 12 times a day for a year with 5 flights putting up 500t of props and the 6th putting up 100t payload plus 100t starship, then each booster puts up over half a million tons every year. A single booster could downmass enough for a Mars colony in 14 years. Miss that goal by a factor of 10, but with 4 launch pads/boosters (39A, Starbase, Phobos + Deimos), and it's still only 35 years. Wow.

Wow. Genuinely thought HLS was going to be the critical path. Boeing better step up.

Thanks for the correction. Should have done a sanity check, I clearly misheard him!

Booster may eventually be reusable a dozen times a day. Ship 1000 times a year. Many more ships than boosters. Wow. That sounds like a big ask. But it sure would be something. That's 440,000 tons to LEO a year per booster btw.

Tweet deleted. But yeah, thought so.

Good to hear. Curious about the Vandenberg official though.

The tower's coming along very quickly.

Vostok and Voskhod didn't have any lift. Therefore also true for re-entry capsules. The desirability of a ballistic entry is, of course, arguable. The necessity is not.

Shades of Falcon1:

I'm uncertain whether China's network would be all the way out in geostationary orbit, but yes, fifty times further away is fifty times the latency and a much larger dish required. Although a geostationary or molniya-type profile wouldn't require tracking antennas or phased arrays.

Almost certainly the Ingenuity drone will be followed up by larger and more capable vehicles now that the technology has been proven. But it might be a while before designs are converted into hardware on Mars.

Higher requires fewer sats and therefore fewer launches, but it also has higher latency and the decay periods for failed sats gets much longer.

The Artemis Program is about landing the next humans on the moon. Artemis I will be an uncrewed test flight of the Orion capsule and SLS Block 1 rocket, roughly analogous to Apollo 4/6. Artemis II will be a crewed flight past the moon, roughly analogous to Apollo 8. The timeline for the first crewed landing is at this point a little unclear. It might be Artemis III or IV depending on the availability of the lander. Launches for the Gateway station and lander supporting the crewed missions won't be assigned a main Artemis number as far as we can tell.

Yes, that exactly! More max Q than lateral is my reading of the design, but it might be capable of a bit of asymmetric loading.

It's a tension member construction, so it's definitely for applying external loads. Aero simulator is my guess.

With RCS in the high atmosphere so aero forces don't overpower the control authority would be my guess.

I've presented plenty of arguments: 1) Re-entry vehicles don't need lift. 2) In any case, cylinders have lift and fins have lift. 3) The design of re-entry vehicles is generally dominated by bluntness for heat transfer purposes, not aerodynamics. 4) Being large, Starship is blunt without special shapes. 5) Sure, the other vehicles can benefit from efficiencies of special shape, but they aren't primarily high pressure pressure vessels which are dominated by other requirements. 6) There have been round re-entry vehicles. 7) Starship has active stability and TPS and so will be controllable during re-entry and terminal descent. Here's a new one: 8) Stainless steel is more robust than normal aerospace alloys and doesn't need to be protected to the same extent. The counterpoint presented of "re-entry vehicles can't be cylinders because they've never been cylinders before" is pretty easily dismissed by "they haven't needed to be". Only *after* all of that do I appeal to SpaceX and NASA knowing what they're doing, because they self-evidently do.