RCgothic

Wow, I hope we get lucky and these two don't collide. That's a lot of debris to have in a highly inclined orbit.

Humans are capable of self-motivating, so no syrup pipe for us!

I also think catching starship in a net is nuts. Even with a ridiculously long breaking distance a net that size is not inertialess. An impact at 70+m/s isn't fun for reusability. Lots of TPS on SN15:

The first piece of SN20 has been spotted: This being the first piece of the next major block of starship upgrades beyond the SN15-class of starships and potentially the first piece of a starship to orbit.

On my last project a missed delivery slot for a 30t payload for 150 mile transport cost on the order of $15000. Three times further for $45k sounds about right.

I'm pretty sure this is the sort of thing we could sim these days.

I estimate that GSE tank is ~2000m3, or about half a million gallons.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impact_depth Newton's Impact depth approximation implies it'd struggle to escape the atmosphere. It has to move through all space occupied by all the mass in its way, which must move faster than it to get out of the way. But by conservation of momentum it can't give more velocity than it starts with to an equal or greater mass without coming to a complete halt. The approximations look reasonable. Blunt body. High velocity. Non-cohesion of the impacted material.

There's about 10 tons of air above every square metre. The plate at 100mm thick (4in) has an area of ~1.25m2 or ~1.2m diameter. It'd therefore need to move between 11t and 1.1t out of the way on its way out of the atmosphere depending on how it tumbled. If it survived it would necessarily be going a lot slower by the time it reached space.

I wonder if the header tank imploded again. Stir the tank, get an implosion, mix methane with oxygen, boom. They said they were taking the helium pressurant away again.

Well, SpaceX's are. AJR's engines on the other hand...

THis is the latest on cost. Not sure what's changed since.

So announced 3-4 months from now means a delay to 5-6 months time. Sept-Oct time. Let's see if that's how it happens.

Moving right.

Diagram of the camera position of the brief internal shot we got:

The Daily Hopper is really great.

So not on target. FTS would trigger in that instance. That's actually less bad than an uncontained engine RUD IMO. Scott Manley's hot take (based on Elon's "crater in the right place") was that FTS would be safed for landing, therefore tank rupture caused by engine RUD.

This is cool for free-flight missions:

Wow, very very limited views of that flight. Still not clear what the failure was, but from the debris it looks like it may have come in hotter than any landing attempt so far. Not great.

It's not the oversight I have an issue with. Obviously there needs to be a regulator. And the fact Space X breached the terms of its launch license for SN8 should be expected to have consequences. But... A basic level of timeliness ought to be expected. Everyone knew before Friday that a scrub would likely mean a backup day of Monday. This wasn't hard to predict.

Shade.

Chris B NSF thinks it's just an old label template.

Falcon 9 is simply the best looking rocket flying today, and makes it look routine and easy compared to every other rocket. In the 90s I was a fan of the Ariane4, not sure why now looking back.