RCgothic

If something goes wrong with SN8... No big deal. SNs 9,10 and 11 are waiting. If something goes wrong with the green run... No Artemis One.

STS could put what, 110t of mass in LEO, 78t of which being orbiter? If SLS could put 10m diameter payloads of up to 110t into LEO 3-9 times a year at roughly the same cost as the space shuttle, then that would be a useful capability no matter what it was used for, even in the face of new commercial competition. Sometimes that 110t could be a departure stage for BLEO missions. Useful! I think it would save a lot of money in assurance if crew never had to go up on it, but even so it could still work. But I don't understand how you start with shuttle, add an engine, and get less mass to LEO, a quarter of the flight rate, 3x the entire marginal cost of a shuttle flight on SRBs and RS25s alone, and a lunar rocket that can't even put boots on moon properly.

Sure, but large diameters are not essential for any mission other than telescopes, and as you say the large diameter capability is on the way.

Berger's not wrong. SLS/Orion is stupidly overpriced. If it all worked perfectly for launch tomorrow it still couldn't put boots on regolith. It can't co-manifest a lander with Orion and the lander isn't ready anyway. For the price of the SRBs and RS25s alone you can get ten fully expendable Falcon Heavy flights or 20-30 Falcon 9s. You can build a better moon mission around a fraction of that lift capacity with a little in orbit assembly. The only reason they haven't is because those boosters came along after Congress made its mind up. With even greater commercial heavy lift coming along there's no reason for SLS to continue to operate.

SN11 starts construction:

Which implies Vulcan superheavy can't manage heavier payloads (pad TWR) but can send them further. Better for lunar or deep space missions.

Vulcan superheavy?

SN10 gets an extra ring on its forward dome...

Sad:

The fairings didn't stick the Starlink landing unfortunately:

They couldn't interfere with each other that way, and any other TVC engines in the way could just gimbal out the way.

Well that was fun to watch, but I still don't think SRBs should be anywhere near a crewed launch.

It's there anything stopping all the engines gimbaling even with only 2 lit?

Pretty sure there's no situation where you'd want Raptors to Gimbal towards each other. They'd be fighting each other's control.

No positive confirmation for booster, but it has seriously been suggested by Elon for RVac on the Starship (plus double bell) as a way of stabilising the bells against turbulent flow separation for sea level aborts.

Yes, I meant centimeters. I keep getting the diameter confused with the orange one. 9m works fine! Plus this completely fixes any residual space issues.

I was just looking at engine config. I can fit 28 in 8m diameter without any TVC, so I think you're probably right about a skirt. The most I can fit in 8m with any space for TVC is 24. I think 10m may be unlikely though - that's a lot of unused space. I think 875-900mm diameter is probably the minimum space to fit

300t of thrust per Raptor... Wow that's ridiculous! Edit: Ooh, page 1000!

1100bar! Wow!

I hope that's indicative of Raptor performance improvement and not a loss of payload! Edit: 4-symmetry of legs agrees a bit better with 28 as well.

Superheavy starts production this week: