RCgothic

The booster burn time (and therefore MECO velocity) isn't an entirely fair comparison with Starlink as those are ASDS landings and the booster naturally burns longer and faster on those missions because it's reserving less. A better comparison would be CRS. Good spot on the altitude though, it does look steep. Was the dogleg before or after stage sep?

It's not a big payload to be dog-legging south and returning to LZ-1!

Huh: SpaceX super-Sunday apears to be still on! I was sure SAOCOM couldn't go ahead with NROL in the southern trajectory hazard areas.

Wow, they're actually going to try and go for it (20% cumulative chance of acceptable weather and range availability notwithstanding!)

In order to fuel an upper stage they will need a service tower. If you're building a tower anyway, might as well stick a hammerhead crane on too of it...

I don't think ducted fans work particularly well when they're expected to work for hypersonic retropulsion well as forward flight.

Virgin feel even more gradatim than BO. Pretty sure I was first hearing about Virgin's spaceflight ambitions twenty years ago. Still not flying passengers suborbital.

I don't think it works as a universe. It's not stable. One perfect perfectly long infinite wire, axial forces cancel out. But if it curves even a little bit, gravity will bend it. The system collapses. Two perfectly parallel perfectly straight infinite wires can orbit each other as in 2d. But the moment they become not-straight or not-parallel they collide. The system collapses. But until it does, axial momentum of a smaller object orbiting a wire would be conserved. You'd get orbital spirals. Circular or elliptical orbit would be a special case of zero axial momentum.

The launch platforms will be giant!

By the way:

Haha, well. I guess closing all the airlocks does rather identify the culprits!

Interesting! So basically it's not that the main burn is exceptionally accurate, but they spare nothing on vernier RCS burns!

And the secondary customer will be similarly worried about the primary customer's requirements (e.g. CRS-1/Orbcomm).

It's clearly a launch pad. The supposed downcomer isn't lined for water and there's no piping beneath the concrete footing for it to connect to. Plus we know the pad will have to be elevated because you can't excavate a flame trench in Boca chica due to the water table. The centre pipe is either structure for a flame diverter or temporary support for the concrete forms.

Well B1051.5 isn't the flight leader, so that agrees with what you're saying if they're being a little more cautious with B1049.6.

Looking back I don't think B1051 was cleaned before its fifth flight.

Are these cleaned up weld lines new, or do they do this before every flight,