mikegarrison

Yes, a rocket program noted for its successful safety record!

Considering they haven't launched one yet, I think "at this rate" is counting your chickens a little too far before they have hatched. Obviously, if SpaceX is going to meet its vision of rapid turnaround, they are going to have to radically change how rocket and payload integration is done. Maybe they are already working on that. I don't know. Airplane designers have to put a lot of work into making sure this sort of thing can happen without conflicts:

Cranes don't usually need to survive the environment of being directly next to a launching heavy-lift rocket.

I'll just point out that no one has yet taken public passengers into space except for the Russians. It's a big step from test flights to making a boarding call for "flight 642 to the ionosphere".

That would work great! (Assuming all the water is in one place.)

At least scrubbing is clean, right? (How did that word get associated with "we will not do this thing today" anyway?)

It looks like they are two wolves short of a full three-wolf moon.

I have a GTX980, and KSP has never been a problem with it. Framerate issues in KSP are usually caused by the physics engine and part count, not by the graphics.

That would be great course for an electric vehicle. It's a short course, so there is no need to worry about the slow refueling time. And you have a lot of steep uphill sections coming out of low-speed corners, which favors a drivetrain with low-speed power over one with high-speed power.

Boeing announced that a third person has been named to the flight crew of their first operational crewed mission, which is planned for "late next year". (This would come after the uncrewed repeat flight test and the crewed flight test.) https://www.space.com/astronaut-jeanette-epps-joins-starliner-crew.html She was originally scheduled to go up in a Soyuz, but the Russians cancelled her ride without any explanation.

Probably burns what most ships burn -- any old tarry junk left over after the refinery has cooked off the good stuff.

In theory a lot. In practice, CO2 is 400 ppm in the atmosphere. That's a lot of air-sucking to do.

Fully loaded, the newest US aircraft carriers weigh about 100,000 tons. (Tons and tonnes are pretty similar, so don't let that worry you too much.) A F-18 Super Hornet MTOW is about 30 tonnes, and a SpaceX starship is supposed to be about 1,300 tonnes. So the rocket is way heavier than an airplane, but still less than 2% of what the ship weighs. I'm sure they could figure out some way for the ship to deal with something that heavy if they had reason to.

I'm sure that's possible. They would likely want to do it on a module-by-module basis. I don't think they would want to just shut off the entire system unless they had to. I don't know the exact details of their system configuration, though, so I don't know which systems and modules are too integrated to isolate.

Ithacus. Not sure where the name came from. Could be from the home island of Odysseus, which is Ithaca. Or maybe derived from the rocket itself, which is a version of the ROMBUS. It was supposed to carry troops. It's a sub-orbital point-to-point intercontinental rocket idea. (Nobody thought Elon Musk was the first to have this idea, did they?)

No, I didn't know that. I'm not really an "anti-fan" of SpaceX -- I wish them well -- but I'm certainly not a fan of theirs.

I just don't get it. What is the fascination people have with welding steel? It's been done for millennia. SpaceX rockets look nothing like water towers. (Grain silos, yes, I could understand.)

We haven't been told what "this size" is. The ISS is a noisy place, what with all the air that is moving around in it all the time. A leak from full pressure to vacuum would probably have a pretty distinctive acoustic signature. Likely very high frequency, especially if the leak path was narrow. Acoustic leak detectors usually use microphones and look for ultrasonic noise humans can't hear with their own ears.

What does "rough ride" mean, anyway? Usually upper stages have longer burns but lower acceleration. I'm not sure exactly what the Crew Dragon profile looks like, so I don't know if it fits the usual pattern.

The thing is, all the air in a space station has to be constantly blown around. Since there is no natural convection, any CO2, ozone, etc. would just sit where it is created, leading to pockets of bad air. So they make sure that all the air is constantly moving, getting pulled into the air cleaning systems. What this means is that anything you put in the air to see where it goes will just go to the air cleaner. That's not exactly helpful for finding a leak. Sounds like what they are doing is isolating the modules to find out which one is leaking. Then they can turn off the air recirculation in that module. *Then* they can try putting something into the air and seeing where it goes.

Hey, mockups are very important. These days many companies make their mockups digitally, using CATIA or something like it, but in some cases a physical mockup is still the best solution.

The standard answer for how long an airplane can keep flying is "as long as you are willing to pay to keep it flying". The issue with a car, an airplane, a boat, etc. is not that it's impossible to keep it operational. The issue is that it generally gets more and more expensive to do that as it ages. Eventually it becomes cheaper to buy a new one than to keep the old one working. I'm sure the same applies to rockets.

Delta IV Heavy: the rocket that took "light this candle" a little too seriously.

LOL on the follow comments: "That hanger looks just like Space-X's" (reply) "It's a metal box with a door on it."

The X-37B has won the 2019 Collier Trophy. (Well, technically it is the "X37B team" that won the trophy.) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collier_Trophy