Racescort666

That's a funny looking boat you've got parked there.

You totally have my permission to steal this thread.

Is anyone there in person?

I got busted by my IT department for having games on my work laptop. It wasn’t KSP, although KSP was definitely the first game I put on and the reason I started gaming on my work computer. I went for about 4 years of really solid KSP play throughs. Starting around the time we started issuing CAD laptops to the engineers to run SolidWorks, CATIA, and NX. I ultimately got busted for World of Warships which I forgot to log out of and it ran an update which got flagged by IT. I don’t think I’m actually in trouble, my manager had known about this basically since the beginning. I never played at work anyway so I doubt this is any kind of fireable offense. Plus I told him about it as soon as I got the email from IT and he just said “thanks for the heads up”. So here we are, no more KSP on the work computer and I’ve gotta buy a gaming laptop. Actually, as of this writing, I’ve already ordered one: Dell G3 17” and I’m pumped for it to show up.

I always feel like I'm catching up on it as well. I usually just end up skipping through a few dozen BFR speculation posts and I'm right up to current events. Just look for the tweets which are usually relevant. As for the happy reactions to the delay, I feel like @Ultimate Steve is always in school during launches. I wouldn't recommend skipping class to watch, you've gotta graduate man! FIFY

Ha! True story. McDonnell and Rockwell (in its various iterations) built basically everything else that went to space while Grumman only built the LEM which was effectively used once it was already in space. So maybe they’ve got them on a technicality.

Since this has come up a few times, Boeing’s corporate structure is huge: https://www.boeing.com/company/bios/ I highly highly doubt that 2 divisions whose first manager in common is the CEO behave the same. Also worth noting, according to Boeing’s website: ” Every American spacecraft that has carried astronauts into space was designed and built by Boeing or Boeing’s heritage companies.

At the risk of sounding like Jerry Seinfeld, what’s the deal with embedded tweets on mobile? Surely other people have noticed that the width is all borked when viewing a thread on mobile that has embedded tweets and other content. I didn’t see any threads on it and only brief discussion. I just want to make sure that this is a known issue to the people who can fix it.

That doesn’t mean they don’t have a change control process to evaluate the necessity and impact of changes. The processes that I have seen be successful are ones that have a reporting system that everyone has access to, where issues are easy to raise (by anyone), severity is clearly spelled out to properly prioritize “nice to have” from “safety critical design change”, and issues that truly need to be implemented before anything bad happens get escalated to the proper levels. So the typical process has a freeze at the end of the design phase. The freeze is really a soft freeze where details of the design get worked out like model cleanup, tolerances are worked out, drawings are made, etc. before that, yeah, changes are made freely. Hypothetically, “nice to have” issues from the reporting system are implemented in the design phase and “nice to have” after the freeze gets logged into the system for the next design phase. If something comes up, change control is there to address critical changes and shut down things that aren’t. Change control is really important but just as important is a reporting system that is respected at all levels so when an issue comes up that could delay a program, the people who make the delay decision are properly informed. On the other side, change control is not about preventing changes but making sure that the program stays on time and on budget. If you are an engineer or a line worker and you have an idea of how to make whatever-it-is better and it can be done with little-to-no impact to cost and timing, it goes into change control for review. This is the point where impact to other groups is assessed (or before if you’re doing your job right). If there’s no impact to other groups, the change is allowed to be implemented. I don’t work for SpaceX, I work in the auto industry, but we do have complex products and the success of them is absolutely dependent on how well issues get handled. I would suspect that SpaceX is pretty good about balancing delay vs product improvements. Musk is a wild card about posting timelines but we have collectively recognized “Elon time” but that’s not to say that the product is unsafe or inferior. It’s just a case of delays are normal.

I hope they have a sign saying "You've Come to the Wong Place."

Very Excite! I am solidly not in the Fan Boi club but this makes me very very excited.

Nice little vapor cone there.

On topic: the Earth-Sun L3 lagrange point is very unstable. https://map.gsfc.nasa.gov/mission/observatory_l2.html

What about one of them being highly advanced in the past and something like nuclear war drove everyone into bunkers for generations? Meanwhile, the other planet advances sufficiently to realize something close to space travel with neither side knowing that there is an advanced society just out of sight. Planet A suffers nuclear war, they declare the planet inhabitable for XXX years (insert time not roman numerals for 30) and everyone retreats to self-sustaining bunkers. After Planet A has a nuclear war and goes underground, Planet B figures out telescopes and stuff/decides to start to think critically about the rest of the universe. While Planet B is developing technology, Planet A is reclaimed by wildlife. Planet B is to the cusp of developing space travel (I assume this is where your story starts). [Insert plot device] Planet A and Planet B discover they are people. Planet A maybe or maybe doesn't remember how to build spaceships. You could put the people on Planet A in the bunkers for an arbitrarily long time and they forget technology. Kinda campy I think but I suppose there isn't anything "technically wrong" with it.

Especially from the astronauts that have flown in multiple vehicles. Tim Dodd said that the Boeing suit was like wearing pajamas (comfortable and lightweight). I'd be interested to see how the SpaceX suits compare to the Boeing ones and to other vehicles.

Chandra had an issue and is back up as well. We kind of knew that Kepler and Dawn were on their way out but Hubble and Chandra going down is a pretty big deal. As you said, fortunately, they're back up.

A BrahMos or P-800 cruise missile maybe? I think Scott Manley did a video on it once too. If I had to guess, they wanted an ejector system so that the main rocket wasn't firing on the ground (potentially damaging equipment) and the missile itself didn't have the aerodynamic authority or thrust vectoring to make the 90 degree turn keeping the missile low to the ground to avoid detection.

It's worth noting that the fuel tanks in KSP all have the same wet/dry ratio regardless of size. This isn't the case in real life as you get the square-cube law. Quick calculation says that the FL-T800 has an areal weight of 35 kg/m2 which is super high considering that the Space Shuttle ET is less than 20.

Assuming that they will fly a similar flight profile to SpaceX, if they can throttle to 50% they should have no problem and even if the minimum throttle is 75%, they're well within my guess for being able to hover land. The Falcon 9 has a very high mass ratio so the booster is very light when it comes back (thus the hoverslam landing). Based on Blue Origin's published payloads and some back of the napkin calculations (spreadsheet), they have a ton of dV margin and the booster can be reasonably heavy when it lands and well within the engine's throttle range.

There's also a chance that the 6 SRM Vulcan was designed around the payload history of the Delta IV-H rather than the theoretical performance of it. Most of the launches (past and planned) were (are) NRO missions and if it's within the margin with a significantly cheaper rocket, it would be would probably be a smart move.

Relevant Veritasium video (also very interesting if you’ve got 10 minutes to watch):

Dual Engine Centaur arrived at the cape: Full gallery: https://www.flickr.com/photos/ulalaunch/sets/72157696741708550/with/31557912328/ I can't decide if I'm amazed at how small the Centaur is or how big it is compared to everyday things like a semi-truck. Like "huh, look how small it is, a regular truck can tow it down the road." or "It's the size of a semi-truck, that's huge." both at the same time.

Is that an F150 for scale?

Have they adjusted their payload yet? I have been under the impression that with the switch to hydrolox upper stage that they would see a pretty good bump in payload.