Hotel26

(dimly remembering from the far past): if you built them with symmetry, turn symmetry off when you are finished in the SPH/VAB... try it. no guarantees.

Amen to that. People underestimate how revolutionary the idea of accumulating rocket fuel in orbital depots is. But SpaceX get it. ["LEO is halfway to everywhere else." It breaks every mission into two easier ones,' one already solved.] I think advanced robotics will be #2 most significant in the near-medium future. I'm excited about the present/near future. Lecturing about the past has its place in community colleges.

+10 (no Tour d'Eiffel, but a Tour de Force).

...that's deleetful...

Respectfuly disagree. Nothing is "standard" until it is widely adopted. SpaceX are certainly leading the way, far out in front in the direction they are heading, no one in the rear-view mirror. It's great, exciting and innovative, as well as undeniably unpredictable. And, yes, innovative means they are "making it up as they go". Open-minded discovery is the scientific method. Not the common, man-in-the-street, boring "lab coats and slide rules" view. Plodders can say what they like, but they ought to be honest with themselves and just change the channel.

I ran up KSP today for the first time since June 21, 2024. Oof. The break (unusual!) has been so long, I'm relearning keys. I've lost touch with my mainline Orbit world (started Jan, 2018)... don't know as yet, but that may finally provide the reason to start a new world, using only the most modern (definitive) equipment. Not really positive "I'm back" yet. Feel like I've just stepped out of a cryogenic pod in an interstellar freighter and not quite ready to go back to work. [And I can hear something rustling in the crawl space under the lunch room...]

"Design for the long-term; implement for the short-term." Short-sighted designs may have a conscious use for a completely throw-away application, but -- consciously taken or not -- those will be 'throw-away'. The throw-away stuff has been the specialty of the past ("dueling slide rules", you could say). [It was appropriate perhaps for once-off exploration of distant targets, but the mentality had to change.] "Industry-standard" is similar to "scientific consensus": the death knell for innovation (fatal in science and fatal in aerospace); and marks the completion of the entry of the carpet money-baggers and the full onset of the corruption of objectives... ...and that's just counting in Texas.

I did not know this: SpaceX was founded in 2002 by the current CEO. I did not realize that this company had operated this long in such a difficult field. Twenty three years (this week!) and under one management. Outstanding!!

Definition: "a true Chief Engineer has a pocket protector and is never seen without his slide rule."

"The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results", Albert Einstein

I don't want to be "methodical" or anything, but once you've ruled out incompetence (or, at least, "failed to attribute it"), it is clear that Hanlon's Razor does not rule out other possibilities, yes? You could, for example, apply a maxim from an investigative field, alternatively, and look for "means, Motive and opportunity". But I think we are far from that yet... Let's wait and see what facts and determinations are made, why don't we?

There's your major malfunction...

If the Chief Engineer is the owner of the company, that's all fine then, yes? Maybe the competition will just, you know, eat his lunch. If they're not just "all washed up", as it appears. This is the thing, Bob. Science is *supposed* to change knowledge, technology and, yes, even supersede the plodding ways of the past. I know this could be hard for the practitioners in a field to understand that they themselves are, just... all washed-up; yes? But this is what scientific revolutions do ... to careers. Bob. The world just moves on, as one gets older, you see. (Speaking from experience, too.) Oh but yes, "unfair government influence". (Not so great when it's suddenly "not on your side", hey?? <snip>) My opinion is that the FAA has a duty to respond to and serve the public interest. That includes for space exploration and especially future flights to the Moon, Mars and possibly the asteroid belt. It has to accommodate it; but not direct it. SpaceX progress, the utility of Starlink and demonstrated synergy with NASA programs have proven the worth of SpaceX to the world at large. The FAA could and should investigate upgrading its capability to handle mixed-mode traffic to respond to this progress (as it always has done: think GA/commercial/military comingling). The US ought to be glad that the world's premier space program is still based on US soil and if that brings some issues with airspace or wildlife reserves, then that should be considered from every angle -- including that of the much-vaunted 'national security'.

Just barely! I'm checking in 3 days late after IFT-8 got scrubbed, feeling pretty despondent about missing the Monday(?) reschedule. And, hey hey hey, it's Wednesday! But I have to nominate someone next. OK. @James Kerman!

As long as engines don't RUD, their reliability seems analogous to the widepsread use these days of SD memory, which is always degrading but error-corrected. It's overall system performance/economics that count. I expect that the economics of the current state of the art (making it perfect immediately) compared to the economics of simply reserving some flight lane bandwidth (time and space) for the benefit of human progress in space flight (e.g. SpaceX) is going to argue that it will or should be the FAA/DOT that takes compensatory future action to prevent reoccurrence of mutual hazard. (You could actually say it is the fault of those controlling authorities, but what matters is only how those now react to the data.) This situation is analagous to the shootdown of MH17 over the Ukraine (Donbas) in 2014. The (impossibly) idealistic solution might have been proposed of stopping that war (still continuing (and looking mighty like ww3 already in progress, summing all told around the world)) but the actual solution applied was to ban commercial overflights of the area until such time as deemed safe to resume.