sh1pman

Would be cool if they had a camera somewhere on Dragon’s hull to livestream the reentry.

Nothing to see here folks, everything is great, absolutely nothing bad happened. Off you go!

Is prop load that big of a milestone? They just pump RP-1 and LOX into the tanks until they're full.

Don't jinx it!

Got it, thanks for the clarification!

How Fake News and Elon Musk Sent South Africa's Currency Haywire Coincidence? I don’t think so!

if you coat it with vantablack, disable all communications and come up with some kind of active cooling to CMB temperature, then you can probably hide a satellite pretty well. EDIT. wiki (vantablack): Aerospace sectors, right.

UFO-derived spacecraft? Awesome!

Usually I use Stage Recovery mod to recover the side boosters since they are traveling relatively slowly and don't leave the atmosphere. The central booster, however, needs a manual reentry and landing. After the shuttle separation I switch to the central core and do a boost-back burn to cancel some speed and to make sure it lands on solid ground. Then I switch back to the shuttle and continue burning prograde. I switch back to the central core when it's about to hit the atmosphere and do the reentry and landing procedures. At this point shuttle has high enough apoapsis, so I can land the booster safely. If I use Stage Recovery, I recover everything in one flight, without saving and loading, but for the purposes of this challenge I disabled it and showed the landing of a single side booster (with quickloading). You can probably land both of these boosters with kOS or MechJeb without quickloading, but, as far as I know, autopilot in atmosphere isn't allowed in this challenge

Not if you can cover it up and make it look like a failed launch.

How would they know, Zuma didn’t pass over Russia.

S2 could’ve worked nominally, but the Zuma spacecraft could fail to separate itself from S2. NG made their own custom decoupler (I think it’s the right word) for Zuma, so there could be problems with it.

If both parts are human rated, then combined rocket should also be rated.

For a second I thought the fairing failed to deploy.

Mark-2 parts are very draggy, I don’t use them for SSTOs. I’d try to remake it using regular 1.25m parts.

And you’re going to use this falcon super heavy for... what? Where’s money in that? You’re mentioning markets, but where’s the market for SHLVs? It’s practically nonexistent, aside from some semi-fictional government programs that may or may not still exist in 3 years time. BFR is a concept, but it’s a pretty solid concept already, and, well, everything has to start from a concept. I’m not even talking about Mars now, BFR can make a killing launching stuff to LEO, GEO and to the Moon. There is an economic sense in it, unlike in Falcon super duper heavy. Ability to colonize Mars is an added bonus, but not the most important one.

With BFR flying there isn't much need for ISS. After all, it can make a round trip to Mars with dozens of people on board. Just pack all of the scientific instruments in one BFR and send it to LEO. Deorbit it every once in a while for resupply and crew rotation.

The main question is what Moar Boosters approach is going to achieve for the Falcon rocket. Not much, I don't think. It will probably be able to compete with SLS, Energia, or whatever SHLV the Russians and Chinese will come up with. Is there's a huge market for super heavy rockets? Don't think so. Even if it's less work than BFR, it'll have a very hard time recouping its R&D costs.

They don’t need new rockets to expand LEO operations though

Nice! Those landing legs are awfully jumpy...

Yep. Also, the point of BFR is not to replace FH or to haul some super-heavy payloads to orbit. It’s going to replace every other rocket by being much cheaper to launch due to reusability. Being able to fit 150t of payload is a nice bonus, but not the main purpose.

Ok, my stock STS-1b mission (I can skip 1a, right?). Full album: https://imgur.com/a/0IGly Craft file: https://kerbalx.com/sh1pman/BFGR-Shuttle-Heavy

Well, if it’s modded, it can mean that some really unbalanced mods were used. Like giving an engine 10x times the thrust or something like that. No way to tell. Stock, on the other hand, is well-balanced, and is the same for everyone.