sevenperforce

This can’t be correct for a minimal lander to and from low lunar orbit since we know Apollo LEM was able to do it at ca. 15 tons gross mass. Well, it's NOT a lander to and from low lunar orbit. If you mean that the numbers are off-base for a minimal lander that WOULD be going to and from low lunar orbit...that depends on what you mean by minimal. The ascent element denoted above needs to get from the lunar surface to Gateway. Technically, going between LLO and the Gateway should only cost 730 m/s, but the ascent element above has additional Δv to handle phasing and other issues for abort situations. Assuming the minimal mass of 9 tonnes above and hypergolics at ~318s, we're looking at a notional 5.4 tonnes of propellant. (This means a dry mass of 3.6 tonnes.) Reducing the required Δv to the bare 1.87 km/s to go from the lunar surface to LLO allows the total props to drop to just 3 tonnes, trimming the ascent element to a wet mass of 6.6 tonnes. Let's say the reduced tankage weight and getting rid of reusability/refillability can trim it to 3.2 tonnes dry and 5.9 tonnes wet. The Apollo LM ascent module had a dry mass of 2.15 tonnes, so ~49% dry mass growth for double the crew is pretty good. No reason to think this "can't be correct". With an ascent module wet mass of 5.9 tonnes (compared to the 4.7 tonnes of the LM), using the gross mass ratio of the LM descent and ascent elements, you'd need a descent module of 12.9 tonnes, for a total gross mass of 19 tonnes. That's what the above figures suggest for a minimal lander going to and from low lunar orbit. 19 tonnes. Of course that wouldn't satisfy any of the program requirements of Artemis.

It looks absolutely terrific. The shoulder motion is…amazing.

Absolutely incredible.

Looks like a behemoth! Reminds me of the early Raptor 1s with all the extra tubing and such.

Liftoff of MAXAR-1! MECO and stage separation. MVac ignition is good and these ground tracking shots are gorgeous. Re-entry burn startup and shutdown look good! Continuing to see the short nozzle on the MVac burning hot. Tracking camera showing re-entry. 20th entry burn by this booster. Landing burn startup! And that's a successful RTLS landing! Seriously, 20 reuses of a single airframe is impressive. Insanely.

Time will tell whether evaporative cooling would have been a better idea. There is no material with a sufficiently high melting point, a sufficiently low thermal conductivity, and a sufficiently high strength to weight ratio to serve as the entry half of the starship and still be able to make orbit. We've got the webcast starting!

Speculation -- most of it already rebutted many times -- from beginning to end. As you know, Elon was talking about the dev version that was intentionally launched with underfilled tanks to a non-orbital trajectory. His suggestion that this was still capable of 40-50 tonnes to orbit suggests that Starship dev is well on track to meet goals...goals that, I must add, do not depend on the performance of any dev version. SpaceX has done zero qualification flights to date, as they are still in development of their launch vehicle. Since all qualification flights are in the future, there are no "further" qualification flights needed. As an attorney with a particular certification in securities law, I can tell you that being "scrupulously forthright" is much more important for officers and board members of a corporation than it is for engineers (or whatever you imagine a "Chief Engineer" to be), and that your particular quibble over the way that static fires are described is nowhere near the ethical line for misrepresentations. Where SpaceX deviates from industry standards, they do so openly and intentionally. You might as well complain that Apple deviated from industry standard by introducing an iPhone without a removable battery. Sure, people didn't like it, but it certainly didn't stop it from begin successful. Besides, you have presented no evidence that SpaceX has failed to share information with its potential customers about the duration and thrust levels of its static fires. Those were items C11-C20, so not the top of the list. Additionally, your phrasing -- "tendency of the Raptor of..." -- does not reflect the FAA's corrective action statement. More importantly, all of these were corrected to the FAA's satisfaction. Each of which have been debunked. No. So NASA and the FAA were fooled, then?

Given that they have not started any qualification flights, this does not appear to be a problem, now does it?

They didn't show up for me either, but if you right-click the image and hit "open in new tab" then they are visible.

Nope, but it sounds like other people had a similar idea! This was at a public park in Terre Haute, IN. My Tiktok livestream of the ceremony caught this shot of the moonshadow whooshing overhead at the end of totality. Try to pay attention to the sky rather than the sun and you can see it: The setting and ceremony was really beautiful, and we had a great time. We catered our own wedding so I did eclipse tarts that all show varying levels of partiality: Some video of the eclipse etc: https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZPRTnu1Yd/ https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZPRTn3QRd/ https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZPRTnCKDv/ https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZPRTn4Vo4/

I meant naked in the sense of having no accretion disk, not in the sense of a naked singularity. In any event: I am blown away. Unable to really express it. It’s the most amazing thing I’ve ever seen, by far. Doubly amazing because we were getting married during it.

It was what you would imagine it would look like to be a god staring into the event horizon of a naked black hole.

Speaking of rings, we forged our own wedding bands from a 125-year-old gold coin (with additional space themes as expected): https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZPRTqKkke/ (if you feel like helping us celebrate at all, we’ve got a honeymoon fund here.)

Radian has an update: Wow! They have finally gotten enough capital to pay for a NEW RENDER!

That's gorgeous to see! It's very curious to me that neither turbopump is being placed inline with the engine. An inline approach (Raptor, BE-4, RD-191) would seem like the simpler, more lightweight design. Granted, other single-chamber engines with dual-shaft (separate turbines) turbopumps (RS-25, RS-68, YF-100, Vulcain, YF-20, YF-77) have both turbopumps off-axis, but that feels like it has almost always been due to other design constraints. Maybe it's an engine length issue? Something to do with how they are handling gimbal? I wonder if the gimbal is happening halfway down the nozzle rather than up at the top. The structure of the top of the engine looks pretty gimbal-unfriendly, and these highlighted bits around the nozzle extension look suspiciously like gimbal mounts: (Notable that those are clearly Lapsa's kids which is just awesome.) Putting the gimbal halfway down the engine bell is....definitely different. Probably lower control authority, among other things. But I suppose it could really reduce weight in other places.