sevenperforce

Major cloudbanks here in my city too, which sucketh Interesting that they separate the trunk before they deorbit. Does D1 do that as well? I suppose the trunk will decay on its own? I guess they are confident it will be obliterated in re-entry rather than surviving with debris to the ground.

David Saint-Jacques describes Dragon 2 as feeling like "a business-class spaceship".

Correct, and correct.

ULA is for when your payload absolutely, positively must go to space today.

I don't know if loss of roll authority would RUD or just lead to unacceptably high gee-loading. Dragon 2 has a ballast sled which can be used to adjust CoM and thus produce lifting re-entry. However, it needs roll authority to work; without roll authority you can't use the ballast sled because you'll get precession around the longitudinal axis, and so you end up with ballistic entry. That might be the main pucker factor here. If lifting-body entry fails and you get a ballistic entry, I wonder...is there a chance of coming down over a populated area?

Elon has made several statements about tumble risk associated with Dragon 2's asymmetric backshell. What are the actual risks here?

Looks like the ISS is over my horizon from 8:35 Eastern to 8:41 Eastern and climbs up to 29 degrees. So I have a pretty good shot from my skyscraper.

It should be noted that NASA required validation of a 1-in-270 LOC odds for both vehicles, as opposed to 1 in 90 which was where the Shuttle operated at the end of its life cycle. Of course STS-1 had a 1:12 LOC probability.

At this rate EM-1 will be reduced to an unmanned rerun of Ares 1-X to serve as an inflight abort test. In 2025.

My original point was merely that Dragon 2 is the first orbital crew vehicle launched from American soil since the Shuttle. Orion on Delta IV Heavy didn't count, to me, because it's not an all-up test.

Boeing will do a pad abort test shortly...either right before or right after the uncrewed flight test...but will not do an in-flight Max-Q abort. It's my understanding that NASA offered both companies the option to either validate Max-Q abort via data or via an actual test. SpaceX has a bunch of spare reused cores laying around gathering dust so it is pretty inexpensive (and easier) to validate with an actual Max-Q abort test, while Boeing expends all its rockets and so it elected to go through the mountains and mountains of paperwork to validate on data alone. Either one can provide the required safety levels. CST-100's flight abort capabilities will be validated with wind tunnel tests, data from the uncrewed flight, and data from the pad abort.

No ISRU. Just a big single-stick rocket. I didn't plan in ISRU because of time (there is a limited amount of that) and because I didn't know whether the asteroid in @Rover 6428's save file would have much ore. Technically it is not quite single-stick -- it was eight Vectors on the lowest 5-meter stage, a single Rhino on the second stage, but inside a fairing I had a core four-engine nuclear stage with four parallel nuclear stages hanging off it. I was able to blow the fairing and begin firing the peripheral nukes while the Rhino was still burning, so I included an extra LF tank in the second-stage stack to feed the nukes while the Rhino was doing its thing. The OP actually has a gameplay situation in his save file that he is going to send us. But if we wanted to make this as much like Armageddon as possible, we'd do an E-class asteroid and have it lined up on a hyperbolic Kerbin impact trajectory either coplanar or nearly coplanar to the Mun, coming in from approximately Minmus, so that we could use a free-return Munar slingshot to "catch" it. We could also specify, just to make it challenging, that the vehicle needs to be manned and needs to glide to a landing at KSC. Just occurred to me that this is yet another problem with Armageddon -- even with all the other wildly implausible nonsense in that film, even with the wild notion that exploding a thermonuclear bomb 1% under the surface of a Ceres-sized dwarf planet would cause it to "fracture along a fault line" and drift apart in two pieces with no gravity pulling them back together -- you had to get the Shuttle off the surface and onto a survivable Earth re-entry trajectory.

Just ran this on the reference mission I came up with. Used a nuclear core with 4 parallel staged nukes on top of a five-meter TSTO. Ended up with enough excess dV to throw the asteroid into Kerbol with 400 m/s left over.

@Rover 6428, I just emailed you with a simple cheat-menu parameter set so anyone can create this mission from scratch without a save file.

Count me in!

X-43A is the fastest level-flying powered atmospheric vehicle disclosed, and it probably gets just about to the point of causing plasma around it, but not nearly so visible as something like a re-entering spaceship.

The RS-88 engines can gimbal to angle through the vehicle COM so I think it is probably pretty likely that they can be used for changing orbit and deorbiting, though they may want to use RCS thrusters for more precision. The original RS-88s used LOX/ethanol but these have been modded to run on hypergolics. Boeing won't tell us what their Isp is because apparently they have ITAR heritage. They will reuse Dragon 2s for cargo delivery, which means cargo will now have abort capability. Dragon 1 is officially deprecated; they will continue reflying reused Dragon 1s until they all retire.

Orion on Delta IV Heavy is to Orion on SLS what Dragon l launching on Falcon 9 V1.0 was to Dragon 2 launching on F9B5.

Millions of pounds of force disappear at booster burnout, do they not? STS boosters were jettisoned just as their thrust began to drop off, thus allowing residual thrust (and the separation motors) to carry them free. If they are jettisoned too early, their high remaining thrust would likely result in collision; jettison too late and the transient shock load would indeed shred the ET. My point was that the stack does not yet have a TWR>1 at booster separation, but can still maintain heading via gimbal. If blow-out panels had been installed, then, the thrust could have been caused to drop off in the same way as typical burnout, permitting a "premature separation" with substantively the same forces as a nominal separation. Prior to T+80, this sort of separation definitely would have resulted in LOCV, as the stack would not yet have enough thrust to maintain heading, but between 80-85 and 120 seconds it could have been survivable.

Wowwwwwwwwwwww Just wow Congrats to SpaceX and NASA...godspeed, Ripley. That landing tho...I was worried. It translated hard to port.

LIFTOFF! A crew vehicle has left American soil for the first time since Atlantis.

Falcon is in startup!!!

0.7

NASA would not put crew on a vehicle that had not demonstrated docking.

They would have to redo DM-1. So no, not a gain. Dracos yes; SuperDracos no.