sevenperforce

This is why I just love the Atlas V with the solid boosters.

That's the flight plan posted on the #dearMoon site.

The math only BARELY works for this, I think....

It should be doable, yes. The biggest issue IMO is weight distribution. Those two engines are heavy and the nose is extremely draggy, moreso if it retains the fairing. Aerodynamic forces will make it wanna re-enter engine-first which would be a bad day. That's one of the reason SpaceX put the LOX header tank up in the nose: to get that proper balance. The brute-force solution would be to wrap a large inflatable ballute around the engines and cover both it and the tank exterior with ablative paint. That upper stage shouldn't weigh terribly much more than the New Shepard Crew Capsule so they can chute it down into the desert once it makes it through re-entry, and the ballute can double as an airbag to protect the engines. It's a capsule that is vertical on launch but re-enters sideways, not unlike Starship.

I think they will do a full heat load by using a higher apogee and just keeping the perigee around 30 km.

Yeah, they probably just rip apart like twigs.

Disagree. Astra Rocket 3.2's upper stage cut off at 7.2 km/s when it needed to be at 7.68 km/s. With an apogee of 390 km, the intended velocity would have given it a perigee of 122 km; its actual final velocity placed its perigee 1,066 km below the surface of the earth, somewhere near the bottom of the mantle. Starship can enter an orbit with a high apogee and a perigee at around 30 km above the surface of the earth...definitely orbital speed, just eccentric enough to ensure re-entry in one orbit.

Holy crap. Did they not have any sort of range safety?!?! I wonder if that means these bolts have to be removed before flight: Evidently, then, the pad lever arms must fit into the slot there labeled карман. This makes sense, given карман is the word for pocket. So the core hangs on the booster ball joint, and the booster pocket hangs on the pad lever arms. However there would also need to be something holding the boosters to the core at the base. Maybe another slot-like structure. *does more digging* Okay, this looks like it. Looks like there is a coupling between the booster and the core (orange) as well as a tooth/hook between adjacent boosters (yellow). So once the boosters burn out, the core just lifts straight out of the joints/couplings and the LOX press venting from the tops of the boosters pushes them away.

Exactly. I want to see multiple companies vying for payloads.

I ended up doing the math and it was no-contest at all. Inertia doesn't matter and neither does TWR; it's just a question of whether total aerodynamic drag exceeds the thrust of six engines. Drag at MaxQ wouldn't even exceed the thrust of one engine. I was initially confused because I thought you'd need TWR>>1 to oppose drag, but drag doesn't care about the direction of gravity. The math works the same no matter what direction you're headed. As long as Superheavy's engines don't keep running, Starship has more than enough thrust to pull away regardless of drag. It does not, however, have enough thrust to pull away rapidly enough on the pad. Just go all Matt Lowne and do a Venus-Earth-Venus gravity assist in order to get a Jupiter flyby in order to get a reverse gravity assist at Saturn to drop your periapsis into the Sun. If you want more velocity headed into the sun then line up your Saturn reverse gravity assist with another (reverse) Venus gravity assist on your way back.

The question is whether running all six Raptors at full throttle at MaxQ would produce a thrust be greater than the magnitude of aerodynamic drag. I feel like it would be?

I mean I do want nuclear thermal.

Oh, I have no qualms about people bidding $3M for a seat on New Shepard. It's their money; they can spend it how they like. It was just a very good marketing strategy, that's all. Allows them to set the official per-seat ticket price high but still lower.

Okay, now THAT is an awesome sight. Also, a quandry... If Superheavy undergoes a benign failure at MaxQ, can all six Starship engines produce enough thrust to resist drag?

Forward section will be the cargo bay and its empty for the test flights. It will have an huge door for the later cargo versions making it very hard to pressurize. The crewed version will have an internal pressure hull. They but the lox header tank at the front to move center of mass forward for landing. That's actually a really interesting question. The Falcon 9 fairing is pressurized to 1 atm at launch but vents slowly during ascent to match ambient, so when it is opened it's not, like, venting. However, it's not like the Falcon 9 fairing actually closes so the problem isn't considered in reverse. Pressurizing the cargo bay would help tremendously to strengthen everything on re-entry, especially because having the LOX tank and forward fins up there means you're bearing a significant load. The cargo bay of the Shuttle wasn't really load-bearing since it had an aerodynamic structure under it. The Shuttle had vents along the sides of the payload bay (or maybe the vents were in the payload bay doors) to allow the pressure to remain equalized on the way up and on the way down.

The high bid for a seat on New Shepard is currently $2.4M. Unbelievable.

Hurrah!!! All issues with the Chinese government aside (heaven knows ours has issues too), this is awesome and fantastic. The more rovers on Mars, the better. Do we know if it has any solar panel cleaning provisions? On a related note, this is just stupidly funny/nonsensical/ridiculous.

There's always cryptocurrency mining

The soot. It is good.

Scrapped. They want to go with bigger, more dangerous, more aggressive solid boosters that weigh less and pack more propellant. Maybe they can start test-firing those at around the same time that Amazon starts doing same-day lunar deliveries and SpaceX opens up tourist visits to breathe freshly-terraformed Martian air.

Well yes. But no more a frankenrocket than SLS, if you think about it. You'd have to shrink the drop tanks to about 33% of their normal length. But it would send 34 tonnes to TLI with a GLOW of just 2,006 tonnes, significantly smaller than SLS Block 1.

I was worried I missed it, but...scrubbed again. Another attempt tomorrow.

Such a gorgeous view all the way down. Amazing. Also awesome to have telemetry for both stages at the same time.

While Neutron seems like a decent idea, I'm honestly not sure what the best bet is right now. A smarter play (and for all we know they are doing this) might be to wait and be ready to be a "fast follower" should Starship actually work. I would think any of the commercial launch companies must be doing this, though of course the money required would be non-trivial (particularly for companies that have yet to actually land anything). Rocketlab has a stock offering through one of its investors, Vector Acquisition Corp, trading as $VACQ. Unfortunately the launch took place after the markets closed so we can't buy until Monday. I set a buy order for early Monday AM but we'll see where it is then.

Okay, hear me out. ROMBUS + New Glenn. Take a Delta IV common booster core and put two RS-25s underneath it. Yes, you'll need a fairing. No big deal. Build two Delta IV CBC hydrogen tanks without the corresponding LOX tank and put Delta IV Heavy nosecones on the top and bottom. Mount those on the sides. Take two New Glenn first stages, add nose cones, and mount them on the sides (at 90 degrees to the hydrogen tanks) with their methane tanks partially empty. Crossfeed the New Glenn LOX tanks into the Delta IV CBC LOX tanks, and crossfeed the side-mounted Delta IV hydrogen tanks into the Delta IV CBC hydrogen tank. Centaur V on top with your TLI payload. What does that send to TLI? Probably nearly as much as SLS Block 1B, with only two RS-25s, only two RL-10s, and recoverable boosters.