Ultimate Steve

Blue Moon Mark 1 (though I am skeptical of it actually launching any time soon) is indeed intended to deliver 3 tons to the Lunar surface. I know you are very much a flags and footprints type guy so this may not be a problem for you but the apollo LM ascent stage was 4.7 tons. It cannot get to NRHO. Unless you want to rip out Orion's service module for a new LLO capable one, you are NOT getting something with even Apollo's capability levels without either going back to 1960s safety standards or reducing the crew to 1. Also with nrho you kind of have to stay on the surface for a long duration due to orbit timings. So good luck fitting in a few weeks of life support.

I've been pretty bullish on Starship thus far but it is getting a little less justifiable. If it was an RVac burnthrough as suggested above, this reminds me an awful lot of the second flight of Delta III which did everything right but just got unlucky in a sense, the normally quite reliable RL-10 decided to fail. Obviously RVac has nowhere near the flight history as RL-10, but still, parallels. If this turns out to be related to the harmonics issue on flight 7, well... I also find it quite strange that the ship kept going with only 2 RVacs. Maybe there's some non intuitive reason, and I'm not super informed, but at least on the surface level, keeping a compromised ship with no attitude control burning faster into a spiral seems like a bad idea.

Seems like the block 2 ship has gremlins.

Well. Again.

Past week or two has been a whirlwind. I went on a road trip with Dad, we saw the Houston space center (I have now seen all 3 remaining Saturn Vs!), the Starship launch site, and the Alamo. I have partially relocated to Texas (I'm in a company provided hotel room, I have ~6 weeks or so to figure out a more permanent solution). I saw some of the oil fields recently - It didn't hit me until now just how massive the drilling operations are down here until I was driven through it, and saw the never ending pumpjacks, and looked on google maps to see how, well, scarred is probably the wrong world - But how much infrastructure was all over the land. Reminds me of a significantly less aesthetically pleasing version of viewing cornfields from an airliner. I thought two years of bus driving would prepare me a little for city driving. And yeah it prepared me a little bit compared to my hometown of ~3,000ish, but the roads are more confusing, the drivers are more impatient, speeds are faster, you have to turn/merge in less space, and in general you have far more information coming in and far less time to make a decision. There have been a number of close calls already. In Texas, I find that there are (only somewhat, and location dependent) more people following the speed limit than up in Iowa, but the limits are also much higher down here. I had my first experiences with dust storms. It is quite the shift going from six inches of snow to dust storms. I also had one moment that hammered it in "Oh, I'm in the south now!" when I saw a tumbleweed blow by for the first time. I'm going to miss (honestly I already miss) the snow and the rain and the greenness of home. I'm not going to miss the humid summers, but we'll see how I'll feel when we start getting extreme (though dry) summer heat in a few months. There's a lot of trash everywhere here. Makes me want to just grab a bag and start picking up, but with the scale of the issue I don't foresee it making much of a difference, though I might be able to eventually clear out the land immediately surrounding the hotel. I started work yesterday. Lots of information really fast. There's apparently a housing stipend I didn't hear about, so it was nice getting what was effectively sort of like a surprise raise on the first day haha. Haven't done any actual non onboarding stuff yet, so jury's out on whether or not I'll like it. Thus far everything seems quite, well, scary is the wrong word. But traffic at a pace I'm not used to, weather I'm not used to, a standard of cleanliness I'm not used to, and well, having a real job that I'm not used to, missing home and the weather of home. Too much highway facing infrastructure, not enough trees. At least on the surface, not enough to do that isn't alcohol based (I don't drink). And in an area of the country/state that might not be super receptive to my sibling if they ever decide to visit. This is just about the last place in the country I expected to end up, but I suppose after 192 job applications I don't really have the luxury of choice. Barring something either extremely unfortunate or extremely fortunate, I am going to be here for at least a few years. But I guess it wouldn't be an adventure if there weren't scary parts. Here goes nothing.

Update: It is saying that a hold will happen at T-40s if they haven't figured out the problem by then.

Hold.

Here are some pictures from my visit to Starbase with dad:

While I will sadly not be around for the launch, I did visit Starbase and Boca Chica Beach today! Got some pictures I will hopefully post later - And I managed to snag a few fragments of the launch pad that got blown up on flight 1!

We had managed to alter our trip to also be here Friday, RIP We give ourselves three days and Starship randomly decides to take six. But it is how it is.

I visited the Houston space center today. I have now seen all three remaining Saturn V rockets!

Flight 7 failure summary is out: https://www.spacex.com/updates/ Highlights: Engine out during was an aborted startup due to a low power state on an igniter. So finallly, a failure that can be directly attributed to Raptor. The wording ("pre planned upgrade") suggests that they had already thought this might be an issue, and that they have already been working on fixing that for futute engine versions. Ship failure was due to fires in the "attic" that happened because of leaks that happened because of vibrations several times stronger than expected, implied to affect the new raptor vacuum fuel feed lines. The recent long static fire was testing various fixes for this. Ship did not go pop until the AFSS went off about three minutes after contact was lost.

Typical for it to be delayed to the 28th immediately after we put in hotel reservations for the 26th and 27th.

I am well aware, we have the driving durations planned out.

Yes. Moving down to Texas for work. With an extra 1.5-2 days of driving, I might be able to be in the Brownsville area on the 26th and the 27th. Possibly the 28th as well.