Ultimate Steve

In Scott Manley's video he brings up a good point, the station has been in constant sunlight for a few days now and that could have lead to above average stresses.

Wow, I just noticed this, its amazing! I didn't know it was possible to do Eve that light. I've been a bit obsessed with low mass missions lately. A few weeks ago I did a low-ish mass conventionally fueled mission to Moho and back to prove to a reddit commenter it could be done with a reasonably sized rocket without resorting to minimalism... But that just made me want to go minimalist. I spent a bunch of time continuing to pare that down and I got it pretty small into the single digit tons, my stumbling block was the Kerbin ascent, low margin atmospheric ascents are the bane of my existence. It ended up though that I had accidentally optimized the vacuum segment to pretty much the world record. Unfortunately there isn't usually that much room for innovation in low mass records these days, but as you have so proven, the low mass grand tour is the exception! I messed around with a lot of designs earlier today for a low mass grand tour, and I was coming in significantly under my goal of 100 tons (vehicle is not finalized yet), so I decided to see what the record was, and I saw this, and it has given me some ideas. Seeing as until now I've stubbornly refused to learn gravity assists, I don't think I will beat 14.4 tons, but I've decided to give it a go and see how low I can go. Any secret to those basic fins not exploding on the way down on Eve other than lots of gentle aerobraking and physics warp? Also I never have seen anyone use Magic Hand before, that's a good name for it. I don't think I'll be relying on it, but I wonder how else this could be exploited.

It's also possible that for ferry trips like these they fit the additional three seats. I'm not sure how difficult that would be this late in development though, and iirc there was some constraint they were up against, maybe splashdown g forces or something.

Dear Moon crew has been announced! Notably, Tim Dodd is going! There are 8 primary crew and 2 backup crew. No timeline update. My biggest hope was that we would get at least one musician, and we appear to have gotten at least 3! (2 of them are not listed as musicians but are also musicians) Full list: DJ & producer Steve Aoki Youtube creator Tim Dodd Artist Yemi A.D. Photographer Karim Iliya Photographer Rhiannon Adam Filmmaker Brendan Hall Actor Dev Joshi Musician T.O.P. Backup crew: Dancer Miyu Snowboarder Kaitlyn Farrington Would be interesting to see dancing in zero g. There was some talk a while back about having one or two professional astronauts along as well, if that is still the plan, they have not been announced yet.

I tried, but if I remember right there was something not right about the displayed telemetry or something, I don't remember what exactly.

Yes, but if you orbit around the terminator you never go into shadow. Obviously you have to balance this with getting to the correct inclination, but every extra minute of sunlight you can get by getting closer to the terminator translates into being able to become operational earlier, and being less susceptible to upper atmospheric fluctuations of the type that killed most of a whole batch of starlinks earlier.

If my assumption is correct, they are launching at sunrise or sunset to enter an orbit with more time in the sun so they can run the ion engines for a larger chunk of the orbit.

Breaking news: NASA has successfully turned an asteroid into a comet.

Chapter 33 - Hoard The Dust

If the center of mass was exactly halfway up the ship and the landing legs did not protrude outside of the 9m diameter, the maximum tilt would be about 10 degrees, although the actual safe level would be set lower. The steepest Apollo landing was about 11 degrees (Apollo 15). I believe the center of mass will be significantly lower due to the ascent propellant, and, of course, the landing gear is not set in stone. It will definitely be easier to tip than Apollo, but I don't think it will be prohibitively so.

Stream glitched out on liftoff sadly but S1 and Fairing seps went ok, and second stage burn is nominal so far. It looks like they are going to make it this time!

Might be the dome of the upper stage.

I don't think it is particularly likely (especially after Jared's tweet just now) but presumably a recovery mission won't take place for a long while - In that time starship, in theory, will be able to prove itself. Regarding the tweet, Dragon has carried docking adapters before, but there was always a robotic arm involved. I wonder how they plan to get around that.

Recover Hubble via Starship with Dragon EVA support?

Just like we do in Kerbal!

Impact!

My assumption is that the right hand image is the entire field of view of the camera, but either to save on bandwidth, or to zoom in, only part of the image is being displayed (centered on the asteroids, like some kind of image stabilization). That is the left hand box. The right hand box shows that image's location in the full field of view.

Draco is the camera on DART itself, if I remember right.

Anyone know when we will get pictures from the cubesat that is observing the impact?

Alright that's it I'm going frame by frame and plotting acceleration and velocity based on the official telemetry. There's been too much speculation on this. I might have a little bit of free time tomorrow morning to do it, but in general this week is very busy for me so it will take a while.

I prepared for the first exam of the semester for like 15 hours and still only got a 70%. That is one of the 3 or 4 grades in the class (class is graded on exams only) and it only gets harder from here. And I was going to try to turn my GPA around this semester...

I am well aware of that, I'm just curious as to what gremlins are in the engines that they have needed to do so many spin primes.

I wonder why they are doing so many of those. Also, page 1500!

I have a hard time believing that a mostly vertical re entry from a low altitude would make more g forces than a mostly vertical re entry from a high altitude. Might have been a spike upon the abort engine ignition.

My dad was in California for vacation this past week and he went 0 for 3 on launch attempts. I guess the luck required to get 3 consecutive launch attempts from Vandy was canceled out by the bad luck of none of them working.