Ultimate Steve

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.

Part of me wants to go frame by frame and calculate an acceleration plot but I really do not have the time for that right now.

IMO N1 counts because it was proven to generate the amount of thrust advertized. Super Heavy has not, yet, and will not until it does a full static fire, and arguably won't until it actually leaves the ground. You can measure it as "most thrust assembled" "most thrust generated in a single assembled rocket" and "most thrust generated in flight." Neither SLS or Super Heavy have achieved the required thrust levels to count for level 2.

I'm in the third year of an aerospace engineering degree and this is the best explanation of this by far I have ever come across. Thank you.

Well, there goes my next few days of productivity!

I think that may be skewed by the fact that dragon got cut down to four seats instead of seven because IIRC they couldn't get touchdown forces within acceptable levels or something like that. Granted NASA wouldn't have used all seven anyway but there is also some cargo in there in place of the 3 seats, so the cost per seat also includes some cargo. And all space projects grow in cost. Most Americans would probably agree that even if the costs were equal, it is better to have that money spent domestically than abroad in a country we haven't tended to have great relations with.

It is over 1000. I do space battles from time to time and that can easily get to over 1000 debris fairly quickly.

I think the end point of SpaceX obligations would be after everything has been unloaded from the capsule, and if that unloading happens in a NASA facility, when the capsule is back in SpaceX's possession.

So! I should have known something was wrong! The first thing that went wrong was I was off by like 7 degrees, so I did a correction that involved some guesswork, bringing me back onto my predicted course. I then eyeballed a plane change burn. But then something *really* went wrong. It was a classic unit conversion mistake. Always write down your units, people! I had calculated that Minmus moved 1.2 degrees per hour, which was correct. However I then took my 9 day travel time, and I forgot to convert 1.2 degrees per hour to 7.2 degrees per day (Kerbin days are 6 hours). As a result, my calculated phase angle was off by a factor of 6. I then tried delving into actual orbital mechanics math (the stuff I had been using involved an ideal trajectory with an encounter at apoapsis, which is much easier to calculate, because angular position as a function of time is a very hard calculation to do. Time to apoapsis is just period divided by 2, which is a very easy equation to solve). I attempted to solve for the needed eccentricity needed to encounter Minmus at a certain time and angle (true anomaly) obtained by a protractor and some estimation, with the periapsis and a few other things known. However, no matter how hard I bashed it with a hammer, I always ended up with one more equation than unknown so I couldn't solve it at my current level of understanding. I ended up just time warping until I got a Minmus encounter (about 200 days) as I was on an orbit that loitered at Minmus altitude a lot and was at vaguely the correct inclination. I thought it would take a long time until I was aligned at the ~65 degrees required, and was prepared to estimate a correction if I came close to that value, but I got a perfect encounter without having to do anything a few orbits later. Val got to Minmus and back safely! Although, it was not because of my math, it was in spite of it!

The more the merrier, if there's empty space that's not going to be used anyway, why not?

I've tried a new gimmick to help me procrastinate less on stuff. I've made a list of the things I need to do and I've tied a fund value to each one, and I'm trying to run a KSP career mode using only rewards from completing items on that list. It's a bit more complicated than that, with chains, streaks, and milestone multipliers, but that's the core of it. It has been pretty effective so far. I spent today designing a Minmus mission after completing a successful Mun mission. However, even though I have divided all building upgrade costs by 10, it's still a lot of money, and usually I would need a level 2 tracking station for this. I decided to try doing it without this upgrade using math. I did the math for a Minmus transfer from a 100x100km orbit. Assuming I can eyeball the inclination close enough, I need to hit a window about 5.5 degrees wide (although it's a bit more than that since I only checked if the apoapsis intersects Minmus, and not the rest of the trajectory). Should be doable. I have acquired the funds to undertake this mission, although the rocket isn't the most safe thing in the world. I'm going to bed now and I will fly the mission tomorrow. I will update you tomorrow with if I did the math right or not. I don't know if I will sleep well, pre launch jitters certainly hit different when you have put hours of work into obtaining the necessary funds, and can't revert if something goes wrong!