Ultimate Steve

This is a guess, but it could be to kinda like a permanent thrust vector, to help pull up early into the burn, or maybe to better direct thrust through the center of mass because the wings/landing gear will lower the CoM somewhat.

So basically, the earth is not a perfect sphere, it's a bit squashed due to rotation, and bits of that spheres are more dense than others, meaning that the gravitational field is a bit lumpy. This means that spacecraft in orbit won't follow the orbit perfectly, it will change in subtle yet predictable ways over time. A while back, some clever people found out that at a certain near polar inclination and altitude (or rather a range, it doesn't have to be exact AFAIK), these orbital perturbations would cause the orbit to rotate around in a circle (like spinning a coin, that axis) exactly once per year. If a spacecraft is launched into this orbit, along the day-night terminator, it will always be in sunlight, hence the name, sun synchronous orbit. This is useful for a number of reasons. It allows for constant, predictable solar power, it covers all of earth except for maybe the very far north/south regions, and it allows for similar illumination/shadow conditions over all of earth, allowing for consistent imaging of the surface. As such, a lot of scientific earth observation satellites use this orbit.

I have no words!!!!!

Five minutes to go, again!

We are five minutes out!!!

When does it land?

Interlude III - A Brief History of Galactus The Cow The following is retelling of the first three and a half "Galactus The Cow" comic books I wrote several years ago, edited to be canon compliant. I liked the character enough that I brought him into Voyage, although the name is originally from an unrelated Minecraft Let's Play series.

Twitter thread with lots of information on recovery.

Update: They have fixed the thermal control system issue, but are now experiencing issues on three of the four propellant heaters on one of the RCS blocks. They need a minimum of two functioning while docked or else they violate a flight rule relating to redundancy. If they can't fix this, they might be coming home early.

One of the two thermal control loops on the capsule itself.

Spectacular launch! Having an overpressure issue of some sort but they are proceeding so it can't be too serious.

He's there to duel Soichi.

I don't know, but I do know that the NRO loves to be cryptic and or misleading with their mission patches. I don't have a source for this, but if I remember right, they used to be really clever, but then someone cracked the "code" on one of the patches and figured out what a spy satellite was for or something, so now most of what they put on the patches are red herrings trying to look like clever allusions.

Oof that doesn't look good.

I'm confused, should this go in the SpaceX thread because it was partially their concept, the boring thread because they planned to do that at one point, or the virgin galactic thread because this loop is a virgin project?

Tom Cruise: I'm gonna make a space movie, it's gonna be the best space movie ever! Russia: Hold my vodka!

Don't you love it when life gets in the way and motivation drops out and you drop a project for nearly a year? Yeah, me neither. Chapter 29 - Journey To The Centre Of The Galaxy, Part 2

Title says most of it. Currently when your engine is burning and you are in map mode, rotating the camera changes where the engine noises come from. Personally I find this annoying, especially with headphones while I'm not listening to anything else and all of the sound is coming out of one ear. Do you find this similarly annoying or is it just me?

Is there any known bug where none of the textures will show in flight, leading to a fully white rocket? I'm in 1.3.1 and experiencing this issue.

Propane chemical formula, C3H8. Do I get any amount of it? One molecule? Just the formula? If I have enough I can burn them all, but any other amount and it's pretty useless.

I have never seen a better visual representation of 2020.

Starlink beta is live! Details in the link!

Oh, so *that's* why the nose cones kept multiplying...

Appears to have been a preburner test. No detanking yet. May recycle for additional testing later in the window. It has also been noticed that the "triangle" venting usually starts really close to 12 minutes before the test. EDIT: Literally right as I posted I heard them say "Detanking now" lol

It's also probably going to cost ULA more to do the demo than SpaceX considering the projected costs of Starship and Vulcan.