Ultimate Steve

My personal opinion is that the idea of a lunar station itself is far from pointless, but Gateway's location is kinda pointless, mostly where it is because Orion never got a better service module post constellation. The orbit does offer some advantages above frozen polar llo, like constant sunlight and comms, but not really worth the delta v hit for the Landers imo if we are considering this from strictly an engineering standpoint. However, the idea of a lunar space station, no matter what orbit, has major benefits in areas outside of engineering. Once gateway or another station is up, canceling Artemis is less politically feasible, as we have permanent expensive infrastructure in place, and if current plans progress, international partners will also play roles in it's construction, adding more support and momentum to manned lunar operations. This should help Artemis be more than just flags and footprints. If an extra few hundred m/s to a detour orbit and disproportionately large landers is what it takes to make this more than just a few missions then a cancellation, then so be it in my opinion.

Why would it be a requirement to return to Earth and burn up? The moon is a perfectly suitable disposal area as far as I know. Physical contamination with debris may be a minor concern, but we have already crashed tons of stuff into the moon including lunar module ascent stages, Saturn V third stages, that one probe that measured ice or something, etc. And thats just the stuff we've crashed on purpose. Biological contamination isn't a concern as the moon is almost certainly dead, and if it is a concern, the damage has already been done with those bags of astronaut feces.

By the time 2024 rolls around there will be many vehicles to choose from. NGIS should have OmegA by then, and if OmegA doesn't pan out, Vulcan will almost surely be ready. As much cost advantage as SpaceX has, it would be unwise to rely on the Falcon family for all of these cargo launches, although the Falcon family is certainly up to the task.

There are two different providers that will be awarded contracts, I think, so they could still win the second slot.

Falcon Heavy TLI payload is something like 20 tons. Getting to gateway from there is ~500m/s if I recall correctly. RCS thrusters can be fairly efficient enough for this if done right. Draco thrusters (not SuperDraco) have like 300s isp in vacuum. It is my understanding that this will not return to Earth, for re-use or in general, so it doesn't need to do that.

Notebook Space Program - 1974 Actually a pretty boring year

Notebook Space Program - 1973 Fly me to the moon And let me play among the stars I don't have enough power to reach Jupiter And I just crashed into Mars Twice

Ya, particularly the Deimos contract. The docking one would have been nice too, but it won't be as impactful as Vesta and Lunar Flyby, which will hit after the Venus fail.

Notebook Space Program - 1972 SCREW YOU, VENUS!

Nope, idk how far off that is but it is waaay more than 5 years off.

Notebook Space Program - 1971 C R E S C E N D O

Notebook Space Program - 1970 Why is Venus so hard to orbit???

Holy cow, they are cranking these things out!

Pretty much every spacecraft is going to have issues on its first flight. If bet that the vast majority of the issues found were minor.

To orbit, probably unless someone does one before they do. Suborbital, no. Spaceship One did it, and depending on you definition of space, Spaceship Two did it. By the time this happens New Shepard will probably have done it.

Ever since I updated to the most recent version, if I try to switch to a piece of nearby debris using the [ and ] keys I get the message "No nearby controllable objects to switch focus to. Use Map View to select distant ones." This didn't use to be the case in previous versions of KSP. Is there a setting to turn this off? There are plenty of reasons someone would want to switch to a piece of debris quickly. Edit: Never mind, I found it. It's alt+[] to switch between the main vessel and debris.

Notebook Space Program - 1969 Starlight, Starbright, First Manned Orbiter I See Tonight...

I actually visited it a few days ago. It's still sitting there. There is work going on at the site, but not on Mk2 and not visibly on any other Starship. IIRC someone took a pic of what looked to be Octograbber 2.0 and they are moving some equipment to the Texas site.

Chapter 16

They were going to static fire it, and they did the test with cryogenics. I'd guess that this wasn't a test to failure.

Welp.

Speculation over at NSF and the wording of those tweets suggest that SN1 will not fly. It would explain why they decided to stick all of the equipment on the outside of the stage and why they left the header tanks out... If this is true... Ouch. That's twice now they have built a flight vehicle only to realize it's not good enough for flight. I wonder how many more they will have to build to actually get to the flight stage. On the plus side, I guess, they can make full tanks in ~2 months now. Might still be acceptably close to SN2s testing. AAAAAAAA I'm going to be an adult by the time something flies. Someone help, where did the time go? I'm not ready to be an adult yet. I'm not ready for the big wide world of taxes, politics, finances, insurance, bills, and five figure college debt!

Okay you made me panic for a minute, you meant mk1 and I thought that SN1 had blown up too!

Wait, so they are going to static fire it without the stuff attached? AWESOME!!!

Do you think they will try to stack it today?