Ultimate Steve

I think you're confusing Polaris 2 with Fram2. Fram2 is gonna be first polar orbit. We don't know much about Polaris 2. Rumor has it that it was gonna be the hubble servicing mission but that's in limbo. Polaris 3 is going to be the first crewed launch of starship.

A dedicated dragon mission just to return the Starliner isn't really feasible. Endeavor is currently in space for crew 8. Resilience is prepared for Polaris Dawn and has all of the EVA modifications and currently has the cupola in place of a docking port. It would be possible to modify it back and do a specialty mission but Jared and crew would probably have to wait the better part of a year to fly. Freedom is going to fly Crew 9. Using this for a rescue flight would mean Crew 9 gets pushed back a few months, and either Crew 8 stays up there for a year (Dragon may not be rated for that) or the ISS crew goes down to 3 and relies entirely on Soyuz until Crew 9. Endurance is slated for Fram2. It has only been back since March and isn't scheduled to go up until an ambiguous "Q4" date. It probably isn't ready and will probably also use the cupola. This would also make the customers somewhat unhappy. C213 is set to fly in Februart for crew 10 and will not be ready in time. Sure, they could possibly get Resilience or Endurance ready for a rescue if needed, but why bother with a very expensive mission that involves delaying someone else and having to add yet another spacecraft to the ISS parking schedule when the problem can be solved by keeping 2 people in space for 8 months and bumping 2 astronauts to a later flight? Seems like the solution of least resistance as it is minimal ground work for minimal cost and only seriously inconveniences four people. Like basically SpaceX can indeed throw around a Falcon with a few days notice. I don't believe they can, or plan to be able to do the same with Crew Dragon. They aren't rapidly reusable and I believe require significant refurbishment. There are only four (soon to be five) of them and at any given time one of them is probably in space, and the rest of them are spoken for to various degrees.

Starliner crew will return on Dragon.

Raptor uses about 3.6 kg of oxygen per kg of methane. I think they subcool both of them for increased density but I'm going to ignore that because that's more math than I'm willing to do right now. Liquid oxygen has a density of 1141 kg per cubic meter and liquid methane has a density of 424 kg per cubic meter. 1000 kg of methane would take up about 2.358 cubic meters, and 3600 kg of oxygen would take up about 3.155 cubic meters. Thus we can infer that for every volume of methane added, 1.34 volumes of oxygen should be added. There's stuff I haven't accounted for that will shift that number around. But spacex is in a position where it can only easily add volumes in discrete rings. The ratio is pretty close to 3 rings of methane for 4 rings of oxygen. The thought of taking the analysis any further than this hurts my brain. There isn't an immediately obvious reason why they would add 2 methane rings and 1 oxygen ring. Maybe the new downcomer is more space efficient, maybe the header tanks are getting moved, maybe the old design was suboptimal, maybe the new domes have significantly less volume. I don't know. Or maybe NSF got the rings wrong.

Yeah this wouldn't have as many advantages for the initial landings. But to be clear I'm not suggesting a completely different vehicle. I'm suggesting a Starship with a different interior configuration. That's still not nothing, it would need different life support and such. But it should be on the easier end of problems you'd have to solve for Mars.

Yes. Need about 2.5x as much prop starting in LEO to go LEO -> mars transfer -> mars aero brake and circularizarion into LMO -> earth transfer -> earth landing burn than it takes to go LEO ->mars flyby -> mars landing burn. I'm having a little trouble parsing the second half of your comment. Are you talking about the transfer ship on the return to Earth phase aerocapturing and circularizing into LEO instead of going straight to a direct entry and landing burn as I had proposed? Assuming it is either then refueled to land or refueled to go to Mars again (in my comment I speculated that a refit may need to happen on the ground) this might actually require slightly less refueling burden as the post aerocapture circularization might be less Delta V than the Earth landing burn. If this is in addition to the landing burn, it would increase the burden by a little, but we are getting somewhat close to exceeding the fuel capacity of at least the V2 ship (V3 is a thing but it looks so goofy I think my brain blocked me from using it haha) and that's with the fairly optimistic delta v numbers I used.

A discussion elsewhere gave me an idea. Well most of it wasn't my idea. But part of it is. This pertains to Martian Colonization, which is a ways away at best. Though it could work for a large non-colonial base too. This whole idea stems from the idea that Mars ISRU is the bottleneck on mission size, which is a fairly common sentiment. It follows that you want to minimize your total ISRU requirements. If they actually can pump cargo ships out like Liberty ships, the fuel cost to send them home will be so high (my highly optimistic numbers say 422 tons) that it would be better to just keep them on Mars. Thus, this analysis will only focus on crew ships. Taking your entire roomy space station to land on Mars is good for the first few missions as you'll need a ton of life support and such, but once you have a base set up, it is a waste to bring all of that down to Mars and back up. Thus, the idea: Send a number of "transfer" ships to Mars. They aerocapture into a low orbit. The transfer ships rendezvous with and transfer their crew to a "shuttle" ship which is waiting in Mars orbit. This "Shuttle" is laid out like an airliner, lots of seats, designed for short term habitation. The shuttle lands on Mars. The crew exit for the base. The shuttle is refueled, and then at the next transfer window, launches the crew (those that wish to return at least) to the transfer ships. It then waits for the next round of incoming transfer ships as the transfer ships all return to Earth, where it will be reused. This means that all of the fuel for transfer ship Earth return has to come from LEO refueling, and requires significantly more LEO refueling. As an aside, the assumption is that all of the transfer ships return to Earth, either because all of the crew are, or because the expensive crew rated ship is to be reused. I made a spreadsheet to compare various approaches with a lot of tweakable values: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1HUDZwD90kcUYPOvI87MgN6ZaRnhkfMiZGpwheewFxDA/edit?usp=sharing All of the mass values are suspect, but this is less about the raw numbers and more about the ratios between approaches so it shouldn't be too terribly bad. In short, if you can fit 8x as many people into a shuttle ship than you can fit into a transfer ship, you can reduce the ISRU burden by a factor of 18 at the cost of increasing LEO refueling burden by a factor of ~2.3-2.5 for the numbers I chose, compared to the baseline "ship lands on Mars, is refueled on Mars, and returns to Earth" approach. This would however require zero boiloff tech on the main tank, the capability for ships to loiter in LMO without maintenance, the development of an additional Starship variant, and probably a few other things I'm forgetting, so it isn't free. But I think that's an amazing tradeoff! Scaling up LEO refueling by 2.5x and doing all these things seems a lot easier to me than scaling up Mars ISRU by 18x! Depending on a few factors it might be advantageous to also do this the other way around, aerocapturing the transfer ships into Earth orbit and using an Earth shuttle ship to send the crew up to reduce the need for launches. However I don't think this will be done as you will probably need an overhaul (and cargo loading) of each transfer ship between missions that is almost certainly easier to do on Earth. Also, leaving that loitering in Earth orbit for 2 years between missions cannot be good for the heat shield from a debris perspective if you're staying high enough to avoid orbital decay. And it isn't even that big of an advantage because the reduction in launches would be low, as for every launch you save you still have to do several refueling flights either way. Also, related: Another reality check of how much easier it is to send a Starship to Mars than it is to send one to the Moon. Many analyses go as far as refueling in stages using an elliptical orbit for a zero payload Lunar Starship to close because the tank simply isn't big enough depending on which numbers you take to be true. For Mars? Take your dry mass (plus payload) and multiply it by 2.5 or so. That's more or less how much you need for a (one way) trip to mars.

Here's my take. The short version: Starship will eventually have to compete with other fully reusable launchers. I would not count on that happening for a long time. By that time, SpaceX will have had ample opportunity to compete with them if they so desire. Off the top of my head, we have Terran R, Nova (Stoke's rocket), and the reusable New Glenn upper stage. Terran R proved to be hard enough or expensive enough that they dropped upper stage reusability. Nova is stated to reach orbit in 2025 (Stoke estimate) or 2026 (external estimate). I am very excited for Nova but I am skeptical of these timelines. They only entered the Starhopper phase 10 months ago and they only fired their first stage engine successfully two months ago. While IIRC there's a lot of ex-SpaceX talent there, getting from Starhopper to flight more than twice as quickly as SpaceX did is going to be a tall order. Granted, they did go from nothing to an FFSC engine in 18 months. So maybe I'm wrong here. I'm very excited to see how it all plays out. And I think they are targeting a 5 ton payload. Hopefully they can avoid the sort of mass growth that has plagued Starship, because it wouldn't take much to reduce Nova's payload to basically nothing, from an external view at least. I'm not familiar with Stoke's funding situation but I don't think they have the same deep pockets behind New Glenn and Starship, and I don't think t Blue Origin, we know nothing about the reusable upper stage since like 2021 or so. I haven't watched the EDA interview yet, I know that he said it was still being worked on and that they were going to let economics duke it out. If there was anything more important I probably would have heard it by now. With pockets that deep I'm sure they can pull it off. But they aren't exactly known for their speed. Ground handling costs were mentioned. This is something that a fully operational Starship will dominate at, if they manage to make it work, and it won't even be close. While there are two other fully reusable vehicles in the works, Starship seems to be the only one taking rapid reusability seriously. I don't think New Glenn RTLS is a big priority. The plans I have are old plans but the old plans were downrange only. That's naval assets, ship travel times, getting it on the launch pad, and reintegration with the upper stage, whatever that ends up looking like. I expect NG to be on par with Falcon 9 for reusability timelines. Stoke is RTLS so they have it better. Haven't seen much of their launch pad plans yet. They will need a crane of some sort. Starship wants to land both parts in the crane that stacks them. We've known that for years and it still seems crazy. Granted I have not heard their plans for payload integration, and I think with the KSC pad they might have a separate catch tower or something, it has been a while since I've seen that. So maybe the plans have been scaled back. Then there's the economies of scale. Blue is going to finance its own megaconstellation so there's going to be some scale to work with there. SpaceX is financing its own megaconstellation so there's already scale to work with. Stoke is not doing that and has no internal payloads to boost flight rate up. By the time either competitor flies fully reusable, Starship will likely have ramped to an extent. And then, would SpaceX feel the need to compete in the 5 ton payload class? I don't know. But maybe 5+ tons, moon, Mars(?), crew, station modules, and Starlink are enough for them to not bother with a mini Starship, like how they aren't bothering with a smallsat launcher right now, besides the transporter missions. There's a chance that the commercial satellite launch market just won't be a big percentage of what SpaceX plans to do. That's somewhat hinted at by the fact that we still have not seen any hint of a proper payload bay door system for Starship, beyond the Starlink Pez dispenser. No clue how much payload the New Glenn upper stage is gonna get considering that an expendable upper, ASDS booster is expected to get 45 tons. Might put the payload somewhere around Falcon. That is something to watch out for when it happens. But with ASDS there's still room for it to cost more than Starship, though any predictions on the cost of either vehicle are basically useless right now, I'll admit. I won't be surprised if in 5-10 years, Glenn-R or Nova becomes competitive enough to take some customers from Starship. I will be surprised if SpaceX hasn't reacted by then.

They are still posting jobs. Half tempted to apply just out of curiosity if they weren't all higher level positions, despite the below the charts job security. So unless they left a job bot running on some server, they are still doing some amount of stuff. https://astra.com/careers/#open-roles

You may have seen some headlines today about SpaceX violating environmental regulations recently, mercury values in their deluge runoff were way too high. After further analysis a bunch of other people have determined that what most likely happened was that a value of 0.113 micrograms of mercury per liter was accidentally recorded as 113 micrograms of mercury per liter and is almost certainly not a valid measurement, given that the other measurements are all fine and are very close to 0.113 (EPA limit on drinking water is 2, and this is not drinking water). I believe this value has even been corrected in some versions of the document. EDIT: Corrected Lead to Mercury, wow, I'm tired. Maybe don't trust my analysis and look it up yourself if I can't even be trusted to remember the correct contaminant haha.

EDIT: Accidentally hit post again

Shots fired! Something about Raptor 3 just makes it look so unreal... I can't quite put my finger on it.

Chapter 61 - The Sirens Of Moho

It is probably some obscure thing nobody here could think of. Most software is full of stupid things that make changing the plan difficult... Though I would have expected the capsule to be able to undock itself. There's a few situations where you might want that anyway.

It will be deployed from the ISS, I believe from the Nanoracks airlock. If Cygnus doesn't reach the ISS, it is game over. Granted it looks like they probably have the issue sorted. It is looking like maybe a 1 day delay or so at this point? But that depends on what trajectory they replace the current one with. The ground station is not yet set up though (the guy in charge dragged his feet ordering a new antenna rotator for well over a year) and the last semester the team was downsized down to the two seniors who knew what they were doing the most, and now that we've both graduated, this means that the team of newbies, who won't even be meeting for the first time until a month from now at the earliest have to figure out antenna pointing and moving the ground station software to the server on the roof, as well as a few other things. Given how effective I was as a newbie, this is a big ask. I would have much preferred to retain at least one non senior so that there could be some team continuity, but that decision was above me. The CubeSats typically get deployed 1-3 months after launch, I have no idea where we are on that spectrum and I have no idea if we have any say in when that is, I was pretty well insulated from the administrative side of things. Basically, that's a lot of words to say "We will take any delay we can get". The biggest tragedy would be for it to work flawlessly but we would never know because the ground station didn't get put together.

Couldn't find the cygnus thread so I guess it's going here. Hopefully it is something that can be fixed with a settings change or quick software update.

And, mission is orbital!

Stop it, you're this close to having me doing a deep dive on that paper and posting a half novel long post here about it and get no sleep tonight haha. Back to the raptor 3. 35 tons less engine on super heavy is monumental. And that's in addition to everything else. That's a very large percentage improvement in dry mass from the engines alone. Even if Super Heavy somehow massed 350 tons that is a 10 percent mass decrease, again, from engines alone.

Goodness, going from 33 R2s to 35 R3s will save nearly 35 tons on the booster. I really wish they would come out and say if their numbers are sea level isp and thrust or vacuum isp and thrust. Should be possible to double check with some effort, in another community the consensus is that those numbers are vacuum isp and sea level thrust. 95 tons of engine hardware alone on current super heavy boosters. That is a lot of mass. Tucked away in a corner of the SDR's SD card, there is a picture of a KSP craft which I believe has a goo canister.

The satellite is equipped with a software defined radiometer. At the risk of overexplaining, software defined radio technology replaces what would be physical components with code. It samples the incoming radio signal a bajillion times per second, and computers are so good these days that stuff like filters, modulators, demodulators, attenuators, and a bunch of other stuff, can be emulated via software. You don't need to go out and buy (and have space for) those components, you just drag them into the flowchart. You can also do this at the same time as stuff which would typically already be done in code, in the same interface. Doing math on the data, bit stuffing, printing it to a live spectrum plot, etc. This is traditionally used for amateur radio (and indeed our ground station setup does use software defined radio for some of it) but our mission wants to see if this same technology can be used to make a low cost radiometer. How exactly it works is beyond me, the instrument is the product of the thesis of the professor running the satellite team. While I didn't have to make it, I did have to fix it and modify it and get it to talk nicely with the satellite's main computer, and calibrate it, and figure out how to power the 9 Watt instrument from a power supply that was not designed to power something that power hungry and... If all goes well we should be able to point it at Earth and see how much moisture is in the soil in any given (large) area. The satellite is capable of taking a 10 minute measurement at 1 sample per second every 2 ground station passes, assuming the battery is filled up in that time, although we will start slower. I'm not sure how precise the data will be. I will be ecstatic if we get back data at all, moreso if we can tell apart an ocean from a desert. I'll be ecstatic if the thing even beeps at us. I forget the exact statistic, but half of all university cubesats either don't succeed or don't even get to the point where they can beep (which puts full successes much lower). And I think that number includes graduate teams, our team has been entirely undergraduate except for the professor writing the program for the experiment and doing a lot of administrative stuff. Given the seemingly endless troubles we've had, the issues that were cropping up until the last minute, and many other things, I'm not expecting much. My personal victory threshold is a single occurrence of 2 way communication.

2 years or so for me (4 semesters), project has been around for far, far longer than that. I'm not sure, but I want to say the current iteration of the plan was started somewhere around 2015 or 2016 with a targeted launch date of 2018, which, uh... Well, we got there eventually. Knock on wood. And that's just the modern incarnation of the project, I think there was an earlier 1U design that was worked on for several years before not being selected (NASA didn't want to pay to send something up without a science payload). And the team goes back even further than that, apparently they did experiments in a Zero G plane at one point back in the late 90's or early 2000's. It has been a LONG road indeed. And yeah, sorrows, struggles, and joys is an apt way to describe it. I could almost write a book about it.

I spent four semesters and a summer working on this little guy: And he's going up on the NG-21 mission tomorrow morning!

Firstly, thank you for all of your preservation efforts! This isn't strictly preservation related, but you're probably a lot more well versed in the legalese than I am, but when you say "images and styles", does that refer to like the background and banners of the forum, or pictures in posts? And you're saying, for sure, anything posted here belongs to the poster? I was under the impression that T2 legally owned any content posted here for some reason (probably the panic back when the old EULA change took effect), if this is not in fact the case, and I actually own all the stories and images that were used in the stories that I've made, this is a really big weight off my shoulders.

I have no idea how feasible this would be, but I hope someone figures it out. Magboots were one of my favorite parts of KSP 2.

If you ever do find a reasonable and above board way to acquire 0.17, let me know! 0.17 has been a fascination of mine for a while now and I would love to get my hands on it.