Codraroll

Thanks. As @Lisias said, it has been an issue for months now, but recently it has gone from "bad at times" to "borderline unworkable". I encountered three whiteouts and spent ten minutes just on my way from opening the forum, seeing the "your message was quoted" notification, and opening this thread. Every step of the process has taken several minutes. And this is not the first nor only time the forums have been like that recently. Every other time I try to open them, some error message or whiteout pops up instead. The rest of the time, it works, but slowly and service is frequently lost. It's a sad sight.

Building onto the most recent post in this thread, which seems to be the closest thing I've found to a "Forum technical issues" thread (EDIT: I just found the Network subforum. Silly me): The servers don't quite seem to be operational. For the past couple of months, the forum has had whiteouts, 502 errors, Cloudflare errors, and downtime out the wazoo. It seems I cannot browse for five minutes without some major hiccup. The forums went down completely during the latest Starship test flight. Everything seems to be slow and prone to breaking down all the freaking time. Sure, it's usually back up and working within a few minutes, but after the last incident when the forums were out for weeks, it's hard to shake the feeling that they suddenly won't be back up anymore. What the heck is happening? Is the new server host massively lacking in capacity, or is it located somewhere with terrible bandwidth or frequent electrical brown-outs? Why is there service at all, but with such inconcistency? EDIT: Even as I pressed the button to submit this post, the forums threw a "bad gateway" error at me. What is going on?

No, he cannot. That premise is flawed from the start. With the amount of scientific discussions you've had over the years, it honestly surprises me to see such a basic misunderstanding of very elementary physics. But if you want to have astronauts maneuvering without RCS in a zero-G environment, create a massive magnetic field in that limited area you're working in, then do shenanigans with electromagnets. If will probably be a lot more hassle than spraying compressed gas around, though, and have side effects out the wazoo and back. Like requiring a silly amount of power to maintain the field, and having it casually frying any nearby electronics. Maybe it's cheaper just to feed the astronauts a lot of pea soup.

With authenticated and equally valid copies in English, German, Italian, Spanish, Polish, Dutch, Greek, Swedish and a tiny handful of dozens of other languages, of course.

Some jokester might have thought it hilarious to sneak some durians into the launch manifest.

"Quick! Shove it out the door before the program is cancelled!"

Doesn't this mean that the FAA is like 1% of SpaceX's regulatory worries for this flight? Flying a rocket stage the size and weight of a locomotive at double-digit mach numbers across all the country sounds like the kind of activity the Mexican government would want to examine very closely before approving.

Fate, not legacy. Both will presumably stop flying because of a lack of customers and/or meaningful destinations to go, after the ISS is decomissioned.

This close to what, is the big question. The only thing they were close to, was the start of a program reliant on a rocket that could fly every other year to the cost of several billion dollars. SLS was not about to do anything useful, or achieve anything. The program had to invent useless tasks only SLS could complete, because there were better and cheaper ways to achieve all other tasks that could also be done by other rockets. And the useful tasks no other rockets could do, SLS couldn't do either. Let's face it, SLS was only ever good at costing money and being a rocket too powerful to use in low Earth orbit, yet too weak to go beyond Earth orbit. The longer it was kept on the table, the more money it would waste without being useful.

It could potentially get a lifeline if several or all of the planned space stations end up being built, which might create demand for more crew capsules than SpaceX can operate alone. But if ISS is the only destination it can serve, and the flights left to fly there are finite in number and already contracted, then there isn't much financial sense left in certifying it. But hey, at least it will probably get to share its fate with Soyuz, for much the same reasons, just getting there a few years earlier.

With the ruble worth as little as it is, I don't think it will make any sense to further subdivide it into smaller units. What do you get for a hundreth of a cent these days?

On the other hand, the fine is specified in Rubles, so give it a couple of years, and it will be something like $15.

Looking at the reaction videos, this was a very big day for expletives. Lots of excrements and acts of intercourse were being canonized. Many people called upon their deity of choice, or stated that the deity was doing a bit of stuff in bed. Sometimes repeatedly. I think many of the attending kids learned exciting new phrases today.

I'm not sure if I'd break out the Apollo 11 comparisons, but it might still be up there with some of the earlier Apollo launches. It was a tech demonstrating mission, which certainly demonstrated some awesome tech. But we're still not quite at the point where the tech is *used* for a purpose other than to make sure it's working. We're seeing a big space freighter on a test run, demonstrating it can indeed get out to sea and return to dock, but it's still running with an empty hold. Hopefully, the next mission will see it delivering something to orbit. And maybe putting Starship somewhere it can be recovered too? Or at the very least, dismantled and inspected?

RSD in this case. The ship isn't built to survive a water landing (why would it be?), so of course it was wrecked upon landing. And they needed to sink the thing too, because they had no intention or way to recover it, and it's illegal to create floating obstacles to shipping (even in the middle of nowhere). So I guess the contact between the hot engines/skirt and the cold seawater caused the first explosion, and that the FTS was activated afterwards to blow the tanks open. The fact they had a buoy right outside the blast radius suggests it landed exactly on target too.

SpaceX: "So, here's our proposal for a reusable spacecraft: We send the rocket up the ordinary way, decouple the first stage right before it runs out of fuel, use some of the remaining fuel to boost the empty stage back towards the launch site, put some aerobraking equipment on it, use the last bit of fuel to cancel its velocity right above the launch mount, and catch it in mid-air using a pair of giant robot arms attached to the launch tower." Industry: "Oh come on, that's ridiculous." *The plan works* SpaceX: "Umm, yes, you are right. It is ridiculous. Look at this footage, it's absolutely bonkers. Unmentionables-to-the-wall crazy. It evidently works, though!"

It must have been so hard for the hosts not to swear during this. What a sight. What a magnificent sight. Oh, and Starship is in orbit. That happened too. Anybody know where it's heading? Hawaii again, I presume?

This is just the perfect time for the forum to start throwing Bad Gateway errors. Trying to add to the post now that I've seen it go through, though: That was spectacular to watch. I thought the whole base would be done for when the side of the rocket caught fire, but then it was caught and the absolutely insane idea seems to have worked like it should. Madness, true madness.

You don't get low gravity in a Gravitron on Earth, though. You get the regular 1G gravity downwards, plus the centrifugal component of rotation, for a total >1G, no matter what you do. If you want to test partial gravity in a centrifuge, it must be stationed in space or on the Moon.

Betteridge's Law of Headlines strikes again. If they were, there'd be better sources than a clickbait video on YouTube.

f'dubar, if we're being technical.

Rather, the choice they made was the one that gave them the least backlash regardless of the outcome of Starliner's descent. Even though there are risks associated with leaving the astronauts up there for six more months, those risks can be viewed, at least by the public, as unrelated to that of the Starliner question. Even if they had to evacuate the station before Crew-9 gets there with the extra lifeboat capacity, I doubt NASA would face a lot of public outrage over the choice of sending away Starliner. That would be an "unforeseeable accident" (even if NASA had long ago mapped out the risks of it happening) and simply bad luck that it occurred during the same three-week window that Butch and Suni had no return ride available. If any of the station modules were in the middle of severe or accelerating failure, it might have been different. But as it stands, I think most people consider it an acceptable risk to undock Starliner long before Crew-9 comes along. Or in other words, the capsule had been delayed in its departure for so long that risking the ride would seem more reckless than another six months facing the "background risk" of space travel. Of course, this is how I view it as a layman, and my interpretation of how the media would spin it. An investigating report after a catastrophic or risky evac mission from the ISS might be a lot more damning to the careers of those involved in the decision.

That's roughly the same as (well, within 10% of) the cost of a 1550 -foot residential skyscraper in Manhattan, including the cost of land and air rights in one of the fanciest streets in the city (and by extension, in the world). If Artemis comes out at $12.5 billion per launch, it means each launch would be roughly as expensive as building such a tower, giving away all its apartments for free, buying them back at market price, then dismantling the tower again, twice.

So by next year, they would be doing as many orbital launches in a week as Russia does in a year. Hopefully more.

My best guess: it's a problem that needs to take into account a lot of factors for accurate calculations, and many of those factors can be hard to obtain good data about in operation. That means the calculation has to rely on assumptions piled on assumptions until you can't really create a reliable answer. So the whole complicated problem, including the maintenance frequency, is simplified to a single factor and counted as a constant inefficiency. The average of a sort of "sawtooth curve" as the heat exchanger is fouled over time and cleaned occasionally. The factor you end up with could be based on some old research projects or a collection of industry data. Such things are done all the time in standardization, and it can be quite a rabbit hole to dig up the original source of a number.