Codraroll

I was watching the liftoff in awe, and re-entry quite slack-jawed. That footage of the hypersonic air stream and re-entry plasma in real time was gorgeous. Quite mind-boggling that they were able to broadcast the footage even as the spacecraft was tumbling through the atmosphere in a stream of plasma so bright that the Earth itself wasn't visible next to it. That struck me as well. Quite aside from the whole re-entry thing, what Starship just did was to bring more mass to orbit than SLS ever could, at a vastly lower cost than even the side boosters of SLS, and there's a mass production line of these already up and running. It wouldn't take much adaptation of the already proven concepts of Starship to far outperform everything SLS dreams of doing. Even when treated as an expendable two-stage rocket, with all the waste it implies, Starship still does more than SLS does, for less. I will definitely keep this excellently consise summation of Exoscientist's whole posting history for future use.

Doing a half-decent job of imitating a Beatles cover while they are at it.

Is this pathetic attempt at whataboutism in any way relevant to the topic at hand, which is the state of the Russian space agency?

Well, at this point it's them and the North Koreans. Syria, Eritrea, and Nicaragua presumably don't have the funds for a space program.

All right, time for a short one. Every high school student knows the measure of pH for the acidity of aqueous solutions. The H is always upper-case because it stands for "Hydrogen ion exponent". It's essentially a measure of how much free Hydrogen ions there are going around in the solution. Interestingly, whatever the p stands for has long been lost to history, or was never clear to begin with. The Danish chemist who introduced the term never gave any explanation why he chose the letter p in particular, why it was lower-case, or whether he meant it to stand for any word. It has even been suggested he picked the letter arbitrarily because he liked to use the letters "p" and "q" the same way mathematicians use "a" and "b". Modern chemistry has scrambled to ret-con the p into meaning something like "power" or "potentiality", or the like, but neither has gained any definite dominance. We've just accepted that there is a little p there, without fully understanding why. And now it's too ubiquitous to replace with something more sensible.

Wasn't the annual target usually around 50 before they stopped announcing them? But yeah, good luck finding extra money for manned spaceflight in the current budget situation. Not to mention the one in a couple of years. If there even is a budget by then, things will already have gone more favourably than many are expecting.

Your first challenge would be to get it anywhere. Even if it ran on pure annihilation, it would still weigh billions of tons. Although it probably wouldn't matter much where on the planet you set it off. By the way, why 3 yottatons in the first place? Why not 1 or 2 or 5 or a more round number?

Starship didn't explode in the PowerPoints either.

In a way, that is exactly what it's built for, after all. For some value of "truck", anyway.

Never mind dirigibles. A nano-porous material with closed pores that contain no gas is the holy grail for insulation scientists everywhere. Since most insulation materials are based on stationary gas in pores, the total thermal resistance of the material is limited to that of the gas. So-called vacuum insulation panels overcome that limit by encapsulating the material in a diffusion tight envelope and pumping the gas out. They are extremely effective in theory, but using them in practice is like covering a building in balloons - which they effectively are, only with the pressure on the outside instead of the inside. That means nothing can be cut or punctured, and you can simply forget on-site adjustments. But a material that could sustain its own vacuum ... that would be a revolution worth trillions. Take the length of all the exterior walls in a building, multiply by 20 cm or so. That's the cost savings in building area alone.

You get that in more densely populated countries too. And besides, not everyone will always want to live out in squirrel-land where you have to drive for ten minutes to get to a grocery store and an hour on the six-lane freeway to get to work.

Let's hope it's a game about being nice to each other. A game in the vein of Stardew Valley, perhaps, about moving to a new town and being nice to everybody else? I'd call it "Harvester Moon".

No, it is evidence that the new flight termination system works. The explosions had absolutely nothing to do with the engines, as has been pointed out repeatedly.

The Ariane rockets also face stiff competition from Falcon 9 and other US rockets, but Europe will still pay for its production, to maintain its own launch capacity. For the same reason, NYX will probably be funded despite competition from the US capsules. Earlier, there was a certain willingness to fall back on Soyuz for that task (as Russia was seen as a relatively European country), but that option is now off the table, making NYX more urgent than its cancelled predecessors.

Let's see ... late 2027, that's four years away. Any space-related promise relating to delivery more than two years in the future, has a roughly 50% chance of not happening at all. But for the remaining 50%, we can apply the rule for the next time window (delivery between six months and two years from now): add 50% to the time elapsed from the present day to the promised delivery. So overall, I'd say a 50% chance of delivery by late 2029. Still better odds than Oryol.

Yup, all of which have - individually, even - raked up the same number of flight hours as Orel.

Doesn't sound like "Standard industry practice" to me, if you find 1 (one) example of somebody doing it, and they are the first to do so.

I think the "System requirement review" is long before any hardware production. They have basically just finalized a list of specifications the design needs to meet, and now they are ready to start designing it. It will probably fly before the Orel, though.

No, you're making that conclusion first, and then trying to find whichever flimsy pieces of evidence or erroneous methodologies you can come up with to defend it. Those pieces of "evidence" have been unmasked as bogus, and the methodologies you try to apply are extremely lacking. This has been shown every single time, by people with way more patience than I have. It includes repeatedly comparing the Raptor to engines, components, or rockets that do not even exist. I suggest to take a step back and review what you're doing here. If neither the data, the background theory, nor the methodology hold any water, why should you try to defend the conclusion time and time again, usually from scratch after the last attempt was torn to pieces?

Click your profile pic in the top right. The menu for "ignored users" should be in the dropdown menu.

I see what you did there ...

The excuse for dumping boosters on houses like this was usually "the civilians are evacuated in advance". But if they are close enough to the crash site to film the stage impacting the ground, would that even count as evacuation? I mean, the booster might just as well have come down where the person with the camera was standing. One would think that the booster could potentially come down anywhere within an area several kilometers across, and it'd be just as likely to be on top of the evacuees' heads as on their houses. Fortunately, it seems they were at least aware it would be coming and had plenty of time to spot it as it fell - potentially enough to make like a tree and get out of there if it was headed for them.

To the great surprise of ... let's see ... no raised hands at all. The one good thing about Hyperloop is that it raised awareness of "gadgetbahns"; those spectacular infrastructure works that promise to revolutionise transport but end up inventing a poorer version of the bus/tram/train/taxi. In the case of Hyperloop, it was a system with the space requirements of a railway system, but the capacity of a bus ... while having to tolerate an environment comparable to a high-altitude air liner. That makes it heckishly expensive, and unable to capitalize on its speed, which would be its biggest advantage if built as intended. Not to mention the risks of some technical failure or other. All that came together to make the decisionmakers say "ain't no way we're paying to build that stuff", which would make it quite clear that the company was doomed to end like it did. But I guess the key people got to claim quite hefty consultancy fees to hang on at the company for a while, so it might have worked out just fine for all involved parties. I wonder what happened to that demonstration capsule they built out of an old aircraft, though.

Shiny on the outside, hollow on the inside. Great analogy.

Finding oneself in a Scooby Doo van in the middle of hostile RPG territory is the culmination of pretty poor life choices all around. Weighing the poor engine down with explosive blocks that limit the vision of the driver will not be the ticket out of there, to put it like that. EDIT: Or probably, it will. Just not in the direction of home. Well, not just in the direction of home.