Flavio hc16

I'm skeptical that New Glenn will be able to launch 60 tons to LEO any time soon ( <18 months), and that this lander can land a crew on the moon with today's standard of safety. You know why Spacex did develop falcon 9 and BO is developing NG the way they do instead of how spacex is testing Starship? Because the NEEDED/NEED to do so, they NEED an orbital rocket to have a businnes. Spacex is in the controlling seat right now, so they can test a rocket without payload. In the long term, Spacex method of launching starship will pay out.

I really hope it slides to tomorrow, I have to sleep.... ... Sigh in European.

As a European, I really hope it goes to the 7th

Shuttle C was always the Answer, and it would have been a good architecture: 2/3 launches of shuttle C + a crewed launch of just Orion Ares I stile ( but not with the Ares 1) and you had a 170/ 240 tons stack in LEO ready to do whatever you want, and you knew you could launch at least 4-6 per year and 2 launches in close proximity.

Ift 7 video

or...instead of putting the cart before the horse, we could just wait the launch date? considering that for launch 2-3-4 we got the Mishap investigation and launch license a couple hours prior to the launch? Also, the SEC had a single investigation of Tesla ( 420 tweet) back in 2018

This is an educated guestimate: They will do a deorbit burn that will target 20/30 km out east of the landing pad, so that if anything goes bad, the heavier debris will fall into the Gulf of Mexico America, then do a direction reversal either aerodynamically or propulsively so to target the landing pad, and IMHO we will see somewhat of an "lofted" trajectory, higher up in the middle phase, so that more debris will fall in the ocean in case of problems (look at my mad Paint skilz)

This is quite a remarkable article! There is also a good video of Eager Space ( and if you are new to the space world, I would strongly recommend you watch basically all his videos).

I think that the Boeing space division is really getting desperate

Boy the Gradatim is biting them back

https://arstechnica.com/space/2025/02/boeing-has-informed-its-employees-that-nasa-may-cancel-sls-contracts/ We might be at the end of the road of this 100B $ boondoggle.

https://jamestemplephotography.pixieset.com/spacexstarship7explosion2025-phonewallpaper/?fbclid=PAY2xjawH665dleHRuA2FlbQIxMQABpoWZuh2n_h0tNEFWyhEdbi7o3TNJ0g-4EC4dC4BN4ZriFbWTrq8IXjyOnw_aem_xWCgVWX0mUY61lM243q_hA If someone wants some amazing wallpapers/prints of the flight 7 breakup

The planes are taking revenge

If you don't do it already, follow Eager Space, he is a great creator and brings generally good points. He is the Perun of the space industry.

This is something that should get talked more IMHO. If the trajectory isn't over populated areas, let the ship remain intact and glide/bellyflop for as long as possible so that it has less energy and there is less chance it hits something, it would be also easier to avoid. Ofc if it is falling over risky areas, blow it up, it better to have a lot of debris than a Rods from Gods type situation with a 150/200 tons meteor.

This is bad, this might be a worse f-up than IFT-1 Another view:

(Alleged) photo of ship 31 (ift 6) during reentry https://www.reddit.com/r/SpaceXLounge/s/Sm87fqaQDP ( I have no idea why reddit is not embedding properly)

20 tons payload to polar orbit? That's a chonky spy weather satellite.

And we are actually coming up on the same finesse ration with starship... SpaceX rocket propulsion engineering is truly insane.

That would be lovely! Now we have to find a deep space probe that doesn't get shaken apart from the SRBs heartquake.

Yeap, and I know for a fact that someone must have screamed it.

the Footage on a 4k tv is insane, it looks like a film, especially the lauch

IMHO they will start to compromise on weight of the Starlink launches to get the 1st stage either RTLS or the drone ship closer to home. If a full launch of 23 Starlink need a 630km downrange landing, and an RTLS can carry 14 Starlink ( mass wise), maybe launch 20 starlinks and land the booster on a droneship 200 KMs downrange starts to make sense. Or they could buy more droneship, but knowing how Elon operates, I doubt it.

Gateway is useless even as a shelter, for 2 reason: 1) it gets to randevouz with the lunar polar orbit once every 2 weeks, so there is a high chance that if something happens, Earth might be closer (3 days) than gateway. 2) you are in an orbit that isn't shield half of the time by the moon so you only take half the radiation from the Sun in case of solar flare/storm.

I will do a copypasta from my reddit post: So, thinking from the rumor/news that Berger got us, about the cancellation of the SLS program. Not the block 2 (was never going to happen) or block 1b, even the block 1. This spurred the conversation about how to change the plans, and the fact that the rumor talked about SLS, and not Orion. IMHO Orion is here to stay for the foreseeable future ( 4-8 years), because making the architecture work with Dragon adds complexity and as of right now Orion is unique because is capable of direct-from-the-moon-reentry (allegedly). In 4-8 years we can probably let also Orion die And this the made everyone say " human rating a starship is a nightmare' IMHO... They are wrong. And this time, the fact that SLS was designed they way it was will help us: Just stack the whole ( already built) Icps-esm-Orion-LES combo on top of a disposable starship. And what will help us with the human rating? The fact that SLS was born with Solid rocket boosters and so to escape from that we have Orion with a stupidly overbuilt Launch Escape System This will mean that Spacex will make a starship stage disposable, that is basically SN5 with a 9 to 8.4 meters adapter, and then just stack the whole ICPS stack on top. You need to build an hidrogen facility, but pad 39A Had that, and making H2 from methane (CH4) isn't that hard. Ofc they will need to rework some plumbing on the tower, but IMHO people are making it way more problematic that it really is. We are talking SpaceX here, they move fast. IMHO they will have enough performance margin that they will be even able to reuse the booster. 275 tons booster with 100 tons of remaining props has enought DV to land (1000ms) Reusable Booster gives the stack around 3.1 km/s of DV The disposable starship (V2, 1500 tons of propellant), weighting in at 100 tons gives the whole ICPS/Orion stack (66tons) 8.7 km/s, this give you 11.5 km/s -+ 500 Ms/s for the naked starship to do a deep decor it burns This gives the whole ICPS/Orion stack 1500 m/s of DV more than SLS. SLS can be replaced quite easily, as rocket replacement goes. Edit: on a 2nd thought, expending also the superheavy would actually give enough margin to send Orion to TLI without even an ICPS Just two stages: expendable SuperHeavy + expendable Starship. Expendable SuperHeavy gives ~3.7 km/s of delta-v. 100t expendable Starship, 1500 propellant, 27t of Orion, Isp 370s, this gives 9.2 km/s of delta-v. Total delta-v is 12.9 km/s, enough to send Orion to the Moon. This way we don't need to worry about running out of ICPS, no need to worry about LH2 at LC-39A, everything is much much easier.