RealKerbal3x

Had to order myself one of these. Looking forward to it!

I mean, the engines are all there and seem to be in the same positions they were pre-testing. Worst case in this scenario would have been an engine literally exploded, and I would have expected to see more collateral damage in that case. Of course, the engines may have suffered internal damage, but if they're lucky, the flexible boots around the engines prevented that from seriously damaging other engines. I'm not saying this is good, only that it looks like it could have been a lot worse.

There's a lot of scorching (which I suppose should be expected), and I see a few broken/bent pipes, but the engines themselves look fine from this viewpoint. Still waiting for more info from Elon, but this is encouraging. Hopefully either this wasn't as violent of an event as it looked, or the booster and GSE are well-hardened to this sort of thing.

My understanding was that any test involving CH4 loading needs an overpressure notice, but something may have changed (either it's not needed anymore, or residents were discouraged from posting them online)

Didn't look that nominal, but I guess it was:

Static fire? Looked like it.

Thanks to the walls of High Bay 2 being decidedly opaque, we missed this completely on the live cameras:

The coverage seemed a little subdued today.

Live

The oval at the bottom is an access hatch, I'm not sure where the Starlink antenna(e) are on S24. I do know that B7 has a couple on the small HPU aerocovers near the base.

24 gets the Shuttle paint treatment:

@Gotmachine So, I hate to be the bearer of more bad news, but I found a bit of an issue with the new autostrut patch: If you add an autostrut action group to a craft in the VAB and then launch it, the action group assignment will vanish when the flight scene loads. The action group will work fine if you add it via the inflight action group editor, but it disappears when moving from the editor to flight. I don't know if this is related to the issue dok_377 reported above, but I thought I would let you know. I was able to reproduce the issue in a clean 1.12.3 install with only KSPCF, MM and Harmony installed, but if you need a KSP.log I can provide one.

QoL feature request: would it be possible to allow autostrut to be toggled via action groups/KAL controllers? If this isn't doable, ignore me, but I've been fiddling around with robotics recently and thought this would be useful.

Probably one of the coolest screenshots I've taken in a while.

Yes, they want it to leave the pad with ~1.5 TWR.

We already know it has all 33:

Not sure this would work, for stability during descent the main tanks are almost empty, leaving only propellant in the header tanks for landing. Once the ship is landed, it's stuck there until a refuel is possible.

I think the takeaway from this should be "if you fire a bullet at a rocket, you and/or the rocket will probably have a bad time".

Falcon 9 enters the atmosphere more or less vertically. It is able to use body lift and the grid fins to descend with an angle of attack, but left to its own devices it would descend like an arrow.

Liftoff! This is like an NROL mission, no cams or telemetry from stage 2. Touchdown! Those legs deploy scarily late.

Live

Touchdown!

Well, maybe, but he's also previously talked about how TWR is everything for a reusable launcher - especially a huge one like Starship. It seems to make sense why - if your TWR is lower, you're using more propellant to do the same amount of work accelerating up until stage separation, which cuts into landing reserves, so you have to carry more. And of course, the longer period of slower acceleration means that stage sep happens later, meaning you're further downrange and need even more propellant to boostback for landing. I haven't done the maths to figure out how much of an effect it would actually have, but I imagine they're working pretty hard to optimise the booster's mass. If they can figure out how to get more thrust from a single engine, that's (almost) 'free' from a mass perspective - as opposed to just adding more engines, which probably adds up pretty fast (the booster is pretty tail-heavy when empty, because the engines are some of the most massive single components). 'Slapping a few more engines on' might end up being more difficult than it sounds as well, because they've almost run out of space on the bottom of the booster as it is already. So to get the equivalent thrust of 33x 250t-thrust Raptors by adding more 230t-thrust engines, you'd probably end up having to rearrange the engine configuration, or possibly even flare the base of the booster a little. That opens the door to all kinds of extra structural and aerodynamic considerations which might be more trouble than they're worth. So for now at least, just increasing per-engine thrust is probably the way to go. It's worth noting that Merlin is one of the highest-performing modern rocket engines, while also being one of the most reliable. There are lessons there that can be (and probably already are) applied to Raptor development. Reliability improvements will go hand in hand with performance improvements as they continue to develop and test the engine.

If you have a technology that allows you to literally manipulate gravity at will, why do you need an Orion? Why do you need any kind of rocket at all? This is again running into the problem in which you try to optimise the Orion design and completely obviate it in the process.

EUS takes SLS from Block 1 to Block 1B. Block 2 may come later, it includes changes such as composite boosters and upgraded RS-25 engines. Regardless, EUS is already funded and the first articles are under construction. It's currently planned to fly first on Artemis IV. https://www.nasa.gov/exploration/systems/sls/fs/sls.html This has nothing to do with SLS block upgrades. NASA contracted SpaceX to develop a variant of Starship to land humans on the Moon as part of the Human Landing System (HLS) program. Artemis was never intended to land humans on the moon in a single launch; it's planned to be somewhat sustainable with landers eventually being reused. Why? The whole point of Starship is being cheap and rapidly reusable. If that is achieved, many launches is no problem. Again, not a problem. Artemis mission cadence is bottlenecked by SLS launches - currently it can only fly as much as once per year. At some point, they might be able to increase that to two, and even in the worse-case scenario where Starship still takes 6 months to complete refuelling at that time, it won't be causing a bottleneck. This is not the point of Artemis. It's not meant to be Apollo 2.0, because while SLS is still a hugely expensive expendable rocket, serious development is being put into landers that can make many trips between lunar orbit and the surface, as well as a lunar space station (admittedly, in a not-too-useful orbit). Even if that was the plan, I highly doubt that Orion's underpowered service module would have the available delta-V to brake a lander into lunar orbit and still return to Earth.