RealKerbal3x

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.

Two weeks isn't bad.

@Ariggeldiggel I'm no expert on this, but I do have an analogy that may help: Imagine space as a three-dimensional grid, with galaxies sitting in it. This grid is constantly expanding in every direction, but the galaxies aren't physically moving away from each other - they're simply sitting in space and being carried along for the ride as every point on the grid becomes further and further from every other point. Now, this doesn't prevent the galaxies from moving about in space normally, as we do see some galaxies such as Andromeda moving towards us due to gravity. However, it does provide an explanation for why everything in the Universe seems to be running away from us no matter where we look - objects aren't necessarily physically moving, they're just becoming further apart as space itself becomes physically bigger. The interesting upshot of this is that the fabric of space doesn't need to obey the 'cosmic speed limit' aka the speed of light, because it's not made from matter or energy. This is why the observable universe appears to be about 93 billion light years across, despite being only 13 billion years old. Hope this helped!

Highly doubt it's an actual component, the obvious resemblance to a turtle shell suggests to me that this buggy belongs to SpaceX's environmental team (given the abundance of turtles in the area).

Probably too busy flying the spacecraft, only Jeb could recover from multiple thruster failures and still successfully dock.

Best 0g indicator ever

Rocket Lab is a US company, despite currently only launching from New Zealand. I think it's set up that way so that they're eligible for US government launch contracts.

Not too bad of a delay it seems, thanks for keeping us updated guys! If anything, I'd interpret this as good news. 'Early 2023' and not just '2023' suggests to me that they're confident that it'll be ready for that relatively short release window.

At least in my understanding, 'fairing' is colloquially used in the context of spaceflight to mean the disposable aerodynamic cover that surrounds payloads, but the general definition means just any aerodynamic covering. So I think Starship's nosecone still counts as a fairing, though I think referring to it as a 'payload bay' would probably still make more sense.

The wording is interesting, though: Maybe I'm reading into this too much, but this seems to suggest that the PEA is largely complete, and a mitigated FONSI is the expected outcome. I don't think "mitigations" would be explicitly mentioned in this manner if the outcome was still unsure, or the FAA expected to grant SpaceX a regular (non-mitigated) FONSI or an EIS.

That's basically what the colony VABs/launchpads already are.

KSP is already a decade old, it turned 10 in June last year.

S20 is incompatible with Raptor 2, and changes to the stage separation design make it incompatible with B7+ boosters as well. There's a small chance that it could conduct a solo suborbital flight, but I wouldn't count on that. It's an old design now, SpaceX probably wants to move on.

BFR was essentially the placeholder name for the older proto-Starship designs. Officially it stood for Big Falcon Rocket, but it could also be interpreted as something a bit more rude

Note that we haven't seen an overpressure notice, which means that they can't use CH4. They should still be able to load LOX.

Unexpected, but not surprising

I believe at least one of them has had its deck cleared of unnecessary equipment, but they seem to be at a low priority right now.

Probably so B4 can begin static fires, if something goes wrong they don't want to take S20 out as well.

They probably painted them for rust protection, I don't think any conclusions about B4's fate can really be drawn from painting the bells.

Raptor is still very much an in-development engine. SpaceX didn't build the first Raptor 1, say 'yeah, this is fine' and produced 50 more identical to it. With every Raptor, they've been improving and optimising things, with the goal being to produce the most powerful, efficient, compact and mass-producible engine they can. That's why, up to now, they've needed that rat's nest of sensors, because almost everything about the engine is a moving target. I find it helpful to think of Raptor 2 as the 'production' version of Raptor. They're still tweaking things and making changes - as Elon said they're still working on increasing thrust - but the engine is enough to get Starship working, and they can focus on producing as many of these as they can, as fast as possible. They're going to need a lot.

Check yo stagin