RealKerbal3x

For Cape Canaveral launches, the boosters return to Port Canaveral and get offloaded there. It happens in full public view and there are actually a few webcams pointed at the site. Also, B4 cryo #2 seems to be underway:

CRS-24 launch success!

Successful Starlink launch and landing (the 11th for this booster). Now just waiting on payload deploy.

Surprised that this hasn't been posted here yet. https://www.nasa.gov/feature/nasa-conducts-environmental-assessment-practices-responsible-growth A new pad at Cape Canaveral, LC-49, is planned to support Starship launch and landing operations. This would give SpaceX two Starship pads at the Cape.

I've been hesitant to do anything with the robotic parts for a while now because of this bug, it's fantastic to see it fixed

B4 lift to the OLM is underway!

It's still 41 years until First Contact Day, we have time to figure it out.

The year has absolutely flown by.

The new methalox plumes are fantastic, thanks again for your work @Knight of St John!

Well, to be pendantic, SN8 flew on 9 December... so today is Raptor Abort Day.

It's been a while since I've done this sort of thing, so bear with me... Welcome to Ultra Hardcore, a KSP career save played with punishingly difficult settings and mods. No quicksaves, life support, part failures, a 2.5x system rescale, the works. I've wanted to try something like this for a long time. Don't take the flashy banner as an indication of any real story, this will mostly be your standard garden-variety mission report. Mod list: Settings: With that out of the way, time to get started! Part 1: Sine (I already have the screenshots for a couple more parts taken and ready to go, but I didn't want to put all of them in one post, because that would be huge. Expect those soon-ish, I guess)

I, for one, did not expect for them to start so soon!

Falcon 9 goes above 100km in a normal flight profile, not sure about Superheavy given that stage separation for that happens sooner. The velocities involved are way lower than an orbital re-entry, so only minimal heat shielding is required coming in engines-first.

Ship 20's flaps are fully deployed right now:

Looks like that email was at least somewhat true:

I'm not going to make myself unduly concerned about this until we hear more from multiple reliable sources. Besides, as the article states, Elon has a tendency to exaggerate to get workers to meet deadlines and targets. I don't expect this to be any different.

Dart separated from the second stage about an hour after liftoff.

Great render:

Eve is intended to be a challenging, end-game destination. It's possible to land there and return, but your flying and craft-building skills need to be at a reasonably high level to succeed. Making the atmosphere thinner and the gravity lower would defeat the purpose of that. This might be interesting, but I think you underestimate the conditions at the core of a gas giant like Jupiter. The pressures and temperatures are so great that they can form diamonds and make hydrogen act like molten metal. Under those conditions, no current or near-future craft could survive - the Galileo spacecraft sent an entry probe into Jupiter and it didn't make it nearly that far down before being crushed and/or melted. We're going to see multiple new star systems, each with interesting planets, but I think an entire galaxy composed of billions of stars might be a bit out of scope. Travelling at relativistic sub-light speeds, you would never be able to explore even a tiny fraction of a galaxy.

Or just make a quick module manager patch, then you can change the stats to whatever you want.

@OJT Welcome to the forums, and great first post! Looking forward to more

Raptor isn't being deprecated, Elon seems to be simply speculating on future developments. This new engine is probably a long way out. Given the way he's talking about it, I doubt this new engine has even started its early development yet.

Heat shield around Booster 4 Raptors looks mostly complete: