Clamp-o-Tron

To be fair, having a cardboard cutout of a Kerbal would be useful in many situations where I have to judge size. Could you PM me the source?

Abort at 1:24. The curse continues. Holding at 15:00, probably done for today. EDIT: confirmed scrub. Backup window tomorrow.

Starlink-17 (finally!): & mission control audio EDIT: Droneship landing for booster B1049, fairings will be fished out of the Atlantic by GO Searcher and GO Navigator.

Soyuz 2.1b/Fregat-M with Arktika-M No.1 observation sat launching from Baikonur into a highly elliptical polar orbit in a little less than 15 minutes. Propellant is loaded, pad cleared, and there are no indications that we won't get a launch today.

IIRC they’re only limited in shelf-life when combined, all of these segments are from the shuttle era. I would expect de-stacking to begin soon.

Never modeled an engine in my life, but I imagine The Ring became a convention to allow better-looking attachment of an engine to a bare tank (without a custom boattail), or to identify which footprint the engine “should” be used for. It just stuck around and has been used on places where it shouldn’t belong, like where the nozzle size is wider than the footprint of the ring. Eisenhower 1.0 is out by now if you somehow weren’t aware, but I think we’re all looking forward to more post-Soviet rockets!

True, non-atmospheric landing would probably be a lot easier provided they get those landing thrusters working. I don’t doubt they will if the unlikely possibility they are selected for the Artemis HLS bid comes true. We haven’t seen much development on Lunar Starship out in the open at least, and the lack of work on the mockup leads me to believe the project is on the backburner until they go orbital (which I would estimate to happen mid-2022, if the Raptors cooperate). It’s a BIG step, though, to go from orbital Starship to refueling with tankers for trans-Lunar trips. Orbital refueling has been used in the past, yes, but at limited scale like Progress spacecraft transferring some small amounts of storable hypergolic to Zarya for reboosting orbits, and something similar with MEV-1 and the geostationary sat it serviced. To do that with cryogenic liquid oxygen and liquid methane on scales similar to that of the Saturn V’s SII is no small undertaking, especially considering the tanks won’t be back-pressurized for ease of flow like I assume Progress and MEV have. (No source on the Progress and MEV tanks, it makes sense to me that way though) Not to mention keeping up a rapid launch cadence for refueling likely with shorter turnaround than F9 has yet to achieve, but using a vehicle with 34(?) engines that have so far been fickle, partially returning from orbital velocity, and using a thermal protection system which may not be as potentially dangerous or hard to replace as Shuttle’s, but still a potential cause of long delays. Because of these issues, I don’t find it likely that Lunar Starship will be ready by 2024, 2025, or even 2026 for a landing even if development is pushed hard, and the lack of an HLS contract would probably mean SpaceX has no reason to actually go the Moon, or it wouldn’t be worth the development money they would have to put up for themselves.

Unless, of course, you live literally anywhere else than good ol’ Merica. A Merican myself, I actually had to condition myself into using the metric system instead of Imperial so that I can work easily with work and etc. with Europeans and such. It’s been 4 years now, and I (like OrdinaryKerman) am a little confused every time someone gives a measurement in feet or pounds.

Oh-thanks! I had worried that somehow I had broken my installation with an outdated Kopernicus or something.

“Tantares Green” is #5b7d39. More colors here.

Somebody made a response. I’m not sure what to expect out of this, as most of the claims in the original were just common sense. EDIT: partway through the first installment of the original, they make decent economic arguments but nothing special. They really display their lack of knowledge about rockets and the aerospace niche, and as @mikegarrison said, costs probably are intentionally kept (somewhat) high, because there isn’t a ride to LEO for larger than smallsat scale that can compete with F9 on cost.

The folder misc_endcaps in GameData/Tantares/Parts has the assets for those things under texture_end_general_1.dds, if you want to change them.

I would suggest changing one of the FMRS settings- go into the stock difficulty settings and the FMRS tab, then change “Timer Stage Delay” up from 0.2 to close to the maximum, to allow time for those stages to clear the rest of the rocket.

I would use the aerodynamics of the atmosphere to your advantage. That's a Falcon 9 coming through the transonic regime for the landing burn. What you see is the massive angle of attack there- they use the entire rocket like a wing to adjust their landing site, instead of having to do continuous engine burns like you would on a vacuum world to trim your trajectory. Just angle your rocket away from the direction you want to go, and you'll move that way. To illustrate how this works, even on real life Mars with a fraction of Duna's atmospheric pressure, go watch this simulation of the Mars 2020 EDL earlier today. Notice how the capsule isn't pointed exactly retrograde or towards its target at Jezero Crater? Again, that's using aerodynamics. Scott Manley illustrated something similar here, again. Although both examples are capsules, it works just as well with thinner spacecraft as long as they aren't just atmosphere-penetrating pencils. Design is less important than you'd think. The stock landers work fine for atmospheric descent and control on Duna, but it would help a lot to add airbrakes. Wings in a lifting-body configuration would greatly assist your crossrange, as said above. The important part here is pinpointing your trajectory- this atmospheric control can only do so much. Just remember how you would target a landing on a vacuum body, then move that point where your trajectory intersects the ground a specific amount that can only really be obtained with fiddling. Since you know how to make a 10 km accurate landing, I would suggest going back to the conditions before your descent, quicksaving, then iterating the descent until you get it close enough to use aerodynamic control. Hope this helps!

I don’t think this will delay Crew-2 or any upcoming CRS missions, but does anyone have an idea if the landing anomaly will push back some launches as they investigate? They obviously don’t want to potentially throw away boosters if they can help it. USSF-44 (Falcon Heavy) has been delayed to July, probably unrelated. Also, it seems like Starlink will be 75% of SpaceX’s manifest through Q1 and Q2 this year.

The idea is that the dry masses of the tanks are decreased, but SMURFF doesn’t rescale tanks. My recommendation would be to choose one- either RSS-balanced parts or stock-balanced with SMURFF.

Watch at 26:49 (can’t embed at a timestamp b/c I’m on mobile ATM) for the call for entry burn shutdown, and visually the shutdown. Beginning immediately after that and lasting until the video and S1 telemetry cuts out 13 seconds later, there is a very large plume of sparks and something blue-ish originating from the bottom of the right side of the booster. Plasma I would suspect, which indicates either: The trajectory was too much for the booster to handle (extremely doubtful because the booster lands in the vicinity of OCISLY, and MECO seemed to occur on time) Entry burn somehow was not enough. I will have to go back and compare the Stage 1 telemetry with past Starlink launches, but because the callout was on time and the vehicle didn’t flip out due to asymmetric thrust I will assume the entry burn was mostly nominal. The booster came in at too high of an angle of attack. This is more convincing to me than the other possibilities, but it doesn’t account for how close the booster landing to OCISLY (we saw the light of either the Merlins or somehow an explosion in frame, and those lucky seagulls heard something and flapped about), especially when a large deviation at those altitudes and speeds would bring the booster farther away from the droneship than I imagine grid fins could bring it back from. Finally, my favorite explanation, that is a hardware problem with a Merlin. It needn’t be one of the landing burn engines, but if any of the engines somehow had an issue that would result in it breaking apart due to thermal and aerodynamic stresses, that would explain it. It explains to proximity to the ASDS, the apparently nominal ascent and entry burns, and the streak of plasma up the side of the booster that surely would cause a loss of signal. The only problem is why an engine would fail like that- B1059 has proven itself- would be an unpublicized engine swap, damage during refurbishment, or something during NROL-108. Anyway, just my two cents. Elon remains silent about the cause or any more details. We mourn the loss of B1059 and celebrate the survival of several seagulls.

Yeah, they did safe the FTS. IDK if they have the thrust, I think the dV would be pretty trivial

I don't think any up-to-date Realism Overhaul configurations for Tantares exist, but if you want to play with just stock-balanced parts in a scaled-up system, SMURFF will do just fine. Just don't use RO, and only stockalike parts, and you'll be fine.

Exciting. Do you think this will go on BN1, or is it just in Boca Chica for mounting checks/storage?

They ought to be consulting with those Russians and their Soyuz. Might help their launch cadence if they can launch in the rare Florida blizzard!

Unless you like the launch site selection menu (IMO worse than KK), use the mission builder, use the Gemini parts or the MEM, use the suit variants, or like the loading time, nope.

Gliese-581c isn't really like Eve. First, that picture is just an artist's interpretation, as we definitely can't build telescopes that can observe that much detail over 20 light-years. Second, G-581C is what is considered a "super-Earth". Measurements of orbital wobbles in that system can be used to determine approximately how much mass there is in that system, and where. Third, G-581C is likely tidally locked to its parent star, given its close proximity. This could make it look a bit like Puf from the KSP2 previews, but with the "eyeball" covering the entire side of the planet that faces the star. The feature wouldn't be an ocean, though, it would just be an area bereft of frozen volatiles that would make an ice cap on the shadowed side. Fourth, it definitely wouldn't be purple. There just isn't really a combination of anything that would realistically combine in planetary scale to make an atmosphere bright purple. Sorry to break your inflatable heatshield, but Gliese-581c isn't an Eve like planet, the artist just chose to render it that way.

IIRC, SS needs the sea-level Raptors firing for the first 1/3 or so of its flight to orbit, because the TWR on just Rvacs is too low for the trajectory SH would put it on. Your concept stands, though. Maybe some nuclear-ion or just straight NTR propulsion for more dV, so SS could just go to near-TLI, deploy the kickstage, divert to a Lunar encounter, then take a free return and aerobrake back to LEO, giving it more capacity then having to turn around.

Oh, wow! I completely missed this series and now can highly recommend it. Moon landing in the late 50’s and plans for Mars in 1961? That’s completely mental! If you noticed your sub count go up, that’s me. You might be able to simply copy the link to the image (not the viewer, it should have a .png or .jpg suffix) into the post editor. If not, export it (can’t imagine Steam wouldn’t let you do it) to an image hosting site like Imgur and upload the link as above. Oh, wow! I completely missed this series and now can highly recommend it. Moon landing in the late 50’s and plans for Mars in 1961? That’s completely mental! If you noticed your sub count go up, that’s me. You might be able to simply copy the link to the image (not the viewer, it should have a .png or .jpg suffix) into the post editor. If not, export it (can’t imagine Steam wouldn’t let you do it) to an image hosting site like Imgur and upload the link as above. —————————————— Uhhhh.... the above post is a mess. Ignore formatting, and repeating myself, I can’t edit it now.