Minmus Taster

Distant lunar orbit for a few weeks before return to orbit to test lunar reentry

Update on the lander; it's still dead and the team has tried looking for it's signal in other parts of the sky. If I had to guess the sat will be inactive for so long at this point it will be fried by the sun without cooling Worse still, they're about to miss the moon

I mean it sort of makes sense; you can't launch an ascent rocket so powerful directly on top of it's landing stage, it's not an issue with Moon sample return because there are weaker thrusters involved but Mars requires a full-on rocket to ascend. It's not unheard of technology either, submarines shoot their missiles up with compressed air:

Felt like this should be it's own thread (Tianwen 3 still sort of fits into the existing threads) The part where they throw it in the air makes my heart skip a beat thinking about it.

*Violent Ares 1 flashback*

Everything was going so perfectly...

Did someone say they were actually gone? My sources say that there is still some life from at least OMOTENASHI. CAPSTONE recovered twice so there is still a chance that they could be saved (it's optimistic but we just watched SLS launch so anything is possible at this point).

Wow I really like how Debdeb is turning out

Can't wait for when people can see this again

Which one was the second?

Wow! NASA loves this mod so much it made it's own version of block 1!

Holy crap, they actually did it.

Time to vent some anger on this darn rocket

I really hope it doesn't explode with them on it, watching SLS fail is only fun when people aren't getting hurt (physically at least).

"eventually"

Just let it fall apart, I'm truly tired of this rocket.

And here comes the marketing in question

Words cannot describe how happy I am

They could probably find to refurbish the boosters like in the shuttle but would lead to the usual NASA delay's, core booster is hopeless as it's just not designed for reuse, same goes for upper stage and literally everything but the Orion capsule which I think can go more than once. This had better work, say what you will about the rocket but if this fails the entire US moon program is ruined overnight. It's time lads'

Nate said that some were not in Debdeb in the forum discussion for episode 4. I doubt Lapat is gonna be in Debdeb, we haven't seen much of it but Nate also said that Lapat was the focus of the video's last shot; So Lapat is probably quite dry (like a dying Kerbin maybe?) but still has plant life on it as we've seen in some other footage, so I doubt it would be in Debdeb since it takes much longer for an ecosystem to develop then a few-hundred million years in a violent star system. Also a planet that serves as a second Kerbin would be pretty big news and might fit better in the second star system to be released later.

Weather or not it launches it's gonna be a loooong night

I honestly think it will just rust away on the pad

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If you take the the name of the Webcomic XKCD and then add up the numbers you get from the placement of each letter in the alphabet you get 42