Minmus Taster

If it was on it's side as planned than this wouldn't have happened. It seems it landed and is transmitting data but is in some sort of abnormal position.

Given its odd orientation on the map maybe it could have hit a Boulder? ITS ALIVE! Someone just spoke something on the broadcast in Japanese, does anyone know what he said? LEV-1 also seems to be operating

With Peregrine just having been destroyed that's possibly two landers gone in a day. Rough times for lunar exploration.

Possible tumble? This doesn't look great Is it still sending telemetry? It doesn't seem to have suffered a tank rupture. Unless the screen froze when it made contact. Program ending, they're waiting for the press conference. This doesn't bode well for the probe.

Getting a little low on fuel.. Final descent has begun 500 meters, hovering 50 meters, hovering Attempting touchdown. CONTACT Telemetry indicates landing

Why do they always need to draw them as cute cartoons. It makes me feel worse when something goes wrong

I had no idea this thing existed until now. Looks like an overbuilt satellite launcher in kerbal.

Silly question but I didn't follow the launch very closely; by 'translunar' do they mean an immediate transfer or the gradual approach that takes months?

*SLS Cubesat flashbacks*

Booster just fired, did the deluge function correctly? Ok, it was just a camera delay.

I've always thought of Minmus as a sort of melting dwarf planet that was captured early on around kerbin. It's possible that there are some remnants here and there even though most of the moon has been turned to glass.

They are called Blue Origin after all

Looking forward to (hopefully) being able to play this game consistently with all the performance improvements! Only a couple hours now, all systems are go for liftoff!

He would get further by spitting on the bills

Rockets are hard and always will be, but money is harder. 24 or even 16 Starship flights for a single lunar mission is never going to be economic unless starship can launch and land at full throttle and be reused in a matter of days without any repairs. And since starship needs to be economical in order to operate in the scale it needs to I just don't think the vehicle has the capability to preform all of this. And that's before even touching on what happens when there's inevitably a failure of some kind and the program is grounded to investigate. I like starship and I think it will work as a heavy lift vehicle, but anything more is stretching way too far. And sadly since NASA is already almost at max capacity at this point monetarily it needs to put all it's eggs in one basket. All of this for a single trip to the moon. That's what I meant when I said artemis was "crumbling", it just cannot be sustained with so many different components that all need to be paid for and then work perfectly.

I think it's time to press the 'panic' button for artemis and perhaps even starship. The entire thing is crumbling as we speak.

Seems fairly clear the pilot or maybe co-pilot did it, though motive is hard to pin down. My personal hunch is that it was politically motivated (won't be going into details on that obviously) but the plane is reported to have circled over land for some time, the pilot could have tried to negotiate with the authorities and the malasian government chose not to divulge this in fear or possible sociopolitcal repercussions. Some or all of this could be total bogus but the mass murder-suicide theory doesn't seem to be something the pilot would do. He had a wife and family and apparently loved his job, while not everyone has an outward reason for ending their own lives it just doesn't make sense why he would choose to take so many with him. Regardless of motive its clear the plane was manually steered to the most remote area possible to avoid it ever being found. The little wreckage found indicates that it nosedived into the ocean and probably totally disintegrated, weather this was intentional or not I cannot speculate on but it makes detecting the wreck even harder on the bottom. If it is somehow found the blackbox is likely useless at this point. A very sad story and certainly mysterious but not impossible to decipher with what we already have.

I previously mentioned I was getting into model making, well today was my birthday and my father's gift was a 1/700 Tamiya 'Taiho', mostly as a practice model. Started some construction including gluing the smokestack and an AA Gun together just to start it up. Wish I could post images but it's not working for some reason : / I'm thinking of starting a thread just to show my progress on Taiho and eventually the Shinano.

Orion reentry as seen from onboard the spacecraft: https://images.nasa.gov/details/art001m1203451716 So THIS is what Jeb goes through when he reenters from Eeloo at twice the solar escape velocity.

Ooooh, maybe a falcon heavy launch for my birthday