Beccab

Next road closure is tomorrow for possible pressure testing, if they miss that they'll probably wait until Monday. Also, from here you can see that the bottom half of starship heat shield is basically complete Also:

Not to mention, it depends on the state. E.g. in California they are unenforceable no matter what

Not ULA, but we do know what Northrop Grumman's (part of the National Team) Lunar Mission Fault Management Engineer thinks about all this, and this was before BO took NASA in the federal court

There really is, given that those 9 are unmanned tanker launches. Put crew and even a LES on it and it isn't a tanker anymore

That either NASA chooses them or they will have the contract delayed until cancellation, ala JEDI

LES doesn't, Starship does. Every section of starship upper stage is covered in half with heat shield tiles

https://www.cnbc.com/2021/08/16/jeff-bezos-blue-origin-takes-nasa-to-federal-court-over-hls-contract.html Because if you can't win, nobody should

I think we agree then, we are just focusing on different points. Nobody is trying to get the LES off Soyuz because it is practical there: not a lot of mass, not a lot of cost compared to the rocket, easy to make. On starship nothing of this is true: how would it even work? Expulsion seats like on gemini, which are more likely to kill you than the rocket and that won't work on pad aborts? A huge SRB thrown away every launch, probably bigger than the ones on shuttle to even work, paired with similarly huge parachutes that would eat half of the payload at least? There isn't a single launch escape system that can work on Starship without being extremely impractical and little more effective than just separating it from SH and going away

That's a better comparison, yup. Let's look at the soyuz launch aborts: -Soyuz 18a: failed second stage ignition, abort using the service module engines since the LES was already ejected. Starship here is either irrelevant or able to do the same, because should superheavy suffer issues that require separating from it its engines can be shut down and Starship should be able to have a TWR > 1 even alone. I said irrelevant because second stage ignition failure should be almost impossible, given that you'd need to have at least 1 RVac failing as well as 2 Raptors failing to ignite at the same time. -Soyuz T-10a: pad abort following the rocket taking fire. This one is a lot harder, starship abort would mean that Superheavy is blown up by the exhaust of the Starship engines, which makes survivability very uncertain. Absolutely best to prevent this in any way possible with redundancies on the tower as much as possible -Soyuz MS-10: abort following side boosters colliding with the core. Luckily Starship doesn't have side boosters that can cause this and every other related issues goes in the first category So, out of the Soyuz aborts in his history only 1 would probably have been impossible with Starship. There is another risk reduction at this point: uncrewed starships. For at least the first half of this decade and possibly until 2030 there's going to be a huge disparity between the crewed launches and uncrewed ones, in the order of 100 uncrewed for 1 crewed. Every possible issue is much more likely to happen in one of those launches than the ones where the life of someone is at risk, so if that 1 failure starship is unlikely to survive happens every 150 launches there's a 99% chance it will happen in an uncrewed launch.

The Saturn V was an very dangerous rocket that flew more than 50 years ago, so not really a good comparison. Yes, it didn't explode mid flight, but that doesn't change the overall safety of it: had Shuttle stopped at STS-13 like the Saturn V did it would have had a 100% safety record as well

Skylab-Salyut, one of the original Apollo-Soyuz proposals

You don't say

Which was answering: But because the Shuttle was going to exist and was planned to almost completely take over launching US government payloads to space, spy satellite ops and other government payloads massively influenced the Shuttle's final design. The cross-range requirement that drove the large wings on the Shuttle came from the U.S.A.F.'s desire to have it capable of doing 1-Polar-orbit missions from Vandenberg. Without that, the Shuttle could have had much smaller straight wings, as it did on some of the earlier designs. The Shuttle payload bay size and design was strongly influenced by the forecast U.S.A.F. payloads that the Shuttle was planned to deploy and recover. And so many people talk now about Starship taking over the launch market as if it was a fait accompli. Before even a test-article Starship has launched to orbit. Sounds familiar. People critical of Starship have been making this comparison for years, I have only answered to those. Quoting myself:

I have literally spent dozens of posts repeating over and over to stop comparing Shuttle and Starship because they have nothing in common, including the post you are replying to. You were the one to say that "All-in-all, pretty much everything SpaceX fans say Starship will do actually was done by the shuttle."; I didn't compare the planned Starship capabilities to Shuttle, you did

Literally the only thing they have in common is being reusable orbiters. They are as similar as Starship and Crew Dragon. Shuttle: - wasn't fully reusable -wasn't a super heavy-lift launcher - couldn't fly without crew - couldn't be refuelled in orbit - couldn't reach or return from lunar orbit - couldn't land on the moon - couldn't reach orbit of, return from or land on mars

We don't know, but we can use logic. It possible that SpaceX is spending money developing rockets and spending even more money by selling every single one of them at a loss to try to trick every other launch provider that reusability can be cost effective without ever gaining anything, all this for 15 years, for whatever reason. We can assume SpaceX is reusing rockets only as a PR move and that they are extremely ineffective, but they want to ridiculize the Proton so they continue spending hundreds of billions so that maybe one day they will be able to raise prices by 100 times and gain millions. Or we can think that SpaceX is gaining some money as a launch provider and that reusing rockets 10+ times has finally become less expensive than throwing them in the sea. Which of these is more likely?

Which gives us a decent approximation of what their launch costs are lower than. Unless you believe they have been selling every single launch at a loss since 2006 and plan to continue to sell everything at a loss It was "planned" to reduce them back when they were trying to get funding to develop it, but as soon as its design was finalised it was already extremely likely not to be any cheaper than an expendable launcher (and even turned out to be *more* expensive). The design of the shuttle, as you have already said, wasn't made to reduce launch costs or even for the NASA necessities. The USAF couldn't care less about lower costs during the cold war, and if you combine: - crew on every single flight; - "recovering" SRBs from the sea, which was all but likely to work; - dropping the external tank in the ocean every time; you already have a pretty discouraging view of affordable reusability, and this is before the Shuttle started to fly. Add the later foam issues and the difficulties in refurbishing the orbiter and every hope of affordability is gone. Starship starts with none of these design issues against cost effectiveness; the only issues we can think of is issues with Starship upper stage reuse, which has already on the positive side the use of the proven TUFROC tiles tech. So, for the 100th time, Shuttle-Starship is a terrible comparison

Something made to be cost effective is more likely to be cost effective than something made to help the USAF

Rogozin joining the "Where are Tory's engines Jeff?" train, now that was unexpected

Fortunately, time is infinite and a capsule that launched a NASA mission in 2020 is extremely late compared to one increasingly unlikely to have a non-demo mission before 2023, provided every demo goes right

"Pfft, starliner not completing an uncrewed test flight until 2022 is nothing. Look at crew dragon, it couldn't even complete one until 2019!"

Also related to the new infographic:

And the fins. Blue Origin clearly isn't an expert in orbital rockets

The barrel section has also been fully tiled now, need to fix the issues on the top and the gap between the nosecone and body