AckSed

Impressive CF-laying robot and early peeks of Neutron's tank domes:

Looks interesting. For the record, SGL is "Sun gravity lens", and this is the rocket proposed to send a spacecraft 550AU to hang out there and use the warping effect of the Sun's gravity to image exoplanets through their Einstein ring. There are a few wrinkles, though: For one, sending one spacecraft with a single imaging platform will limit it to viewing one part of the ring - best bring a swarm. Two, any planet will only be observable for 40 minutes before moving out of focus. But the key takeaway (and to bring it back to FFREs) is that this is an excellent precursor to interstellar travel. If you can make it here, you can make it anywhere! (Sorry not sorry.)

Uncovered some more details about Mockingbird: https://yarchive.net/space/rocket/small_rocket_inefficiencies.html I note the sea-level thrust and T/W ratio of Mockingbird is quite a bit less than EOS. If Siderus are forced to pack on the kilos, there may be slack to make it into a non-reusable system.

United Kingdom launches its first wholly-owned optical spy satellite: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c1d77yq9zz2o

Umbilical door also on interstage. Closes at t-0. Whiteboard with "Recognition, Safety, Quality, People" diagrams all filled-in in red and green alongside "Action Plan" and separate whiteboard 2/3rds filled with pink and eggshell post-its. Machine-shop had screen with "OLS Structural component Production" graphs but tragically any numbers are washed-out. Orthogrid milled from stacks of AlLi plate, then bump-formed into curved tank walls. Skim a thin layer off the raw plates before milling to relieve strain from manufacturing process. Remove 90% of the material. Looking to remove the orthogrid and go to monocoque in GS2 because they found enough performance in other places. B3U engine went from target 160,000lb to 172000lb (78019.2 kilograms, 765094N) thrust. Mass penalty not huge, cost savings for expendable justified. Going to see if can make expendable GS2 so cheap that reusability never makes sense, and try out reusable GS2 that's so operable expendability never makes sense. Going to let it be a "horse race" as on paper the trade isn't obvious. For 1st stage reusability is "blindingly obvious". Have a design for reusable GS2, doing lots of work on thermal protection systems. Trade between AlLi and stainless [steel] is better because of its thermal properties, but aluminium is lighter if you can sort the thermal protection. Most of these trades you cannot decide at the conceptual level; much more "fine-grained". Smaller practical issues dominate - refurbishment and such. Engine factory is in Huntsville. Won't be seeing that today [in this video]. Next year will be building a BE-4 every 3 days. [May 30th], engines for 2 Vulcans are [were] sitting there and a 3rd about to be delivered, and the Glenn engines were all in assembly then. Carbon-fibre composite-laying machine comparable to the 787. Random worker pulled Bezos aside to say he worked for Boeing, Northrop Grumman, United Technologies for 36 years, about 10 years each, and BO is the best company he ever worked for. It's still going to be his last job, and he doesn't want to work any more. Fairings and payload adaptor carbon composite. (Payload adaptor looked bigger than the Apollo capsule.) Cured in Large Composite Cure Oven or LCCO. It was indeed large. Lady walking next to it looked like a matchstick in comparison. Composite for fairing half laid down by massive robot in what looks like the world's largest Easter egg mould. Tape is in pods and can exchange them, so it can keep running. Can design laying pattern for carbon-fibre tape so that it's not homogenous and designed for the loads you have. It has A structure under the CF, but Bezos didn't share what. Very repeatable process. Which is what you want when it comes to production. They have non-destructive testing with ultrasound and repair methodologies, but they don't need to repair very often. Stopped to show four GS1 in construction. Just going to start producing vehicles at rate. (This may be able to replicate the Starlink effect: if they have spare launch capacity, they can sell themselves a space at cost to launch Project Kuiper, taking advantage of the learning function and rapidly building out their constellation into profitability while, as Perun said, beating their cost to death with the scale bat. Folks, we may be about to see combined launch capabilities and frequencies that would boggle von Braun.) Flight BE3U engines! Nozzle-less when filmed, but seem to have a common-shaft turbopump. Hot-fired without vacuum nozzle once attached, then nozzle put on before flight. Engineers signed the names on engine as well as Bezos'. Disregard that, it has a two-shaft, in-line open expander cycle: LH2 is split: most goes to injectors, smaller amount of the high-pressure LH2 regen-cools the thrust chamber, its heat and expansion powers the LH2 turbopump, and then the exhaust from the turbine goes on to the oxidiser turbine that powers the LOx turbopump. Which rotates in the other direction from the GH2 turbine to extract the small amount of rotational energy from the exhaust. Finally, the exhaust from that is flowed into the vacuum nozzle to cool the skirt. Ingenious. And efficient: 445 seconds of specific impulse, because the excess H2 contributes. BE-4 dev engine next, with rat's nest of Development Flight Instrumentation. Compares it to the RD-180 and F-1, but is going for a medium-performing variant of high-performing ox-rich staged combustion cycle to take stress off everything for longevity and reusability. 140 bar chamber pressure, and you have so much mass flow with all the oxygen going through the turbine gas doesn't have to be very hot. If you go to very high chamber pressures, you start to lose some of that advantage. Still have 340 sec.s specific impulse. High ISP on the second stage, high reusability on the first stage.

Straight off the bat, we have some details of how New Shepard works: has to be aerodynamically stable going up and going down, so the top ring fin used for descent is exposed by the capsule being ejected. There are also extra fins that pop out and drag brakes to improve the ballistic coefficient. The ascent uses inertial navigation to compensate for and measure wind blowing off-course, remembers the path it took, then inverts that to return to the launch pad. They have the umbilical of the X-33 SSTO in the lobby. With the exception of the engine, I'd thought it was just a paper rocket! Legend on the display: "LH2 Ground and Flight panel assembly intended for NASA's Advanced Technology Demonstrator reusable spaceplane." All the main stuff like regenerative cooling was invented back in the Sixties, so "Our job today is not to do better at spaceflight, it's to make it more affordable." More cool artefacts in their Kent headquarters. Talks about retrieving the Apollo 11 F1 engine. "This is going to be the easiest thing I've ever done." The Google search of where it landed was the only easy thing about it. Too many objects discovered. 30-mile corridor was NASA's graveyard. ROVs gathered what they thought it'd be. Incredibly difficult, but also fun. Took the family, stayed out for 28 days. Also pulled up an Apollo 13 engine that's on display in the Air and Space Museum in Seattle. (Side note: saw a notice for a blood drive beside the door to the factory. There was also station for a broom and dustpan to be clipped. Not important, but interesting) Shows us stage one New Glenn (GS1) LNG tank and isogrid stiffening. Graphic shows it's located beneath the fins on the booster. Has common dome with LOx tank; is about to be friction stir-welded on to LOx tank. (No indication of materials, but FSW might mean aluminium-lithium. Might. (Confirmed later.)) Automated FSW rig. Good part about reusability is you get to reuse all those high-performance parts. "Highly-engineered objects always end up beautiful." Orthogrid vs. isogrid: orthogrid (rectangular) can be bump-formed, as it may be done with the panels before they're welded into tanks. Isogrid needs 5-axis milling. Spun-formed domes with added gore panels of what looks like insulation. Use stickers and machine vision to check against CAD model. Stage two hydrolox with helium pressurisation bottles inside. LH2 tank almost as big as Saturn V S-IVB. Had to get suited up in clean-room suit to poke head inside top of tank. (not flight article, we see that later.) Beautifully-engineered. Will be slosh baffles, but orthogrid/isogrid "does a lot of that job for you". (Dual-use, I approve.) Baffles are more important on the LOx side because the LOx is so much denser. Do have to worry about slosh at the sump when using the last bit of LH2. Shows lower section of GS1 and interstage. Tan fabric covering on both is thermal insulation developed in-house and tested on New Shepard. Booster comes in for landing at Mach 6. "Highly reusable" thermal protection system that doesn't need to be touched up. Vehicle designed to be turned around in 16 days, and designed to last for minimum of 25 missions. Like to get to at least a hundred. Landing gear deploys 14 seconds from landing, taking 8 seconds to deploy. Landing gravity-assisted because it's decelerating. Landing gear is parasitic mass. Learned a lot from New Shepard. (Sides of landing-gear wells smaller orthogrids. Extensive hydraulic lines.) In-between four and six landing gear your mass-trade is about even. When you have more landing gear your splay can be smaller for the same [resistance to] tip-over. Like six because geometrically it fits really well with a seven-engine configuration - you have a landing gear between every engine. It just packages well. BE-4 engines fit inside, there's a heat-shield and each engine has its own eyeball seal. Stage can hover, engines can throttle down to 40%. Three gimballing engines in a line, four fixed engines. Light three gimballing engines for return and land on single engine which is throttled down to thrust-to-weight equalling 1:1 for constant deceleration. Dry mass of the whole vehicle "only a few hundred thousand pounds". Always landing downrange - initially. Bezos acknowledges it may be a smart thing to do RTLS if you don't need the performance and it makes economic sense. Do small exoatmospheric burn, then landing burn. Tradeoff between the strakes and weight of fuel until you reach an optima. Don't quite know where that is yet, erring on the conservative side of the exo-burn. BO close to understanding - want to do whatever we can do through simulations and testing on the ground first - but some things you only learn in flight. Much better simulations nowadays. Operating range of fins 60 degrees. Need large hydraulic actuators - 5x bigger than the Shuttle SRB actuators. Next section is blurred. Everything "one-fault operative" on New Glenn. Flight computers, four large actuators and nitrogen pressurant bottles (RCS) in fin section. Interstage mostly empty space to fit BE-3U vacuum nozzles. Stage separation pushrods thick as a person's neck, in pairs. (24 altogether, at a guess.) Some advantages to big rockets: parasitic mass doesn't matter as much, rotating objects can be big, easier to balance a broomstick than a pencil or toothpick on the end of your finger, because of inertia slowing everything down. Lots of RCS control authority on top. No wind gusts on the moon, so in some ways it's easier.

I'll give a shout-out to my favourite SF sitcom and novel series Red Dwarf. While the science was usually, "whatever makes today's plot work", there's harder stuff in the background and the books go into more detail: The titular mining ship we see in the opening and ending sequence has a Bussard ramscoop, which conceivably could give it infinite range and acceleration (at least before it was figured out it would act like a space-bulldozer on the interstellar medium); holographic backups of people are so detailed and intricate, they simulate genetic code and bodily processes and are thus very expensive to run in terms of processing and energy; genetically-engineered lifeforms and robots made as worker races for humans populate the galaxy as humans are almost certainly extinct.

I'm just hoping Bezos shares his O'Neill habitat plans with the nice viewers.

Liquid water, even. Martian extremophile environment? It's possible.

My finger is on the pause button, the relevant NASASpaceflight thread is open and I have a notepad. Can't wait.

Heatshield tiles replaced with Starlink phased-array antenna for SAR.

I just picked up The Revolution from Rosinante by Alexis A. Gilliland. While the social stuff is extremely Of Its Time, because it dates from the Japanese dominance in the late early Eighties, (Japanese businessmen, Spanish convicts from the Alamo and Korean-Japanese ladies, oh my), the rotating station feels like it was meant to be built. I mean, the first page is a rebuttal of a change order for an expensive dichroic mirror, to avoid the habitat absorbing too much heat from the sun. There's complaints about the workers absorbing too much radiation by doing an EVA even when the sun's at its solar minimum. And more and more.

In addition to the 'testbed for Mars' case, in terms of raw resources there's a lot of oxygen that can be baked out of the regolith, aluminium and titanium ore, magnesium and calcium too, and a much-reduced gravity well compared to Earth. While the Sun is up on the Lunar day, you have heat and light to run as many solar panels as you want, and the materials to build as many as you want. Blue Origin's "Blue Alchemist" made a solar cell out of regolith simulant, so they're clearly thinking about this. The lower gravity may also make semiconductors easier to make. Energetically, Earth-Luna L5 is right next door, something like 1.7km/s delta-V to reach Low Luna Orbit, then 0.7km/s to L4 or L5. If one were serious about building a full-fledged artificial-gravity L5 space station that telepresencing workers could live on, building the solar panels, framework and shielding from Lunar materials would be much less painful than shipping it from Earth.

I do get it, really I do. It's exciting to know that they have a booster that makes Saturn V look underpowered. Hell, when IFT-3 took off I told my housemate it could be a disposable heavy-lift booster right now. However, I don't think you should conflate "could do it" with "should do it" or "will do it". Take into account merely human will. I feel reasonably confident that now they have IFT-4 and a rather melty second-stage re-entry under their belt, SpaceX will continue to develop Starship as a reusable second stage, despite the multi-faceted and extensive technical challenge. Because unlike their start when they developed reusability for the Falcon 9, SpaceX is making money, and both Musk and Shotwell believe in the Mars mission, however foolish you might think it is. I'd venture a large amount of the senior engineers believe in the Mars mission too, or at least the prospect of designing a fully-reusable second stage.

Nothing is really new under the sun science fiction:

If there was a list of private sector companies that have the time, the money and the inclination to take on such a massive project, I suspect it would have one name, maybe two: SpaceX and Blue Origin. I don't know if they'd want to be responsible for when bits start falling off and the atmosphere leaks get worse.

Might be time to dig out the studies on charged-dust droplet radiators and adapt them to Lagrange sweepers: https://ntrs.nasa.gov/citations/19870010920

Note: I am guessing. That looked like a strong UV light. This may simply be a zero-G print head with fancy lighting or laser measuring. However, a quick search suggests that no, they typically aren't resistant to UV once cured, though the arts-and-crafts video I found showed varying levels of yellowing for different clear resins exposed to 30 days of sunlight, from very little to visible. More speculation: if this is a thermosetting plastic as opposed to a thermoplastic, and they are using fibre reinforcing, it's more plausible, as the combination gives excellent tensile strength, good elasticity and fair thermal resistance. Situating it behind a solar panel may shade it enough from the UV that it's viable. Reference: https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Continuous-fiber-reinforced-thermosetting-polymer-3D-printing-device-composites-and_fig5_351217124

German company Dcubed preparing a cubesat to build the support structures for a thin-film solar panel in space: https://spacenews.com/dcubed-raises-4-4-million-euros-for-in-space-manufacturing/ Their thing seems to be providing deployable parts for smallsats, including solar panels, so they have experience. No indication on materials or method however, which is saddening. Although going by this photo: It looks like they're going to be extruding plastic and curing it with UV light?

tl;dw If inspiration 4 was a commercial version of Mercury, Polaris Dawn is commercial Gemini. Apart from the spacewalk, the thing I'm hoping to see work out is the Starlink test. We've already seen the Starship re-entry, but reliable connectivity? That's potentially a whole new sector of telecommunications that can service other satellites. It also makes the prospect of teleoperated orbital factories that little bit closer to reality.

The name's a little dull. You could say it has... a shortfall of gravitas. *flees*

Maybe it's the frost on the injector head. That's usually a hydrolox speciality. But yeah, it does seem to be incomplete and yet it works.

Advertising on space stations is another:

*charges in with upraised finger* That is Sergei Krikalev, who endured nearly a year in space when the USSR fell: https://www.inverse.com/science/sergei-krikalev-the-cosmonaut-without-a-country

Launching and hatching quails in Russian space stations: https://finchwench.wordpress.com/2011/09/06/cosmoquails/