AckSed

New Hazegrayart: Space Station Freedom:

ACS3 solar sail may have a slight bend in one of its booms. It shouldn't affect its performance: https://blogs.nasa.gov/smallsatellites/2024/10/22/update-on-nasas-advanced-composite-solar-sail-system/

Mostly, there's no difference. Irregular grain size is the biggest issue, and that can be screened out. Here's someone making sand out of glass:

Fire ze mudballs to build a wall: https://arstechnica.com/science/2024/10/impact-printing-is-a-cement-free-alternative-to-3d-printed-structures/ It looks coarse and poorly textured, but the partially-dried clay can be shaved off with ease, and indeed there is another machine that does this.

And on that note, new Eager Space vid: tl;dw In the case of on-the-pad/just-past-launch failure, every 9 engines on your rocket, your overall reliability rises. Adding a tenth drops it down again, but not back to simply having 1.

Artemis I discovered that radiation dose in the van Allen belt (the inner, proton-rich one) can be affected by attitude i.e. which way you are pointed: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-07927-7

Side note: going back to Starship's reentry, did anyone catch sight of some sort of bracket on the leeward side? Had a hole in it. It wasn't even in the path of the plasma, yet it was still glowing red-hot down to the start of the belly-flop. Goes to show reentry's harsh.

Signal acquired!

Nominal orbit

Second burn and the telemetry is doing the KSP thing where the path unspools out to deep space.

On our way. No oxygen leaks I can see

Temperature anomaly on second stage, investigating.

Approx 1 hour, 10 minutes to Europa Clipper launch.

I admire the gumption, and I think they have a shot if they're launching a single, longer Haven module to start. I also wonder if they're still going for the spinning-stick station on top of it.

Alternate view where you can see this massive thing just fly in:

I may be wrong about it being reentry heating, or only reentry heating: rewatching the ED stream, at 2 hours 30 minutes, when it's 38-32km up and moving 4330km/h, the glow of a fire spreads through the internal engine bay. This may just be trapped methane from engine chilldown.

(Thank Scott Manley for pointing this out.) Reentry capsules are not new (e.g. pre-digital spy satellites that dropped film capsules), but doing the Varda Space thing and making it a cheaper way to bring experiments back from orbit? That's more novel. https://spacenews.com/shijian-19-reusable-satellite-lands-after-2-weeks-in-space/

Zoom in on the flamey end of the booster: That is not a happy engine bay; that is glowing red-hot, with several fires outside the engines and distorted nozzles on the boost engines. Maybe the retropropulsive burn needs reinstated.

"Off the nose"? What's that, a stage on top of the Starship?

Booster 12 is being slowly lowered down, and its carriage (transport stand) awaits. Can I just say that of all the things that happened, the rocket nozzles glowing red-hot from reentry underlined how violent it was.

The shot of Starhopper in the same frame as the caught Superheavy in NSF's normal Starbase stream is very, "Son, I am proud."

Landed! Then the buoy camera caught it blowing up. Still incredible.

Uh, Starship doesn't seem to be flying 'straight'- oh never mind, it is.

It wasn't entirely smooth: one of the chines looked ripped open at the bottom and there was that internal fire next to the trapezoid holding the flight propellant-loading hardware (that's now out thanks to the CO2 fire-suppression), but they caught it! AAAH THEY CAUGHT IT Best of all, now they get to examine it and discover what needs to be fixed.

AckSed's Second Law of Entropic Cleaning: every rag, scourer or sponge used for cleaning will inevitably be loaded with so much hair and dirt that it has to be thrown away.