AckSed

What is a true Chief Engineer? Do they have aerospace experience? Are they a respected expert in their field? Do they have at least ten years of working at a rocket company? Are they experienced with a high-pressure environment as they work with a team to push boundaries? And are they also sensible and know when not to push the boundaries?

My choice: There's an atmospheric 'window' for a specific wavelength of IR, with something like 90% transmittance in the narrow 4-micron near-infrared band. (It says here humans radiate most warmth in the 10-micron band.) More penetrating power can be achieved by pulsing the laser. In double-pulse laser-cutters, the first pulse excavates material and the second a nanosecond later prevents the ejecta from adhering to the side of the cut, presumably by keeping the vaporised material hot.

I saw the Raptor bells 'twanging' like the RS-25 on startup. Damn.

The deluge system is supposed to absorb the acoustic energy as well as the heat, but maybe? "Go-fever" mixing with new and interesting failure modes is... not great.

That's not gone well. Maybe consider 'crasher' stages next time? (Sorry, not sorry)

Man, it looks used; intact, but definitely been through the wars, so to speak. Like the Millennium Falcon. Strangely, the thing I'm most impressed about is the tyres: in space for years, exposed to vacuum, radiation, extreme temperature fluctuations and they are still flexible.

The little rock kicked up and spinning floatily back down is an unexpectedly nice touch.

Stepping frame-by-frame back and forth in that RGV post of the mission-control engine-bay camera reveals: A growing purple-orange glow of what I surmise is methane escaping the bell; A bright flash fading to black, then an orange flame; The white of escaping gas with the curve of the Earth starting to reveal the spin and in the last second, more purple-orange flame. With the hot-spot, I'm reasonably confident that that was the RVac nozzle burning through, causing an explosion that took it out.

I saw a glowing spot on one of the engine nozzles in the stream. Think that might have been it?

Carpbaskets.

Mention made of an "Algorithm" that informs their design, which sounds like what Rocket Factory Augsberg uses.

Ship on Flight 7 suffered a stronger than ever "harmonic resonance" that damaged the prop system. Nitrogen purge system and vent holes in the 'attic'. The next Ship will have Raptor 3s, apparently.

Huh: "The Ship is designed for taking off and landing on any hard surface." Maybe future upgrades, but not now. "Switching to Raptor 3 later this year."

Mars' polar ice cap might be less than 10 million years old: https://arstechnica.com/science/2025/02/mars-polar-ice-cap-is-slowly-pushing-its-north-pole-inward/

Guess who's stacked/Stacked again/Starship's back/Tell a friend

Mechazilla is currently paused in the middle of a destack with Ship 34 dangling from the chopsticks. Workers seem to be working at the "skate" the chopsticks are attached. I have to remember that damn near everything at Starbase is highly experimental.

Lunar Roomba-zambonis will have to sweep the launchpads before every launch, then.

In the Orion's Arm shared universe, living planets are all over the place, and are usually normal planets with a substrate of computronium that run godlike AI, either artificial, nanotech-supported or fully biological, depending upon the style at the times of settling. Not full-on fleshworlds, but alive enough that the crust and mantle can be thought of as their 'bones', and the thin skin of the biosphere its brain. A classic living, naturally-evolved ecosystem in this far-future alt-history is rare, but has happened.

If the comment I saw below Arstechnica's article on it is correct, you have to scrap the tooling once the shuttle program is over, then rebuild it when the call to reuse is sent down. If that's not bad enough, stopping a program can cost a bomb as well, and you will never recoup as much as you think.

Biologically growing structures in space is not a new idea in SF, but seriously considering it? This is some Orion's Arm stuff. Still a long way away from growing Dyson Trees.

How the designers and builders of Europa Clipper learned that "Mil-Spec" MOSFETs didn't mean "Europa-rated", and how they devised procedures to mitigate it: https://spacenews.com/end-run-around-radiation-the-saga-and-surprise-vulnerabilities-of-europa-clipper/

Dammit.

Ooo, peek inside Starlink factory on SX stream.

Seeing frost on the booster.

Literal 'ooh shiny' science on the solar panels, running current through to make them glow: https://x.com/vast/status/1890161899775385943