AckSed

I've always thought that Starship HLS is 'pay for lander, gain a free moon base'.

Artemis II is... going. https://www.nasaspaceflight.com/2024/10/sls-update/

Our intern worked one day and night to make this animation.

I am not an authoritative source. I will say it again. I am not an authoritative source. I have a third-class degree in Internet Computing that's 15 years out of date. I only know what I have read on the Internet, tasted and sniffed it to see if it's reasonably plausible, then regurgitated it to a small audience so I can be excited over it with like-minded people. That's why I'm here. Asking whether it wouldn't or would work was secondary. I was trying to engage you, ask the opinion of a smarter person than I and maybe see if you had any insights, read any past research like from the Shuttle era. (And maybe head off any combatitiveness. Hate that stuff.)

A question for Exoscientist, because that alt. Shuttle brought it to mind: how would you design the payload bay doors of Starship? Assume that, no matter what, the stretched version with heatshield will be built; I don't think SpaceX's course will be changed no matter the merit of an expendable version. What shape would it be? Double door vs. single-door? Where would you put the hinge(s)? I imagine the double-door with longitudinal split might retain some of the stiffness.

ESA asking Italian Spanish company, Pangea Aerospace, to design Kronos, a 2MN, possibly full-flow staged-combustion engine for them. For reference, they are the company that are developing a small aerospike: https://europeanspaceflight.com/esa-taps-pangea-aerospace-to-design-very-high-thrust-engine/ I hope they can do it, but making a Raptor- or BE-4-class rocket engine is a big ask. Bringing in a welter of smaller companies, and that The Exploration Company is also planning a similar engine also seems like a mistake.

Skyrora planning to exclusively use satellites for telemetry, completes test using Viasat's L-band ELERA network: https://www.adsadvance.co.uk/skyrora-viasat-and-cgi-achieve-uk-first-with-test-of-inrange.html

It is not fired with heat. It is literally fired out of a launcher. (English, everybody!) This is essentially adobe walls with carefully-controlled particle size and a touch of mineral binder.

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/