AckSed

Current Exo vibe:

NG GS1 staged very low in the atmosphere and the landing barge was relatively close-by to land. I think this is splitting the difference between Starship/Super Heavy's RTLS, 'near-SSTO with just enough booster to get out of the atmosphere' approach, and a F9 far-out landing barge. The closer the landing barge, the less time GS1 takes to reach port and be processed, improving cadence. Other possibilities are that this was a test of booster re-entry, and they were making this as gentle as possible. 'Proper ' payloads might necessitate a further-out landing barge.

I had hopes of another scorching Ship return through the atmosphere. Alas, I was complacent.

Such a beautiful funeral.

NSF is not quite as energetic, so I watch that.

Uh-oh, all but one of the Ship's engines have cut out

The SpaDeX sats approached to 15m, then 3m of each other, then retreated: https://theprint.in/india/spadex-isro-brings-satellites-within-three-metres-in-trial-attempt/2441713/

The first director of ARPA-E, a new/renewable-energy think-tank, said, "Culture eats strategy for breakfast, lunch and dinner." A workplace culture with a person or persons at the helm that listens to their engineers, has a clear objective and is able to make changes to its direction when needed, is a culture that gets the job done.

Oops. Oh well, it can be the first US methalox engine to reach orbit... *remembers Relativity* Dammit!

Nice, nice. Now let's see a rocket. Please?

ED made the observation that this could be the first US methalox rocket to go to orbit. It's debatable, but I suppose it can have that, as a treat. Disregard

That's a point: relight of a second stage vastly expands the orbits you can reach; fingers crossed.

Literally skipped booster touchdown to say NG S2 in orbit. It is likely now a very fancy reef. Edit: Still, to reach orbit on your first try with a heavy-lift rocket is damn good.

She rides!

Provisional go from all eight stations. Edit: 3 minutes

Hold me, thrill me, k miss me, kill me. Edit: restarted at -33 minutes. Aaargh

Restart at t-minus 30. Come on...

Held at t-minus 20 minutes. It's nearly 6AM here. Blue Origin? More like Blue B-*censored*.

Varda just hitched a ride on Transporter 12, and its pharmecutical-producing capsule is not only going to reenter and land on the Koonibba Test Range in Australia, it's also carrying a spectrometer from the ARFL designed to record spectral measurements of the dynamic reentry plasma environment: https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/vardas-second-mission-w-2-launches-with-payloads-from-air-force-research-laboratory-and-nasa-302350940.html Side note: it's running on a Rocket Lab satellite bus. I suppose business is business, and launch isn't half as profitable as satellites.

Side note: I saw the statement on the debris from the Kenya Space Agency, and I just had to stop and think at the fact they have a space agency.

Huh, is this going to be a pressure-test?

The 2025 NIAC Phase 1 entrants are in, and there's a lot of weird and wonderful proposals: A balloon probe that uses a reversible solid-oxide CO/O2 fuel-cell to explore Venus (the key feature of a SOFC is the high temperatures needed to activate the catalyst - not a problem on Venus); Another Venus probe that uses the difference in velocity between cloud layers to power both ends of the craft; A solar sail that is one continuous self-supporting ribbon, simplifying deployment; Automated glass-blowing to construct a circular habitat from microwave-melted regolith (exactly the kind of far-out thinking I miss from 80s and 90s moon-base concepts). There's also more serious things, like a new process for catalysing electrolysis of water on a spacecraft, a constellation of X-ray telescopes to image supermassive black holes and someone outright proposing a shipyard in LEO. No shortage of dreams here.

I blipped through NSF's stream and an interesting detail is that while Blue Ghost is going for TLI and orbit, arriving in 45 days, ispace's Resilience is heading for Earth-Luna-Sun L1 with several flybys, and will take 4-5 months to reach the moon.

You're seeing the 'shooting' part and not seeing the 'tiny spectrometer' part. Lower one of these down a well, gain a molecular signature of the geology.

I think it means that "initiated" makes the nuclear reaction happen at all, and "catalysed" makes the nuclear chain-reaction happen. The difference is somewhat 'angels dancing on the head of a pin', but this page uses both: https://web.archive.org/web/20070103171724/http://www.engr.psu.edu/antimatter/documents.html