CatastrophicFailure

erm, what?

...speaking of which...

Yay for rocket. Lady is way too perky for this unkermly hour. now back to trying to find the wife’s car in the washer which also the pool which is also the beach. makes sense in context. No, not really. zzzzzzzZzzzzzzZZZZZZZZzzzz<snort>Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

Heh, like DM-2’s space mouse?

IIRC, the fact that SpaceX does static fires on the pad at all is unusual, ULA et al really don’t. It’s also quite arguable that, at this point, from the sheer amount of cumulative runtime they know their engine better than anyone else in the biz (‘cept maybe the Russians), and they know each individual engine better than anyone once they’ve been flown. They probably have a great big spreadsheet of the various foibles of each engine, maybe the past performance of this particular batch (plus the experience of the whole) is good enough that there’s nothing really to be learned/validated from a static fire. Or maybe they’re just in a hurry. Which seems less likely, since on this launch they actually have paying (non-Starlink) customers...

BRB, need to go update my Scatterer configs... heh, that’s better than zero-dark-thirty. I’m home sick, s’pose I’m obligated to make the sacrifice now. And hopefully Rocketlab a few hours earlier as an aperitif.

Thrusters.

StarLink is literally a cube-sat, fight me.

So, there’s this annoying little rock about the size of a cantaloupe in the middle of the driveway up to my cabin. Decided to dig it up today... Y’know when you start picking at a little bitty hangnail...

Indeed, but in that regard the shuttle was a foray into the great unknown. SpaceX has had these 40-some years of lessons on how not to do rapid reusability and reliability to reflect on in its own plans. Even the Soviet Buran, which flew only a few years after the shuttle, fixed a great many of the flaws in the design, except for the whole “ridiculously expensive and not really needed” part.

Trouble with the Shuttle was, it was supposed to be so reliable it didn’t need all those abort modes, yet it only flew 135 times and was never really “operational,” as opposed to experimental. SS/SH could conceivably fly that much in a year, or even a month. That’s a large part of its MO. With that kind of flight rate, finding all the possible bugs in its systems and actually making it “reliable enough” at least becomes plausible.

Tweetstorm, apparently. this is what Boca looked like a few years back. I guess they had some settling issues with the soil and had to build this big mound to compact it before they could do anything, part of why it took so long for anything to happen there. If you check out the site on Google maps, it still looks like that.

Well... they’ve already got plenty of experience making huge piles of dirt... Odd to think just a couple-three years ago that whole place was nothing but a big pile of dirt.

You should get a solpugid instead. No particular reason, I just like saying ‘solpugid.’ Just kinda rolls off the tongue, in exactly the way an actual solpugid would not.

Then they should be obligated to race. Space racing should be a thing.

These days merely getting out of bed has become an achievement. Bonus points for not taking one look outside and jumping right back in screaming “aw hell nah!”

I think maybe it got a StarLink terminal.

The way things are going lately that might not be a bad idea. <Steve Irwin voice> An’ ‘ere we see the two Dragon Gouramis locked in a contest for dominance and the favour of the smalla female... @Codraroll has a point, strip down and equip one Dragon and you’ve got a very quick, inexpensive mini-station for longer duration flights than Dragon could do on its own, maybe in a different orbit than ISS. A polar crewed flight has never been done, for example....

This little tidbit may have gotten lost in the shuffle recently: Elon seems to have eschewed Twitter for a while once again, so official info may be... sparse.

Meanwhile, asking the real question... ...but SpaceX still not answering.

It certainly needs to be kept up away from questing hands and smug, indifferent cats... Meanwhile...

Started during launch preps Wednesday, the wife insisted we finish before Bob & Doug docked. Went together quicker than the Falcon, at least. Not waiting til Artemis for the Saturn tho...

I’m sure it’s been made impossible to actually do that, but if they actually did, Dragon could still probably deorbit on its own, as the trunk is just for power and cooling. You need to play more upscaled systems, keeps you guessing. I’m still not 100% sure what it is at 3.2x.

There’s probably a note next to the relevant button saying “check yo staging...”