CatastrophicFailure

Indeed. just a bit… graditam…

Recently found out my wife has this. Kinda blew my mind, I had no idea that was even a thing. Like how some people don’t have an internal monologue. (Mine’s usually muttering on about the pictures…) Anyways, cleaning out the garage today and I found… this… Cue flashback… … and it’s not even mine.

10-15 years tops, I should be in just the right place to get a nice early retirement deal out of it. And given your average driver these days is already yakking on their phone while also watching a movie on their tablet, I welcome the day. I trust the computer more.

No. What I said was, and what the linked paper shows, is that there is no danger to Antarctica. The chart shows, very clearly, where the actual danger zone is, which is nowhere near there.

It’s the area where debris is a significant risk in the event of a complete failure. If the whole rocket going splodey poses an insignificant debris risk beyond that corridor, then a couple of batteries are even less so. Antarctica is around 3500km from Mahia, more, depending on trajectory. Battery jettison happens around halfway thru the second stage burn at over 4 km/s, almost Mach 12. There’s no way any of that is surviving reentry, let alone making it to Antarctica. Someone with more time could plug a launch into RSS for a better visual, but I highly doubt the trajectory even intersects the coast of Antarctica at that point. The risk of any real damage is, as @tater says, just noise.

It’s right there on the second page, the maritime exclusion zone. That’s the only debris risk short of a failure.

Here’s a paper from RocketLab about exactly that. There is zero risk to Antarctica, short of perhaps an upper-stage failure, which they want to avoid as much as anyone. https://www.rocketlabusa.com/assets/Uploads/RL-publicviewingrestrictions-F2.pdf You or I have reasonable options for disposing of said batteries. And if we did just set to burning them, between all the yous and Is our toasty button cells would rapidly exceed RL’s shoeboxes, likely by orders of magnitude. Another reason why so many players, RL included, are moving towards reusability. .

Do they get the neat suits too?

Step AWAY from the bus. Your S needs to get to Mars. And not as a bus driver. Me? I caught a frog. It did not want to cuddle.

Watch your language. Y’all are gonna summon up the R demon with that kinda talk, you mark me.

Pathfinder:

Though this be madness, yet there is method in't. —Billy S., esq

And then, after all that, a pressurant tank inside the core stage pops loose due to faulty struts and causes a RUD on the first flight test… because that’s exactly the kind of issue that can only be uncovered under actual flight conditions. No amount of static fires would ever find it, because it only happens under flight loading. And that’s just one more example. Oxygen. Including that rather anticipated candle they’re about to light tomorrow morning…

In that case, and also checking that nostalgia box, I humbly submit my 9000-tonne F-1A powered Soyuz. As an added bonus, the cryogenics plant (and probably the entire launch facility) could be powered by harnessing the energy of both Korolev and Von Braun spinning in their graves.

Apollo used a significant percent of GDP at the time to put two dudes in a bedroom closet on the moon for a couple of days. I’d rather see all parties involved did not simply do that again, and actually expanded our scope and capabilities, for a fraction of the relative cost. Let’s not merely repeat the past, let’s actually build the future. I’m ok with a heavily-regulated player with massive oversight blowing up a few pre-prototype concept demonstration rockets to accomplish that.

PLEASE send me a postcard when you get to Mars.

Really kinda puts it into perspective… …wait fo’ it… Yes, think they started showing up around IFT-1, when everything started looking a lot more “finished” and a lot less “slapped together in a tent…”

Got a nice peek up under the skirt here (scandalous!), everything is looking very tidy and finished. Now IIRC those “cans” around the outer engines are actually around all of them, specifically to contain a failure.

Sigh. I’ma say this just one, and probably regret it, and hopefully the mods just delete this whole tangent, but anyways… X is objectively doing better now than Twitter ever was. Twitter was on a short path to bankruptcy, X is now moving strongly the other direction, and likely to break a profit next year. Certain people have been foretelling the impending dooms of Elon Musk’s various ventures for years, and they’ve been wrong every single time. Hate what X has become if you want (that’s your right, and it’s mine to say you are incorrect in thinking so), but it’s no more dying than Tesla is bankwupt or SpaceX will never fly again. /RantOff

There’s lots of factors that can determine the brightness of any given space thing. Solar panels are actually very reflective (that’s why the ISS is so bright), but the rest of Dragon is also rather reflective being white. Other satellites might have big solar arrays, too, making them more visible. Even some antennas can do that, like the old Iridium satellites that could flare brighter than the ISS, but only for a moment, if the sun hit the antenna just so from where you’re observing.

Set an alarm. Download ALL! THE! APPS! Once you’ve seen it you’ll wonder how you ever missed it before, sucker is bright.

So, basically, SLS? Have you never seen the ISS? I wonder if we might see more "goofy" stuff like this as boosters start reaching a hard wall EOL? Like, they need to dispose of it anyway, might as well give it a Viking funeral vs scrapping it. Probably cheaper, too.

From what I’ve gleaned it’s just a transfer between main and header tanks. Little to no change to vehicle, plumbing’s already there (to fill header in the first place), zero additional risk to mission.