Brotoro

That was something like the vision that popped into my mind when I first heard about this. They are going to need the equivalent of a giant robot arm mounted on the tower that can move fast, reach in or out, left or right, and position a position a C-shaped 'hand' under the grid fins. What big structures do we have that can move fast like that?

This isn't a question, but here's a picture I took today of the Jupiter/Saturn conjunction. The picture of the Moon is taken today at the same scale. Taken through 127mm Maksutov-Cassegrain telescope, 17mm eyepiece, iPhone 11 focal setup. *afocal setup

So... The cloud that gets kicked up by a landing booster... How much of that is just loose material that has accumulated on the pad, how much of it is material eroded off of the pad surface by the exhaust blast, and how much of it is particulates that form from the exhaust when it interacts with the pad surface? Anybody know?

That was a nice launch/landing video. I don't mind at all that they don't cover the payload heading to orbit, since we get more shots of the booster. It was interesting to see the two shots during the boostback burn, since the shot out the front of the booster showed that it was pointed toward the ground, which makes sense, but which I'd never gotten a feel for before. And RTLS is always great for better coverage. Not too much dust obscuration on the landing pad made for a beautiful landing sequence. I approve.

Scrubbed.

The flight of Starship SN8 inspired me to make a 3D-printed 1/100 scale Starship. So far I have the airframe printed (and currently held together with tape), and I haven't built the internals yet (other than the centering rings) that will allow it to fly. It will need a considerable amount of nose weight and the addition of at least one clear acrylic fin to make it stable. I put it on my shelf of mostly 1/100 scale models for comparison. The Starship is 90 mm in diameter (3.54 inches), while the 1/100 scale Saturn V behind it is 100 mm in diameter.

Huzzah! Go job, CNSA.

And... Did they recover it?

Did they have to dump propellant before landing, or can SoaceShipTwo land with a full load of prop on board?

Hopefully they recovered it.

Thank you. This mission certainly has been exciting in the same way the the Apollo moon missions were exciting, with stuff happening quickly (compared to the slow pace of interplanetary missions we are used to nowadays).

Do we know when Chang'e 5 is scheduled to boost back toward Earth?

The ascent profile wasn't at all like I was expecting to see, so it sure had me wondering at the time. I expected a jump up to 12.5 klicks, then a transition to belly flop for a vertical descent. Instead it did that long slide off to the side, where it seemed to be translating quite a way. After the sequential shutdowns of the engines (which I hadn't expected, and which look pretty violent as unburned propellant makes flames all over the place, and the engines gimbal hard and fast to handle the transients and park the other nozzle out of the way), I thought, "Aw, hell, they've lost two engines, so it isn't going to be able to do a safe landing... so they must be translating out over the water to ditch it into the gulf." So I was expecting to see the remaking engine gamely try to perform the flip-around before seeing it splash in the water. In those close shots of the tracking cameras, you don't have a good sense of where the ship is relative to the landing pad.

I was rewatching the video. Stuff that looked bad when I watched it live look cool now. When the engines get turned off, there's lots of activity, but the engine appears to smartly lock itself out at full gimbal to get out of the way of the other engines. Much better than the "uh, oh! Engine failure!" That I was thinking at the time.

Liftoff? Check! Controlled ascent? Check! Transition to skydive? Check! Stable and controlled skydive. Check! Restart engines (I presume from header tanks). Check! Kick around maneuver? CHECK!! (And I was out of my seat screaming) Targeted landing pad? CHECK!! Landed nose up? CHECK!! Successful landing? Needs improvement.

Watching replay. They had two engines firing on the landing. Did it crash because they needed all three?

THAT WAS SO COOL!

Nice kick around.

Blammo!

Niiiiiice

Belly flop?

Engine out?

Stay on target! Stay on target!

So slow!

I like the duct-taped look of the propellant lines. Very Kerbal.