PakledHostage

Yes, that's what I was referencing when I called it that in that video. I guess it is a fairly obvious reference, but I did use it already 11 years ago.

Just as an aside: Watching EveryDayAstronaut's interview with Elon Musk yesterday where he mentions the "Pez" satellite deployment system, did they get that name from my "Figaro" KSP GNSS mod? I made this video 11 years ago: Would be kind of cool if that was the case.

@farmerben, I think Darth is referring to the plug being pulled on KSP2 development. Presumably funding to keep these forums running is tied to somebody's revenues from selling KSP so I too am concerned that, one day, I'll go to check what's new on here and find it's been shut down. But all good things do eventually come to an end. And it has been a good community to participate in. I have been a member since 2011, in the early days of KSP1. I've learned a lot in that time. A stand-out memory is when the Chelyabinsk meteor happened. News of the event was posted on here within seconds of it happening. Over the ensuing hours, information trickled in about how significant it was. By the morning my time, the media was hauling experts from the local planetarium out of bed for interviews and I already knew, listening to the interviews, that those experts were wrong. This forum had it's finger right on the pulse. It was amazing.

There are 5 overseas administrative regions, of which French Guyana is one. According to Wikipedia: Also, I recall that the American justification for funding the Russian space program was to keep the people involved in that program employed in peaceful pursuits after the fall of the Soviet Union, rather than having them all scatter to work for other enemy weapons programs.

This does seem odd. Something is missing from the story.

Those grid fins did seem to be working really hard yesterday morning. I briefly tensed up thinking it was going to lose control again. It recovered, but I wonder how close it was to failure? You'd think they'll want to be able to stay more in the middle of the "controlabilty corridor" before they try a catch?

I was thinking the same thing. I had never heard of either SX300 Inconel or SX300 stainless steel. I assume that they are both proprietary SpaceX alloys, judging by the "SX" prefix. According to the Wikipedia article where SX300 Inconel is mentioned, that alloy is used in SpaceX engines. I guess it is possible that they have a SX300 stainless alloy that shares a name with their Inconel alloy... despite the confusing nomenclature, it would make some sense under these circumstances.

I speculated about Inconel 718, not because I was confusing it with any stainless steel alloy, but because it is extremely strong at high temperatures. I didn't realize that SX300 is also a nickel alloy. Odd that they repeatedly refer to Starship being made out of stainless steel, and even Elon refers to the alloy as SX300 stainless steel in his tweet. As @mikegarrison points out, nickel alloys aren't steel (stainless or otherwise).

Interesting that he mentions "SX300" stainless steel. I assume that's a proprietary SpaceX variant of a 300 series stainless steel? I wonder how that alloy stacks up against something like Inconel 718?

Sure. But that doesn't explain why Starship's re-entry seemed so much longer and with less deceleration than shuttle's, since they both use tiles. The tiles work to insulate as well as radiate. Longer exposure means more heat manages to permeate that insulation. As I wrote above, I wonder to what degree the re-entry was nominal?

So I did a rough (very rough) integration of the speed vs. time plot on the previous page by counting squares. From first plasma to splash down is about 5300 km. That seems long? My knowledge of Space Shuttle re-entry comes from playing Orbiter, but the Shuttle re-entered over a shorter distance than that by on the order of 1000+ km. Could that have been a factor in the various burn throughs? (As EveryDayAstronaut pointed out, it looked from the glow like something outside the camera's field of view was on fire on Starship before the landing burn started.) The longer exposure to that re-entry plasma would have given more time for heat to permeate the structure. As @Minmus Taster pointed out in a post a few pages back, it spent a long time at 68 km altitude and the deceleration wasn't as aggressive as I'd have expected? Was the re-entry trajectory nominal?

It wasn't a straw man, it was hyperbole. You asked: I was trying to point out that there's more to it than that. Inspiration took some civilians to orbit and let them float around for a couple of days. It's a big leap from there to doing on-orbit repairs while on EVA. To suggest otherwise is to overestimate competencies or underestimate difficulties (i.e. Dunning-Kruger effect).

So what are you suggesting? Send up some gum chewing, cap on backwards guys named Chad because the computer can fly now? Sure, some tourists have gone to orbit, but they only did so after extensive training and (to my knowledge) none of them has done an EVA, let alone done on orbit repair work. This sounds like a Dunning-Kruger effect case study in the making.

CSI Space has an interesting new video about the interstage ring, and the plan to jettison it on IFT-4:

@SunlitZelkova Thanks for the succinct and and knowledgeable response.

Looking for some validation here: I was given some free tickets to a sports game today so I took my son. It's not something that I would normally be interested in and I haven't done it very often in my handful of decades, but I found the tribalism odd and the spectacle rather... boring. I'd much rather watch a rocket launch (I once flew to Florida just to see a shuttle launch). Is something wrong with me? What don't I get that these thousands of others seem to?

Sure. But Musk himself said in his tweet that it's a significant problem that they are working hard to overcome. Stating that doesn't mean "predictions of failure" and betting against SpaceX is probably not a good choice, but you also can't brush it aside as just an engineering problem. At every turn, they are finding that they need to add mass to the stack, which eats directly into the payload. Those straws all add up after a while. They need some breakthroughs.

Off topic, but we named a lab at my work "Labby McLabface".

EveryDayAstronaut (Tim Dodd) has been selected to fly aboard Starship on the DearMoon mission. I wonder how Musk's admission about the heat shield tiles makes him feel? A single point of failure with no abort modes and that (by Musk's own admission) would likely lead to loss of the vehicle is pretty serious. And while we all understand that space is hard, the criticisms leveled against Shuttle should apply equally to Starship.

Interesting hint at an interview with EveryDayAstronaut next week in Musk's tweet. Will have to keep an eye out for that.

It's possibly still too political for this forum, even over 75 years later, but the bombing of Dresden during WWII is claimed to have intentionally been designed to create a firestorm that would burn off all the oxygen and asphyxiate as many people as possible. The facts support that a large percentage of the approximately 25 000 civilian deaths were due to asphyxiation, so it seems to have worked.

Fair enough, but there's a lot of historical context associated with the original usage of that phrase that doesn't apply here, and that's what makes using it pretentious.

Just happened to look at this thread about 20 seconds before ignition. It's kind of cringe inducing. "Astronauts" going to "space"... yeah whatever. More like some rich [diminutive of Richard]s going on a glorified carnival ride in a rocket that looks like a [diminutive of Richard]. I mean "Let’s light this candle"? Give me a break... Using a phrase of that historical significance for this flight is super pretentious.

New desktop wallpaper for my phone, methinks.

I agree it's a click-baity title, but he's a well known and not bad pop science channel. Edit @Superfluous J: I just took the time to watch it (I was somewhere noisy earlier when I posted the link) and it's as expected. About 14 minutes long, well presented and informative. I didn't see a single ad (and I don't have YouTube Prime, or whatever that's called). Maybe give him a chance, rather than judge the book by the cover (so to speak)?