StrandedonEarth

I want!

Rich country: one family shares a Starlink terminal. Poor country: entire village shares one Starlink terminal. Still a huge step up for that village, which previously had no internet whatsoever. They need to add a bonus offer “Buy 1/5/10kW of Tesla Solar + PowerWall and receive a Starlink terminal absolutely free!!** ** subscription charges apply”

Meanwhile, back aboard Percy...

Any tweaking the shape (cylinder vs ????) for a slightly lower terminal velocity would not be worth losing the simplicity of cranking out cylindrical shapes. Anything else adds complexity/cost/mass/time

Yeah, it looked to me like it dropped quickly at first then slowed its RoD

That doesn't inspire a lot of confidence in New Glenn flying regularly anytime soon.

Have you read Liftoff! by Eric Berger yet? I just finished it; it was a good read. Interesting tidbit from the book: In the early days of Merlin development, they had to make that choice between ablative and regenerative cooling. Despite already wanting to re-use rockets eventually, Mueller and Musk decided regenerative would have too many headaches early on when they needed to get the engine working. So they decided to go ablative at first, which proved to have its own set of headaches, adding weight and robbing performance. So Merlin and Merlin 1A were ablative, and Merlin 1B was abandoned when work on the regeneratively-cooled Merlin 1C proved to be surprisingly straightforward and problem-free. They would have saved a lot of problems and headaches if they had started going regenerative from the beginning.

Something like the Dynetics system will eventually be needed for the low ladder height, although it may take a few more iterations. Completely modular would be the way to go. Swappable and refillable tanks, along with a detachable central cargo/crew module. Land, detach, refuel, lift back to orbit for the next run skyctane style

As I recall, a Starship could SSTO but not land, any payload would depend on what the final dry mass of the craft turns out to be. And who knows how much mass will be added by equipping the shell for mid-term human missions. I'm really curious about how that skin stands up to MMOD.

I’d like to think it’s to give Congress a wake up call of the “bucket of water” sort. You want your buddies to get contracts? Then buck up!

Docking? More like “swallowed by”

Yup, my kerbals land like this all the time.

One of the K-6 kids my wife works with trotted out the classic “That’s what she said!” line, in the proper (improper?) context too. So now that line has had a bit of a revival in our house... E: for instance:

I have to admit that General Atomics is a great name. It just smacks of pure 50's sci-fi. It would be awesome for that name to be a major player in space, up there with NASA, ULA, SpX, BO, NG, etc...

Crane is my favorite brand of plumbing fixtures; it seems every house I lived in had "Crane" stamped on all the fixtures. Now they're owned by American Standard, so I guess that makes them my favorite Crane manufacturer. And there's also Crane Supply...

From looking at this, I start to wonder if they want to do some sort of structural testing with the forward flap actuators, to better understand the dynamics and verify simulations/calculations, including checking for fatigue?

But if it’s Dirk Pitttm it would only appear that way. But he miraculously found a way to ride the crippled craft down to the ground, half suffocated, half frozen, and half toasted

Is this an Imperimetric unit? Standard Imperial What they really need is some sort of extra air brake near the nose to pull the nose up. Skipping the wild sloshing of the flip burn maneuver.

Pure conjecture here, but there may be another reason for the 9m GSE tanks: to reduce the physical footprint I don’t know how much prepared land they have, or what kind of foundation those 100 kilogallon tanks need, but a vertical 9m 400 kgallon would have a much smaller footprint than four skinny 100 kgallon tanks, not to mention plumbing them altogether would be simpler (not a big issue, I’m sure, but still). Sure, Starbase is surrounded by empty land, but it needs to be preloaded to support any significant weight, and that takes time (a year at least, IIRC) So if they’re running low on preloaded land, they may have gone this route to save space. Commercial suppliers would have charged through the nose for custom tanks of that size, and probably have to retool. Then there’s shipping (or barging) on top. So while it may have been cheaper to buy enough 100kgal tanks, it’s almost certainly cheaper to build their own 400kgal tanks, and they take up less space! Sure, they had to buy stock tanks to get going while the factory was getting set up and proofed. But now that they can build their own, why not? Again, pure conjecture about a possible reason, even if not directly cheaper then COTS. Definitely cheaper than preloading more land... And remember, commercial suppliers expect to make a profit unless dumping excess stock. SpaceX does not need to profit on tanks.

As I understand it, they landed in the outflow from one of those channels

Ms. Tree and Ms. Chief have given up the chase and are headed for other waters. Hey, at least they tried, but it seems catching them was trickier than expected and fishing them out of the sea is good enough.