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Skylon

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1 hour 30 minutes.

More details: https://orbitaltoday.com/2025/03/30/next-private-spacex-mission-to-push-human-orbit-limits-like-never-before/

For the Fram2 polar spaceflight, astronaut & filmmaker Jannike Mikkelsen will use a reMarkable Paper Pro tablet, O2XR previs, RED V-Raptor 8K cameras, Canon R5C cameras, and a range of Canon RF lenses.

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Weather front is moving away to the East. Prop load started.

Showing off a portable X-ray plus digital X-ray plate that'll be used in-flight.

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3 minutes!

Lightning in background makes this dramatic.

Liftoff, MaxQ and MVac chill.

Stage2 ignition and nominal trajectory

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6 hours ago, Spaceception said:

Flight 9 is the comeback mission. A reused booster, and a fixed Block 2 ship. Trust.

\o/

  Reveal hidden contents

Also, I'm not going crazy, that's supposed to be raised hands, right? If I try looking it up I only get actual emojis as results

 

What's the status of the next ship, do we know which one it will be? I've heard discussion about whether the current vehicles can be modified if it is a design flaw causing the failures.

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25 minutes ago, Minmus Taster said:

What's the status of the next ship, do we know which one it will be? I've heard discussion about whether the current vehicles can be modified if it is a design flaw causing the failures.

I think they're going ahead with modifications, since Ship 35 was tested last month (had to look it up). But I don't know if they've done a big test, like they did for flight 8 with that long static fire which was supposed to fix flight 7's problems.

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1 hour ago, Spaceception said:

I think they're going ahead with modifications, since Ship 35 was tested last month (had to look it up). But I don't know if they've done a big test, like they did for flight 8 with that long static fire which was supposed to fix flight 7's problems.

You'd probably have to slice the ship in half to get to the downcomers, maybe not a difficult procedure, but a time consuming one. Yet they still seem to be talking about a launch soon?

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 Zubrin thinks SpaceX could succeed at a manned Mars mission, but Elon’s recent statement of a manned mission by 2028 is overly optimistic.

Interestingly, he says if Elons fails it would be for the reason I suggested: hubris.

 Bob Clark

Edited by Exoscientist
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2 hours ago, Exoscientist said:

 Zubrin thinks SpaceX could succeed at a manned Mars mission, but Elon’s recent statement of a manned mission by 2028 is overly optimistic.

Interestingly, he says if Elons fails it would be for the reason I suggested: hubris.

Nah, it would be because 2028 is (was?) an aspirational goal that is supposed to inspire people and make them work faster. Not a realistic deadline.

Whether that is actually a good thing or not is certainly up for debate though. That was more or less what the Soviets tried to do in the 60s. The government would frequently set absurd deadlines that the engineers were well aware could never be met, but they had to work towards anyways. In 1966, just a year after Korolyov's design bureau had been awarded the task of building the lunar flyby ship, the government was already telling them they had to be ready to launch a crewed mission in 1967. Also in 1966, the government informed them that a crewed lunar landing was to be achieved by the end of 1968... despite the N1 having been formally approved only in 1965. Meanwhile the Americans had a three year head start on the Saturn V and were still unconfident they could get a man on the Moon in '68 ('68 was the original American goal, it only slipped to '69 after Apollo 1).

This kind of atmosphere has the possibility to produce mishaps and accidents. Soyuz 7K-OK was expected to begin flying automated orbital missions in Q1 1966, but didn't do so until Q4 1966. Pressure to meet the unrealistic deadlines set by the government are cited as one of the primary contributors to the Soyuz-1 accident, as this forced them to do a highly compressed testing schedule of various components and the whole craft. Had they had more time to test things, the Soyuz-1 accident might have been prevented.

There's a bandwidth with these things, of course. The Apollo program's goal of landing a man on the Moon before 1970 was certainly an aspirational goal, and yet it was completed without any accidents induced by the timeline itself (Apollo 1 was contractor malpractice, Apollo 13 was a pure production defect).

That goal gave itself nearly a decade to allow its completion though. Setting a goal only 2-3 years in the future is much more extreme. Personally I can't imagine how a deadline like that is supposed to be inspirational. SpaceX employees are some of the world's most talented aerospace engineers, and it's difficult to believe such smart people would so easily rely on delusion for motivation.

Spoiler

Unless it's like a toxic spite thing for evil Old Space who destroyed their dreams of a swashbuckling post-Apollo human space program, or something like that. I can see that allowing an individual to justify absurd goals and actually extract motivation from them.

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It's impossible to take a 2028 crewed mission date seriously and no tears will be shed when it's missed.

They might possibly still launch an uncrewed flyby that year. It's possible Zubrin is being disingenuous by conflating those.

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