I wonder what flight will get the first Starlink sats. It seems like they have plenty of ships without payloads doors, but could probably start sending them up in flight 3 or 4.
I love their rover concept. That's also a lot more customer money than I expected. From a risk standpoint, startups paying startups probably isn't ideal? Hopefully enough of them make it to launch, Astrolab gets some NASA contracts, and they can start to become a sustainable little business.
As an aside, if this rover is going up at the same time as Artemis 3 in 2026, it's frustrating that NASA isn't flexible enough to use the crew variant until Artemis 5 in 2030. Give 4 more toys! Part of what bugs me with the Artemis timeline is how infrequent the launches will be and how slowly it climbs the tech tree.
If the 1st stage failure was from fuel slosh and/or water hammer, that doesn't seem related to the hot staging. Unless that caused a different flight profile around stage sep that increased loads?
If the 2nd stage failure started as a LOX leak, hopefully they had onboard cameras that show the source and help find a root cause.
I ended up in a YouTube rebroadcast of the Twitter stream. I couldn't figure out if the glitchiness was from the rebroadcast or natively from Twitter...
People dislike him for a lot of different reasons. One has been his disregard for workers' rights and safety. Another is his twitter posts/retweets/memes that put down or spread misinfo about different disadvantaged groups or minorities. His political views are... what you'd expect for someone who posts that, which most people aren't cool with. His influence over Starlink and terminals not working for the Ukrainian army in Crimea was a mess. When those kids were trapped in an underwater cave and some divers decided not to use his improvised mini-sub, he called one a pedo. He has had sexual harassment allegations. Etc etc.
Basically, he went from the quirky awkward rich guy making cars and rockets to a really annoying public figure with too much influence, some rough opinions, and no one telling him no.
(I'm a SpaceX fan and wish he would delete all social media, shut up, and focus. You know, like most CEOs of giant companies.)
My tv doesn't have a Twitter app and I'm too lazy and tired to get off the couch to turn on my computer, so I guess I'll stick with unofficial Youtube streams for now.
The mass to orbit isn't the hard part. A reusable Falcon 9 can put 18,400 kg in low Earth orbit. That should cover two rods, plus hardware to hold and deploy them.
Redwire will be launching microgravity research payloads focused on pharmaceutical drug development and regenerative medicine, including an experiment in bioprinting cardiac tissue.
Neat
Hopefully between Redwire, Varda, and others, there can be some commercially viable and medically helpful technologies developed and deployed in LEO. I really want the market to grow beyond defense, research, and tourism.
What in the world are those depot proportions