Fly safe, Stoke. Starship needs some legit competition. This design is so much fun, and I feel like it might be safer than Starship, at least conceptually for the entry/descent/landing. I'm rooting hard for this project.
This kind of post would have stayed up on the SpaceXLounge subreddit as relevant competitor news, so I'm ok with it here.
Fwiw, I didn't even know there was a Shitjustworks spaceflight community until now. Of the general space communities, the Beehaw one seems the most active, but that isn't saying much. The Kbin one gets plenty of posts, but not many comments. So, here we are, lol.
Another counterpoint against the "split up the SpaceX monopoly" argument. They'll have launched almost every telecom competitor in the market- OneWeb, Iridium, AST, Telesat, Viasat...
Plus they still have launches booked with ULA in case the Falcons get grounded. There's also a wave of companies trying to mimic SpaceX's reuse success- Rocket Lab, Relativity, Stoke. It seems pretty great for the Air Force/DoD/three letter agencies.
Yup, low earth orbit (LEO) still has some thin atmosphere that slows things down a tiny bit and makes them deorbit over time. That's why, for example, the ISS has to reboost to stay up and can chuck garbage bags overboard and not really worry about them. The deorbit time depends on a lot of factors including the mass and surface area. Starlink sats are supposed to passively deorbit in about 5 years.
Seriously, the Starlink and Falcon 9 production is unlike anything else. Amazon and China will try to copy it, but it'll take them way more time and money.
Yeah, it basically punched a hole in the side but that didn't really do anything?
They qualified a new FTS system, and some of that testing showed up on the streams, so it sounds like this issue is already closed out. They approved the first FTS, too, though...
That's spicy. It makes sense, though. How long have the Kuiper demo sats been delayed now? And how much does anyone trust that a bunch of new rockets and the last handful of Atlas Vs can roll these out on a useful timeline?
"We have more fairings than we have space," Dontchev said. "Fairings are a thing we don't even come close to talking about when it's time for launch. They're always ready, no problem."
Other rocket companies have some serious work to do to try to catch up on reuse.
It's pretty incredible to look at the build and launch sites back then vs now. None of the predicted program timelines were close to right, but the progress is still really impressive.
I'm actually kind of shocked by how useless and jokey most the comments are on that reddit post. Did the main sub change policies at some point? That seems worse than an old lounge thread.
Fly safe, Stoke. Starship needs some legit competition. This design is so much fun, and I feel like it might be safer than Starship, at least conceptually for the entry/descent/landing. I'm rooting hard for this project.