burble @ burble @lemmy.dbzer0.com

Posts

10

Comments

282

Joined

2 yr. ago

Moderating

---

And there are at least a handful more scheduled:

• Ax-4
• ISS private mission 5
• ISS private mission 6
• Haven-1
• Polaris-2 (?)

Agreed, I was surprised they were going for a booster reuse at this point. I guess it makes sense that they're better at the booster than the shop given Falcon heritage.

Ship catch, tower readiness aside, seems like a hell of a time to permit.

This has quietly been the 6th private Dragon flight. The Dragon program has been such a big win for NASA and spaceflight.

I feel like every year since 2020 has been "the year" that competitors are finally supposed to show up. Vulcan and New Glenn have at least finally launched now, but it'll take them years to ramp up to the point of actually being competition to Falcon.

Booster reflight is so hype. Working through stage separation will be huge for the program. Pulling off a good soft splashdown would be phenomenal.

It's cool to see another first, the first polar mission. This builds on the firsts of Inspiration4, Polaris Dawn, and Axiom 1. Vast 1 (next year, hopefully) will be another great first for Dragon.

I'm not excusing the email server, but this is absolutely worse. Planning an operation like this on unsecured phones in an app that won't leave a paper trail and accidentally leaving an uncleared person in the chat... Holy fuck

SpaceX's Starship contracts with NASA are fixed price and milestone based. So, if they blow it up, that cost is on them. Just like Boeing has had to shell out a lot of money from continuing to fail on Starliner.

I'm pretty disappointed in the last two, but the failures were both ship v2 that completely redid the plumbing. But yeah, you'd think they'd be doing better by now.

and achieved a navigation fix

I set low expectations when I saw the headline, but that means they saw at least 4 GNSS sats at once, which is pretty big step forward.

Most of your warmth should come from a more insulated sleeping bag and pad. And/or doubling them up. Assume the tent is mostly just a wind break unless you're going down the hot tent route with a stove or heater.

There are winter tents with less mesh (to keep blown snow out) and stronger flies and poles for snow and wind, but 3 season tents can do a lot if you don't want to camp in a blizzard (I don't).

Maarva got it, too

Well that isn't fully and rapidly reusable. Goddamn. I was starting to feel better about booster reuse soon. Maybe that's still the case, but, man, what the hell is this.

Transporters are so much fun.

I love seeing the infrastructure companies make progress, like the tugs (2 from DeOrbit, 1 from Impulse) and return capsules from Varda and Inversion.

It's also cool to see these lower launch costs and increased accessibility, like for Pixxel's Indian hyperspectral sats and SatRev's non-Earth imaging.

The Mark Rober sat... I'm not the target audience, but, hey, maybe that'll inspire some kids.

That's awesome news. I guess Astrobotic set a great example.

Hopefully the lander teams share some photos before TLI and keep us updated! It'll be awhile before either lands. Like, months.

Look up Stoke Space. Their concept is like having a giant capsule as a second stage. They still have a lot of work to do, but it's very different from Starship and has had some promising engine tests so far.

Hopefully all goes well! I wonder if they'll try for a full booster reuse this year.

Zooming out to look at the competition, there should be some big milestones across the industry in 2025. They're still mostly skating to where the puck is, not where it's going, though.

For rockets, New Glenn and Neutron should have first launches, and we'll see what progress Stoke makes this year.

For spacecraft, Dreamchaser cargo, and the Blue Origin Mark 1, Firefly Blue Ghost, and Astrobotic Griffin uncrewed lunar landers should all have first flights.

For comms sats, Amazon really needs to start launching Kuipers. The SDA PWSA constellation should also start launching their next tranches soon from a handful of manufacturers. We'll see if any of them are able to start to catch up to Starlink/Starshield (doubt).

Lots to see here!

The Raptor reuse is great. All the heat shield experiments are interesting. And more prep for ship catches!