burble @ burble @lemmy.dbzer0.com

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283

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2 yr. ago

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Now I'm dizzy in a fresh and new way. That's a lot of ship to RCS.

Imagine what else he could be spending his time and money on, and, by comparison, big cheap rockets and global internet are pretty nice

Tim Dodd did a writeup comparing rockets to the airline industry

https://everydayastronaut.com/rocket-pollution/

It would be cool to have a spiritual successor to the Delta IV Heavy that's all hydrolox with no SRBs. I guess I want an H3 Heavy?

Transporters are my favorite launches. Seeing the pictures and reading about all the payloads, countries, and companies is inspirational.

Go MethaneSat. I'm looking forward to hearing more about the D-SAIL drag membranes. Loft's YAM-6 is a weird concept to me (rent a sat?) but good on them for trying it. I hope we hear more about True Anomaly's proximity operations. Good luck to the new tugs, hyperspectral imagers, and space domain awareness payloads.

Yeah, that's gotta be it.

NASA paid for it, and ITAR restrictions mean they're probably pretty dang American.

Yeah, they don't necessarily need to expect it to work, but they should prepare for it.

They were already trying to ruin it with Tidal exclusive albums

I switched to AntennaPod for podcasts because of this. It's also just a better experience - it auto downloads new episodes and deletes them after playing.

IM-1 mission Nova-C class lunar lander has launched on SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket and successfully commissioned in space by establishing a stable attitude, solar charging, and radio communications contact with the Company’s mission operations center in Houston.

Off to a good start!

Via https://www.intuitivemachines.com/post/im-1-mission-nova-c-lunar-lander-successfully-enroute-to-the-moon-following-its-launch-on-spacex-s-f

I don't think many people appreciate how insane 55 satellites per week is.

I was thinking in terms of payloads to different orbits, but you're right that the Blue Moon HLS architecture is now a lot closer to the Starship one.

Hmm? New Glenn and Vulcan compete with Falcon, not Starship, and the Raptors looked great on IFT-2.

I don't think this is true anymore. The cost of a rideshare with SpaceX is super accessible. Companies can launch for <$1 million. This has been huge for a lot of companies trying to launch a proof of concept or one-off, and even for some operational constellations.

AstroForge thinks they can close the business case for asteroid mining. Their concept is to launch mining satellites to near-Earth M-type asteroids to mine platinum group metals. These would go on 2 year missions to bring back $100 million+ in metal at a time. With launch and satellite costs dropping, it might just work. Their forge demo sat has been struggling but moving forward. Their asteroid flyby demo sat should launch later this year.

Redwire 3d printed a meniscus in space last year. That'll take awhile to get worthwhile scale and cost, but it's another interesting avenue.

Varda hit regulatory trouble, but their orbital drug manufacturing demo did its job.

There are pictures of some of the Transporter payload stacks online (7, 8, 9...). Estimating mass is tough, but ballparking it, my guess is that they're at least breaking even on most of these.

I found an old version of the RPUG online. They allow 450ish kg for ESPA and 825ish kg for ESPA Grande. That's $2.7m and $4.95m. Granted, I'm sure nobody is maxing out that mass, but even if you halve those prices and start counting sats by size on the Transporter stacks, you can get past $25m pretty quickly on most.

Even if they lose money on some, I'd argue that they're investing in expanding the market.

What SpaceX rideshares are enabling in the smallsat industry is pretty incredible. It doesn't really bother me that too many people invested in rockets that they shouldn't have. Launch is flashy, but they made bad investments.

For launch companies who don't have any differentiation, what's the point? Phantom, Vaya, Astra... even ABL and Relativity don't make much sense to me, but they're well funded. European companies like Isar, RFA, Skyrora, Orbex, Maia, and PLD want to be the new strategic domestic launch providers, but there are too many of them.

Rocket Lab is diversifying well. Firefly has a bit more than launch going on. Stoke has a crazy reuse idea.

Many more will follow Virgin Orbit into bankruptcy. I'm surprised they haven't already.

That was mostly from a past group that basically disbanded. The more recent campaigns I've played and DMed in figure out characters together and roll stats in-person during a session 0.

I don't necessarily want to kill all of them, but, you know, putting a metagaming mage in an antimagic field, a min/maxed flyer in a little cave, no flanking plus some poisoning to reduce sneak attacks...

I'm just done with people showing up with "broken builds" they found online and totally legit stat blocks that they definitely rolled.

It also delayed the Ax-3 crew return