They're the first to go for a reentry license through Part 450, which was supposed to streamline the process. Hopefully Varda has the funding to ride out these regulatory hurdles.
I'm pretty excited for Neutron, but I'm more excited for Stoke.
I love Neutron's attached fairing to make reuse easier. It's also awesome to see such an ambitious carbon fiber project. The 2nd stage isn't reusable, though, so I'm guessing they'll be competing for 2nd place, at the top of the "not SpaceX" market.
Everything about the Stoke upper stage makes me happy. SpaceX did some work on Falcon 9 2nd stage reuse, but this is like if they hit a bong first then merged that with Starship development. It's so damn cool. AND meant to be fully reusable.
Hopefully they can get get to a root cause, corrective actions, and return to flight pretty soon. They had a good launch success streak going and were hitting a pretty solid launch cadence, so this really stinks. Electron has been the best (practically the only?) smallsat launcher, and I'm looking forward to their bigger Neutron rocket, so I wish them the best.
Their stock dropping 20% this morning really reinforces my dislike for the stock market.
Stoke is one of my favorite new space companies. I love their giant capsule aerospike 2nd stage thing. This is my favorite among the different concepts for fully reusable rockets. Starship will kill people of a heart attack if the impact doesn't get them. Blue... I'll comment if they ever do anything. But a capsule? I'm here for a giant capsule.
You can filter here to show the SpaceX group, which is a whole bunch of Falcon 2nd stages. It isn't like anyone else puts effort in to deorbiting their 2nd stages, SpaceX just launches the most.
They also dump Dragon 2 trunks and used to dump some Starlink deployment hardware (which I think is now attached to the 2nd stages), but those two examples are in such low orbit that they don't last long.
How is a fixed price launch contract for SpaceX that different from a cost plus contract for Boeing to build an SLS as far as money going back to the economy? I genuinely don't get how those are meaningfully different.
How does the public domain technology actually matter, other than from an idealistic standpoint? NASA is even spinning off SLS production and management to be more private under EPOC to Deep Space Transport (Boeing+NG). They, along with Aerojet, basically get these sole-sourced, partially because of their non-public IP for making this stuff.
We'll get to see the full list at some point, right?
Going off this snippet:
Corrective actions include redesigns of vehicle hardware to prevent leaks and fires, redesign of the launch pad to increase its robustness, incorporation of additional reviews in the design process, additional analysis and testing of safety critical systems and components including the Autonomous Flight Safety System, and the application of additional change control practices," the FAA said.
I'm curious how many of the changes were already works in progress but not quite ready for the first flight (like the showerhead).
Thank you for writing this response. My general thoughts on hydrogen for rocketry have been that it doesn't seem worth the trouble (temps, leaks, storage, etc), but I hadn't considered the environmental or future angles. I'm not convinced that it's the right choice now, but thanks for giving me something to think about.
I dunno about this take in this case. Most of the US CLPS landers are launching on Falcons. Literally all but 1 so far. PPE/HALO will launch on a Falcon Heavy. Gateway Logistics will launch on Falcons. The HLS options will launch on Starship and New Glenn. SLS will never fly a commercial flight, and Northrop is already getting big ICBM contracts.
I get that SLS and Orion have insane congressional approval. And keep getting overfunded because of it. And a lot of that money would go away without them. And there's a lot of interesting development in HLS and CLPS that wouldn't exist without them. But it still just stinks to see how expensive SLS is and that there's basically nothing that can or will be done about it.
It'll definitely help develop technology that'll be useful for outer solar system missions.
It doesn't make sense as a stop between the Earth and Mars. You have to slow down to enter orbit, then speed back up to leave it. That's a waste of fuel unless there's a good reason to stop there, like for fueling or assembly, but it makes more sense to do that in Earth orbit using distributed life.
And don't forget the Japanese Hakuto-R crashing last December. And we'll start finding out soon if the new batch of American CLPS landers will work.
As far as why - I have no idea why there are so many all of the sudden. For some reason the US and China are working on crewed moon landing programs and making a platoon of non-crewed landers to go with them. And for some reason Japan, India, and Israel all want in? And Russia wants to try to be relevant? I don't get why, or why now, but at least it's exciting.
I think we're in violent agreement that just sorta looks like an argument.
I'll acknowledge that I have a privileged position where I can vote with my dollar for this kind of thing.
This is a similar discussion for electric vehicles and transit. It isn't the fault of the person in a 20 year old rusted out Civic that they're burning gas, because their neighborhood doesn't have a bus and why the heck would they pay for an EV and they just have to get to work.
They're the first to go for a reentry license through Part 450, which was supposed to streamline the process. Hopefully Varda has the funding to ride out these regulatory hurdles.