NSF’s Alex opined on this 10 hours ago, from 08:53 to 08:56 CDT.

Ship Forte now has Ship Forty https://youtu.be/GTIaZaDn-84

If they send the ship to orbit, I wonder where they’ll de-orbit it, given that it won’t be RTLS. Perhaps:

• in their ‘usual’ place for soft splashdowns, west of Australia
• in the Gulf of Mexico
• Pacific, west of California
• Pacific, the cemetery
• near the planned path of Forte, timed so that she can just pick up Ship 41 the day after its splashdown. Strap it alongside Ship 40, and take them both to SpaceX at the same time.

P.S. The sidebar links here but I can’t access that. Would this be better? (I’m not very familiar with the technology or etiquette of Lemmy.)

NASA’s “Space to Ground” videos are nice. (All 573 of them!)

But Varda takes the concept of a ‘space to ground video’ a little more literally. And I love them for it!

If SpaceX eats their core business, I hope they pivot to just sending cameras on all sorts of exciting journeys around the solar system!

So in the time that this single Falcon 9 first stage has flown and landed 35 times, its competitor company [ULA] has made 29 total launches. Put another way, this rocket has put more mass into orbit than more than two dozen expendable rockets over half a decade of effort.

This paragraph feels like bullying :)

The Mark 1 lander is powered by the BE-7 engine, which runs on liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen. There may be compatibility issues related to the Falcon rocket’s kerosene-powered upper stage, although this has not been confirmed. Also, it is unlikely that Blue Origin would partner with a direct rival, SpaceX, in this manner.

Note: This article has been edited to clarify interoperability issues between the Blue Moon Mark 1 lander and the Falcon Heavy rocket.

I don’t think the edit did a very good job of clarifying the nature of the “compatibility issues”! Is there any general reason that a hydrolox payload can’t be delivered by a kerolox upper stage?

I believe the specific concern here comes from a rumour that this particular payload (the Blue Moon Mark 1 lander) is designed to be topped up with hydrogen from the New Glenn second stage. (I think this rumour was in the original version of the article.)

Could there be a solution involving just not topping up the lander’s hydrogen, but instead having the rocket do more of the work? Apparently the lander was designed to do its own TLI burn. But some people on Twitter are claiming that FH could just about do the TLI so that the lander doesn’t have to. Meaning the lander wouldn’t need as much propellant.

I was also wondering about Starship. SpaceX has already done a pretty good job with the ‘pez dispenser’ variant. Eventually they’ll have to make a ‘miscellaneous deployment’ variant, right? And would it be that much more difficult?

But I guess NASA would prefer the focus is on the depot & tanker & HLS variants, because HLS is more important than MK1. And as for SpaceX themselves, they probably care much more about the ‘pez dispenser’ than the ‘miscellaneous deployment’ variant. So the idea of MK1 on Starship seems pretty remote to me.

N.B. Is it really “unlikely that Blue Origin would partner with a direct rival”? Even with Isaacman and all his relatively tough talk about handling suppliers?

New spoonerism deployed: GRIN FIDS

A view of sep from the trunk during the livestream at T+9:24

More views from the trunk at T+ :

• 10:28
• 11:18 (which then switches to an internal camera?)
• 12:04

165 launches with the Falcon 9 rocket (no Falcon Heavy missions) last year, up from 134 Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy launches in 2024 and 96 Falcon flights in 2023. The company plans “maybe 140, 145-ish” Falcon launches in 2026, SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell told Time earlier this year. “This year we’ll still launch a lot, but not as much,” she said. “And then we’ll tail off our launches as Starship is coming online.”

Called it!

Was it a good idea for Orion to have a jettison system? A liquid-only one?

What about, instead, a small airlock, containing a basket with a pusher mechanism? And bags that can fit into the basket snugly?

Some bags designed for men to directly urinate into? Or perhaps just have a tank that empties into them? Some bags to act as the outer bag for smaller bags of fecal matter? Some bags for general trash?

P.S. And presumably in this case all the jettisoned material remains on an almost identical free return trajectory and will re-enter Earth’s atmosphere at a similar time/place to Orion, and burn up?

Sorry Eric, nobody’s perfect.

this marked a point of no return for more than a week

Counterpoint

Will the descent module touch down softly and act as a comms relay?

Will they try 3 slightly different designs of helicopter to see which works best?

28:22

In hindsight we had all the schedule margin in the world against the Soviets. We went to the moon. We left in 1972 and no human’s been back since [then].

Yeah but that’s because the Soviets cancelled their effort after losing the race, right?

(But maybe it’s a very good sign that this was the biggest potential nitpick I can think of after listening?)

https://sh.itjust.works/post/56788160

Will Robinson-Smith interview of Jared Isaacman, upload date 2026-03-14, https://youtu.be/q_Y0qUQUbrk :

We haven’t even determined if we’re going to use ICPS on Artemis 3. We may not have to.

Eric Berger shilling SpaceX

Did you read the article?

I feel compelled to comment here (a Lemmy forum centred around itjust.works?) about another comment (on a Zenforo forum centred around arstechnica.com?) about another comment (on a Disqus forum centred around thespacereview.com?) about the ICPS.

for Arty 3, SLS doesn’t need to launch with an ICPS at all: it’s perfectly capable of getting an Orion to LEO using only the core and SRBs. … This requires that somebody (likely Teledyne-Brown) manufacture an adapter … If they can get this done in a bit more than a year, Arty 3 could be ready to go in 4Q2027. That then leaves the ICPS that was meant for Arty 3 available for Arty 4, which should be the Moon landing.

I wonder whether this is a good idea, and how likely it is that NASA would have already considered it.

Voice calls are allowed, so maybe it’s time to revive the 56k modem!

But seriously, as a non-expert I genuinely wouldn’t be surprised if you told me the audio stream was the easiest option, if the approved apps are all somewhat tamper-resistant. (Probably a very different process though, converting 20th Century analogue telephone line signals, versus converting just-decompressed digital audio.)

I mean, there’s not exactly zero resemblance between him and the bridegroom.

Time to start spreading the rumour that he was raised by wolves who named him after the director of this film and a portmanteau of the film’s title :)

Out of those 13 missions, I believe only 1 person has flown twice, and he’s not from NASA. He’s Mr Fedyaev.

This mission is the first where all four crew members are using the new SpaceX suit design. (Some details were given by the SpaceX guy at a NASA Crew 12 press conference earlier this year.) So presumably Fedyaev is the only person to have won both types of suit in space. Perhaps he’s giving SpaceX some comparative feedback.