Recent content by Thunder Chicken

TLE and the launch deck are trashed. One lightning tower down. The launch tower has damaged strut members at its base. The doors on the far side of the horizontal integration facility are damaged, so the doors on the pad side and probably quite a lot of stuff in the HIF are damaged. Visible tank...

Agreed. Hence why I said "yet". It's not even a NASA thing. Vladimir Komarov died because Soyuz 1 had to be launched on the Politburo's schedule, not when the engineering punch list was finished. Any national space agency has these political pressures.

Here's some imagery of LC36 from this morning: Looks like a multi-kiloton explosion happened, which it was. One lightning protection tower is down, transporter erector is wrecked. The tower and deluge tank and other lightning protection towers and civil structures all took a similar blast to...

Artemis hasn't killed 14 astronauts (yet). Careful what you wish for.

With the explosion of New Glenn yesterday (and damage to LC36 and destruction of the transporter erector), that means the Blue Moon lander may not fly for a long while yet. If the BE-4s are implicated in the explosion, that might affect ULAs Vulcan. Starship as HLS is insanity, and Blue Moon...

It looks like the second stage exploded at nearly the same time, not simply toppling over after the first stage failure. Whatever failed in the first stage was uncontained and took out the second stage too. Yikes. Is FTS enabled on these static fires? It sure does look like both stages...

Looks like insanity won over engineering, again. For some value of "reliable". They rather need a human rated lander that actually works and doesn't kill anybody by then. Maybe, but good luck with that. Good thing they are pushing for NASA budget cuts. Otherwise they might have money to do...

Just catching up with the replay. The video is just amazing, start to finish. I didn't see anything about them attempting to soft land the booster stage in the water - did they actually get a reentry burn or did the booster just freefall like a bomb from engine shutdown after staging? And...

Assuming the thing can actually get to the moon's surface, I also can't help but think about being out on an EVA in a pressurized moon suit and the elevator back up to the flight deck malfunctions. The height of Starship would also allow one to accidentally fall to their death on the moon. From...

It's interesting how they are down to three grid fins on the booster. The booster does have an angle of attack on return, 'flying' after a fashion (with a terrible glideslope) and the one grid fin on the lee side of the booster probably wasn't doing much for control forces.