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Sunita was ISS-commander of Expedition 33 in 2012. I remember she was pretty sad when she had to leave the station after - then assumed - her last stay on the ISS. She grabbed the chance to become a private astronaut, and now she is back on the ISS. Although the circumstances of the extended...

It looks like the current Starliner needs to have a crew onboard, to manually confirm undocking. While the unmanned flight test Starliner had the capability to do this automatically, this was removed / omitted / ... for the crewed version. In case the crew would not return onboard Starliner, it...

The Enhanced Dragon Design could be interesting for Lunar or other far-out missions. With around 10 ton of fuel I would estimate a dV of 1.4 km/s. This would be comparable to the Orion spacecraft.

You are right! There should be moments both for X and Y lift. The reason why I never missed it, could be that the capsule is not steered like an aircraft. It does not have active rudders, but flies (a little bit) in the direction of the offset mass center. The steering is done by rolling the...

Flight test of this new atmospheric decelerator! 🐞

The second stage is now in coast phase. If the animation is correct, its rotation rate is much slower than a Centaur upper stage. The Centaur rotates once every 2 min, and reverses its rotation after half of the coast phase. Here the rotation seems to take much longer. Both stages rotate to...

Below are the lift and drag functions I used for the CST-100 capsule. The figures are small indeed, but not zero. void VLiftCoeff(double aoa, double M, double Re, double *cl, double *cm, double *cd) { static const double step = RAD*30.0; static const double istep = 1.0 / step...

Trees on the Moon, in a Plato Base cupola. The trees are in the right-hand cupola only. Some of the trees in the center appear clipped. This is caused by the sequence of the transparent meshes. By the way, which trees would you recommend for a lunar base? Northern arid trees, to better survive...

Very nice moonpack! I added the microtexture, as described in the readme, which greatly improves the ground view from low altitude. One question: In the "Station Supply Run" scenario, is the wheel station orbiting retrograde around Neptune? This make is pretty tricky to rendezvous with one of...

To distinguish the Chinese base from the Russians two things come to my mind: They make everything a bit bigger, like the Shenzou is about 20% bigger than the Soyuz. They use extensively a combination of a white body, a yellowish gold foil and bright silver foil, as shown in the screenshot of...

For any thermodynamic process, a hot and a cold side is needed. The hot side is provided by the heat of the nuclear decay in the reactor. This will heat up a fluid (liquid or gas) or a heat conductor. On the boundary between hot and cold side, electrical energy can be generated, either by direct...

A Soyuz-derived Russian lander is approaching the Moscoviense station:

What could be added to make a Russian / Chinese station look different, is adding a nuclear reactor area, a bit remote from the main base. Andy Weir considered this for his Artemis Moon Base, and it looked like this:

Thanks for checking! The door is indeed a complicated mesh, a boolean cutout of the shell, with another boolean cutout for the window. Will test, if the door is replaced by simple mesh.

Will share the code next week. This week I am travelling, no access to Orbiter.

Short answer is, no I did not find the reason. It could be a faulty mesh (sometimes I see tringles extending from capsule outwards) or not proper initialized variables. I put the Starliner dormant, as it looked it will never fly again. As it flew now, I might re-visit it. But as this will...

Played around with the hall thrusters' ion exhausts. The greenish-bluish hue varies whether more Krypton or Xenon is used. The very thin and bright exhaust shown in a rendering is probably unrealistic. Photos of a real ion exhaust show a more ghostly appearance. 👻 The left-hand cyan colour is...

I guess you found it! ;) A question on the Janus.dll: Do you have a Saturn moon pack installed, or such? Janus (the moon) has no dll to my knowledge.

A map of the Uranus moon system, for those who are not so familiar with their sequence (like me) and would like to fly the Grand Tour: The illustration is taken from: The Science Case for Spacecraft Exploration of the Uranian Satellites: Candidate Ocean Worlds in an Ice Giant System This...

Just a question on Uranus in the background: Do you use any planetary texture for it? In my default Orbiter installation it looks like pale green ball, with no weather features.