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At least they have a launch escape system capability now. And pressure suits. I wonder how the redesigned field joints fared after Challenger? Obviously no further accidents related to the O-rings occurred, but did they still have leaks? From what I understand they are reusing previously-flown...

This would be a steal, and SpaceX would be losing massive amounts of money if this was the case. Let's say a current London to Sydney flight costs around $1000 USD. 40 people paying three times that amount would be a revenue of $120,000 per flight. Musk himself said fueling Superheavy would...

I really wonder if there is any widespread public interest in spaceflight these days. Outside of the Orbiter community I really have never heard any interest in modern spaceflight expressed by anyone, and I work in engineering where one would expect more enthusiasm. Unless there is a fiery...

New Shepherd was an R&D program wrapped in a business model simply to recoup some of the cost. It's as developed as it is likely to get, and they got over the introductory learning curves of landing boosters and flying man-rated spacecraft using it. Now they are launching and recovering New...

Ever since I Googled "Fliewatüüt" my YouTube recommendations have been all screwed up:

LOL no. The U.S. isn't putting boots on the moon again any time soon, and I don't think it's going to happen again ever. Starship is still undergoing major design changes and it is still popping welds just sitting on the pad. The whole Lunar Gateway infrastructure is a convoluted mess. I hope...

It's basically the mechanical engineering equivalent of vibe coding, but the AI is probably replaced* with overworked engineers who don't have enough time to do due diligence to verify design changes, or even fully understand the problem their redesign is meant to address. You also have a whole...

"Move fast and break things" is something of a paradigm-disrupting philosophy of our tech-bro billionaires. I think it is originally attributable to Zuckerberg. Musk / SpaceX adopted a semi-empirical iterative design process that allowed for the possibility of learning from failures because they...

Yikes. Move fast and break things, I guess. 🤷‍♂️

You can make perfectly functional add-ons in Orbiter using just Lua script. You just need a text editor.

It would be funny if the engineers had problems securing the platform on the night of April 11th with a launch with a lot of VIPs and dignitaries in attendance scheduled for the next day...

I would hope that there is nothing algorithmically different between Lua and C++ that would cause these problems. It is more or less a standard spring/damper model. If the stiffness is too high and the damping too low it is possible to get a natural frequency that is faster than the integrator...

Yeah, but good luck with that with a booster that is still firing. Assuming they survive that and don't get hit by the booster, there is a non-zero chance they come down in a toxic cloud of burning hypergolics. Proton doesn't have a FTS because they want it as far away as possible from launch...

Hmm...putting a manned Soyuz capsule on a rocket that uses hypergolics and has no FTS so they don't destroy the pad if there is a failure shortly after launch... I hope they install all the angular velocity sensors the right way.