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Lot of popcorn coming off the TPS. EDIT Might be ice?

I'm not even sure that the US is actually in the race to the moon anymore. Our modern "moon program" was always a pork project designed to keep former shuttle supply chains busy and spread the government funding around. It's such a convoluted mess that depends on a bunch of complicated systems...

And how many of these were flown repeatedly on vessels that do RTLS every mission?

They are standard everyday technology...being used in a unique application. The use of a technology should be based on engineering principles and physics, not just because it is expected in a spacecraft. I don't believe enough is known, by SpaceX engineers or anyone else, whether COPVs are fully...

Proof testing composites really isn't useful except for perhaps a single test after manufacturing and before installation in the ship. If they repeatedly proof test it prior to propellant loading, they are just increasing the load cycles on the COPV, and guaranteeing loss of the vehicle if it...

At least in 1991 the U.S. and the rest of the world really did not want to see the USSR to collapse in an unstable fashion and supported certain stabilizing activities. Perhaps China will assume this role this time. The US is too busy rocking our own boat to help stabilize whatever happens to...

The Russian economy is a shrinking ouroboros. The Russian government, paraphrasing Perun, is loading the money cannon and firing for effect, trying to keep the war and economy going. Outside of the heavily curtailed oil revenues there really isn't a lot of money flowing into the Russian economy...

Meanwhile, the U.S. lander is coming along just great...

Hey now, don't be pessimistic! NASA flew the shuttles for years experiencing foam damage on the TPS on almost every flight. What could go wrong? /s

I think they should go for a Space Piñata concept. Just make the StarShip shell out of Starlinks and have them break apart in orbit.

RIP Tom Lehrer:

R.I.P. Ozzy

But it's for Artemis IV. Hasn't funding been cut for all missions after III (which still needs a functioning StarShip HLS lander)?

I might have hallucinated it, but didn't ESA or Airbus have a concept for a recoverable first stage that had airfoils and propellers and flew back and landed on a runway?

Renderings are cheap and easy. I don't see Russia actually building and flying this in their current economic and geopolitical state.

NASA facilities are distributed over lots of states. A lot of senators really don't want that money to stop flowing to their states.

If we want a robust add-on ecosystem for Orbiter to develop, the methods to make add-ons need to stabilize. Orbiter has been around for decades, but a lot of early addons are dead because they were compiled for earlier versions of the Orbiter API and the source code may no longer be available...