The Space Thread - Launches, Events, Live Streams, Governments, Corporations, drama in Spaaaaaaaaaaaace

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The founders of that company, from left: Josef Fleischmann, Markus Brandl and Daniel Metzler.

The executive team also looks delightfully German and therefore competent. I bet this company will go far. (Get it? heh)
 
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Badungus Kabungus said:
So how about that moon landing, bros? Now I don't think it was faked, but I also don't think those astronauts ever made it back to earth.
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That’s a new one.

You’ve got any evidence? Because I’ve got the videos of them leaving the capsule? Do you think there were clones or do you think it was some kind of MGS V type deal?
 
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gobbles said:
I bet this company will go far. (Get it? heh)
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Oof

In other news, Butch and Suni came closer to death than previously thought:

Ars Technica: Starliner’s flight to the space station was far wilder than most of us thought (archive)
Wilmore: "And this is the part I'm sure you haven't heard. We lost the fourth thruster. Now we've lost 6DOF control. We can't maneuver forward. I still have control, supposedly, on all the other axes. But I'm thinking, the F-18 is a fly-by-wire. You put control into the stick, and the throttle, and it sends the signal to the computer. The computer goes, 'OK, he wants to do that, let's throw that out aileron a bit. Let's throw that stabilizer a bit. Let's pull the rudder there.' And it's going to maintain balanced flight. I have not even had a reason to think, how does Starliner do this, to maintain a balance?"
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Wilmore: "Now we're back to single-fault tolerant. But then we lose a fifth jet. What if we'd have lost that fifth jet while those other four were still down? I have no idea what would've happened. I attribute to the providence of the Lord getting those two jets back before that fifth one failed. So we're down to zero-fault tolerant again. I can still maintain control. Again, sluggish. Not only was the control different on the visual, what inputs and what it looked like, but we could hear it. The valve opening and closing. When a thruster would fire, it was like a machine gun."
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The big new $13.7B National Security Space Launch glow ops contract has been awarded.

SpaceX emerged as the leading contractor, securing $5.9 billion in anticipated awards, followed by ULA at nearly $5.4 billion and Blue Origin at nearly $2.4 billion. The three companies are expected to collectively perform 54 launches under the agreement between fiscal years 2025 and 2029.
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Of the 54 projected missions, SpaceX is expected to carry out 28, or roughly 60%, while ULA will perform 19 missions, or around 35%. Blue Origin, which has flown its New Glenn rocket just once and has yet to be certified, is slated for seven launches starting in the program’s second year, contingent on certification of its vehicle.
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Pretty basic continuation stuff with the main change being adding Blue Origin to the mix, in theory, once they get their rocket certified as good enough for government work. They're getting about 18% of the funds to fly about 13% of the launches, compared to SpaceX's 43% of the money for about 52% of the launches.

 
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Pedophobe said:
The big new $13.7B National Security Space Launch glow ops contract has been awarded.





Pretty basic continuation stuff with the main change being adding Blue Origin to the mix, in theory, once they get their rocket certified as good enough for government work. They're getting about 18% of the funds to fly about 13% of the launches, compared to SpaceX's 43% of the money for about 52% of the launches.

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I kind of expected Trump to cut space budget too, but Musk's autism saved Nasa.
 
Considering how much money the Glowies are getting for space stuff, I fully believe by the time NASA gets to Mars, they will discover the CIA had been running a black site there for years....
 
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Pedophobe said:
Pretty basic continuation stuff with the main change being adding Blue Origin to the mix, in theory, once they get their rocket certified as good enough for government work. They're getting about 18% of the funds to fly about 13% of the launches, compared to SpaceX's 43% of the money for about 52% of the launches.
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It's an investment basically to have redundant launch vehicles. ULA was formed specifically to enable the USA to have two heavy lift launch vehicles, so if one fails then they can still continue to launch their payloads. Now, what's better than having one redundant launch vehicle? Two, and that's the capability the glowies want.

SpaceX currently works with an economy of scale, and continuously offers lower prices to underbid the competition. With Blue Origin, they are now at a point of trying to get their cadence up now that they've proven they can fly New Glenn.

Plus, New Glenn is actually pretty important for the space force because it means that they can develop satellites that take up more space in a fairing, and can increase the mass of the satellites given they can account for launching payloads on New Glenn and Falcon Heavy. With the fairings, the New Glenn offers an increase to 7m in diameter and has the largest fairing size on offer. This is an increase of 1.6m over the second largest, Vulcan with Falcon 9 having the smallest fairing size at 5.2m.

Now, the space force isn't going to shift directly to making 7m payloads their norm? No, but the USAF now has the capability to launch them and will be willing to develop these payloads which if Starship ever decides that it wants to stop identifying as the N1 then the USAF will have redundant capability to compete at this larger payload size.
 
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The Mass Shooter Ron Soye said:
In other news, Butch and Suni came closer to death than previously thought:
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That’s a really great interview.
They have both been very diplomatic and stoic about the experience - as you’d expect, they’re well trained and shouldn’t be slagging off their employer while employed. But there’s a lot of little details in there that are telling. Including it being 50f. That’s too cold - would that be likely to cause a condensation problem? That was an issue with apollo13 wasn’t it? And the fact they almost lost control while docking and realised immediately that they wouldn’t be going home in it.
Some good journalism there
 
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The Mass Shooter Ron Soye said:
Here's the kind of thanks Eric Berger has gotten lately (for being perceived as too pro-Musk):
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It’s a great article. Good to see some journalists still exist who know their stuff, cultivate good industry connections and can write pieces which are informative without being sensationalist. No good deed goes unpunished does it? One must display ideological purity or one’s work is nothing!
I had no idea they were so close to a complete loss of control on the docking - the media made it sound like there were leaks and a thruster went but they were simply being careful. This shows it was far worse than that.
What’s the thought over the future of starliner? It’s a fixed price contract isnt it? Boeing must be bleeding money, and it seems grossly irresponsible to let another crew go up in it.
 
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