Deep Nozzle Throat
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The good ship Integrity is now flying free. Great milestone, on to ICPS proximity ops. About 20 hours from the the TLI burn.
The Space Thread - Launches, Events, Live Streams, Governments, Corporations, drama in Spaaaaaaaaaaaace
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- Jun 23, 2020
I wish all distractions from the files were this noble and high-effort.
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- Jul 18, 2017
To be fair, this mission was conceived almost 10 years ago during Trump 1 as part of the "Make America Great Again" agenda. Orange man told the base it was stupid we hadnt gone to the moon in 50 years. So we were going to go to the moon again!
And in fairness to the Biden Administration, they could have axed the Artemis Program out of spite like they did most of Trumps projects, but they kept this one going. So credit where credit is due.
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- Dec 12, 2022
The SLS has been in the oven for a long time. Most of the computers and systems are going to be old school
Deep Nozzle Throat
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Astros prefer knobs and switches by a long shot. Dragon touchscreens are utterly despised (the whole control interface runs on HTML or something retarded like that). Starliner actually got very high reviews for the amount of tactile controls.
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- Aug 29, 2024
Here is the original NASA article about the Artemis capsule including the toilet that separates urine and feces while venting urine overboard (piss jet)
When nature inevitably comes calling, crew members will use Orion’s toilet, the Universal Waste Management System, a feature Apollo crews did not have. Nearly identical to a version flying on NASA’s space station, the system collects urine and feces separately. Urine will be vented overboard while feces are collected in a can and safely stowed for disposal upon return.
Should the toilet malfunction, the crew will be able to use collapsible contingency urinals, a system that collects urine in a bag and interfaces with the venting system to send the urine overboard. With two different styles designed to accommodate both females and males, the bags hold about a liter of urine each. Should the UWMS fail, the crew will still use the toilet for fecal collection, only without the fan that helps with fecal separation.
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Keeping it Clean
The hygiene bay includes doors for privacy, a toilet, and space for the crew to bring in their personal hygiene kits. The kits typically include items like a hairbrush, toothbrush and toothpaste, soap, and shaving supplies. Astronauts can’t shower in space but use liquid soap, water, and rinseless shampoo to remain clean.When nature inevitably comes calling, crew members will use Orion’s toilet, the Universal Waste Management System, a feature Apollo crews did not have. Nearly identical to a version flying on NASA’s space station, the system collects urine and feces separately. Urine will be vented overboard while feces are collected in a can and safely stowed for disposal upon return.
Should the toilet malfunction, the crew will be able to use collapsible contingency urinals, a system that collects urine in a bag and interfaces with the venting system to send the urine overboard. With two different styles designed to accommodate both females and males, the bags hold about a liter of urine each. Should the UWMS fail, the crew will still use the toilet for fecal collection, only without the fan that helps with fecal separation.
Evan Kor
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I think the logic is that screens are more reliable than a bunch of mechanical switches. However, screens can only be decent if they have some sort of backups like extra tablets they can plug in in case a screen breaks.
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- Dec 13, 2022
Are they scared of the aliens stealing our turds?
Deep Nozzle Throat
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Dragon was supposed to have a video game controller (no, not kidding, just like the retardo submarine). There aren't any manual backups, Dragon crew just punches the touchscreens to run commands, like there's a literal "deorbit NOW!" button.
Dragon in and of itself is kind of a clusterfuck under a slick minimalist coat of paint. On Inspiration4 there was an issue where seals in the toilet system came debonded because they never tested material compatibility. Boroscoped the other two that were in space and found minor corrosion. Plus the one that blew up during postflight testing. A lot of industry people have been scared shitless over the various private astronaut missions (PAMs) because it's pretty much only NASA safety standards that are keeping Dragon crew alive (which PAMs aren't subject to).
Like, there is no way in hell that Polaris Dawn would've been approved by any modern safety standards. The EVA suit was a hackjob.
And if you really want to get into the reeds on SpaceX (if you can tell, I've heard very few good things), Falcon 9 as it is is maintained by a cargo cult that doesn't intuitively understand the whole vehicle. Probably the last bastion of raw talent (Falcon and Dragon teams) but SpaceX depends heavily on miracle workers and individual heroics for success. Not really stable in a culture of expendable engineers.
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- Jul 30, 2024
No, but getting hit by a flash frozen piece of shit flying at 18000 mph really really sucks.
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- Joined
- Jun 19, 2024
No, they don't want India to have a reason to explore the cosmos.
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- Jul 18, 2017
Actually the concern is orbital debris. Imagine a frozen turd impacting an expensive satellite at 20,000 miles per hour.
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- May 18, 2020
Which is exactly what you want on vehicles, not FUCKING Touchscreens ELON
Put this into my veins.
Elon's insistence on "ohh shiny" BS attached back to Tesla and will 110% get people killed.
You're right that the SpaceX Eva was a rush job that could have ended EXTREMELY BADLY and the SpaceX suits are .... Aesthetics first designs.
Starship will absolutely kill a crew eventually.
SpaceX should stick to cargo IMHO.
Deep Nozzle Throat
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- Jun 24, 2025
Well the good news is Starship is never flying crew.
Hell, it can't even fly payloads that aren't Starlink. They froze development of a proper cargo bay door a few months ago and are only developing the Starlink mail slot further.
Starship is a really fascinating case study of project management and systems engineering (the lack thereof) going wrong. Somewhere in there are the bones of a competent program and good engineering, but it's completely masked by retarded decisions and requirements. The contrast between Starship going into its 12th test flight with a vague road ahead to technological readiness and SLS sending crew to the Moon on its second test flight is mind boggling.
They've flown Saarship with straight up turds in the propellant tanks. No, I don't know how, either.
Hatewerfer
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- Apr 21, 2025
And don't forget controls engineers dealing with human machine interface whose job it is to make sure that someone can't fat finger their way to certain death by pushing the wrong button. Easier to do with tactile switches that need to be operated deliberately than with a shitty touchscreen.
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- Dec 12, 2022
Human excellence saar, best people in the industry. H1bs NOW
Falcon 9 is an interesting case in how you can fuck over statistics to make it look like your product works, and there is a market for something when the orbital launch market really is still a bubble. If you actually take out mega constellations, Falcon 9's launch cadence is significantly lower. Most of the new, commercial launch services are actually government contracts, or built off of scamming investors.
I have been thinking about writing a history of Commercial Crew and Artemis as they exist in a very fine tune between the balance of power between. When people speak of the Commercial Crew model, they act like it is a novel new invention. It is not, it is basically how things were always done in the past with government launch contracts where NASA would offer a series of specifications., and companies would work to bid on them and meet them. It is how the original ICBMs came about with the likes of the Convair ATLAS as an X-plane (classified in the same program).
It is actually the existence of NASA as an entity wanting launch vehicles that is solely unique, with NASA only having designed a few rockets. Those being the Saturns (the Saturn 1 core stage was derived from Redstone + Juno, which was derived from the V2), Space Shuttle and SLS. This unified approach works for one reason, it stops factionalism. it stops infighting as everyone knows what they are working on. This exists in complete contrast to the commercial model, which I'd argue shares a lot in common with the likes of how the Soviet design bureaus interacted where they all had to buddy up with people high up in the politburo, and compete with one another. This was especially problematic when everyone in these bureaus hated all the other ones.
The earliest rockets, those being the likes of the commercial ones came from military projects. Vanguard was Navy, Von Braun was Army Artillery, Atlas was USAF. They all gradually became unified under Airforce projects.
(this is all very condensed and shortened, but is really just Musk rewriting history to go American rockets very expensive, government controlled -> Elon Musk comes up, wants to build a rocket -> Musk creates newspace and prioritises innovation. And boom, everything is golden.
Remember reusability, the thing that everyone likes to go on about? There's a reason why "oldspace" and other groups weren't big fans of it. It was called the Space Shuttle, and the fact that satellites are the expensive part. But, there were actually investigations into all this type of thing and creating propulsively landing rockets. Remember the Lunar Lander? Yeah, that landed propulsively. Then, there are other programs like the Detla Clipper. Remember the Delta Clipper? I sure do, it was cool and it was a cheap program.
There were also a ton of other programs and efforts to return to reusability that could have came to fruition had the Space Launch Initiative remained, and the Columbia disaster never happened. It was Columbia that gave Constellation which basically begun the recent Apollo-Moon nostalgia face (albeit, that did somewhat exist with H.W. Bush with the Space Exploration Initiative.
Hell, Musk wasn't even the commercial enterprise pushing for reusable launch vehicles. Kistler had their own fully reusable rocket in development before even the Falcon 1 flew. They had been awarded a contract by NASA as the sole provider to develop commercial launch vehicle that would act commercially under the Commercial Orbital Transportation Services contract (this would form commercial cargo). Musk got hurt fee fees so bitched to the GAO about SpaceX not having the money, which forced NASA to split the funding (remember this whenever people bitch about SpaceX going after one else if they were the sole recipient. Cough, HLS, Cough. SpaceX loves their lobbyists and lawfare, and SpaceX. I haven't checked Opensecrets in a while, but they frequently spent more on lobbying than anyone else in the space business, including Boeing).
But it was basically Musk's government antics that killed Kesler space as it allowed Musk to siphon funding off from them, and bring it into SpaceX - and it is that which was said to have saved SpaceX.
Again, it is all really just the behaviour of the Soviet Design Bureaus
You know, especially when screens can get damaged if something cuts through them. Which is especially bad in Zero G.
I'm putting both of these together because they go hand in hand with Isaacman basically unofficially killing Artemis and anything that can be used with the architecture. If we are to hold the basic assumption that he actually believed they can get a SLS to launch with Centaur in 2028 then that would require 2 years to get it produced, tested, human rated and so on. After Artemis 3, the upper stage needs to be confirmed as ready, which will likely take billions.
The main reason for all of this? Killing Gateway, and if you kill Gateway you kill anything more than Boots on the Ground for Artemis. you can say you want a moon base, but Orion needs somewhere to go whilst in orbit. Yes, the station is small but it would serve its purpose. And if you want to complain about small stations, just look at the earliest stations launched by the Soviets.
But no, NASA is to just kill EUS - which probably would have taken a similar amount to get ready to fly, and is about to reach the test article stage, and instead adapt a completely foreign upper stage, designed for a different launch vehicle and just put it on SLS. - and yeah, if you complain about SLS reusing shuttle parts and being expensive, it is lowkey hypocritical to also be like "hmmm let's bring over a stage from another rocket".
When people go on about the mentality that caused the Challenger accident, it is this. It is the rush to launch. Like, quite literally. The weather was shit, and NASA was rushing to build up support for the Shuttle as they were trying to gear up to a flight every 2 week which was to be their "break even point". 1986 was going to be a mad year when it came to human space flight, and NASA needed to stick to their schedule - and things were only going to become more hectic.
A lot of this also feeds into a bigger argument about SLS not flying enough. Want to know why it is not flying continuously? It is not operational. It is still in the testing stage. Hence why stuff is taking so long. SLS was building up to Block 2. It would solve the upper stage issue with Block 1 - which was always the plan. Block 2 would introduce the next generation of SRBs into the mix, which were needed as the older shuttle ones were no longer in production, with a limited amount in storage. Enough for 8 flights. Even if you were to get to SLS flying every 10 months, you'd have about 30 months to get to BOLE at the end of 2028, aka SLS would be able to fly until 2031 and then nothing. Which, if you're trying to sustain a moon base is not a good plan.
But hey, gotta love silicon valley.
Starship really is just optimized for the development of LEO. This is not at all surprising given the recent business developments of SpaceX. For starters, there's not much money to be made with the likes of Falcon 9. Especially when more competitors enter the market. Thus, everyone involved in the launch market had to develop something to separate them from everyone else as a source of income. Blue Origin generally did the best at this with New Shepard, Blue Moon, Orbital Reef, Kuiper and so on. They are diversified, safe.
What does SpaceX have? Sure, they have the ISS contracts which Boeing basically lost all interest in anyhow (they only built 2 Starliners), commercial space stations are still a big iff.
(remember, SpaceX started work on Starship back in 2005 where the core concept was announced. If they are going to claim iterative development, I'm going to include everything. Especially with how many times they've changed the core design)
There's a lot of stuff that I could say and I really have been thinking about writing a book as I have mentioned.
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- Aug 21, 2013
I got to watch this launch from my backyard! Even got footage.
Ethan Ralph's Gunt
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- Mar 30, 2026
and it's the Americans too, who would've thought?
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- Dec 10, 2023