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

[GoybeamFireSupportOfficer]

Cooling is still the biggest potential show-stopper. Space is an ideal insulator.

It's great for radiative cooling, though, as long as you put your radiators on the plane that goes through both the Sun and the Earth. The Sun can be treated as a point source at that distance, so if you're edge on to it, you'll be in your edge's shadow. The Earth takes up a non-negligible fraction of the sky from very low orbits, so you'd want an Earthshade to reflect away Earthshine.

Other than that, you're radiating out into a near 0 K environment that isn't radiating anything back. Radiated power scales with the fourth power of temperature, so if you run a little hot, you can radiate a lot of power. Designing your own chips and accepting occasional bit flips that don't affect AI workloads means you can run hot. There's no reason to think it can't be done.

 

[The Mass Shooter Ron Soye]

ThunderF00t found dead from copium overdose.

It's goalpost moving time. Doubtful we'll get a booster catch attempt next flight since engines are still cutting out left and right.

It's about time to talk about how much fully expendable testing phase Starships cost, since it successfully got Starlink v3 into orbit. Falcon 9 launch cost to SpaceX is somewhere around $20 million, but it can't lift Starlink v3 since they are too large.

 

[JustStopDude]

If I was musk I'd go even further and put a skeletonized starship with a NERVA just to rub salt in the wound of NASA and finally make their nuclear space tugboat they dreamed of in the 70s until congress killed the space shuttle by gutting of it all but the plane itself.

Personnel at NASA recognize that their biggest restriction on development is Congress. This is what NASA has been championing getting private industry into the process since easily the 1980's.

We wouldn't even be wasting tax dollars on the SLS except the Trump administration bailed it out yet again to spend tax dollars in specific districts.

I really don't want them to risk a crash into the tower, especially since there's still only one. I don't know why they haven't finished a 2nd one by now as a backup because it this one goes up.. Look at what happened with New Glenn.

It's being built as quickly as possible. Pad 1 was basically a proof of concept. It's being rebuilt into expansion and improvement onto the work completed on Pad 2.

Blue Origin fucked everyone because with their oopsie doodle, the government doesn't allow Space X to use the pad they built at the Cape. Hence they they are also fast tracking the second pad at the Cape.

But you know how all the AI and data center crap has sucked up so many resources like computer chips? Same thing is hitting SpaceX.

Simple shit like fans for electrical rooms are difficult to get in a timely fashion because the same fans are used at data centers.

The work on Pad 1 is literally going as fast as possible.

 

[Freedom Fighter]

I just now remembered that Flight 14 was this morning. Too used to it being at like 6pm, so I missed it.

 

[mindlessobserver]

Really hype they got the thing to orbit. Flight 15 had better show they worked out the kinks because Artemis needs a big boy to take her to the dance. Artemis III is supposed to test the flight alignment of the crew vehicle and the cargo vehicle in orbit prior to escape burn for lunar orbit insertion, and right now Starship is the only platform showing the capability to do the job.

 

[Evan Kor]

Yes, tons of drama during launch. They did one orbit instead of six, just did the re-entry burn so it's coming back one way or the other now. Pretty much everything worked out, but it was tense. No explanation of why only 1 full orbit but I expect it's due to that shutdown. They'll probably explain that later on.

Could've been an issue of icing(frozen water, not cake dipping sauce) in the plumbing. Each orbit causes the tanks to cool down due to boil off.

Thank God they got the Starlinks into orbit. The loss of all those valuable satellites would've horrendous not just because of how expensive they are to build but also the loss of their income generation abilities.

 

[The Mass Shooter Ron Soye]

It will be interesting to hear how the decision to go to orbit was made. Maybe Elon had Go Fever in the control room and overrode caution.

Really hype they got the thing to orbit. Flight 15 had better show they worked out the kinks because Artemis needs a big boy to take her to the dance. Artemis III is supposed to test the flight alignment of the crew vehicle and the cargo vehicle in orbit prior to escape burn for lunar orbit insertion, and right now Starship is the only platform showing the capability to do the job.

SpaceX could refund all the money given to them for Artemis, and would still make more revenue from Starlink annually (a proven revenue stream, unlike AI datacenter satellites). The Artemis Program is more dependent on SpaceX than the other way around.

What SpaceX needs to solve are the booster/engine issues, which were thought to be an easier challenge than Starship's heat tiles. A lot of the launch cost is in a currently expended booster. The booster can land fine with a couple of engines broken, but the engine failure rate is very high compared to Falcon 9 boosters. Falcon 9 may go like a hundred launches without an engine failure (don't know the real #s).

Looks like the testing schedule could accelerate, possibly with more than 1 launch a month now (we are very tentatively looking at October 19 and October 30 for next launches), so that's good. For Artemis, major parts of the Starship program could not work, and it would be fine. For example, the Starship gets abandoned near/on the Moon, and doesn't need to return to Earth with astronauts. Super Heavy wouldn't have to be recovered either, although that burns a lot of engines and money, especially if there are a lot of tanker flights.

It's widely understood that the Artemis timelines will slip a year or three, and the Moon isn't going anywhere. But politicians want it done faster to beat the Chinks. And maybe they will try loading up their Moon base with weapons:

Reuters: US admission of orbital weapons seen as landmark moment in race with China, Russia
BBC: US confirms for first time it has deployed space weapons (archive)

 

[mindlessobserver]

SpaceX could refund all the money given to them for Artemis, and would still make more revenue from Starlink annually (a proven revenue stream, unlike AI datacenter satellites). The Artemis Program is more dependent on SpaceX than the other way around

Artemis is way more important then it seems at first glance. The US intent with that program is not just to go back to the moon for ass pats like the Apollo missions. The goal of Artemis is to create the lift capability for lunar colonization. The USA wants to establish permanent presence on the moon, and SpaceX riding that coattail means they get to be first in and best dressed.

*edit just to add*

The Artemis program and SpaceX's intended support for it is geared towards making permanent human (American) presence on the moon viable. It is potentially one of the greatest shifts in the human econony since an insane Venetian convinced the King of Spain to fund a mission to find a sea route to India by going west.

Luna, Lunar Orbit and Earth orbit are free land. Free. Land. Let that sink in. All the land on earth is owned by someone at this point. All the dirt on it, all the minerals beneath it. This is not true for the moon. Or the near earth orbit region. That territory belongs to whoever stakes their claim on it first.

I cannot even begin to describe the consequences for humanity, and the USA specifically if this effort towards lunar colonization succeeds.

 

[Billy Beeple]

Boeing gets an extra $359M from U.S. taxpayers for their crew capsule that doesn't work.

NASA and Boeing are now planning the unmanned cargo flight ("Starliner-1") to take place this December, with the first manned mission ("Starliner-2") in mid-2028. Woody Hoburg will command Starliner-2. They've redesigned the failed "poppet" valves; some fixes will fly on Starliner-1, the rest starting on Starliner-2. They're also making fixes to the parachute.

The current plan is to use Dragon for ISS missions through Crew-17, then it will be retired. NASA is committed to four missions on Starliner; they are not committing to a fifth or sixth flight yet.

They're going to certify Starliner on Vulcan. There are six Atlas-V remaining, but there are some limited-life items on the rocket, so the current batch may be too old to fly as it gets closer to ISS end-of-life. Boeing seems to think this capsule has a chance at flying commercial missions after ISS de-orbit.

Full press conference:

 

[mlanguishi]

Meanwhile these clowns are still going to try for an uncrewed ISS launch (cause last time it stranded them and nearly killed everyone) on 100% expendable Vulcan which has tons of its own problems. Ninja'd but here's the tweets/article.

https://x.com/BoeingSpace/status/2104662112005923104

https://www.boeing.com/space/starliner/starliner-1

People call SLS a waste but at least the damn thing's been the most reliable of all the recent new US launch platforms,

NASA and Boeing announced today changes to the Starliner contract that add resources for human spaceflight certification and support the spacecraft as a long-term provider of crewed missions to low Earth orbit. The agency also stated that the uncrewed Starliner-1 mission, which will carry cargo to the International Space Station (ISS), is planned for the December 2026/January 2027 timeframe. A crewed Starliner-2 mission is planned for 2028.

The Starliner contract modification reflects a strong, safety-first partnership between the company and the agency and underscores NASA and Boeing’s continued commitment to Starliner as a long-term human spaceflight provider to the ISS and future low Earth orbit destinations.

For future Starliner missions, the contract modifications include:

Spacecraft enhancements:

• Replace valves on all 12 crew module reaction control system thrusters and add measures to prevent corrosion.
• Redesign service module reaction control system thruster poppets
• Record service module thruster chamber pressure data more often for better performance insight.
• Implement a parachute joint design improvement
• Integrate NASA-provided upgraded battery systems.

Other contract modifications:

• Certify Vulcan for human spaceflight to support flights after the Atlas fleet is phased out.
• Restore the fifth and sixth Starliner missions, previously made options under a contract modification in November 2025.

Ahead of Starliner-1, Boeing and NASA are confident in the Starliner vehicle and have addressed the technical issues identified during the investigation of the Crew Flight Test in 2024. According to John Mulholland, vice president of the Starliner program, corrective actions plans are implemented for the eight PIT Report recommendations and 19 of the 21 in-flight anomalies from the crew flight test are closed. The remaining items are expected to close in October. Some of the mitigations require in-flight demonstration during Starliner-1 for full resolution.

With hardware and software work complete, Boeing and NASA teams are closing out the remaining validation work in preparation for an uncrewed Starliner-1 launch planned in the December 2026/January 2027 timeframe.

“With safety-first as their guide, Boeing and NASA teammates worked together over the last two years to address the issues encountered during the crew flight test,” said John Mulholland, vice president of the Starliner program for Boeing. “We’re grateful for NASA’s partnership, and we are confident the Starliner vehicle will be ready for flight.”

NASA should've gone with Dream Chaser. Boeing betting on Axiom needing a lot of missions or that whatever plan Blue Origin is supposed to try for a space station is pretty goofy. I suppose in theory something like this would be more practical than Starship if SpaceX retires Dragon, but there's still no excuse for this.

My theory is this is to just pump Boeing up for the military contracts which usually do ok, and the commercial which has done awfully for a decade.

 

[Dead Lion]

People call SLS a waste but at least the damn thing's been the most reliable of all the recent new US launch platforms,

NASA should've gone with Dreamchaser. Boeing betting on Axiom needing a lot of missions or that whatever plan Blue Origin is supposed to try for a space station is pretty goofy. I suppose in theory something like this would be more practical than Starship if SpaceX retires Dragon, but there's still no excuse for this.

Their plan is to wait for a democrat to be elected since SpaceX will never get a contract afterwards.

 

[mlanguishi]

Their plan is to wait for a democrat to be elected since SpaceX will never get a contract afterwards.

I don't think that's possible anymore. Even Biden didn't kill Artemis and I was pretty surprised since obama killed off Bush's Constellation which set the moon return back by 15+ years. The only way to stop Musk would be some antitrust or Jack Ma situation, which I suppose isn't that unlikely.

 

[mindlessobserver]

Their plan is to wait for a democrat to be elected since SpaceX will never get a contract afterwards.

SpaceX is approaching a critical threshold where they wont need government contracts.

 

[ConsentAccidentVictimNo98]

Meanwhile these clowns are still going to try for an uncrewed ISS launch (cause last time it stranded them and nearly killed everyone) on 100% expendable Vulcan which has tons of its own problems. Ninja'd but here's the tweets/article.

There are a lot of problems with Starliner, but a lot of it is because of how the commercial crew program was managed. A lot of it was hands off, investigated internally [we reviewed ourselves and found we did no wrong doing]. This is why NASA signed off on faulty spacecrafts and has had to constantly go back, because they did not do a good job.

This is something that is generally the case outside of NASA, Public, programs because NASA depends a lot on public perception. Something like Challenger reflects really badly on the program. However, with commercial crew you can go "that's just Boeing.". This is why SpaceX's development for Starship has been horrendous, as for whatever reason they decided to go for an iterative approach. This has been the corporate sector, doing it the corporate [and a very silicon valley way]. It has now somewhat had results, but Starship is so old that it's now drinking age. Even if we are to give the program the benefit of the doubt, the Raptor program began in the 2012 and there are still problems with the engine. This really is the main problem with the commercial space sector as there is a lot of oversight [and even NASA had institutional flaws, especially with contractor difficulties.

Looking at Apollo, NASA's relationship with North American got pretty bad as seen with this report. Which is a lot of the same old happening: https://www.nasa.gov/missions/apollo/apollo-1/phillips-report/. You could replace Apollo with Starliner and much would remain the same.

I suppose this is why you could say NASA was so conservative with SLS and Orion. It is because of the lessons learned and that you have to be strict with this sort of thing.

Oh, and on Vulcan being crew rated. Its mostly because the crew infrastructure is already at the pad. So it can be modified for Vulcan, and less money would have to be wasted. + Centaur is already being crew rated for SLS.

EDIT:

Boeing seems to think this capsule has a chance at flying commercial missions after ISS de-orbit.

Starliner as a program has been managed to meet the bare minimum for ISS operations within the constraints of commerical crew. This is why there were only two capsules for commercial operations built. You could interchange these for ISS missions with Dragon. However, if Starliner was to service a space station on tis own you could be limited to a crew of five [or four with cargo], and you would need a constant fly then servicing loop. Which, with it only being designed to fly a total of ten times per capsule, it appears that there will be a very limited number of flights available - whilst also likely not being able to offer constant flight and being relegated to a singular station. It is not feasible for anything other than a billionaire's joy ride. Sure, there is going to be a while before Starship can fly crew [the version being used for Starlink is the cheap, basic version used for mass production to build a constellation, not crew. There is a lot that needs to be done before it can carry crew]

 

[JustStopDude]

Their plan is to wait for a democrat to be elected since SpaceX will never get a contract afterwards.

Democrat leaders are just as susceptible to bribes as Republicans.

This is why nothing ever changes, regardless of which political party has power.

 

[mlanguishi]

Scott's vid.

 

[Green Man]

Something like Challenger reflects really badly on the program.

Rightfully so, I suppose. The decision to launch Challenger after Morton-Thiokol basically all but told them that it was a really, really bad idea [and were only cowed into being 'go' for launch after a whole lot of hemming and hawing and anger on NASA's part], at those temperatures, was ludicrously reckless. That single decision, to not even attempt waiting a few hours for temperatures to rise a bit, probably set NASA back a decade or more in terms of public perception. The later hearings and released reports made NASA look like a fucking clownshow during the era of Challenger, and public perception wasn't helped by the fact that Challenger was carrying the first non-professional astronaut/civvie. NASA seemingly wanted to appeal to the public by demonstrating that getting to orbit had become so safe, hum-drum and pedestrian that 'now we can take civilians with us, too!' and because she was a schoolteacher, just about every other schoolteacher in the U.S had it on TV when it all went tits up and it was watched by millions of schoolkids, too.

Not to mention their incredibly optimistic launch schedule that got blown to smithereens when Challenger did as well. IIRC they wanted to launch 2-3 shuttles per month, an absolutely ludicrous timetable and one that was guaranteed to result in corners being cut somewhere. At that point, NASA looked like a bunch of idiots to John Q. Public, and possessing just as much ego as anyone else, and Kranz' motto/mantra was apparently forgotten entirely by that point. Columbia wasn't good, either - and while the shuttle was cool as fuck, for a modern spacecraft, it had a profoundly shitty safety record in spite of being very impressive. Two hull losses in a modern space program, let alone the loss of life as these were manned missions, was viewed as quite unacceptable to most. It was unacceptable, and modern sensibilities wouldn't abide it. Anyone who knows dick about space flight knows that it's dangerous, but most of the public doesn't know dick about space flight.

Columbia is a whole lot more excusable, though. By the time the damage was fully realized there was approximately fuck-all they could do about it except hope like fuck the glider survived reentry, which it didn't. People have their pet theories now about what could have been done, but most of them were infeasible as fuck and hinged upon NASA brass actually knowing just how bad the damage was, which they didn't and had no real way of knowing without a spacewalk and one of the crew putting eyes on it and reporting back. Even then, the crew then has to do something about it, with a very limited number of items that would be useful for such a task.

Anyway, thus ends my tangent. The TLR is that NASA absolutely took a shit on their own chest in terms of PR when they decided to launch Challenger against Morton-Thiokol's advice. Columbia didn't help either, because while most people who [again] know dick about space flight can see that once the damage occurred, Columbia was in a no-win situation barring some extraordinary and heroic actions and ingenuity, the average member of the public just sees a bunch of dead bodies and an awful lot of money going up in smoke. Both were sort of evidence also, especially Challenger, that the culture of quiet competence and an open door policy for perceived issues from the Apollo years was totally fucking gone, and unaccountable asshats were not only making calls they had no business making, but browbeating members of the team and their engineers/contractors into giving up on serious flight integrity issues. One of the big-wigs at Morton-Thiokol, who later watched the launch, had been telling his family quite often that the damn thing was going to blow up and everyone was going to die. People knew - NASA knew - and they still couldn't be fucked to wait until the afternoon.

 

[JustStopDude]

The TLR is that NASA absolutely took a shit on their own chest in terms of PR

I get what some people don't like private companies doing aerospace but when their argument is that it's safer when NASA does it really doesn't make sense when you compare the body count.

And those are the deaths we know about because the government couldn't hide them. During the moon race, there had to have been contractors killed during constructions but those deaths would have been treated as state secrets. You could not have build the Florida pads that they did, in the time frame they did, and not have guys get killed.

Don't get me wrong, SpaceX has killed way too many contractors (any more than zero is too many). But NASA has killed a significant number of people over the years. Yet for some reason, a lot of people seem to memory hole that shit.

 

[Falcos_Commisar]

Artemis is way more important then it seems at first glance. The US intent with that program is not just to go back to the moon for ass pats like the Apollo missions. The goal of Artemis is to create the lift capability for lunar colonization. The USA wants to establish permanent presence on the moon, and SpaceX riding that coattail means they get to be first in and best dressed.

*edit just to add*

The Artemis program and SpaceX's intended support for it is geared towards making permanent human (American) presence on the moon viable. It is potentially one of the greatest shifts in the human econony since an insane Venetian convinced the King of Spain to fund a mission to find a sea route to India by going west.

Luna, Lunar Orbit and Earth orbit are free land. Free. Land. Let that sink in. All the land on earth is owned by someone at this point. All the dirt on it, all the minerals beneath it. This is not true for the moon. Or the near earth orbit region. That territory belongs to whoever stakes their claim on it first.

I cannot even begin to describe the consequences for humanity, and the USA specifically if this effort towards lunar colonization succeeds.

*American land you mean.

United States of SPACE

 

[mindlessobserver]

*American land you mean.

United States of SPACE

We're going to the one place that hasn't been corrupted by communism.