relevant context:
It’s even sadder because they were last there 47 years ago and all of a sudden they have to beat India by a couple of days.
It’s just a matter of time before we see Putin at a Trabant ribbon cutting ceremony.
wrong thread
Well this looks promising:
Of course it’s potentially terrible news if you believe in the great filter theory.
This looks as good a thread as any to post this :-
The one of Mars & the Moon is pretty amazing !
I assumed it was taken from a moon orbiter, but it was taken from Texas !
On a sub-Neptune, too. Interesting.
The article calls these one of the most common planets out there, but of course because of the way we look for exoplanets these larger worlds will be overrepresented.
Weird that there’s been no livestream or anything, but apparently Firefly Aerospace made orbit, or at least past stage separation:
It was part of the DoD responsive space program:
It’ll be good to see if they actually hit the desired orbital parameters or not.
That is incredible. I suppose mars would never be that big from the orbit of the moon but a super zoomed in shot would make the distant object look a lot bigger.
I’ve been to this exhibition in previous years - some incredible shots combined with the odd “what’s so good about this?” which is my usual reaction in a photography exhibition. But all the ones in that article looked fantastic.
Very weird:
This isn’t great:
Any one failure of a rocket is not a sign of disaster. Everyone has failures. The problem is that Rocket Lab has had 4 failures out of 41 launches. The prior failure was about 20 launches ago. Depending on how you want to account for things, Electron is only about 90-95% reliable.
That’s not a great position to be in if your company is already in a fairly fragile state. Especially when SpaceX’s rideshare program is so cheap, going to new orbits, and where the launcher hasn’t had a single failure in the past 230 flights.
Osiris Rex landing soon
Video:
Brian
Woot – Landed safely. Looks fairly close to a road.
Given that this is an active range, need to check for munitions and such.
Brian
There is a thread devoted to just this mission
I was probably following that, but forgot about it.
Brian
Dave Limp taking over Blue Origin:
Reports are that John Flaccid was also in the running.
I hear Gen. Buck Turgidson is with US Space Command these days.
Of course all those rockets are targeted at the secret lair of the Evil Emperor Wang the Perverted.
Jokes aside, I’m very far from believing that Dave Limp has a chance at turning things around for Blue Origin.
Bob Smith was of course among the worst possible choices for CEO, unless the goal of BO was to speedrun their way to bloated aerospace contractor without ever passing through a golden period of being renowned for their engineering prowess. If so, Smith was a great choice.
I don’t actually hold it against Limp that he has no aerospace experience. I don’t think that’s necessarily a prerequisite. And he does, as they say, ship. Some of his products at Amazon were huge money-losers (see: Alexa), but that’s more a function of the fundamentals of the product than the product itself. Not his problem if the business model behind Alexa was idiotic. He still shipped.
Still–I just don’t see him coming in and really doing the necessary restructuring and fat-trimming needed. Blue Origin has almost as many employees as SpaceX (11,000 vs. 12,000), and their total product lineup is a (grounded) suborbital craft and an engine they’ve shipped three of (last I checked). SpaceX, meanwhile:
- Flies >60 orbital missions a year
- Supports two partially reusable orbital vehicles
- Is developing another fully reusable one
- All of which using engines that they’ve developed and built
- Has their own manned orbital craft that supports both NASA and private missions
- Maintains 4 launch pads
- Builds and launches thousands of satellites per year
- Builds and ships hundreds of thousands (maybe millions now) of Starlink user terminals per year
- Which are also totally state of the art (from the laser links to the phased array terminal)
- And a bunch of stuff I’m not thinking of
Smaller providers like Rocket Lab do a lot less, but they are also commensurately smaller. So they also deserve respect in how much they accomplish for the resources they have. It’s only Blue Origin and the rest of oldspace that have armies of people while accomplishing so little.
Switching for a moment to unmanned space exploration I found this rather interesting article in one of my news feeds.
Excellent work by the FCC:
It’s not a big fine and this sort of fine will not be dealt out by the Chinese or the Russians to their own agencies who are some of the worst offenders, but it’s good leadership and sets an important precedent.