Beautiful:
That’s video of the Varda capsule returning to Earth.
Or, if they’re a KSP GOD like myself, they can design a rocket and lander, and set down gently on the Mun on the first try, hand-flying the entire descent:
Yeah, yeah, I used mods for some of the boring parts. They actually screwed things up more than anything. Shoulda hand-flown the whole thing.
Holy crap. Odysseus landed with zero altimetry data, because while they patched the software to make use of a lidar package in one of the payloads, the data couldn’t be processed in real time. So the computer landed using just an optical navigation camera, comparing frames to guess at height and lateral velocity. Came in hot and a bit sideways, but to avoid cratering with no altimeter is nuts.
I trust you took into account the c.2.5 second delay between Earth and the Moon?!
Radio communications in KSP travel at infinite speed, unrestricted by petty concerns of the limitations of the speed of light.
After Branson announced he wasn’t going to be putting any more money into Virgin Galactic and considering how few passengers the company had flown and how they are shutting down new flights until new rockets are available, I was expecting they would shortly be going out of business.
But it turns out the company ended December with $982 million in cash or cash equivalents on hand.
I prefer to think that the Kerbals embed tiny Kerbal brains into every one of their probes, and I am just taking the role of one of these brains. Given how little food/water/air they need, I suspect they have very compact brains indeed.
From the IM-1 lunar lander media briefing yesterday:
– a star tracker error after launch prevented battery charge, but was corrected by a software patch
– a thrust vectoring error was discovered during engine commissioning, and corrected by adjustment
– engine LNG and LOX chill down cycles took longer than expected on restarts, so procedures were adjusted. This caused a slightly elliptical lunar orbit.
– laser rangefinder was found to have the ground harness installed, instead of the launch harness. Range safety requires the ground harness for all testing, but it was not swapped out before launch.
– the software patch for the NASA Doppler rangefinder was too slow, so they switched to optical navigation at 15 km altitude. IM-1 landed with only it’s cameras and AI, a first in space flight.
– IM-1 landed upright, skidded up a 12 degree slope, and snapped a leg which departed. After stopping, it tipped onto the missing leg, coming to rest on a helium tank at a 30 degree angle.
– all the science packages worked and sent data back
– the EagleCam was ejected but was unable to send images to the lander over WiFi
– IM-1 will be commanded to hibernate in hopes it will wake up after the lunar night.
Despite many problems, NASA considers IM-1 to be successful, under the CLPS program to develop industry capability.
And its last image before powering down:
Nikon? 
Surely all the buttons are in the wrong places no?
(I may be a Canon user who has picked up a Nikon and gotten very confused. I over-confidently believe I could easily be an astronaut, but not if I have to use a Nikon…)
That’s a crescent Earth to the left of the bright blobby sun.
Boeing Starliner delayed yet again. This time due to “due to space station scheduling” according to NASA. New launch window is early May pushed back from mid-April.
Maybe Boeing needs to hire some Soviet-era engineers from Russia and tell them “the equipment is a total piece of crap, but it’s our asses if it doesn’t work; what do we do?”. The Soviets were experienced with that.
As a point of comparison, Bob and Doug flew on Crew Dragon four years ago. It’s put 50 people into orbit, and one of the capsules has individually made 5 flights–just one less than Starliner is expected to make total at this point.
NASA is no longer capable of directly supervising large-build space missions. They need to identify the goal and the rough mission parameters and then see who can meet those requirements. That’s it. We have finally entered the era where the “free” market can do it better, faster, cheaper.
Well, that is more or less what they’re doing now. It’s just that Boeing is having a very hard time moving into the new reality. But really, making two bets (Dragon and Starliner) and having only one pay off is still a better outcome than if NASA had done it the traditional way.
And it’s what we’re seeing for about half of the Artemis program–SLS and Orion being old-school, with Starship and whatever Blue Origin cooks up being the remainder. So NASA hasn’t completely moved to the new way of doing things, but they’re getting there. Frankly, it’s amazing that they’ve done what they have, given the nature of pork distribution.
Let’s hope they can keep going, and that SpaceX will get some meaningful competition, given how Boeing has so thoroughly dropped the ball.
Boeing won’t be doing it the new way. They already announced that they wlll no longer compete for fixed-price contracts, as they can’t make money doing it.
Which makes me wonder why they would get any contract offers at all, since they are basically announcing their inability to maintain cost and schedule.
NASA needs to institute contract requirements that X (where X is >50) percent of senior management must have degrees in engineering or you don’t get to bid. It’s time for the MBAs to go back to ruining retail stores and get the fuck out of any critical defense or defense-related industries - or actually any industry that actually builds stuff.
So now that New Glenn has rolled out and Starship is just a few days away from IFT-3, looking at how the two compete will be interesting.
Let’s assume Starship’s next flight goes as planned, at least so far as vehicle performance. As a bonus let’s say the fuel transfer experiment works, and the payload door does its thing. Doesn’t that just about mean the end of New Glenn for commercial payloads? SpaceX needs Starship to fly a LOT to make the concept work. They will hoover up all the payloads they can. And if Starship can turn around anywhere near as fast as SpaceX hopes, they’ll have more capacity to orbit than required for all near future demand, won’t they?
The U.S. government might wind up subsidizing New Glenn by giving it lots of launches anyway to maintain a competitor and for the health of U.S. space launch in case of conflict. You don’t want all your eggs in one basket. But will it survive a commercial market with Starship in it? SpaceX even plans to retire the Falcons because Starship will be cheaper.
New Glenn might also have a few years of life while SpaceX works the bugs out of Starship and focuses on Artemis and the Moon.
That’s the thing about SpaceX. Once the design is proven, they don’t build/launch at a cadence to do one thing. One thing doesn’t generate the volume to make the cost savings per vehicle/launch. They build workhorses and do for as many things as they can support.
That’s part of why NASA’s procurement program sucks. They don’t generally create things with multiple potential uses (i.e., cost spread). They say “build us this thing for this mission” (set of missions in the case of Artemis) and we’ll buy Y of them. But Y is never large enough to achieve economies of scale.
Can you imagine any NASA-specific equipment with 10 launches in 1 month (including 3 in 24 hours)? In addition to hitting those milestones, SpaceX launched, on average, every 4 DAYS last year. And they are ahead of that pace so far this year.
NASA is slowly getting better, but mostly because SpaceX is forcing them to by being cheaper and faster than anybody else.