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Ladder climbers and empire builders are a cancer

“Pausing” for at least 2 years sounds a lot more like a death knell

New Shepard also did some uncrewed flights for microgravity research payloads. It had a longer weightless period than the Vomit Comet. That seems like the main value that will be lost, but the cost and staff had to be really tough to justify.

It was out in GEO, so that garbage will be up there forever.

That was partially tongue-in-cheek, but there are definitely risks with a rocket that has only flown one time, four years ago, and a capsule with a new ECLSS system and reentry profile. Neither of those things would fly crew if we were talking about Dragon or Starliner.

It’s late, overpriced, outdated, corrupt, unsafe… But it’s still a cool rocket. I’m going to try to get to the launch if I can make the dates work.

I don’t really mind a moon hotel if it helps pay for research

Progress! I’d love to see bounties placed on some high risk debris.

taken by a GoPro camera

A heavily modified GoPro

Artemis 1 got some great pictures and footage.

It’s better to land a 1st stage than to drop it on a village

Update: he’s headed to Blue Origin

Via xitter

https://xcancel.com/blueorigin/status/2004607908667953519

We’re pleased to announce that @torybruno is joining Blue Origin as president, National Security, reporting to CEO Dave Limp. Tory will spearhead our newly formed National Security Group.

It’s tough with how much they were hamstrung, but without the Amazon contract, ULA would seriously be circling the drain and this would be a very different retrospective.

The Vulcan ramp up seems very open to criticism, from the engine choice to SRB issues and the Atlas V shared infrastructure bottleneck.

It’s complete vaporware until proven otherwise

Where is Orel? Amur? Or anything about their space station? It would be great if they did it all, I just don’t believe them.

Their CTO designed the Bigelow modules, so they might actually know what they’re doing. I would love to see them succeed on a similar path as Vast and beat the legacy primes, like Lockheed and Sierra, who are trying similar things.

Yes, and they can even be better at dealing with debris strikes than solid modules.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inflatable_space_habitat#Advantages

There has been an inflatable module, BEAM, on the ISS for almost 10 years:

https://www.nasa.gov/international-space-station/bigelow-expandable-activity-module-beam/

The CLPS IM-3 launch that this will ride on will also have the three CADRE rovers. Hopefully Intuitive Machines sticks this landing!

https://www-robotics.jpl.nasa.gov/what-we-do/flight-projects/cooperative-autonomous-distributed-robotic-exploration-cadre/cadre-mission-overview/

I found the paper from August 2024 because this article didn’t seem to link any sources

https://www.aanda.org/articles/aa/full_html/2024/09/aa51856-24/aa51856-24.html

It mentions that SpaceX is trying to mitigate the noise. I wonder if anything has changed in the year+ since then.