malada

I'm still a bit of a space nut (I stayed up to watch the moon landing) and I'm happy Jeff Bezo's rocket made it to orbit AND the booster landed safely.

I still think he's a flaming asshole for treating his workers like dirt but giant booster lands safely? Good deal!

I have to admit Musk's giant rocket launches are more exciting as they tend to explode more, half the reason for Musk's launches are to send up his Star Link sats. They're the compact fluorescence light bulbs of internet access - an intermediary step towards a better technology. They'll reach everywhere true but laying optical cable is better: it's laid once and it's good, it will last for decades and the prices are coming down. Musk's satellites? Die in a few years and then pollute the upper atmosphere. And there are a _lot_ of them. To get gamer latency they need to be in low earth orbit and that means they get dragged down by the atmosphere within a short period of time. Wasteful. Dangerous. There's too much orbital crap up there already.

I'm rooting for the Neutron rocket from Space Labs. Go Kiwi!

StarShip goes BOOM again!

Elon said de-orbit the International Space Station and said, "Let's go to Mars."

Dude, you can't even get to orbit.

Space is hard, I get that. But dude, you suck. You've ruined X/Twitter, you bought into Tesla and ruined that with Cybertruck, and you're ruining SpaceX with StarShip.

You're ruining the government by random firings and lying about the savings you're (not) getting.

You can't spell FELON without ELON.

As a child of the space race I like to keep on eye on all things space related. After launching the crewed version of Starliner... Boeing and NASA have a pretty messy situation on their hands. If the cranky Starliner burns up in reentry because of dodgy steering jets it would be... bad. If the cranky Starliner burns up in reentry with people on board it would be a disaster.

Having lost two shuttles (and their crews) to risky decision making, NASA is a bit wary about dodgy equipment. Boeing has been great for the stock holders but for their rockets and planes? Not so much. Starliner is turning out to be under engineered, over budget and shoddily made. I'm not blaming the workers - Boeing's space program is actually a jobs program - this is purely a management problem. Lax training, lax quality control, and budget squeezing are all management responsibilities.

Maybe now when the new CEO was trained as an engineer things will turn around... but this is a huge company and the 'squeeze profits' mentality is probably deeply entrenched. A lot of managers need to be fired, new engineers trained up and the whole company needs to be turned around. This may take a decade. Or more.

In the meantime, NASA has decided to 'get off the pot' and have Butch and Suni come home in the safer Dragon capsule. This is a big piece of crow for Boeing to eat but all in all it would be worse if they returned crispy in the Starliner.

I still think NASA's idea to have two launch systems is a good idea - but there needs to be better oversight, consequences for bad actions, and compatibility between systems.

I know, I know... it's called rocket science for a reason. This stuff is complicated and hard.

But the real problem with the SLS is the rocket wasn't designed to generate thrust - it was designed to generate pork.

At this point they have enough hardware to generate... what, three launches? Then what? If you want to be serious about returning to space in a big way you need to either mass produce disposable engines or semi mass produce reusable rockets.

Damn, bring on the F1-B - the updated version of the classic F1-A engine that launched Apollo to the moon. Hire Elon to make them recoverable and reusable. I'm a child of the 60s and damn it I want my space station and my moon base.

-m

Will settle for a moon telescope base because... damn, the moon is dangerous.