Every time I watch those booster landings I'm amazed.

4/19/2019 1:18:39 PM

Amazing Carolina woman.

4/19/2019 3:11:58 PM

https://www.popularmechanics.com/space/rockets/amp27229261/spacex-crew-dragon-anomaly/

Welp, kick the can on that for a while.

[Edited on April 22, 2019 at 8:14 PM. Reason : +]

4/22/2019 8:14:21 PM

A shot of the Outer Banks shot by Christina Koch



https://myfox8.com/2019/04/23/north-carolina-native-christina-koch-snaps-photo-of-outer-banks-from-space-it-took-my-breath-away/?fbclid=IwAR34fOUKS9eyszpdSs6LN3GvmKU7uQRqWaM2mTB7T3t1567uKWNItS0uI8k

4/23/2019 2:02:12 PM

I saw it on her facebook page. Breathtaking.

4/23/2019 2:52:46 PM

Got a new job at Cape Canaveral. Signing up for prime launch watching spot.

6/25/2019 2:16:06 PM

The Orion capsule had a successful Ascent Abort test on July 2nd.

Also, at some point recently they gave the program a name, Artemis.

7/11/2019 11:39:08 AM

Going back and reading this thread.

Smc has a post in August 2011 saying "If anything, private space companies should be more safe. They know that one death will destroy them."

Virgin Galactic had a death in the time since the post, the company is not destroyed, and the design of their craft was criticized for not contemplating the possibility of human error.

[Edited on July 11, 2019 at 12:44 PM. Reason : .]

7/11/2019 12:31:19 PM

^smc has a lot of troll posts in this thread. It isn't worth your time to contemplate them.

7/11/2019 6:13:52 PM

I don't think you can say for certain which is "safer". Either private or public firms can have a culture that values safety or a culture that values everything else more. Democracy's wage war too, so it is clear they don't inherently value life. If we're in a race to beat the Russians then a few sacrifices along the way will be probably considered worth it. What matters is who's in charge and what they value. Same goes for Private firms. Maybe they have to face lawsuits if people die, but as with Airplanes, the cost of the settlements is probably comparable to the other costs associated with catastrophic failures (a billion dollar craft vs a billion dollars in settlements).

No, all we can say for sure is that private endeavors are cheaper and consume fewer resources because they're not spending other people's money in the same way public run endeavors do. Beyond that, safety culture is dependent upon everything else more, and not heavily influenced by public/private/etc.

7/20/2019 9:24:24 AM

Not manned spaceflight [yet] but the Mars 2020 rover just finished being assembled at JPL. After environmental testing, this guy will blast off on an Atlas V to collect some samples from the Martian soil and hopefully find some evidence of life. The amount of information we gather and the technology that is developed getting those tiny samples of Mars back to Earth will be instrumental in developing a manned mission one day.

8/5/2019 1:28:25 PM

If the return mission doesn't work, Elon will send a maintenance team a year or two later to check on it.

[Edited on August 6, 2019 at 8:22 PM. Reason : ]

8/6/2019 8:21:58 PM

^ He reminds me of CEOs I've worked for that shoot stuff out their asshole with no idea how anything to make it all actually happens works. I think the personality profile has been deemed by psychologists as "dreamers with zero knowledge on the technical aspects".

It's the complete opposite from the stereotypical engineer psychological profile.

[Edited on August 9, 2019 at 9:13 AM. Reason : /]

8/9/2019 9:12:16 AM

^I wouldn't go that far with him, as he is actually quite technically minded. His goals are way too ambitious though. I'm pretty sure he knows that though, as he likes to generate buzz. He could say "SpaceX will be on the moon next year" and every engineer knows that isn't happening, but the common person doesn't know that. It does generate a lot of publicity though, and even if he doesn't make the deadline, he's still go something in the works.

8/12/2019 9:23:26 AM

^^^ He is an engineer at heart, so he has some idea what he's talking about. But like myself and many others, we won't know the difficulties until they arise. And we all might get lucky. If these starship things work out, it would be revolutionary. Revolutionary enough to allow for all the crap he's said.

8/19/2019 3:55:36 PM

Quote :

"He is an engineer at heart, so he has some idea what he's talking about."

"February 2017 - Elon Musk says SpaceX will send two tourists to (sic: around) the moon next year."

Was posted in this thread. Last page. This is an incredibly indefensible statement. This is no different from most anything Trump says. I'd like to just sit down for a few hours with him and pick at the details of how he thought this would happen. Of course, like Trump, he'd never do that. The amount of planning involved to make it reality without taking unnecessary risks on killing the people shot up in space would be much greater than 18 months. Meanwhile the furthest out a spacecraft has gone beyond geosynchronous orbit since Apollo is still the Orion EFT-1 from late 2014.

Hey, the guy is really good at getting public attention. Just not sure I respect him as an engineer however. Part of being a good engineer is showing restraint.

The people working for him, I respect.

[Edited on August 26, 2019 at 5:16 PM. Reason : .]

8/26/2019 5:10:32 PM

He's been wrong a lot when trying to predict the future. Trying to predict the future is kinda dumb, but we all kinda do that anyway.

As for this particular mission promise, it wasn't that absurd. He thought Crewed Dragon would be done, it wasn't. Every sane person predicted there would be further delays, but most didn't predict delays to the extent they've had. However, once Crew-Dragon is approved, his moon mission only required putting a crew-dragon on top of a falcon-Heavy. Well, with crew-dragon flying and falcon-heavy flying, putting the two together wouldn't take much effort at all. Of course, such a mission would be far more risky than a crew-dragon flying on a Falcon 9. But, the draco abort system is there, so, I would have had no objection to going on the mission. NASA would have never approved it, but SpaceX wouldn't have needed their approval.

Why was it cancelled rather than delayed when crew-dragon was delayed? Simple, the passengers were convinced they'd rather fly on Starship. So, arguably, it isn't that the mission was impossible, they technically could still do it. Just no one willing to pay wants them to.

8/28/2019 6:36:53 PM

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DBve1HbqGb8

8/28/2019 6:49:57 PM

https://imgur.com/a/Y10saMq

SLS Mobile Launcher just rolled back out to the pad after being housed in the VAB for the hurricane. This video gives a really good perspective on just how giant this thing is.

9/11/2019 9:00:28 AM

He sets wild expectations for every project he is working on. They use it to motivate, but a lot of them never see it as attainable.

9/12/2019 1:27:53 PM

man i wanna ride on the mobile crawler

9/12/2019 4:09:17 PM

^People used to all the time in the shuttle days. It went so slowly that it took 8 hours to go from the VAB to the pad. People would walk along with it, lay on the non moving parts, etc. not sure if they’ll allow that for SLS though.

9/13/2019 11:00:10 PM

I saw some of the Apollo 11 documentary that aired on CNN when the 50th anniversary was coming around earlier this year. One of the first shots in it is the Crawler moving along, I'd never seen it before, and my first thought was "that is straight out of Star Wars". Looked like some Empire super weapon but this was of course years before Star Wars.

Go find the Rocket Ranch podcast, it's a podcast done by Kennedy Space Center. They had an episode, maybe around episode 6, that talked to the guys in control of/manage/engineer, some combination of those, the Crawler.

Has a max speed of 2 mph, but they only really take it at 1-1.25 mph. (1 mph = 88 ft/hr.)

Quote :

"He sets wild expectations for every project he is working on. They use it to motivate, but a lot of them never see it as attainable."

Again, having worked for a CEO that set wild expectations divorced from reality, I don't consider that good leadership.

[Edited on September 17, 2019 at 12:12 PM. Reason : .]

9/17/2019 12:03:14 PM

If anyone is curious as to what I'm working on at NASA these days, this article has a good overview. I'm working design on the MAV.

https://www.airspacemag.com/airspacemag/return-martian-crater-180973115/

9/19/2019 1:51:12 PM

rip Vikram lander i guess

that's a shame

9/19/2019 3:28:23 PM

a friend of mine from grad school just flew to the ISS today on the soyuz

so cool

9/25/2019 4:46:10 PM

wo-manned space flight (& future walk) is awesome

https://twitter.com/Astro_Christina/status/1176864846178136064

https://twitter.com/Space_Station/status/1180202096785678336

10/4/2019 5:49:05 PM

[Edited on October 5, 2019 at 11:50 PM. Reason : Looks crude as hell]

10/5/2019 11:49:56 PM

It is crude as hell. Only the fins mean anything, since those are the intended part being tested. The rest of it just has to "not fall apart".

10/14/2019 2:16:54 AM

i mean it's clearly a test article prototype. doesn't need to look pretty

10/14/2019 6:17:19 PM

https://blogs.nasa.gov/spacestation/2019/10/15/christina-koch-jessica-meir-will-venture-outside-station-late-this-week/?fbclid=IwAR3Z0EEjS6-Y2PHSImoJ_rfytaKWlblhwZVb2G0SGwCWvN00FDKp3qzQTR0

First all female space walk is scheduled for this week.

10/16/2019 9:00:23 AM

recovered falcon 9 from there last flight. this was about 2weeks ago.
https://imgur.com/a/HADdJyu

[Edited on November 27, 2019 at 12:24 PM. Reason : .]

11/27/2019 12:21:14 PM

i need gift ideas for someone really into the private space stuff

12/20/2019 9:07:48 AM

This wasn't exactly Boeing's year. I wonder what caused the failure.

12/21/2019 8:19:08 AM

most have been using the same 737 max software.

12/21/2019 11:22:24 AM

Satellite relay issues were incorrectly timed, making its mission timeline out of sync and putting it into an incorrect trajectory.

12/22/2019 7:20:35 PM

Only 11 hours off mission time.

Boeing should have to refly this mission on their own dime and its bullshit if NASA lets them skate, again. SpaceX has the microscope put on them for everything and seems to be held to a far higher standard that Boeing. Which we have seen over and over again across all divisions of Boeing that they are not the company they once were and should not get to coast on their previous accolades. Hundreds have died due to lack of oversight on Boeing.

[Edited on December 22, 2019 at 9:53 PM. Reason : ]

12/22/2019 9:52:53 PM

Boeing has a lot more political influence than SpaceX. It shouldn’t be like that but it is.

12/23/2019 12:46:27 PM

The future of american launched manned space flight just got a whole lot closer today.

SpaceX just launched their in-flight abort test and things seemed to go nominally.

1/19/2020 10:46:04 AM

https://youtu.be/wFXQ5SRCy74

4/4/2020 7:35:06 PM

Two astronauts will be launching from Cape Canaveral on an American-made launch vehicle at around 4:30 EST for the first time since July 2011. This is pretty historic as it will be the first commercially developed launch vehicle. I myself had a very minimal impact on this, but I have a lot of coworkers at NASA and SpaceX that have been working towards this for years.

Right now, weather is looking pretty bad so it may end up being scrubbed. Next launch window is on Saturday.

Link to watch online for those interested: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Aymrnzianf0

[Edited on May 27, 2020 at 11:30 AM. Reason : link]

5/27/2020 11:04:41 AM

2024 back to Moon, 2033 to Mars!

5/27/2020 11:06:50 AM

^Mars 2033 is not going to happen. In order to launch for Mars in 2033 we'd have to have some significant risk reduction on key technologies in about the next 2 years which just isn't feasible given the current budget and missions that are already planned.

For context, when we were doing the Constellation program 13 years ago, the goal was Mars 2038. Right now my main project is Mars Sample Return, and despite that being unmanned there are significant technologies that we are working on advancing right now for a 2026 launch.

5/27/2020 11:19:00 AM

My research was sponsored by NASA before, so actually we are NASA alumni. I worked on adaptive control of GTM.
Yes, 2033 is a bold goal to me as well, b/c Mars is 400 times further than Moon. But since Elon Musk promised he would take 1M people there in the next 30 years, I guess it still can happen. Many robots are on Mars already. We just need to guarantee the safety of human astronauts and make sure something like Challenger's tragedy won't happen again. That one shocked the whole world.

Although Musk is a crazy guy, more and more riches start joining like Bezos and his Blue Origins. And The Martian in 2015 made a lot of senses about colonizing Mars already.

[Edited on May 27, 2020 at 11:41 AM. Reason : add another note]

5/27/2020 11:26:12 AM

5/27/2020 3:34:09 PM

It's been super stormy and nasty all day. Bad enough that power flickered a few times, but seems fairly calm right now

5/27/2020 3:38:45 PM

Quote :

"1M people there in the next 30 years"

lol. Right.

5/27/2020 3:50:44 PM

33 minutes

5/27/2020 4:00:56 PM

Could be cancelled.

5/27/2020 4:14:04 PM

yeah, looks like it will be postponed until Saturday

5/27/2020 4:17:16 PM