• 11 Posts
  • 171 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
Cake day: February 28th, 2024
  • ptfrd@sh.itjust.workstoSpaceflight@sh.itjust.works•[Stephen Clark] Northrop Grumman’s new spacecraft is a real chonkerEnglish
    2·
    4 days ago

    Such a chonker that it’ll have to be temporarily moved out of the way during a Soyuz approach in a couple of months?

    Maybe … I’m actually not sure if this is something that they’d have to do even with a smaller vehicle. Anyway, here are the basic details:

    Cygnus will be briefly unberthed from the space station using the outpost’s robotic arm during the approach and docking of a crewed Russian Soyuz craft on Nov. 27.

    “Cygnus is berthed to node one nadir and that’s close to the corridor for Soyuz rendezvous,” Dina Contella, the deputy manager of NASA’s ISS Program, explained during a prelaunch briefing. “So, when Soyuz is coming into dock at the SUV MRM (Mini-Research Module) one port, we’d like for safety’s sake to unberth Cygnus and hold it away from the Russian segment.”

    Alternatively, mission managers might decide to fill the module with as much trash as possible and release it before the arrival of Soyuz MS-28, she said.

    Now, the above quote is immediately preceded in the article by “Because of its increased size …”. But I didn’t notice that point being made explicitly during said pre-launch briefing. The two relevant sections are 9:40 - 10:25 and 33:51 - 35:18. At 34:47 she simply says, “Just to be on the safe side, we’re trying to keep the neighbouring port free.”

  • ptfrd@sh.itjust.workstoSpaceX@sh.itjust.works•Starship Development Thread September 2025English
    3·
    18 days ago

    Flight 11 speculation …

    Any chance they put some real Starlink satellites on board (and go all the way to orbit in order to deploy them)?

    Any chance they try to land Stage 2 on land, on its skirt? So that they can properly inspect the heat shield (etc.)

    • Perhaps the Aussie outback, if a suborbital flight? If so, they’d presumably need to target a bare patch with no foliage that might catch fire. (The first thought that crossed my mind was, “what about that massive rock?”, but I think that might be a little disrespectful …)
    • Perhaps US territory (desert / salt flats / military range / LZ-4), if an orbital flight?

    Any chance they go orbital regardless? I can’t think of much reason why they would. I’m assuming they’re already very confident that Starship is capable of getting to orbit, but perhaps actually doing it would let them test a full deorbit burn?

  • ptfrd@sh.itjust.workstoSpaceX@sh.itjust.works•With Starship, SpaceX encounters an obstacle that haunted NASA’s space shuttlesEnglish
    3·
    24 days ago

    Musk has recently claimed SpaceX will send its first uncrewed Starships to Mars next year, too.

    I thought his most recent claim (maybe a month ago on Twitter?) was much more circumspect? Something like “if everything happens to go very well we can do that”.

    And even on an occasion before that (a presentation he did in Starbase earlier this year), he might have remembered to include caveat words like “aspirational” at least some of the time?

    I think if they really had to launch towards Mars in Dec 2026, they could, because they’ve shown they can get to orbit with a second stage that they can ‘mass produce’. So they could choose to focus on orbital refilling rather than reusability, for the next 16 months. And there’s an argument that they should do this, because Mars transfer opportunities are somewhat rare, and Mars EDL is a potential ‘criticial path’ item for their long term goals.

    But I guess even for SpaceX, there comes a point at which you just have to accept that certain things have a natural sequence that determines the timeline.

    They’ve got an ‘overhang’ of outstanding design changes, which are coming in Block 3, and this will just take a certain amount of time to implement. And once they’ve started testing Block 3, perhaps they’ll even decide there’s another set of ‘obvious’ design changes they’ll want to make; perhaps they’ll decide they need to move to a ‘Block 4’ before aggressively pushing on all the other goals. And the next big goal would probably be vehicle recovery, because that makes everything else more efficient in multiple ways. And maybe only then do they start testing orbital refilling. And maybe only once there’s sufficient progress on that can they start confidently working to finalize the design for the 1st Mars ship.

    And maybe in amongst all this, there’s also a decision to prioritize the transition of Starlink launches away from Falcon 9, because even SpaceX doesn’t have infinite money, and it’s too much of a waste not to combine Starship testing with Starship doing useful work (launching an in-house payload).

    So basically, I’m now at 15% on them being able to launch towards Mars during the next transfer opportunity. (And that’s not taking into account political considerations, NASA saying no due to planetary protection, things like that.)