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I have absolutely no problem with it either as long as it's not a huge monetary commitment on NASAs part, afterall the funding is likely to come from some other budgets that are already trying to be cut to the bone. Throwing them a bit more funding though to try and accelerate a parallel track...

I gather the BO plan is sonething like send a Mark I lander with an unfueled ascent stage and crew module to NRHO, and then send one or more to the landing site with the propellant for the ascent stage. Forgetting that transferring prop on the lunar surface is a little dicey and that it requires...

Not every space craft is designed to be fully demisible, but starlink is. It's an important qualifier to note if your are saying a couple of objects are supposed to be reentering daily, that those objects are designed to disintegrate fully in the atmosphere. In either case space force keeps tabs...

We don't know until SpaceX says for sure, but attempts to total up what we can see haven't come anywhere near 400k. It's somewhere in between those numbers, but I would guess it's probably closer to 300 klb (135 tonnes) than 400. It will probably go back up with the big tank stretch for V4...

Correct as I said above. There were obviously many changes between raptors 1 and 2, but the bigger throat with redesigned turbo pumps to support the higher flow was a big part. Isp was said to drop down from 335 to 327ish at sea level, but the thrust went up to 215 tonnes over the ~185 of raptor...

In theory this would absolutely be what you should do. And in practice it is what they did with merlin as they upped its chamber pressure. The issue is that there is only so much real estate on the bottom of the rocket, and the nozzles (except for the outer 20) have to have room to gimbal. Thus...

I wasn't really pushing back on your comment, I just wanted to include it for context since their second comment was in reply to yours not mine.

Look you can't cite a table and then selectively ignore information on it, and it's not like the plus is some new thing. SpaceX has been consistent in providing a 100+ (and 200+ for later generations) performance quote for years now as a way to state that it will at least be this without having...

The fact that they have an ablative backup underneath large sections is proof that they want to make the heatshield resilient to the loss of tiles. They may not want to lose them, but when you have 18 k tiles on the thing it's inevitable some will come off. Intentionally leaving them off in...

100+, hence at least 100 tonnes. What they are calling V2 is really a V2 ship on a V1 booster. We have yet to get a true V2 full stack. What they are now calling V3 is essentially the specs of the old V2 stack engined with a derated raptor 3. The booster is a little taller, but it's not much...

The steamroller of F9 steamroller fame is the effect it has had on the market. You have to flatten something or it isn't really steamrolling anything.

Yes, my read is that they presented a plan, were told there was no money for it, and are scaling back to make it more affordable. Only there is no more affordable. Space is a nice soft power flex in peace time, but the Kremlin is in survival mode now. A new space station is well down the list of...

It's obvious from their testing that they expect to lose tiles, and they tested it here not only with a lot of tiles missing but as you said with them missing in bad places. The idea was to setup something like a worst case scenario, and the vehicle met it with a resounding meh. The implication...

And if you believe that one I have a...well, space station to sell you.

Inflation since 1960 is cumulatively about 10X. Even over top of inflation the US economy has grown by 6X cumulatively (60X in non-real dollar terms). Federal government spending (inflation adjusted) has grown by a similar margin since the 1967 peak spending on Apollo. There's this general...

It may not be officially acknowledged, but part of Orion's mass growth was to ensure it was too big to ride to space on a commercial rocket. Even without the service module the Orion masses as much as a fully laden dragon. All the long term bits are in the service module, and yet the capsule...

Interesting read, I don't agree with his assertions that domes can't be more than 150 ft and can't be modular an built incrementally. If one is primarily using the weight of the dome to hold back the pressure rather than pure tension, one can use a much flatter structure. I am envisioning...

A dome does not actually have to self support in the way a pressure vessel or arch does though, the pressure force can be countered by the weight of the dome itself. Now that still requires a tremendous amount of mass (and thus thickness) in martian gravity. Something like 10 m of concrete or...

Even though they are being more consistent in their naming system (version 1, 2, 3 vs v1.1, full thrust, block 5) it is rather fluid in terms of future planning. They clearly intended for there to be a production V1, but the test campaign ran long enough that they pushed past prototype V1s and...

I am not imaging any of this for a tanker. As the hot ullage gas cools from the flight they will naturally have their pressure drop from flight pressures. It will take some time to warm that subcooled prop enough to have it start boiling and the pressure to go back up. A tanker might not be on...