For Phantom and Vaya. Their first rockets are supposed to be a bit smaller than Firefly Alpha. And they don't seem to have reuse ambitions. I don't see much of a point, but it isn't my money.
I wish they would have gotten LC-48 instead. The policy to launch and land from the same complex makes sense to be fair to the other companies who might eventually want to try it (Blue, Relativity, Stoke), but, in the meantime, it must be an inconvenience for the only company actually landing anything.
After everything that has gone into the ISS, dropping the crew size now would be such a waste. Losing 1 out of 7 crew members, when they are more productive than ever, would cause much more than 1/7 loss of science because of all the background work it takes to keep the station operational.
Extending crew rotations is much less bad than cutting crew, but it still isn't great for spreading experience around the astronaut corps.
We should be talking about more private flights to station, new Axiom modules, and flights of Starliner and Dreamchaser. Not cutting back.
A full flow staged combustion engine without a customer is really weird. Hopefully we find out soon who will use this.
Full article pasted here:
I did not have Commercial Orion on my bingo card
The people demand ACES
where we’ve previously been seeing about one collision a day
Wow. Good on CO for investing in these.
A screen porch for the hammock is awesome!
Especially in bug heavy areas, more screened space is so nice. There are a few times I've camped with hammockers who brought and shared an extra dome tent to keep their stuff and change clothes.
When do we get the electric RS 6 Avant?
Given that a regular A6 and S6 start at $58.1k and $75.9k, that isn't toooo crazy. The S6 E-tron is pretty much the same price as the ICE one.
TRACERS is a cool program. Studying space weather like this is such a perfect example of NASA's science mission being helpful for everyone in space and everyone on Earth that uses those services.
The launch being a NASA rideshare with 3 other NASA missions, an ESA one, and a private one, is also really cool.
It still kills me that the launch was delayed by an FAA power outage, when the Skykraft sats on board are for air traffic control and could have helped with that exact problem.
Sooo not this year