Ephraim
4093
It would likely take Tony Stark level engineering skills to assemble an IKEA satellite.
Menzo
4094
I can’t believe this is finally launching this year.
If we survive that long. /s
Answering the truly important questions.
There’s only one way to truly find out! Someone call Musk and tell him we’ve got a payload for him.
Man, we just can’t get rid of Trump, can we?
Definitely in favor of firing him into space, though.
jpinard
4100
I thought there was some kind of demand it had to go on the SLS? I’m extremely happy, and equally surprised it is going out this year.
Romalar
4101
That law was mandating that the Europa Clipper mission fly on SLS. However, congress is now discussing reversing that since there’s basically no chance enough SLS launches will be available (even if we fully funded it) by around 2025-2026 that aren’t spoken for by Artemis missions.
I heard they already did decouple Europa Clipper from SLS in the last budget bill that snuck through Congress in December.
FYI two Mars landers are arriving next month, the first from China, the second JPL. The JPL features a rover and a drone/helo experiment.
— Alan
Romalar
4104
Plus the UAE Mars Hope orbiter mission. February’s a busy time out there.
jpinard
4105
Lockheed Martin and Boeing bleeding the American taxpayer blind.
It has since all gone sideways. By the time Saturday’s test took place, NASA had spent about $17.5 billion developing the rocket, and many billions more on ground systems to launch it. The original launch date was 2016, and now the rocket will likely not fly before 2022. And although much of the hardware has a long heritage, NASA and its contractors have still struggled to integrate it.
We and other oversight entities have consistently identified contractor performance as a primary cause for the SLS Program’s increased costs and schedule delays, and quality control issues continue to plague Boeing as it pushes to complete the rocket’s core stage
Which is a problem for sure. So is having most of your rockets blow up on the launch pad like the Russians though.
jpinard
4107
I wasn’t suggesting they should have rushed to launch. The issue is this is cost+ contracting, and the fact it failed simply means more time and money for Lockheed and Boeing. Failure literally gives their stockholders more money.
The whole SLS thing is the last gasp of the misguided shuttle program (it inherited a lot of dumb shuttle tech and is re-using shuttle engines/boosters). So, like the shuttle program, it’s going to cost a fortune and be late and not do everything it advertised. Fact of life.
I used to be a lot more bitter about SLS until I realized that Nasa/Boeing are irrelevant in rocket tech and this is just congress propping up donors while SpaceX is our real American rocket tech company.
Romalar
4109
Quite unlike these large rockets, a new rocket just had its first success: Virgin Orbit is working on a small rocket dropped from a 747 which can carry small payloads to orbit, probably competing with small launches from companies like Rocket Labs (and competitors which haven’t made it to orbit yet) as well as competing against ridesharing slots on larger rockets.
This kind of horizontal launch is supposed to be very flexible since you can in theory launch from many airports worldwide if they’ll OK it, meaning you can properly launch into unusual orbits which are difficult to hit from places like Florida. You can just fly the airplane maybe an hour out over an ocean or somewhere similar before actually dropping the rocket to avoid the normal issues launching near inhabited areas.
A bunch of companies want to try to do this, but it seems like Virgin Orbit is the first to succeed if it’s affordable going forward (the existing rocket like this - Pegasus - was clumsier and too expensive to work out commercially long-term.)
This was their second orbital test and first orbital success, launching a small suite of NASA-funded educational/research CubeSats.
It’s either Lockheed Martin and Boing, or Musk and Bezos. Who could disappear at any second in a bad plane crash or something. Not sure which is better.
Hopefully, it’s not also going to be as dangerous to passengers as the Shuttle. (Unlikely, since it’s a much simpler concept.)
Not really a reasonable way to look at it. While Musk does a lot of PR posturing for his companies, I don’t believe he has a lot to do with the day-to-day running of SpaceX. If he dropped dead tomorrow SpaceX would continue to thrive.
This SLS abomination re-uses the same engine and booster design for the shuttle. I believe the SLS test fire the other day actually used some engines that had flown in a shuttle. There’s two ways to look at that. One is that the design has been tested and refined in harsh real-world usage scenarios, like blowing up teachers. The other is that the design is decades old and has been known to blow up teachers.
For a few years. Until investors bail. It’s not like the head of NASA.
It’s a free country. Investors are free to bail for any reason, even no reason.
I mean, people backed Trump for decades even though he was a completely incompetent pauper. (Relatively speaking.)
