Space In General

  • Thread starter Thread starter BubbleBelly542
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Booster 7 made its way back to the launch facility this morning (now with all 33 engines) and was just hoisted onto the pad using the chopsticks. 🥢💪

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Whose bright idea was it to call this set of lunar missions "Artemis"? Do they not remember what happened to the crew of Artemis 2 - admittedly a crewed lunar landing mission rather than the flyby planned for this iteration - in Superman II?
 
Artemis I live stream. Personally I will not be getting up at 5am (my time) on my day off for the launch, so I will catch the highlights.

 
I just saw today that a guy has been working for years to fly and land a model rocket. He's doing it with an unthrottleable regular model rocket engine!

 
Static fire testing is on the menu today at Starbase. Fuel farm is currently active, road closed, ready to go.



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First direct image of an exoplanet by the Webb:

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The HIP 65426 b gas giant planet photographed by the James Webb Space Telescope on the background of the Digitized Sky Survey (Image credit: NASA/ESA/CSA, A Carter (UCSC), the ERS 1386 team, and A. Pagan (STScI))

The James Webb Space Telescope took its first direct image of a planet orbiting a distant star, proving its potential to revolutionize exoplanet research.
The absolute majority of exoplanets have only been observed through temporary dips in brightness of the stars they orbit; only about two dozen have been imaged directly. But that might soon change. Less than two months after it started its science operations, the James Webb Space Telescope has delivered its first direct photo of a planet beyond our solar system.
The planet, a gas giant orbiting the star called HIP 65426 some 385 light-years from Earth, appears in the image as a tiny splotch close to the glowing star. Webb photographed the exoplanet using its Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam) and the Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI), each of which focuses on a different flavor of infrared light.



linky
 
Full 6 engine static fire for Starship 24 just a bit ago. Which unfortunately sparked off a grass fire that has expanded quite a bit but appears to be extinguishing itself.



 
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Just another Starlink mission, but this one a record 14th flight for this booster. Crazy to think that just a few years ago people considered reusable boosters an impossible feat, yet here we are with a single booster successfully making 14 flights. And yet SpaceX is still the only company doing it...

 
wfooshee
I just saw today that a guy has been working for years to fly and land a model rocket. He's doing it with an unthrottleable regular model rocket engine!

Click to expand...

Kinda unthrottleable. It's a solid rocket motor so very difficult to throttle (not impossible, just very hard at this scale and on this sort of budget), but he's got what's essentially deflector arms that extend into the exhaust to reduce effective thrust. It's a clever, cheap and robust solution that works well for his setup, even if it probably doesn't scale up very well.



Landing with zero control over thrust seems like it would be incredibly hard and very inconsistent.
 
Today at Starbase:





I'm also making another trip out there in a couple weeks. Keep an eye out for on location posts. 😎
 
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