This would be a nuclear option and, in reality, probably would do more harm than good to SpaceX,
It would probably set back their more ambitious targets by decades. But even Starship is now far enough along to no longer really need Musk's stewardship, and the US government would be happy enough just with control of the Falcon programme. They don't care much / at all about Making Life Multi-Planetary.
So I consider a move like this pretty plausible.
If so, why would SpaceX have so rapidly & aggressively moved to restore Ukraine's communications capabilities in the early days and weeks of the current war, and maintained them ever since?
I find the defendant not guilty! I think the NSF guy's idea involved replacing the woman & her arms and the daughter with the tower & "chopstick" arms, and a Super Heavy rocket booster (which is in the process of being caught by the arms). Something like that?
The closest I've seen is this. Not great!
So I tried getting Chat GPT to do a better one for me. This did not go well 😂 But surely someone with experience should be able to cajole a suitable generative AI tool to do a good job of it?
One of my favourite videos of the catch, because of what happens when the sonic booms arrive!: https://youtu.be/749dRxbSkVU (They're at 6:51.) Also it's a different angle from most of the others, because it's from Mexico.
And a playlist: Starship IFT5 booster catch, original footage only
You heard it on Lemmy first!: https://sh.itjust.works/post/25840892 (very soon after Stich first mentioned it)
Link currently doesn't WFM.
I believe when you create a clip from an ongoing YouTube live stream, it will (at best) only work as long as the footage you selected is still available on the stream. And I believe YouTube only keeps the most recent 12 hours of footage.
(What they should do is create a permanent copy of the relevant footage, assuming the channel owner permits it.)
The fairing looks spotless. I guess they're using a new one, at least partly for reasons of cleanliness? (Planetary protection and all that.)
With boosters we're at the point where "flight proven" is no longer just a euphemism for "second hand". I've felt that way myself for a few years. And NASA basically confirmed they agree a couple of months ago, when the brand new booster intended for Crew-9 was given a Starlink mission first, increasing confidence in it after a minor problem during transport. (IIRC)
But I'm not sure if we're at that point with fairings. Or even if we'll ever be.
Is it the end of days if NASA goes without a low-Earth orbit space station for several months or even years? One key commercial space official at the space agency, Phil McAlister, suggested that maybe it wouldn't be.
He's right, and I hate him for it :)
Expedition 1 arrived at the International Space Station on 2000-11-02. That's 59-and-a-bit days before[1] the start of the 21st Century. So whatever disappointments people may have about the 21st Century compared to their expectations, at least we can (currently) say there has been a continuous human presence in outer space for the entirety of it. Pretty cool!
Strikingly, it could easily be the case that there will never again be a time with humans only living on Earth. If that's because AGI kills us all in a decade, with any people in orbit / on the moon being the last to have their atoms repurposed, that's not ideal. But if it's because we spread out through the universe, and outlive our sun and even our galaxy, that could (potentially) be very cool indeed.
Perhaps everyone reading this either witnessed the start of, or was born during, humanity's Second Age!
Or perhaps the current period of continuous off-Earth habitation will finish around 2030 and all my attempts at profundity were a waste of time! After all I'm not sure how much I'd want NASA to spend just to maintain it.
Of course, the ISS isn't the only hope here. The Chinese space station might fill in any gaps after the ISS, although that would be a concern for other reasons (assuming China is still controlled by its communist party, with other parties banned). And then there's the moon. The Artemis Program in its current form won't bring about the start of a continuous presence on the moon by 2030. But I wouldn't put it past SpaceX to shake things up in that regard.
[1] - If you thought the 21st Century started at the start of 2000, see this or even this.
What's the 'unique selling point' of this compared to existing Earth re-entry systems? The parafoil giving 100 metre landing accuracy?
Were existing heavy duty systems all designed to ultimately be suitable for humans? And this? Could some future version be used for humans? If not, does ditching that criterion allow for massive efficiency improvements?
P.S. I thought they had a typo, but no. (Well, not really.) You learn something new every day.
I like SpaceX's Sarah Walker, despite (or partly because of?) the fact that she tends not to answer questions from mere mortals (non-SpaceX / non-NASA personnel).
For example, at the Post-Launch News Conference, there was a question about pulsive splashdown (although that term was not used).
She seemed to imply that the capability would have been available for Crew-7 if it wasn't for a problem with one of the GPS sensors. (Was this problem known about well in advance of undocking? Would that be why they didn't announce the new capability at the time?)
She spent most of the time confirming the point I made in my first comment on this post, about taking into account any extra risks that this capability might add, and she said that it had taken "years".
She didn't answer whether it's available if the parachutes fail during a launch abort, nor tell us any of the (non-NASA) missions it has been active for (of which Gerst had said there were "several").
Here's the question: https://www.youtube.com/live/wwhfph1vGdE?t=32m30s (at 32:30)
When composing the title of this post I nearly called this technique 'Propulsive Splashdown', but I didn't remember ever hearing that term used before. (Stitch didn't call it that, did he?)
Later I heard Stephen Clark use that term in his question. And yesterday that term was used during the launch stream. Nail and Cardman spent a minute discussing the capability: https://www.youtube.com/live/SKXtysRx0b4?t=3h29m8s (from 3:29:08)
Apparently they often abbreviate it to "prop splash".
Interesting! They're talking about unnecessary aborts, and how they want to do as much analysis as possible of the abort criteria, to prevent them.
This will remain an issue for Flight 6 which, it seems, will happen the moment SpaceX decides it's sufficiently ready. Unlike previous flights ...
"Given this is the first launch in a long time ... well really ever ... that we've not been FAA driven ..."