Tar_Alcaran

Some of the wiring seems original

From the location of it, I’m assuming it means “This is where the signature would be if this were the paper copy”.

That wouldn’t work.

Boeing knew there was a leak, said it wasn’t too bad and launched anyway. Then they reconsidered. The great O-Ring Monk wouldn’t have fixed this.

Quick, ask Boeing for adv… no wait.

Yeah, 70 bucks buys a LOT of disposable ones though. It’s probably worth it at some point, but not at my amount of abrasive filament use.

And if you do print aggressive abrasive materials, remember to either get a super expensive hardox nozzle, or just throw them away after each print. Woodfiber will murder any nozzle.

Gotta say though, your nozzle mostly looks dirty, not worn out (much)

It makes sense that the astronauts would need time to adapt to the pressure difference, but…

This is the first test of these suits after all.

Surely they’ve been tested on earth before launch???

as in, depressurization will take several hours? That seems extreme.

there aren’t a lot of scenarios where having fewer people in vacuum will help save someone. You’d have to have an event where someone has an emergency that’s bad enough they’re not able to return, but slow enough that there’s time for a second person to come get them through an airlock cycle.

They’d kind of have to. Going straight north would be an overland path that passes a few thousand kilometer of USA. Going straight south means going over Cuba.

Iridium (and presumably other polar sattelites) launch into a high inclination orbit, and adjust to a polar orbit once they’re up there.

A low orbit won’t spend much time outside the belts, and they’re not spending months in orbit.

Long answer: nooooooo

Noooooo, really?

I’d much rather they blow up an empty mockup than a manned shuttle, but yeah, ignoring known issues isn’t great.

They’re called drone-ships, but they’re more drone-barges. You absolutely couldn’t take them all the way out into the Indian Ocean in anthing but amazing weather, and they were delivered to their current home on top of another ship.

That’s not to say you couldn’t have some kind of unmanned observer nearby, but it’ll have to be something else. Any yacht with a camera and a good drone would do the trick, you don’t need to spend (and risk) millions on custom ships for that.

On the one hand, you’d definitely want a look at the landing. On the other hand, I’m not sure I’d want to be anywhere near the possible impact spot in case of failure.

I would love to see external video of the landing. Is there any?

Three major caveats here:

1 - Free cash flow doesn’t actually mean profitability. It doesn’t include, as a prime example, expenditure of satellites, only the actual replacement sats launched. Starlink satellites have a life expentancy of about 5 years, so to calculate profit, you need to add 1/5th of the cost of your satellite network to your yearly expenses. For free cash flow, you only have to take account of the actual expenses. So, if you buy a 100k car every 5 years, your profit-statement will show 20k in car-costs per year. But your free cash flow will show 4 years of nothing, followed by 100k.

Starlink had very few sats 5 years ago, so they’re barely replacing anything yet, the FCF is 4 years behind the yearly costs of the Profit.

2 - A lot of Starlink income currently is from selling terminals, which is a very finite market. You only sell terminals to new customers, not existing ones.

3 - Nobody can actually check these numbers, since they’re not public. We have no idea how realistic they are.

If a “natural” pressure differential is the only thing that’s transferring fuel, you can only ever average out the amount of fuel/pressure in both tanks. So if your craft is at 30%, and your tanker at 50%, a natural delta will result in both craft ending up with 40%.

I guess they want to settle the liquid fuel with ullage thrust, and then vent the gas in the craft, but not in the tanker, letting more flow into the craft? The article is very light on details.

Next year? Isn’t that when all of Tesla’s new stuff is coming out too?