New tests vs flight 5:

Reigniting a ship Raptor engine while in space

Testing a suite of heatshield experiments and maneuvering changes for ship reentry

At least their stream is in 4k on YouTube, though

Hopefully they can recover the center core during the Griffin launch. It would be great to finally bring one home.

The engines glowing made me reeeeeal nervous

Nice. Hopefully SpaceX shares a blog post with more information.

Understood, but I’m asking why it wasn’t an approved last ditch backup plan until now. Did they do more testing or sumulation recently? Is NASA more risk averse after Starliner and digging deeper into backup backups?

I wonder what changed to get it approved after all this time.

That accuracy is just mind boggling

I don’t think they would install the FTS if they were just posturing.

Eager Space puts out good stuff! The numbers in this all have some serious fudge factor, but the concepts are still good. It’s interesting to me that SpaceX and their copycats are going for high engine counts for redundancy/resilience while the satellite industry is doing the same by switching from big birds to constellations.

Legend of a booster. This one alone has single handedly outperformed the entire launch accomplishments of whole countries and companies. I’m looking forward to the higher numbered boosters with more block upgrades that surpass it and push to even higher launch counts.

It should, yeah.

There are a handful of GTO missions coming up in the manifest that might be able to get it, too, but the’ll probably lift the grounding by the time I look into all of those to figure that out.

as Falcon 9 returns to flight

Bad headline. They clarify it in the article, but it launched with a one-off exception because the 2nd stage for this mission didn’t have to do a controlled deorbit. The rest of the Falcons are still grounded.

I’m glad Hera beat the weather.

They must have gotten a heads up that it’s coming soon so they can prep for that date?

The catch attempt will definitely be another “excitement guaranteed” moment.

Hopefully the heatshield improvements hold up well.

Yeah, it feels like they’re hitting engineering and/or process corner cases. We also might just be emotionally drawing connections between totally unrelated things when there isn’t any actual thread to pull on here.

It was inevitable that they’d have some issues after the crazy success streak, it’s just frustrating and feels bad that there have been 3 groundings in quick succession. Hopefully they root cause and fix this new issue just as fast as the last two.

Directed at European launch companies:

You couldn’t live with your own failure. Where did that bring you? Back to me.

I’m sure they still have a lot of work to do to make mobility easier and make them self contained instead of tethered, but it’s a great first step. It’s cool to see the investment and development alongside the Axiom xEMU derivative.

This milestone is more about developing the technology in the suits and ship. The spacewalk itself really just involved testing out the range of motion of the suit, but the full test involved a lot more changes and tests in the Dragon.

RIP B1062. 23 flights is literally unheard of.