>>64835936
a stupid looking fag in front of a stupid piece of shit rocket that didn't work again during testing lol. $90 billion well spent bravo.

>>64835941
How is maduro posting from prison?

>>64835941
space is hard, plz understand

>>64835941
those grapes were probably sour anyways you're right

>>64835936
I remember when the FH Demo launch happened, the NASA security teams kept buzzing the area from their white helos. I could see the door gunners and couldn't help but crack a smile at the NASA Door Gunner meme from all those years ago.

>>64835942
You fuck dogs

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shame we don't use entire aircraft carriers for capsule recovery any more. Crew Dragon has a lil boat and that's it.
would be a better use of carriers compared to whatever the ten of em are doing nowadays anyways

>>64835965
youre a fucking dumbass.

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>>64835971
hmm? it's true, we don't use carriers anymore. Artemis 2 uses USS Somerset

>>64835942
>>64835943
>>64835946
>there are Americans (or at least """americans""") on /k/ who actually defend the Senate Launch System jobs program
Holy shit you absolute fucking retards. It was stupid and obvious pure pork of the bad sort at conception, even before private launch revolutionized space access. It only looks worse now.

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I hope they still use the M113s for launchpad EVAC/firefighting

>>64835936
nasa defense should be either carrying super small micro smgs or giant auto shotguns from the 80s.

>>64835976
look fella I've read casey handmer's analysis, I've read other analasisises too, I know fully well that it's a fucking terrible fucking program (like lol I work on it - got myself a cool Artemis patch, poster and pin a couple months back as swag).BUT I'd still rather go back to da moon after fifty years with a boondoggle of a program rather than not go at all. wouldn't you? it's the American way.

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I love the TAV

>>64835977
they got rid of them for MRAPs I believe :(

>40km fiber FPV are becoming more common
What's to stop one from slamming into a rocket sitting on a pad?
Note I'm asking what will stop it, I'm sure there will be nothing you can do after the explosion to escape but thats a price to pay.

>>64835992
there's also nothing stopping you from taking a $4 wrench, beating up a fuel delivery truck guy, hijacking it, and dumping the gas into a preschool either.
Like dude, humanity operates on a level of sanity that we all sort of agree on whether we like it or not

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>>64835991
Yup. Just looked it up, retired in 2015. Man...

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>>64835976
Wym?
I’m gang falcon9/starship

>>64835986
SLS is fine for these initial flights since the rockets are being forced on us by Congress but the sooner we can switch to pure SpaceX/Blue architecture the better.

>>64836064
Agreed

>>64836064
>SLS is fine for these initial flights since the rockets are being forced on us by Congress
Wait wut. No it's not fine, in part precisely because it's being forced by Congress. It's being rushed along despite various test issues and they're doing live humans around the moon on it with a brand new capsule that has not had it's life support systems fully tested, the first launch was a different lower power design and didn't do everything. And it also had major weird heat shield issues, which I guess they're sure hoping are resolved since they won't test it again without people onboard. And now the hydrogen leaks, which was a problem with the first one as well and now is still a problem anyway. The whole thing is an expensive clusterfuck done for PR and every single bit about it is a waste vs building real capabilities.

And I'm not even against the pork bit per se. I mean, yeah pork isn't ideal but I understand why congresscritters see part of their job as bringing home the bacon and helping locals compensate for losses elsewhere. But if they have to spend billions it'd at least be nice if it's billions on something that'll have some long term ROI. Building some ginormous new space station or starbase around Starship's launch capabilities for example, or serious nuclear rocket research, or exotic launch possibilities like launch loops or mass drivers or whatever. Stuff that industry isn't and won't be doing and could cost a lot but will result in something built that then is valuable for decades to come. SLS is a dead end in every respect, tens of billions consumed that will then just get dumped into the ocean or torn down. Sure spend a hundred billion on pork if you want, but do so on something neat.

>>64835991
why is there an RC Tiger 2 drilling a tire?

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>>64836714
Tire Assault Vehicle
Meant for remote popping for shuttle tires, I believe.
>cursory glance says 300psi minimum

>>64835946
SLS is a complete piece of shit, this fact is non-negotiable. if you were actually a patriot (or at least not a retard) you'd hate this thing too.

>>64836638
>SLS is a dead end
that's the thing, SLS isn't even the kind of pork-barrel jobs program that generates new jobs. it's entire and only purpose was keeping boomers who were working on the space shuttle employed, all that fucking money was spent on developing bunch of donut steel OC shuttle parts for a just a little bit to different to reuse shuttle parts frankenstein rocket, barely anything from the shuttle program was re-used, and they still needed to develop a bunch of just slightly different parts from scratch, only to ultimately build a frankenstein shuttle without a shuttle who's still weighed down by the baggage of the shuttle's LEO optimized design, but which is going to the moon.

the closer you look at SLS, the uglier and more nonsensible every single inch of the program starts to look.

>>64835991
>they got rid of them for MRAPs I believe :(

Thats lame as hell.

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>>64836714
>why is there an RC Tiger 2 drilling a tire?
There is no safe option for deflating those tires.
As for the previous method...

>>64835955
>You fuck dogs
Technically, I think the dogs fuck him.

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>>64835936
French version.

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How about planes chasing the launches? F-4s during Gemini to capture images of vehicle stresses, F-15s or 22s proving airspace security for the shuttle, the French having Rafales chase their launches.

>>64837161
>>64835936
Do you think they're given specific orders to keep looking outwards at lift-off?

>>64837209
Lift off is one of the most critical moments and also the last moments where it is most vulnerable to anyone on the ground.
Thats when they need to be looking out.

>>64835936
i fucking LOVE SPACE

>>64835941
That happens when your 4 billie space rocket has so long launch cadence that every launch is practically a new test.

>>64835974
San Diego?

>>64837291
FAR OUT, MAN!

>>64835986
>BUT I'd still rather go back to da moon after fifty years with a boondoggle of a program rather than not go at all.
Those aren't the only choices. For the cost of 1 SLS you could probably buy 10 starhips and 5 new glans.

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>>64837291
It is a pretty cool place, also an interesting place.

>>64837433
https://youtu.be/2a7clqqbHZI

>>64835941
I'd rather them play it safe than sorry. It was unseasonably cold these past few days. Better that challenger like event not occur.

>>64837161
Having HK416s with no optics is grim

>>64836714
*brrrrrrrrrrrr*

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weaponize it

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>>64835941
Yeah sure let's just fucking send it like Musk does with Starship

>>64837161
>looks respectable and doesn't look out of place and overmilitarized in a civilian space launch
Soul
>>64835936
>Look at me mom I'm speshul farces
Soulless

>>64835942
Maduro is post from Rocket.

>>64838135
Poorfag fope (french cope). Someone's mad that their daddy cant afford to buy him actual optics, a helmet and other such assorted bullshit.

>>64836771
1) it looks cool
2) it's a moon rocket
I don't need anything else nigga

>>64838005
Add a gun.

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>>64837161
He just keeps winning....

>>64835936
What's the point of these guys? To swiss cheese chink or russians saboteurs from just waltzing in?

>>64836771
>SLS
Is still more likely to bear fruit than Starship.

>>64835941
The last time a rocket launched in record cold weather, 7 people died and equipment worth 50 billion in today's dollars were lost forever

>>64835941
Imagine the amount of chink cope if it exploded. It would be the ultimate humiliation. Better make sure it just werks

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>>64835974
that ship looks smug

>>64837161
Do you think dressfags will ever realise that berets look fucking retarded?

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I know it failed at being cheap & quickly reusable, but the Shuttles are still some of the coolest fucking things ever.
If there's something SLS did correctly it's bringing the engines along into the next program.

>>64838363
pretty much. that or muslim terrorists, eco terrorists, religious fundamentalists, flat earthers, communists in general, democrat-funded radicals, ect.

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>>64835941
Sucks to suck, foreigner.

come on Ian do an episode on the soviet space Soyuz survival gun

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>>64835965
>shame we don't use entire aircraft carriers for capsule recovery any more.
Yeah, we used LPDs now.

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>>64835979
XM177s or M16Ks would be acceptable too

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>>64835979
The Space Force at Vandenberg was the last unit in the military to use horse mounted cavalry to patrol around the launch pads

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>>64835974
>>64838636
>ywn wait tensely for the order to come to light up the capsule with 30mm fire because the returned crew failed the blood tests

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>>64838680
remind me to never land in Estonia or Latvia
they'll steal your spacecraft

>>64835941
>>64835943
>>64835976
space is so hard, yuros still haven't figured out how to put a man in space, since they aren't smart enough

>>64838738
they figured it out just fine, they pay the Americans

>>64837433
didn't some group seethe over this?

>>64838746
>being forced to pay the cuck tax to America or Russia

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>>64835965
Fun fact, the USS Hornet is used as a venue for an anime convention
I shit you not
https://uss-hornet.org/carriercon/

>>64838759
awesome

>>64838764
I love the irony that a carrier built to attack Japan, is hosting an event celebrating japanese cultural exports

>>64838091
Musk is regularly landing a fucking Saturn V sized rocket on a stand.

>>64837483
Forget optics it looks like he doesn't even have plates in his vest. Which means he's wearing a vest to carry a single spare magazine.

>>64838091
Yes. Unironically.

>>64835941
FPBP
made the zog faggots seethe hard kek

>>64838974
>he doesn't even have plates in his vest
What's going on with his comrade's vest?

>>64838368
it really fucking isn't, that's how bad it is, and the people who cling to it suffer from a bit of EDS
>waaaah bootlicker
i think elon is a retarded spastic as well, i just think that shartship has a future, and SLS has none, it is a complete and total dead end.

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>>64835941
wrong rocket

>>64839386
>conversation is about rockets
>random completely unrelated seethe about starlink
you're retarded.

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>>64839399
>conversation is about rockets
pretty sure it's not fucking retard
maybe learn to read before posting?

>>64835942
yeah you'd know a thing or two about rockets wouldn't you lmao

>i cant believe musk allowed russians in ukriane to use starlink!!!

how would they be able to tell whos a russian or ukrainian using starlink?

>>64839367
>it really fucking isn't, that's how bad it is, and the people who cling to it suffer from a bit of EDS
We'll see in March.

>>64835941
It's a shame because NASA is still competent but congress is so corrupt they want shuttle contracts to continue more than they want a working rocket.
>inb4 NASA isn't competent
To put the Senate Laundering System in gun terms imagine a gunsmith being told to design an assault rifle but we want to keep funding domestic bronze production so the whole gun needs to be made of bronze. It's shitty and jams all the time but just getting it running at all is still impressive.

>>64839473
It would probably look exactly like this.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cly94qe3yr0o

>>64835943
its hard but the problem is the fuel. congress is dead set on forcing liquid hydrogen on nasa, which is known to leak due to physics. they could've gone with a normal fuel like kerosene or methane, but congress doesnt want that, and so here we are.

>>64838749
MUH KESSLUR SINDRUM

>>64838467
They'll figure that out as soon as self-proclaimed sommeliers realize French wine is mid

>>64839514
Yeah SLS is legitimately impressive in the sense that it even exists and can launch
Unfortunately NASA doesn't do anything useful for the military or industrial sectors (anymore, they've been surpassed by corpos) so the administration has no interest in funding them. A shame, since NASA missions have consistently been the most successful space missions in our entire collective history of space exploration.

>>64839623
This x100000

Very sick of hearing people "Elon brought us back to space!" when all we had to do was fund it. Everyone he has accomplished was with ex-NASA know-how. We could have gone to the Moon once a year if retarded corrupt politicians funded NASA instead of other dumb shit.
Granted, he made the launching part profitable. But the re-usable rockets and all of the vehicles could have been done by NASA, for cheaper, with the added benefit that we don't have some autistic cringey ketamine-addicted foreigner landing on Mars instead of a REAL American.

>>64839638
lol this is such a fucking retarded cope post. NASA became a trash organization a long time ago, and Elon was absolutely responsible for every single one of the SpaceX hires that made something that all the gov space agencies and Old Space said was infeasible not just feasible but a roaring success. They've done both rockets and now with Raptor engines that no gov agency ever did. Cope and seethe fag.

>>64838091
>Yeah sure let's just fucking send it like Musk does with Starship
Musk is absolutely correct to do so, because Starship is a proper cheap hardware rich program. The one you picture there was literally already obsolete. The Raptor v2s and overall stack it had were worthless, and they'd already gotten the value out of it just by building the thing and getting more practice in refining the manufacturing process. The marginal cost of launching it was a few million at that point at most, some LOX, methane, and the time of the people involved (but good practice for all them too). So might as well. Notice how they immediate succeeded completely the next time and are now on to the actual v3 in March that's intended to start getting seriously used.

In contrast at $4 billion a pop AND insisting on sending humans onboard without full testing sure it better be ultra conservative (costing even more money). But that's a fucking retarded approach in the first place. By the time Starship carries any humans itself it will have a launch record 100+ rockets, and it'll have the raw mass and economics to throw a lot at any extra safety kit required.

SLS is very mildly less retarded then the Space Shuttle but not much.

>>64839623
>>64839638
Every dollar NASA has ever been given has made $7 in long term profit by their inventions being commercialized.
The original idea of splitting Apollo contracts between states was a smart way to get long term bipartisan support but has sadly turned into a jobs program where results are secondary to keeping corporate wellfare flowing.
It's ultimately a corruption problem, if it was run as a meritoracy NASA engineers would be free to set design requirements and if Boeing or Northrop can't meet the requirements the contracts would go elsewhere. Instead the contracts MUST go to them so the NASA engineers are told they must use the RS-25 and Space Shuttle SRB grains.

>>64839653
>something that all the gov space agencies and Old Space said was infeasible
I assume you're talking about re-usable rockets, that's interesting (and wrong) considering NASA was recovering and re-using STS boosters in the '80s.

>>64839670
This is the kind of statement someone mindlessly repeating talking points makes if they've never actually researched anything at all themselves. And never engaged their brain either, which would lead them to wondering things like
>gosh, I wonder why the space shuttle cost over $1 billion per launch when it was so """"""reused""""""
and then learning the the "reuse" was more "rebuild from near scratch after shit sat in salt water for awhile with homeopathic amounts of reuse" not "turnaround in 9 days for a few million". It turns out that there's a big difference between actual for-real for-profit reuse involving landing on a ship or back at the launch site and designing for easy and repair and political talking point "reuse" where you have to rebuild your engine after every single trip to the grocery store.

>>64839688
>actual for-real for-profit reuse
Also to be clear this is what I meant by using "infeasible" vs the word "impossible", only true retards and management thought "impossible" because of course the physics of delta-v budget for a given ISP and thrust rocket is not hard to work out and it was clearly possible. But on neither side of the pond did anyone Old Space give any credit at all to the notion that reuse would actually be a real thing that would radically change the economics, both in raw cost and in cadence. You can see this with the Vulcan rocket, where even if they intended to expend it, they could have designed it so that it was possible to setup for reuse if that turned out to be important. But they didn't, same with Ariane 6, so now they're fucked and the future will be SpaceX/Blue Origin/Rocket Lab/china.

>>64839688
NTA but a massive rocketry nerd.
Second stage reusability is retarded with the only pratical use being stealing military satellites from other nations. Starship is going to have the same problems because 8km/s reentery is rough, you don't refuel and launch again the same day despite what some ketamine addicts claim.

>>64836793
This they should have just kept launching shuttle without Gaystronaughts. Alas that would have shown they are pointless and NASA can't have that.

While funding commercial like now*

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>>64839688
No, nigger, I'm completely fucking aware of the degree of refurbishment involved for STS boosters. It was a very early example of being able to re-use anything at all from a rocket launch, and came with the expected baggage. But the fact remains that they did it. But the Space Shuttle program in general proved that a launch system didn't strictly HAVE to be single-use. NASA did that. They just didn't have the means at the time to go further with it, to the extent SpaceX has today.
Not disparaging SpaceX's accomplishments, I've seen the footage of the Falcon Heavy triple-booster landing as well Starship getting caught out of literal air by the tower. That shit is impressive. But SpaceX has the advantage of funding, and private ownership by a schizo who understands rocket development better than congress or the senate or the White House (and still had to get told off by his own engineers at several points during Starship's development, if I'm not mistaken).

>>64838505
After paying AeroJet Rocketdyne 160 MILLION dollars apiece. Thats including NASA owned engines.

God it was fun to bully AJR on Twitter about that contract.

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>>64839725
>AeroJet Rocketdyne
Don't besmerch their good name, it's L3Harris supplying SLS.

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>>64838738
are these yuros in the room with us now?

>>64839725
To put that 160M$ in perspective you can buy a Falcon Heavy with 27 engines for the same price.

>>64839734
Worthless twilight year boomers are the epitome of gift. What could have been done with those wasted billions....


Still better than euros, china, russia, and thirds. They made jelly

>>64839734
Figures the guys making nodz and laser modules would also price gouge the antique rocket engines

>>64839701
>Second stage reusability is retarded
It objectively is not.
>you don't refuel and launch again the same day
Even it takes an entire week it's still a major savings.

>>64839716
>But the Space Shuttle program in general proved that a launch system didn't strictly HAVE to be single-use.
No it didn't, given that expendable was literally cheaper retard. That's why everyone didn't rush for reuse after the Shuttle died, if anything the shuttle did DAMAGE to the cause of reuse because it was such a piece of fucking shit design.
>They just didn't have the means at the time to go further with it, to the extent SpaceX has today.
They absolutely did, though to be clear I don't blame them for Congress fucking with it so badly. NASA did develop lots of internal problems but a fair share of that was due to requiring constant heroics to deal with design flaws which existed due to Congressional meddling. Like, in any sane world even with the rest of the design insanity at least the SRBs would have been manufactured and refurbed right on site with the SS, or at least on the coast so they could be barged. Instead they were manufactured in fucking Utah due purely to politics which forced design compromises for shipping and sealing which arguably lead directly to Challenger.

But that doesn't change the reality either and that it did in fact take SpaceX to come along and show the way.

the security guys at my NASA center have ARs straight out of 2013
it's a vibe

>>64839741
>To put that 160M$ in perspective you can buy a Falcon Heavy with 27 engines for the same price.
Yeah, Merlins themselves are down to around $600k each. And Raptor 3 full flow staged combustion engines are down to around $1-2m each.

The SSMEs are technically incredibly impressive machines, ORSC was something the Soviets actually thought was infeasible themselves which is why they went FRSC instead. Which makes me even angrier to see them thrown into the ocean, they should be in technical museums with full explanations of everything that went into them.

>>64839751
>given that expendable was literally cheaper retard
It's called a technical first, nigger-kun, it doesn't need to be cheap when the prevailing attitude is that it can't be done at all, nor should it be expected to be, no new technology or methodology is mature out of the gate
>Congress fucking with it so badly
>design flaws which existed due to Congressional meddling
>manufactured in fucking Utah due purely to politics
You don't have the means when the means are literally being withheld from you, nigger-kun. That doesn't count.

>>64839749
AeroJet & Rocketdyne were both great companies that made amazing engines, AeroJet Rocketdyne was a slow death and the L3Harris acquisition was the end.
It's basically the same story as Boeing going from a great company making great planes to being taken over by the same people that destroyed McDonnell Douglas and being taken down by them.

>>64839764
SSMEs would replace the J-2s of a second / third stage of a competenly designed Saturn V replacement, instead they are doomed to be well engineered upper stage engines forced onto a first stage get again.

>>64839764
>they should be in technical museums with full explanations of everything that went into them.
Agreed, Indy. Waste of a perfectly good historical artifact.

>>64839770
>It's called a technical first
No, the shuttle was 100% politics-first.
>That doesn't count!
Holy shit you're a walking textbook meme. "They didn't do it, but they totally COULD have in some magical alternate universe" is the biggest fucking cope ever. Jesus. And Congress didn't force the normalization of deviance and management bullshit that cost them two shuttles either. They knew about shit like the foam for years earlier. Yes, the retarded design is what made that something to worry about in the first place but they didn't have zero options to try to ameliorate it instead of just "throw up our hands and pray".

Fact remains: SpaceX did something nobody else had ever done, completely by themselves, and that the entire rest of existing space companies and agencies in every country worldwide thought wasn't feasible. Which is why the revolutionized launch. And then even AFTER they fucking did it, other places STILL refused to accept it was a big deal and changed everything, instead plodding along the same path. Only New Space companies and the chinkbugs got the message right away, and are now approaching where SpaceX was a decade ago. The yuros are fucked for the foreseeable future given they still don't take it seriously, just toy shit, and ULA is looking to sell before they are ded.

>>64839804
>"They didn't do it, but they totally COULD have in some magical alternate universe" is the biggest fucking cope ever.
Check again, nigger-kun, I'm not the one saying this:
>>64839751
>>They just didn't have the means at the time to go further with it, to the extent SpaceX has today.
>They absolutely did
I repeat, it is NOT NASA's fault that everyone they're tied at the hip to is retarded. They could not have realistically done much better than the Space Shuttle at the time and with the restrictions placed upon them. Following that, they 100% could have made a fully reusable rocket just like SpaceX and possibly several years earlier than SpaceX did, they had the expertise and technology necessary to do it, if only congress would've funded it, and if only they had either the institutional agency or the order from on high to make it happen.
TL;DR stop being a nigger. Only niggers hold people accountable for other peoples' independent actions.

>>64839835
Holy cope. So on the one hand you fully admit NASA couldn't do it, and then you also steadfastly ignore the entire rest of the planet including ULA itself. All while projecting your brownoid retardation. Whew!

>>64839842
Do you know what a year is, nigger-kun?
Did you know that the first Space Shuttle launch is separated from the first Falcon 9 launch were separated by 29 of them?
Re-use was possible, but not practical, when NASA made the Space Shuttle.
It could've been better, but it wasn't, because retards had NASA's hands and balls tied, and continued to tighten the testicular torsion machine over the following 29 years (and fun fact, are still doing it today).
If retards did not do this, they could have developed a re-usable rocket that was also practical between then and now, but as mentioned, retards did it, and continue to do it.
Whew yourself, nigger-kun. Yikes.

>>64839885
You apparently are very confused, though no doubt that is a very common state of affairs for a subnormal intellect such as yourself.
>Re-use was possible, but not practical, when NASA made the Space Shuttle.
Source: your ass. The shuttle design was complete, fundamental trash even for an expendable. There were far more promising re-use designs involving normal stacks well before that. NASA chose to pursue the Shuttle instead. And while some stuff wasn't NASA's fault, other parts absolutely were including their lies to justify it and cover up bad decision making and design. It was NASA who pulled their safety projections out of their asshole, not Congress. NASA of the 80s let alone later was not NASA of the 60s. Deal with it.

And everyone notices how you yet again speak only of NASA and nobody else lol. I'll take your ashamed silence as acknowledgement about SpaceX superiority :^)

lol timely article just now:
>https://arstechnica.com/space/2026/02/nasa-finally-acknowledges-the-elephant-in-the-room-with-the-sls-rocket/
>It is common in commercial rocketry to build one or more “test” tanks to both stress the hardware and ensure its compatibility with ground systems through an extensive test campaign. However, SLS hardware is extraordinarily expensive. A single rocket costs in excess of $2 billion, so the program is hardware-poor. Moreover, tanking tests might have damaged the launch tower, which itself cost more than $1 billion.
>Moreover, tanking tests might have damaged the launch tower, which itself cost more than $1 billion.
They spent a BILLION FUCKING DOLLARS on the fucking LAUNCH TOWER. Not even the rocket, just the stupid tower! So now that's a fragile bit of unobtanium they can't risk either! Amazing work NASA.
>So there you have it. Every SLS rocket is a work of art, every launch campaign an adventure, every mission subject to excessive delays. It’s definitely not ideal.
lol you don't say

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>>64839923
There is a reason I call it the Senate Laundering System, all the contracts are "give Boeing a few billion, they can give us something in return if they feel like it".
As for the tower that is just the cost of using so much HydroLox, it's the best upper stage fuel and worth it for high energy uppers like Centaur but useless for a first stage as it requires huge tanks, produces less thrust and hydrogen loves to leak because it's so small.

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>>64839934
>picture
God it's so depressing to imagine what might have been if the US had just kept developing Saturn and worked to make it cheaper and more mass produced, or pursued concepts like Sea Dragon or Nova. We basically wasted 50 years. We pissed away trillions worthlessly trying to civilize dune coons when we could have been building permanent orbital colonies and moon bases with mass drivers for ultra cheap mass for use in space construction and more and more.
>mfw
fuck this gay timeline

>>64836638
>SLS
>rushed

kek, thanks for the laugh anon and for letting us know you only have superficial knowledge

>>64839949
Sorry to rub salt in the wound but...
>Saturn MLV-V-4(S)-B
>LEO Payload: 171,990 kg (379,170 lb)
>Payload: 63,160 kg (139,240 lb) to a translunar trajectory
>Flyaway Unit Cost 1985$: 97.440 million.
>inflation adjusted $291.540 million

http://www.astronautix.com/s/saturnmlv-v-4s-b.html

>>64839966
>SLS having humans onboard
>not rushed
Not my fault they designed this stupid piece of shit so that each one is a magical snowflake that takes 3+ years and thus they are rushing to stick 4 astronauts onboard for politics despite no tests of the current version stack and big heat shield problems on the last one. Nor that you're such a retard that you can't understand how something can be a fat slow pig and simultaneously be getting rushed as fast as they can bypassing typical testing.

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>>64839981
NTA, it's not rushed it's underfunded / overcorrupt. They aren't pushing manned flights fast because it's running late it's because they haven't funded building enough of them.

>>64839973
It also wouldn't have killed anyone and screwed over the whole civilians in space effort, because even if it had problems (which wouldn't be stunning in an old rocket) it would have had a normal sane escape capability the entire launch whereas the shuttle had nothing for large portions. And it's impossible to have falling ice/foam hit your crew module heat shield when it's on the top of the rocket where it belongs not on the fucking side of the rocket.

The shuttle is so weird, in that I simultaneously can recognize it being cool in some respects yet also so fucking retarded and such a stupendous infuriating waste. And what we could have done with 172 fucking tons to LEO would have been cool too. The entire fucking mass of ISS, painstakingly assembled with the fucking vatniks (whose own stuff is garbage and now failing) pulled in, is 450 tons! We could have had something way better and purely American/allied in the 80s/early 90s. REEEE

>>64840009
Anon, I'm saying that it's simultaneously slow AND rushed. These aren't mutually exclusive. In fact they're two sides of the same coin. They're having to rush certain parts (like their testing regime) precisely BECAUSE it's running late.

Also:
>underfunded
holy fucking shit anon the problem is absolutely not that $30 billion was somehow too little money.

>>64839934
>260 inch strapon
my god

>>64840033
To me the shuttle is like the ekranoplan, very cool and interesting engineering to do something that is done better by other options.

>>64840040
>the problem is absolutely not that $30 billion was somehow too little money
It really is, if you want to get to the moon fast which Trump claimed in 2017 you need to spend BIG.

>>64840047
She was tested.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JRsbVNELSKY

>>64840053
>To me the shuttle is like the ekranoplan
The Ekranoplan at least was novel, had some arguments and was making use of a real phenomenon to do something interesting, and solve a real direct problem the soviets had (utterly shit blue water port access). It's possible to imagine a less falling apart better resourced nation designing better ones that might have done something I guess. Whereas the Shuttle was obviously bad from the beginning.
>>64840053
>It really is
It really isn't. Starship's entire R&D budget has been about $9 billion so far, and increasing by about $1-1.5b a year right now, but that'll tail off as they finish nailing down the first production design launching Starlink and then other sats.
>which Trump claimed in 2017
SLS is effectively a renamed Ares V/frankenstein Constellation, which Obama rightly nuked (though retardedly without any credible immediate replacement or developing political support). Ares V development goes back to 2005. With SLS we are now at 21 years for one test launch of not-final hardware. Cost of Constellation=$9B, post Constellation Orion=$18b, and SLS $32b = around $60 billion and increasing by about $2-4 billion per year with no end in sight except the end of the program. It's shit designed to shovel money at Shuttle contractors who sucked up $200b+ over the life of that program, and then NASA managed it badly even by Shuttle standards on top.

>>64840112
>Starship's entire R&D budget
You can't go to the moon with Starship, it's like sending a Saturn V without the CSM & lander.
>inb4 the planned lander
That could work but we haven't even seen a boilerplate, it's not anywhere near flight.

>>64839978
good depiction of the seething zog fags

>>64840129
>You can't go to the moon with Starship
It's retarded to try to defend $60 billion and 21 years of outlay by saying that anon. You're saying that given Starship launch capabilities and flexibility that it's impossible to get it to the moon with another 11 years from now and another $50 billion in budget? Because that's the equivalent comparison. In fact it's a generous to SLS comparison because the SLS budget doesn't include developing of the engines or boosters.
>it's not anywhere near flight.
Neither was SLS in 2015! In fact, I'd argue it still isn't in terms of moon landing given that there's no way at the current rate Artemis III can't possibly even hope to launch before like 2030.

Not to mention that "getting to the moon fast" is a fucking retarded goal anyway that is worthless. The US already did that 57 years ago. What matters now is going back in a sustainable way that builds us a useful presence and claim to territory. Which is 100% perfectly impossible for SLS to ever accomplish, since that requires high volume of flight and economics.

>>64840151
I'm not saying SLS is good or well managed but so much talent left SpaceX when they started working on BFR (early Starship name) I have serious doubts about the project.
Originally it was going to have clamshell fairings so it could open and deploy payloads but to balance for reentery they had to put header tanks at the top and do side deploy which is heavier and part of what made the shuttle shit.
Then they were going to use fuel as evaporative cooling to avoid the tiles that caused shuttle so much trouble but the math didn't work so now they have the same tile problems as shuttle.
Then the LEO payload dropped from 150 tons to 15 tons for block 1.

The Falcon 9 is the best MLV ever flown even beating the R7 series but all the engineers that worked on it saw the early plans for BFR, pushed to change it, got told no and quit.
SLS isn't great but it is getting to the moon well before Starship.

As for what I would do if I was in charge of getting to the moon I would let the engineers do a clean sheet design and if they want a 8 MN hydrocarbon engine then you put out fixed cost contracts instead of telling them to use the fucking SR-25 again.

>>64840183
Where did the engineers go to? I've been out of touch with private space since Armadillo shut down.

>>64840183
>I have serious doubts about the project.
I honestly don't see how you can. Like, it's already succeeded at MVP. The measure here isn't the ultimate perfect ideal they might like to achieve eventually, but whether it can do stuff better then what exists right now. Most of the raw cost is in the Super Heavy launcher, and they've proven that works and that they can even catch it, saving more dry mass by avoiding need for legs and enhancing turnaround. So they've got a super heavy rapidly reusable methalox RTLS tower catchable booster they can mass produce cheap right now. They've got a very good methalox FFSC engine with an Isp of 327-380 seconds. If 2nd stage flat out had to be just expended for awhile then it'd still be an enormous step forward. Given the improvements we've seen each reentry though I'm doubtful it's going to be much of a problem given the speed of iteration, the real question is just going to be the economics and how much mass they spend. But the upper stage is clearly pretty flexible, steel is nice to work with. Having multiple options gives a lot of flexibility.

So I'm genuinely not doubtful about the project at all. It's a success. That's not the same thing as not being doubtful about some timeline specifics like human launch, but in terms of "get lots of Starlink v3s into space, branch out into commercial cargo, iterate fast from there" yeah they're not on a dead end path at all.
Specifics:

>>64840214
>>64840183
>Originally it was going to have clamshell fairings
And they still plan to again afaik, but it's not a critical path for mvp. They can start messing with stage 2 once they've got the rest sorted out and are having it make money by launching big Starlink.
>so now they have the same tile problems as shuttle
No, they don't at all anon. Starship isn't a glider, it doesn't have the weird shape with every single tile being unique, and the structure isn't aluminum. It experiences a far easier reentry profile and as demonstrated in actual flight it has way more leeway. And like I said it's completely fine to just have it be expended for awhile if necessary too. SpaceX has a whole other rocket and human capsule/reentry vehicle they can lean on if they need to for awhile.
>Then the LEO payload dropped from 150 tons to 15 tons for block 1.
Raptor v1 to v3 has gone from 89 TWR to 183 TWR, they've been spending mass on experimentation, and they're doing the obvious thing of just extending the stack. V1 was 15 tons, but for the V3 they're saying it'll be back up to 100 tons, and for V4 200 tons (with an increase in prop load of about 45% iirc). Not seeing the problem.
>SLS isn't great but it is getting to the moon well before Starship.
"Not great" is an understatement, Starship started 11 years after SLS, it's perfectly possible SLS will get canned before A3, and "getting to the moon" doesn't matter anyway.

>>64840212
Tom Mueller was the main man on Falcon 9, he started Impulse Space building satellite busses.
Zach Dunn went to Relativity Space.
Hans Koenigsmann is at Stoke Space.

>>64840214
>it's already succeeded at MVP
The only real advantage Starship has over a bigger Falcon is second stage reusavility and they haven't reused a second stage, this isn't MVP.

>Most of the raw cost is in the Super Heavy launcher
No, the Saturn V cost ~$50b inflation adjusted, the CSM cost ~$40b adjusted and the lander cost ~$40b adjusted.

>So they've got a super heavy rapidly reusable methalox RTLS tower catchable booster they can mass produce cheap right now.
Booster 15 flew on March 6th and reflew on October 15th, this is worse than the shuttle so far. I expect it to improve but claiming this is "rapid reuse" is a stretch.

>They've got a very good methalox FFSC engine with an Isp of 327-380 seconds.
This is legit impressive, if they solve the reliability issues, which I think they will, it'll be a great engine.

>If 2nd stage flat out had to be just expended for awhile then it'd still be an enormous step forward.
This is what all the engineers that left wanted, build the second stage cheap and keep throwing it away instead of trying what the shuttle did.

>branch out into commercial cargo
I think they might struggle here without a huge redesign of the slit door, who is going to want to launch an extremely heavy and extremely small payload.

>>64840233
>And they still plan to again afaik
Not possible because of reentery center of pressure / centre of mass issues.

>it doesn't have the weird shape with every single tile being unique
True, they still have a few shapes because of the flaps but much less than shuttle.
>It experiences a far easier reentry profile
No, it doesn't S-turn high to bleed speed so it comes in much hotter.

>Not seeing the problem.
The rocket equation, doubling first stage thrust and doubling the fuel gives you ~50% more payload to orbit, eg. 15t to 22.5t

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>why didn't NASA bet everything on a SpaceX rocket that didn't exist at the time?
The world wonders
>why doesn't NASA have SpaceX design a moon rocket from scratch
Because we're trying to do a manned landing next year.
>but the SLS took 20 years and cost a billion jillion dollars
Neither of which will be refunded if we don't use it
>but what about this technical problem
The SLS has done an unmanned lunar flyby mission already, while every other moon rocket out there is a paper-only design. There is no universe where an alternative design can place a man on the moon quicker or for cheaper than the SLS because we've already fucking built it.
>b-but
Great. Invent a time machine and go convince recently inaugurated President George W. Bush to replace NASA with the paypal guy's startup.

>>64840040
>>64839981
Anon, Orion is what carries the humans and it is some 20 years old.

>>64840112
If you want to split hairs there were in line Shuttle derived rocket concepts before the Shuttle even flew.

>>64840047
>260 inch strapon
After the strapon, they came stretched from the factory.

>>64840129
>You can't go to the moon with Starship

Anon, Starship IS what we are using to go to the Moon. SLS is just a taxi ferrying astronauts to it because 1) SLS is not capable of sending a human lander to the Moon and 2) congress is forcing it on NASA which means NASA isn't allowed to use Starship to transport them anywhere except NRHO to the surface.

>>64840428
I'm willing to put down money based on the most likely outcomes
>1 China wins SpaceRace 2 and the US gives up
>2 Blue Origins lander is put in NRGO by SLS, Orion on another SLS docks, transfers crew and BO lander lands
>3 the US gives up without China winning first
>4 15 years from now China still hasn't landed and Starship HLS is ready for an Apollo 8 style test run.

>>64840295
I like how you frame second stage reuse as not an absolutely massive deal.

>>64840468
It's the Shuttle, it's the X-37, it's not new.

>>64840470
X-37 never flew and the Shuttle was 1) not fully reused and 2) required extensive work between flights.

If this was a decade ago you would be claiming F9 was not revolutionary.

>>64835936
Man his outfit is so bland.

Why not have some flair at least? Not even a NASA patch?

>>64840482
>Status
>In service
>7 spaceflights completed

I always loved the F9, at the start I was a bit worried about how low dV the first stage was so it could survive coming in and doubted such a high dV second could be so cheap but after a few engine revisions they got there.
As for if it was revolutionary I did talk about the McDonnell Douglas Delta Clipper landing in 1993 but the F9 was so much bigger and faster it was clearly a major step.

By biggest issue with Starship is it's functionally the shuttle all over again while claiming it will have quick turnaround according to the guy that would have men on the moon in 2017 and men on Mars in 2022.

>>64840515
>is it's functionally the shuttle all over again

Stop being retarded.

>>64840589
>large fuselage with small wings using body lift and heat tiles
What factors that effect turnaround am I missing?
>potential return to launch site
Same as Shuttle landing at the Cape.
>more standarized tiles
Legit improvement
>easier to replace tiles
Unknow, this was the plan with the spike mounting system but they seem to have quietly switched to the same glue as the shuttle based on recent pics after losing dozens of tiles every launch.

I'm happy you are excited about space anon and a lot of people got into space for the first time watching SpaceX. This has been both a blessing and a curse because while public support for space is vital for funding many can't understand that SpaceX has undergone institutional chance similar to Boeing over the past decade with more focus on attracting investors than on designing products.

>>64840609
Starship doesn't have wings and Shuttles did not land at their launch site.

>>64840295
>The only real advantage Starship has over a bigger Falcon is second stage reusavility and they haven't reused a second stage, this isn't MVP.
What the genuine fuck are you talking about anon? First, there's no such thing as a "bigger Falcon", that'd be an entire new rocket by itself. You can't just click an "embiggen" button on an orbital rocket. And Starship has a lot of "real advantages" around economics beyond size, though size is an enormous advantage by itself. The design is far more reusable (in terms of cheapness) top to bottom, it's a lot cheaper, methalox is cheaper than kerolox, etc. MVP for Starship is "launch big Starlinks, recover first stage".
>No, the Saturn V cost
WTF are you talking about with this tangent? We're talking about Starship launching cargo. And for Starship launching cargo, the most expensive bit is the SH because the most expensive bit remains the engines and associated plumbing and SH has 33 of them instead of 6 (or 9 for v3).
>Booster 15 flew on March 6th and reflew on October 15th, this is worse than the shuttle so far
I honestly hope you're just trolling here.

>>64840609
Yeah at this point I'm pretty convinced you're just being a raging faggot.

>>64840625
>The Space Shuttle primarily landed at NASA's Kennedy Space Center (KSC) in Florida, which served as the end-of-mission site for 78 of the 135 total missions.

The most important thing about getting interested in any new topic is just look shit up, instead of going straight for an easily disproven claim with the source "I made it up". There are plenty of sources way better than your imagination.

>>64840635
>there's no such thing as a "bigger Falcon"
Reuseable first stage, expendable upper, "Falcon architecture" if you prefer.

>The design is far more reusable (in terms of cheapness) top to bottom
Stainless will be cheaper than the 2195-T8 alloy used on Falcon but materials price don't make up a large percentage of manufacture cost, same goes for fuel but combined it might be a couple of percent.

>WTF are you talking about with this tangent?
We were talking about Starship HLS which has to do the job of the Saturn V, CSM and LEM. An empty tube doesn't get people to the moon and back.

>I honestly hope you're just trolling here.
If someone says "it's proven rapid reuse" and the best turnaround is worse than the shittle I am going to call it out.

>>64840685
>Reuseable first stage, expendable upper, "Falcon architecture" if you prefer.
It's called "develop a completely brand new rocket from scratch", ie, same thing as Starship except kerolox is significant worse for reusability and future development.
>materials price
Anon, there's coking of the engines, stress/durabilty of the steel, construction speed, and a lot of other stuff that goes into it.
>Starship HLS
Is someday in the future. We were talking about MVP.
>If someone says "it's proven rapid reuse" and the best turnaround is worse than the shittle I am going to call it out.
But you're lying about it being worse then the Shuttle unless you ignore Enterprise and the test program begun in 1977. Because Starship has been in the pathfinding development stage where they are actively, majorly iterating with large changes from v1 to v2 to v3, while doing enormous amounts of infrastructure construction for the ground factory, services and launch hardware. They're experimenting with construction, including making lots of stuff they're just scrapping afterwards. They're taking time to analyze and make hardware changes after each launch incorporating new data, which is the entire fucking point of having a hardware rich test program! You trying to pretend that somehow is the absolute maximum speed it can possibly go when that's done jumps from credible misunderstanding into bullshit territory anon.

Ultimately though, proof will be in the pudding. V3 is supposed to start launching in March, with a second flight in June. We'll see at that point where they're at objectively in terms of payload and performance, at which point these questions will get answered. Hopefully this absolute retardation Musk is doing with xAI doesn't fuck things up.

>>64840685
Anon the Shuttle did not launch from an airstrip at KSC.

>>64840829
You think the Falcon 9s that "return you launch site" take off from the landing pad?

>>64840816
>But you're lying about it being worse then the Shuttle
I never said worse than shuttle I just don't see much evidence of significanly better than shuttle.
You are acting like it's some brand new project, here is an artical from 21 years ago.
https://www.thespacereview.com/article/497/1

I hope it turns out great but Musk loves lying and all the guys that made F9 great left.

>>64840841
>You think the Falcon 9s that "return you launch site" take off from the landing pad?

We aren't talking about F9. Both stages of Starship land at the actual launch site.

>>64840829
The Shuttle landing was also pretty terrifying, unironically more-so then Starship will be even let alone a normal capsule. The compromises meant the Shuttle landed as a fat unpowered glider with a subsonic glide ratio of just 4.5:1 (a 737 for contrast is 18:1). Zero chance of a go-around, landing speed of 215 mph. There were close calls on that front as well though fortunately nobody died on that one.

I'd also forgotten NASA actually killed people with the shuttle before killing shuttle astronauts, 3 ground crew died for the first one after they were sent into an oxygen free pure nitrogen atmosphere. Whoops! And STS-1 was hair raising in a lot of respects. A good one:
>The orbiter's heat shield was damaged when an overpressure wave from the solid rocket booster caused a forward RCS oxidizer strut to fail.
>The same overpressure wave also forced the orbiter body flap – an extension on the orbiter's underbelly that helps to control pitch during reentry – into an angle well beyond the point where cracking or rupture of its hydraulic system would have been expected. Such damage would have made a controlled descent impossible, with John Young later admitting that had the crew known about this, they would have flown the shuttle up to a safe altitude and ejected, causing Columbia to be lost on the first flight. Young had reservations about ejection as a safe abort mode due to the fact that the SRBs were firing throughout the ejection window, but he justified taking this risk because, in his view, an inoperative body flap would have made landing and descent "extremely difficult if not impossible".

>>64840841
>I never said worse than shuttle
>"the best turnaround is worse than the shittle"
???????
>I just don't see much evidence of significanly better than shuttle.
What excat evidence are you expecting for something that hasn't even had a single launch of its final design yet and has been in the development phase beginning literally as a dirty camp site in the desert with zero infrastructure of any kind? But at the same time, they've already proven they can produce more Starships then shuttles ever existed. The last test was Ship #38 (the final model of block 2), and a second reused booster. We know a lot of their delays have been for reasons that won't apply to finished flying hardware, stuff like figure out the launch pad/tower, from seeing if they could get away without a deluge system and finding out they couldn't so having to build that to developing the chopstick catch concept and building it (which has turned out to work). The speed at which they reused Super Heavy alone is already better then the Shuttle did. They've done a F9 turnaround in 9 days. I mean, if you just look at what went into refurbing (or not) SRB sections (SRBs were not refurbed as a whole but as 11 segments) vs SH the reduction in complexity is enormous.

If you really want to assert that Starship will not turnaround faster then the Space Shuttle

>>64840867
>Three ground crew
You made me search, it was one + 2 injuries:
>The space shuttle Columbia passed another crucial milestone in its preflight preparations yesterday, but the successful countdown rehearsal in Florida was marred two hours later by an accident that left one technician dead and two others injured, one critically.

>The technicians were exposed to the pure nitrogen atmosphere in an enclosed area around the engines inside the shuttle. The nitrogen is used to drive out the oxygen present in normal air, lessening the chance of a fire or explosion in the engine area. The death was caused by a lack of oxygen.
Don't be hysterical and state facts instead or you lose credibility anon.

>>64841265
Your searching skills need work anon, and you should acknowledge that before you throw around accusations at others about "stating facts". 5 techs were asphyxiated, before the 6th alerted a guard who donned air gear and pulled them out. 1 died shortly afterwards, another after a few weeks, and a 3rd lasted longer before succumbing to the heavy brain damage. NASA's official rundown of the incident they put out in 2011 has the three deaths:
>https://sma.nasa.gov/docs/default-source/safety-messages/safetymessage-2011-10-03-sts1prelaunchaccident-vits.pdf?sfvrsn=a6ae1ef8_4
>Page 3:
>Three of the technicians eventually died as a result of the GN2 exposure.
Or you could have searched for articles about it that weren't from the day of the event.

>>64841279
Unironically an archived NYT article when I searched for asphyxiation deaths, thanks for correcting me with NASA as a source however.

>>64841292
Yeah I recognized it, and honestly good on you for looking at all anon. And fwiw I will admit that it's always irritated me somewhat how much news will cover breaking events but not do any follow up. I guess in the print era that was more excusable, but the habits have stuck and while it'd be easy to update an article for people searching in the future not many places do. It doesn't always matter but when we're talking stuff like stupid accident deaths in a government project I think part of holding officials to account (which we have enough trouble with anyway) is making sure the final death/injury total is known and not let them skate just because some people died later. But algorithms have just made it worse, prioritizing "fresh" above all else seemingly. Oh well.

>>64839623
>so the administration has no interest in funding them
dems constantly cut NASA's funding so they can waste money on welfare. under obongo we got stuck with soyuz like yurocucks

>>64839740
yeah, there are a ton of no gunz yuros on /k/ and 4chan in general. I know because whenever you moon or space post they all fucking seethe because they have this fake superiority which conflicts with the fact that yurop just isn't smart enough to put a man in space

>>64839716
>>64839751
the shuttle was a marvel of engineering but it was a fundamentally bad concept. the SRBs weren't actually reusable, especially since the landed in the water and what parts of them could be refurbished and reused ended up costing more than just replacing them (which would have been safer) and the parts that were refurbished were basically just the shell. The orbiter was a marvel of engineering, but it was fundamentally unsafe. it had to be on the side of the rocket, unshielded, as opposed to a shielded top capsule. it was unreasonably heavy, it wasn't modular enough and you were asking for a bunch of heatshields and parts to survive reentry multiple times, where as even a reusable capsule can be retired way earlier than the orbiters could and you can launch more modular, safer conventional rockets, including unmanned rockets for things that don't need a crew.
The only thing the shuttle potentially did better is satellite maintenance and if you wanted to deorbit a satellite, but no one ever does that anyway. it was also probably better to hang out inside the shuttle than to hang out inside soyuz but you probably could have modified an apollo capsule if you really wanted to be able to work on satellites

sfg is dead, /k/ is my new rogget discussion board

The other night Booster 19 successfully went through cryogenic proof testing, not that it should have been a big deal but good to see milestones being ticked off towards launch next month, hopefully no delays. Apparently for the first V3 they're going to do basically the exact same suborbital trajectory as all the previous ones to make sure everything with the Raptor 3s and various SS changes all work as expected using a known profile. Then the real stuff will begin, full orbital tests, in-orbit refueling, first real Starlink usage, and the first attempted true recovery of a second stage returning to landing site rather then a dummy landing in the ocean. Can't wait to see things start to really move, and no doubt the spooks are excited to have 100 ton spy sats that can read our passcodes off of our phones if we ever enter them outside.

>>64839454
maybe you didn't see the rocket in the OP, so i'll give you the benefit of the doubt that you're just blind and not blindingly retarded.

>>64839638
honestly, no
by it's very nature, spreading production out over every single US state in order to pacify the senators who decide on funding was always going to make it more expensive than spacex, dude. even the transportation costs of ferrying all those subcontracted parts across the country was going to make it slower and more expensive than spacex in and of itself.

>>64843028
nta but I'm a little lost too on what Starlink getting shut down for ziggers at last has to do with the SLS being a total piece of shit? Starlink is definitely rocket related, but it launches on a good rocket and a bigger one is planned for an even better rocket. Vatniks are completely shit without the Ukrainians to do the real engineering for them so of course their rockets are even more trash somehow but the SLS is still trash.

>>64839670
no, they were rebuilding STS boosters, because most of the rings it was made of had to be remade anyway because of heating damage and salt corrosion.
not to mention of fucking retarded you are for comparing a burnt out tube that is the STS booster being fished out of the big saltpond to a liquid rocket booster doing a much larger share of the actual delta-v work and then re-entering, coming down and autonomously propulsively landing itself on a moving barge.
i don't like to use EDS or TDS much because they are terms mostly used by retards, and there are many things to genuinely dislike musk on, but sometimes it becomes very clear that people are cutting off their nose to spite their face. spacex is a massive success, and it wouldn't have worked without musk, no, people did not believe that what they were doing was going to work, nobody else was ever going to attempt it for at least like the next decade, and certainly not NASA.

>>64843043
That's not nothing but it's not a big part honestly. Basically, powerful Old Space lobbying Senators wanted the gravytrain to continue even after the Shuttle was ded. So they made a bunch of decisions that tied NASA's hands and forced them to not pursue anything new, even just a new kerolox Saturn style first stage, but rather force usage of the RS25 and hydrolox sustainer model with solids. That fucked the whole thing, NASA managed to mismanage it even further (though I doubt their hearts were really in it since everyone knew it was just pork sucking money from real work), but there's no coming back from such an idiotic thing. Obama killed the first try at this in 2010, but Congress was working to bring it back and his top advisor on the job basically told him that he'd have to spend a lot of political capital and burn even more bridges to kill it and they should just try to extract some concessions and let Congress have it. He cared more about getting the ACA done so he gave up, the big extracted concessions were that Congress agreed to fund Commercial Crew and keep up Commercial Cargo despite old space lobbyists wanting both dead, no doubt expecting nothing much to come of it and it just being a low cost face saving bone. So in that respect we did get a win from it, if those programs had died on the vine in 2010 life would have been way harder for SpaceX (possible they wouldn't have made it, or been far delayed) and US would have been far more gigafucked with no way to ISS but the Russians.

Still Shelby and co aren't universally hated nearly as much as they deserve. That $60 billion could have gone so much further.

>>64841393
>retard doesn't look at picture of european that invalidates his entire argument
i don't like to use the word mutt, but damn is it fitting here.

>>64839934
i'm gonna say it, the only reason hydrogen kept being used as a 1st stage option for both the shuttle, SLS and other rockets like ariane, is to subsidize military rocket fuel production.
thiokol are the ones who produce the solid fuel for the boosters, and those boosters are NECESSITATED by the absolute dogshit thrust of a hydrogen 1st stage. all of these hydromeme core stages + solid rocket boosters are all purely to subsidize the producers of that solid fuel.

>>64841393
>yurop just isn't smart enough to put a man in space
It's not that they don't have plenty smart people there, but just like with the military the fact is Europe unfortunately got very comfortable leaning on the USA for everything and getting to put all their excess money into social services and jobs programs instead. And bad habits (and entrenched interests) are very hard to change, even in the face of crisis. They have refused to both trust the free market but also put enough raw money towards it.

I will note however in fairness that America came very, very close to clipping SpaceX's wings multiple times during their ramp up. A lot of old space fags hated the whole idea of fixed price contracts and NASA using commercial services. Musk was attempting multiple capital intensive things at once and in 2008-2012 he was absolutely on the edge of bankruptcy a few times, no infinite money hacks yet. Good decisions were made but also a bit of political luck.
>>64843075
>picture of european
>invalidates his entire argument
What. Can you try that again, in English this time?

>>64843094
>i'm gonna say it, the only reason hydrogen kept being used as a 1st stage option for both the shuttle, SLS and other rockets like ariane, is to subsidize military rocket fuel production.
Well, you're wrong. The reason they used hydrolox on the first stage was to subsidize RS25 production. There was no higher purpose. You can use solids on other designs if you want (though it's kinda retarded), see Vulcan for example. And unlike Europe the US buys and uses enough actual missiles all the time that the military component is pretty self-sustaining. SLS was designed purely to keep all the IDENTICAL contractors in identical states eating from the same trough while having to do as little new R&D or capital investment as possible to maximize their profits. That's it.

For Ariane yeah there is some cross investment with solids, but that wasn't the driver in the states. Just pure visionless corruption.

>>64843075
show me the yuro flag on the moon, I'll wait, no gunz
>>64843101
yuros just aren't smart enough or rich enough. sucks to suck, but it is what it is and it is why we beat them in the spanish American war, wwi and wwii
yuros just weren't smart enough to run the red ball express. yuros tried mules instead

>>64843110
>yuros just aren't smart enough or rich enough
OK, so you're just a retard. Wouldn't be surprised if you're brown wishing you were American too.

>>64843113
white and American, actually.

>>64840609
>with small wings
they're not small wings, and starship is not a fucking glider anon, it's reentry profile is much closer to a capsule than anything resembling a shuttle re-entry.
due to it's high drag and relatively speaking lower weight it also slows down a LOT faster than the shuttle.
>easier to replace tiles unknown
nigger, they literally had an E-celeb retard plug in a tile in like 5 seconds recently, it's way faster, simpler, and cheaper in terms of man hours and training.
>but now they seem to have quietly switched to the same glue
no, no they haven't, the vast majority of the heat shield still does not use any glue.

>>64843101
>c-can y-you try that a-again?
can you say that without crying again?

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>>64843071
agreed 100%
you basically just said exactly what i'd been saying in one of my earlier posts >>64836793
>still shelby and co aren't universally hated nearly as much as they deserve.
absolutely.
>"y-you can't talk about orbital depots around me because it'll invalidate my grift and i'll have a spergout!"
i hope that faggot rots in hell when he dies, i still maintain that when the first US orbital propellant depot gets built, we should name it the "Richard C. Shelby Memorial Depot" to spit on his grave.

>>64835936
where's the instaloss slide?

>>64843117
and then you woke up.

>>64843188
I'm white and American when I'm awake. do you dream about being a chinaman or something?

>>64843139
So the answer is no basically, you're just a schizo? Ok then.

>>64843206
>i'm white and american w-when i'm awake
what flavor of drugs do you use to "awaken" yourself from your horrible reality?

>>64843234
>the answer is no
so you can't say that without crying? good to know.

>>64843265
my horrible reality of being a white, American man? being a white, American man is pretty based

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>>64843269
Thank you for your concession about America's superiority :^)

>>64843277
>m-my reality
i mean, if i'm sure you believe it if you wish for it hard enough, but sadly reality has other plans for you.
>>64843278
>n-no, you conceded!
i'm sorry a bunch of euros had to carry you through the apollo program, maybe with another 100 years passed people will have forgotten, but until then it's something you have to live with.
dry your tears, honey.

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>>64843284
>E-europe i-is re-relevant in sp-space guiz ;_;
>t-these aren't t-tears it's ra-raining ;;;;______;;;;;
there there

>>64843305
>europe is relevant in space
i never said that, i said that your handwringing over what flag is on the moon is covering for your insecurity about who actually made that happen lel.
>n-no you're crying not me
lel, lmao even.

>>64843337
You seem pretty obsessed and mad about this tears thing you imagine all other humans on the planet are doing. Is this some sort of father issue?

>>64843343
>y-you seem pretty upset
that's a feeling that's coming from within you, i'm content to keep prodding you as long as you keep making noise.

>>64843022
By the pattern though, there'll still be a few lost hulls along the way. It's never an A > B progression.
It's always:
A > A1 > A1.2 > B

>>64843284
I'm white, cry about it. yuros still haven't put a man in space. must be due to poor yuropean education. that's probably why they lost both world wars

>>64843337
>for your insecurity about who actually made that happen lel.
Americans did. yuropoors mad as fuck they can't into a moonlanding

>>64843442
>americans did
yes, i remember "von brown" telling me with a thick american accent how he didn't care where the rockets went when they came down, as long as they went up.

>>64843459
American citizen. all the other designers and builders were also American. if yuros could do it, why have they never put a man in space? seems like lack of education. like 17 of the top 20 colleges are in the US

>>64843484
>a-american citizen
if that'll make you feel better lmao.
>i-if yuro's could do it
considering the people crucial for the apollo program were yuro's, it seems like they can.

>>64843493
it seems they can't since they haven't.
but hey, what else can we expect from a country that couldn't invent the red ball express or icecream ships?

>>64843518
>since they haven't
what was von braun doing running the whole show then?
i'm sure everything being done in metric and then translated to imperial for the flyboys was just a flex too. those silly german sounding americans.

>>64843524
which is why the germans were so dumb they were using mules in WWII instead of trucks like we were? lmao
germany has put 0 men into space. pretty sure a jeet went to space before a german did

>>64843546
>b-but what about [insert unrelated seethe here]
it's a simple question anon, why was the success of apollo and many other US scientific and engineering endeavors mostly the result of european genius?
i'll let you think about it, i understand you need a bit of extra time.
mind, you, i'm not german, so seething remarks about germany will mostly be met with amusement.

>>64843564
Apollo was done by Americans. Americans designed the rockets, Americans built the rockets, Americans flew the rockets. yurop as a whole continent can't do what the US did 60 years ago, due to lack of education

>>64843524
>what was von braun doing running the whole show then?
Being American. When he was under the yoke of inferior yurothought he was unable to produce any meaningful progress towards a moon rocket. But like so many others once he converted to Americanism and learned about Freedom his creativity and capabilities bloomed and he was able to make a real impact on humanity. God bless America.

>>64843604
>apollo was done by americans
i see you've chosen the denial of reality option, that's too bad, i even gave you extra time and everything.
welp, some dogs just can't be taught, that's life, or c'est la vie, as the french say it.

>>64843622
I will pray that the light of America will someday illuminate your dark existence as it did Von Braun and so many others anon!

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>>64843620
>being american
ze very american herr braun vas instrumental, yes.
>weird esoteric and indecipherable seethe at germans running the apollo program
my work is done here.

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>>64843626
>more weird esoteric seethe
stop, stop, burgerman, i can only belly laugh for so long.

a Hungarian guy who didn't speak any English was critical to like the lunar rover, and that sort of situation wasn't unusual; large swaths of design and engineering was done by random recently-immigrated euros outside of the Peenemünde folks.

>>64843620
true
>>64843622
the french are another nation, too dumb to put a man in space
>>64843637
which is why yurop still can't figure out how to put a man in space 60 years later due to lack of iq and education?

>>64843628
>>64843635
>the schizo is now so sad and depressed he's resorting to spam and random reaction images he got from leddit
Let us not be angry at him brethren, but sad for him for not allowing the light of America into his heart being stuck in the sad darkness, clinging desperately to the fiction that Americans were not American. May the darkness of unAmericanism be cleansed from your soul one day my dear friend anon.

>>64843637
stop anon, he's already very emotional now, don't take this away from him.
>>64843643
then why was it europeans who put a man in space, and on the moon?
i understand that you care deeply, and this makes you very emotional anon, take some time to process it.

>>64843646
>the schizo is now so depressed
on the contrary, watching you spin around in circles trying to pretend i'm mad in your head has brightened my day considerably. sadly, to the detriment of your mental health.

>>64843654
Americans put men in space and on the moon. exactly ZERO yuropeans have been put into space on a yuropean made rocket and exactly ZERO yuros have walked on the moon

>>64843643
It's because they prioritize funding the welfare state and living La Dolce Vita.
That's unwise and "stupid" in another sense, but not in the book sense you're talking about.

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>>64843663
>a-americans put men in space and on the moon
i'm sure if you keep repeating it hard enough, all of those suspiciously foreign sounding languages metric systems, accents and names that spearheaded apollo will finally go away.
you'd look a lot less ridiculous if you focused all your desperate jingoistic energy into something actually american made like starship, at least then it would only be the jingoism itself that people would laugh at, not the delusion of apollo being done by americans.

>>64843680
Name them

>>64843663
>>64843654
The dude's a SAAR or one of those (surprisingly) few anons on 4chan who's genuinely, truly insane. For all people pretend to be retarded we don't get a lot of unironic delusional head cases that often but they're always memorable. No need to respond at this point, not like he has anything on actual rocketry to share.

Speaking of actual rocketry, Rocket Labs has said they're aiming for completing the first Neutron and bringing it to the pad to start launch qualification in the next few months as well. I wish them luck in getting it off successfully mid-summer, it'd be nice to have a 3rd player in reusable medium lift. They've done pretty well with Electron but the niche for small launch is shrinking and unsustainable long term. And even after Starship is running there will still be room for at least one and maybe two serious medium lift companies (I'm assuming the other will be BO) since a lot of serious players will want to be able to hedge their launch schedules if one company has a problem. Particularly once commercial space stations start going up.

>>64843665
it's cause they can't even if they tried, they can't >>64843680
America went to the moon with Apollo. America is going back to the moon next month. yurop isn't even smart enough to put a man in space, be mad forever
>>64843701
I'm white. idk about the seething nonAmerican

kek, here comes the part where he starts looking for a fight over the specifics of just how unamerican apollo was, and no matter what the answer is, he'll still pretend in his head that it was "american enough"
>>64843701
ikr, the funniest part is i never even contested that europe today is absolutely pathetic in spaceflight, that's simply true, but he's such a turboautist he can't handle the fact that he knows nothing about apollo yet has to be extremely jingoistic about it. can't handle the bantz, it seems.
>neutron
i've been waiting on that shit forever, i'm so tired of spacex being the only game in town when it comes to medium lift reusability, blue and rocketlab will finally enter the game and then interesting shit might start happening again.

>>64843719
>i-i'm white
you had a pretty brown-style temper tantrum, so i seriously doubt that.
you should be more like this man >>64843701
who is actually white and interested in spaceflight, unlike you.

>>64843723
For what it's worth, part of my irritation is that Europe SHOULD be more of a space power. Just as it's healthy to have multiple players in America competing I think it's healthy to have multiple Western powers in friendly competition, both because it serves to spur everyone forward, keep anyone from getting too comfortable, and serves as a hedge just in case. And Europe has the population, tech, and economic base to do it. But they just haven't been able to take it seriously, to put the kind of money America did into commercial service and create a unifying vision and goal that helps to drive everyone forward. The most obvious would be to do a serious Starbase, which I think America should have as a goal too. The kind of thing that'd then serve as infrastructure to help further reaching out into space.

But they'd need to get productivity up and be willing to spend some serious cash to get the ball rolling and right now they just aren't which is unfortunate.

>>64843728
I am white. that's why you are having such a hissyfit
>>64843723
yurop could never do what the US did because you fags aren't smart enough. that's why we were able to stop in the 70s and give you decades and still go back before you faggots could even put a man in space
>>64843746
yurop doesn't have the capacity. the chinamen and nips probably do

>>64838769
Fun fact anime is born from infatuation with American animation so this is a deeper metaphor than you thought

>>64839653
>Elon is responsible for all SpaceX hires
Yeah because at the time NASA funding dried up and every space nerd engineer had only one place to go. Had NASA been funded they would have went there
>t. Actually talks to SpaceX fuckers

>>64843795
>yurop doesn't have the capacity
What the absolute fuck are you talking about? Of course they have the capacity, they have a population of over 450 million and a GDP of $21 trillion. It's particularly weird you'd say this compared to Japan, which has a population of 123 million and GDP of $4.2 trillion. Europe also has access to decent equatorial launch facilities without needing to build launch platforms or something, though I think that'd be a good thing for them to consider innovating on as well if they were serious given they EEA has some pretty serious platform construction capabilities. Aker Solutions in Norway is producing ginormous oil platforms and could be contracted to do something for heavy rocket launch instead, maybe with a French nuclear reactor and in-situ water/methane/lox generation. That'd be something nobody has ever done before.

What the EU seems to lack right now is the will. That's a different thing then the capacity.

>>64843795
>i am white
see >>64843728
>that's why you are having such a hissyfit
i'm not though, why are you trying to project your anger onto me? you're a midwit who doesn't know anything about his own country's spaceflight accomplishments, you're too retarded to be patriotic, which is why you're a jingoist instead and everyone mocks you for it.
>>64843746
agreed
>>64843795
>y-yurop could never *starts crying*
lol you gotta calm down buddy, you're gonna burst a vein like this.

Question for all the Shuttle haters here. Why do you hate it? Went to Canaveral recently and learned a fuck load more about them. The amount of shuttle missions is staggering and they ran well into the 2000s and post major incidents. Despite this there were dozens of missions frequently done at a tempo no other org has managed, doing tech work no one else has managed. It doesn't mean it was perfect but for an idea pitched by a NASA og decades before the tech was even feasible it's an genuinely impressive and useful tool

>>64843848
>why do you hate it?
reality is multifaceted.
i love the way the shuttle looks
i love the insane engineering behind the shuttle.
i fucking hate the final product and what it represented, i hate it for being needlessly expensive, dangerous and killing 12 people and i hate it for setting stagnating spaceflight for 40 years as well as souring everyone on the concept of reusability to the point that a private company had to come in decades later and show everyone it was actually feasible to do it properly.
>genuinely impressive
sure
>useful
for the amount of money and effort put into it? absolutely not.
not to mention most of the compromises for capabilities that the DOD or airforce demanded it have to greenlight funding were never actually fucking used, but gimped it for it's entire existence, like those stupid oversized wings.

>>64843832
they don't. they factually don't have the capacity. they haven't put a man in space because they simply cannot
>>64843846
you are having a massive hissyfit over the fact America did and is currently doing when yurop can't and you are so upset you are falsely accusing me of being brown, when I'm white. pretty cringe and seethe based behavior by you
>>64843848
I like the shuttle, it's cool, but it was obviously a bad choice both from a cost and safety perspective. you also see a ton of seethe because it couldn't go to the moon and because it was a compromised design for the chairforce

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>>64843868
>more jingoistic seethe
you're not part of the conversation at all little bro, you're an angry little guy who doesn't know anything about spaceflight and interrupts the adults talking. you know nothing about this topic, have no interest in it and at this point i'm about 99% sure that you're not even an american, but rather an angry zigger doing a D&C routine, considering you know absolutely fuckall about american spaceflight despite screeching about it 24/7

>>64843863
I'm a bit curious as to why it wasn't useful in your opinion. Over half of its later missions were DoD missions of which we know zero of what they did. The other missions included things like orbital construction, intercepts and testing for labs. Was there an equivalent NASA idea that would have been as capable?

>>64843868
From the cost point of view is this from SpaceXs cargo mission? The Shuttles compromises were used by the people that asked for them

>>64843887
>From the cost point of view is this from SpaceXs cargo mission?
the SRB basically weren't reusable and until challenger they were literally putting satellites up on the shuttle when they could have used unmanned rockets. The shuttle is also fucking heavy for missions that didn't actually need all of the orbiter's capabilities
>The Shuttles compromises were used by the people that asked for them
actually no. the chairforce made them make the shuttle bigger and built a launch pad in california all so they could retrieve spy satellites over the poles and they never used this capability.
There was also at least one time where they were launching something heavy and they were worried the shuttle wouldn't make it into orbit

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read it

>>64843907
after challenger they were going to use the atlas stage'd payload thingy which would have been heavy as f, yeah

>>64843887
>wasn't useful
ultimately it was a rocketsystem that existed and was able to be used, sure. but that's kind of the bare minimum you can expect from even a non-reusable rocket, and the shuttle only managed it with a ridiculous amount of wasted money, numerous safety incidents, 2 straight up catastrophic events, and the destruction of any faith in future re-usable projects. yeah, you can say that a shitbox gets you to work every day, but it's still a shitbox and you can still be deeply dissapointed in it.

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>>64840482
>orbits earth for 908 days
>never flew

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NASA still operates the last 3(2) B-57s

One recently had to do a belly landing so it's future status is not clear
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e4da10FjJnQ

>>64838135
Great until they have to uhhh do anything at night
>>64838505
I got to see the space shuttle on its final trip one day when walking to school. It was awesome.

>>64840488
NASA guards should wear various models of historical space suits to show their eliteness via color like they're video game mooks.
>Regular guards - orange Shuttle Escape Suits
>Elite guards - blue MOL spacesuits
>Guard commanders - silver Mercury pressure suits
>Heavies - white Apollo moon suits

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>>64843940
That's come a long way since the first US version.
I'm sure the fleet will be back to four faster than there will be three Lancasters.

>>64843940
poor old girl, that must've hurt. i hope they fix her up right quick.

>>64835941
>posted from my chink village that was destroyed by a failed rocket launch

>>64844029
Posted from Starbase actually you seething Old Space retard. I will pop a bottle of champaign the day of the final ULA launch and them getting sold for pocket change or shut down :^).

>>64843848
>Question for all the Shuttle haters here. Why do you hate it?
tl;dr:
1. It was an intrinsically horrendously unsafe and shit design that got lots of good people killed and almost killed lots more.
2. It was an EXPENSIVE unsafe shit design as well which sucked up enormous resources that could have gotten the US way, way further in space.
3. It threw away tons of hard won knowledge and manufacturing with Apollo for shit, setting the US space program back decades. And this sort of thing compounds.

More detail:
• Putting your precious crew/cargo on the SIDE of the big column of explodey vroom is madness. It makes escape effectively impossible most of a launch. In every other normal rocket, the answer to something going terribly wrong is fundamentally simple: go faster. When you're on top of the rocket, you just need to fire up some high thrust rocket briefly (can be solid or liquid) as everything RUDs below you at any point (whether on the ground or near orbit) and whoosh off you go and then have options from there (return to ground or burn to orbit and then back down depending on where you are). On the side you just die. Possibly slowly (analysis indicated at least a few crew members survived the Challenger explosion until it hit the ocean which is extra depressing).
•Being on the side also means you can get hit by shit. Nothing else but the shuttle has ever had or ever will have its heat shield damaged by falling ice from tanks/booster because nothing else is BELOW the fucking tanks instead of on top of them.
>cont

>>64844100
>cont
• Politics on shit like the SRBs forcing them to be constructed in fucking Utah is directly responsible for design issues like the O-rings and in turn Shuttle loss. More safety/retardation.
•Hydrolox sustainer for a first stage is retarded. It can be sorta made to work (though not in the shuttle) but at enormous cost at best.
•It wasn't even really a normal staged design at all but a weird 1.5ish/boosted SSTO sorta thing that throws away the typical advantages of staging. Expensive shit.
•The big fat delta wings the USAF forced for some weird niche spook thing that they never even fucking did anyway and considered obsolete before the Shuttle hit the pad added even more wasted dry mass and made reentry and everything else worse and more dangerous/expensive.
• Also lead to landing being a terrifying one-chance-or-death endeavor where you had to land a 1:4.5 glide ratio tub at over 200mph.
•$1.5 billion per launch for tiny cargo relative to the price for an eyewatering $50k+/kg to LEO.

All this directly screwed America on a ton of stuff we might have done with Apollo or a continuation, or concepts like Nova or Sea Dragon. As a kid I did think the Shuttle looked cool. I still recognize the heroics that thousands of people performed to limit loss to "only" 2 full shuttles and all crew. But a good rocket design shouldn't NEED heroics every time, it should have safety margin in all the normal ways. And now I can't help but imagine where we'd be with decades of a normal stack instead and how that would have changed history for the better. So yeah I'm pretty bitter about it and have gotten more not less so over time, even while retaining respect for a lot of individual components and astronauts and support staff/engineers of all kinds.

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i fucking love the Shuttle and no amount of seethe will stop me
>>64843887
>over half of its later missions were DoD
nigga there were only 9 classified DoD missions

>>64838091
Yes, NASA should be doing exactly what SpaceX is doing and should have been doing so for 50 years. The bureaucratic bloat and inefficiency has set us back nearly 30 years.

>>64843094
The reason hydrogen was being used is because AJR was incapable of designing a new engine after the RS-25.

>>64843101
>>64841393
European spaceflight is structurally crippled by excessive regulation and EU members being unwilling to fund it without a major slice of the budget pie coming back to them.

>>64844029
newspace is the only reason why the US is currently in the lead against china, dumbass. before spacex and the other up and coming, we were relying on fucking soyuz to get to the ISS.

>>64844100
>>64844104
the most important part for me is that it completely fucking demoralized everyone involved in spaceflight to the point that nobody bothered with re-usability anymore and single use expendable rockets like we had been building them since the 1960's was considered the apex of rocket design, nothing else was ever going to work, this was the way forward, that's just how it was.
people take newspace for granted now, but before spacex, you would have been laughed out of the room for even suggesting a powered landing and rapid turnaround of a liquid booster, when for all intents and purposes, the shuttle had proven for them that even a fucking empty steel tube was barely re-usable, and certainly not profitable to re-use.
as much as elon is losing his focus and grasp on reality, we should be damn thankful that sperglord stuck to his guns on re-use, otherwise everyone would still be singing the same song everyone was singing since the shuttle got cancelled, hell, some people are still in denial about reusability now, that's how bad it's been.

>>64844471
yeah but that's the complicated non-meme answer, that's a little bit too difficult to parse for the D&C shill.

>Nasatards and Esacucks still seething at SpaceX

Cute.

>>64843952
Fuck, at least have some space white or safety orange jumpsuits or SOMETHING.

Anything of ther than more faggy plate carrier+OCP SHIT

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>>64844516
Famously, these flabby, complacent lisping faggots laughed at the very idea back in 2013.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W676Kk9LSYw

Until all this talking adipose tissue is wormfood, Europe will remain the Designated Fluffer of US rocketry and US balls.
slurp-slurp!