Defining standards down.

I am not the only individual with a love of the past—Stoke looks to give new life to Bono’s plug nozzle.

Bono had another concept—perhaps not serious (used to show how a typical rocket design is best).
Still, his idea of a lenticular HLLV should get a fresh look:

http://www.astronautix.com/b/bonosaucer.html

Here is why the design is desirable:

https://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?topic=50748.msg2729497#msg2729497

Having a wide surface should lower wing loading.

New Borman?
https://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?topic=54391.msg2729627#msg2729627

“New Borman is obviously the proper name for a 9 engine New Glenn. Beyond just being the first time Humans got further than LEO, Apollo 8 was the first times humans flew on a super heavy lift LV. So it seems an appropriate name for a vehicle that would be flirting with the definition of super heavy lift.”

PBS on the future of Seetee (CT) ships
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eA4X9P98ess

Michael: I just realized that your comment was on the quick links that are scheduled for later today that were accidentally scheduled by me too early. I rescheduled them. Your original comment and my response will appear later today.

Sorry about the confusion.

Since the general topic is space, let’s talk about what we’ve been learning about Venus in particular and stagnant lid worlds in general. Of late, what we thought we knew about planet Venus has changed utterly.

Venus is what happens—not, it turns out, when there’s a climatic “runaway greenhouse effect” as hitherto supposed—but rather when you’re a world lacking in plate tectonics, which therefore is subject to so-called lid tectonics.

In Venus’ case, this transformed what could have been a semi-habitable world into the hellhole we see there today—not by means of any kind of a climatic catastrophe, but wholly geologic.

Venus geologically is a so-called stagnant lid world. (Other local examples: the Moon, Mars, Mercury, Vesta.) Rather than plate tectonics (a.k.a. “mobile tectonics”), as Earth enjoys, Venus experiences lid tectonics, which means that Venus’ crust—rather than being cracked into “plates,” whose motion, subduction, volcanoes, et al., act to release a great deal of internal heat—instead forms a thick cap (a “lid”) atop the venusian interior, insulating it.

For those who like to contemplate physics in operation, imagine what such an insulating layer lying atop its (heat-generating) interior does to a world.

But no need to imagine, we now know (from its complete surficial dearth of old, large craters) that Venus around half a billion years back underwent a tremendous convulsion—due to heat buildup in the “stagnant” mantle below—whereby Venus’ entire crust one fine day basically turned over and melted (obviously a stupendous catastrophe), then refroze into the nearly pristine surface (a scattering of tiny craters have arrived since the cataclysm, allowing rough dating) that we see there now.

The result is that any carbon hitherto resident in Venus’ crust—in calcite, limestone, coal, oil, or the bodies of any venusian inhabitants—would thereupon have been “cooked” and propelled into the atmosphere as CO2 gas. Thus, the situation we see on the planet today.

Indeed, this kind of “resurfacing” event (sounds so sanitary, doesn’t it?) is a previously unimagined danger that stagnant-lid worlds, we now realize, are generally (or at least many of them) subject to: a disaster which can “suddenly,” with almost no warning—over geologic timescales (of perhaps 100 million years or less), that is—transform formerly clement worlds into almost literal hellholes.

One might note that such disasters might occur repetitively to “lid” world(s) like Venus.

#ScienceFiction and #SciFi has contemplated many kinds of planetary catastrophes—but it never imagined this.

The answer is “Dear occupant”

Interesting find via magnetics
https://phys.org/news/2025-10-strong-magnetic-field-duality-materials.html

1) The Haven Demo has been confirmed to be scheduled for launch this Saturday night on the Bandwagon 4 mission.

2) The second New Glenn is vertical on pad 36 at CCSFS in preparation for its launch of Escapade. Expect a static fire to occur shortly.