SpaceX launches military payload for the Pentagon’s Space Development Agency
SpaceX early today successfully launched a classified military payload for the Pentagon’s Space Development Agency, its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California.
The first stage completed its sixth flight, landing on a drone ship in the Pacific.
I did not post this in the morning because there was a second SpaceX launch scheduled for the afternoon, and I planned on posting both launches in one post. That launch however was scrubbed and rescheduled for tomorrow.
The leaders in the 2025 launch race:
115 SpaceX
53 China
12 Rocket Lab
11 Russia
SpaceX now leads the rest of the world in successful launches, 115 to 90.
On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.
The print edition can be purchased at Amazon or from any other book seller. If you want an autographed copy the price is $60 for the hardback and $45 for the paperback, plus $8 shipping for each. Go here for purchasing details. The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.
The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News
SpaceX early today successfully launched a classified military payload for the Pentagon’s Space Development Agency, its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California.
The first stage completed its sixth flight, landing on a drone ship in the Pacific.
I did not post this in the morning because there was a second SpaceX launch scheduled for the afternoon, and I planned on posting both launches in one post. That launch however was scrubbed and rescheduled for tomorrow.
The leaders in the 2025 launch race:
115 SpaceX
53 China
12 Rocket Lab
11 Russia
SpaceX now leads the rest of the world in successful launches, 115 to 90.
On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.
The print edition can be purchased at Amazon or from any other book seller. If you want an autographed copy the price is $60 for the hardback and $45 for the paperback, plus $8 shipping for each. Go here for purchasing details. The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.
The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News
I watched Ellie in Space yesterday.
One fallout from IFT-10 was how flummoxed the CFD people were over SuperHeavy’s performance.
One of the reasons I advocated for an Energiya/Buran type Shuttle-2 was that the orbiter was just one of many payloads.
Hypersonic test articles, spacecraft simulators with tiles, etc….all these could have been used for flight tests.
I NEVER trusted CFD for spaceflight. I don’t much trust computer models for climate research or anything else for that matter.
Starship doesn’t impress me, but SuperHeavy does–it really did show up the experts with its “bumblebees can’t fly but they do” moment.
Large scale test flights are the only way to go. Marshall said that first.
CFD is always a work in progress. The models inform test campaign designs and the test campaign results feed back into the models. That’s why it’s important to be able to afford to run test campaigns.
If Marshall said that first, it was the young and vigorous Marshall of the Moon Race era and not the elderly and demented Marshall of today, drooling on its bib and barely able to remember its name, never mind what it said 60 years ago. But then Marshall and its contractors could actually build hardware quickly enough in those days to allow for a decent test campaign and not just a single unmanned flight. If SLS was subjected to the same development flight regime as Saturn V, we wouldn’t be sending anyone Moonward sooner than the mid-2040s.
But, as Yoda famously said, “There is another.”
Dick Eagleson opined: “If SLS was subjected to the same development flight regime as Saturn V, we wouldn’t be sending anyone Moonward sooner than the mid-2040s.”
Curious about the comparison, as ‘Men from Planet Earth’ set Lunar foot 21 months after the first test flight of the Apollo-Saturn system. SLS is projected to put people in position to maybe land on the Moon 8 years after the first test flight. If SLS was on the Apollo test regime, it seems we’d be there, already.
THE SPACE REVIEW a few years ago had an article that lauded SLS because it was made during flat budgets. One big stage—giant de facto RATO units and a D-IV upper stage. That’s simpler than the Saturns—Saturn V anyway.