https://www.reddit.com/r/PrepperIntel/comments/1gvrv2t/russia_potentially_preparing_to_use_nonnuclear/?utm_source=embedv2&utm_medium=post_embed&utm_content=post_title&embed_host_url=https://www.secretprojects.co.uk/threads/ur-500-super-icbm.24878/

What I want to know is—why did it take a unicorn like Musk to provide America with Falcon?

I have written elsewhere that Vietnam and Great Society were always going to be better supported than Apollo.

I suspect Air Force interference. THE RIGHT STUFF vilified engineers—yet Dragon is rather like Vostok.

Subs, jets—all had top dollars—but rockets were about just getting enough umpf for your payload.
R-7 was overpowered, whereas tiny little Delta II was based on not an ICBM, but an IRBM—Thor.

Again, this may go back to culture.

I was watching a documentary about Groom Lake…Barnes I think was the person interviewed.

There he talked about how aircraft needed to be put back in the hanger before the “ashcan” flew overhead.
—By which he meant a spysat.

That miffed me.

MOL was killed—but the Almaz equivalent—supported…becoming Salyut, Mir, Zvezda…

We killed Saturn IB—they kept Proton until today.

No matter how bad things got—they at least kept a steady presence…where our efforts were of starts and stops—no real lasting commitment over time

Elon should not have had to bail us out.

Jets are sexier than rockets…so maybe that’s part of it.
An old saying about how aerospace turns billionaires into millionaires is still repeated and spooks the donor classes.

LIFTOFF and RE-ENTRY both do a good job—but I am always looking for that “unknown unknown.”

The United States should not have had to rely on an Aspie to get to space—any more than having our guys ride Soyuz.

It just makes me so mad.

Area 51 is an institution—it gives us the best planes on the planet…all while we stretched out Thors to have a Delta II payload shroud not much wider than my waistline.

I just don’t get it.

What worries me, is that Elon is doing such a good job—institutional support for spaceflight might take a worse hit.

WWI fighters were just so much better than the earlier craft..over only a few years. Aviation got constant love. Maybe that’s the difference.

This year, they are bringing online a new pad at Vandenberg, SLC-6, which will help with cadence. Rumors persist about a new, fourth drone ship.

RTLS for more missions would certainly help, but of course that comes with a cost….

SpaceX continues to work down minimum turnaround times at all of its Falcon pads. Apart from weather, the limiting factor for average turnaround is the cycle times of the drone ships and I suspect there is not much more ground to be gained there.

Short of building additional drone ships – which SpaceX may elect not to do given that the Falcons are now probably nearer the ends of their service lives than their beginnings – SpaceX’s only obvious option to continue cutting turnaround times significantly is to make more missions RTLS.

The only missions for which SpaceX can straightforwardly do this are Starlink launches. Taking out a few sats from a load should allow for an RTLS booster landing rather than a drone ship one.

Both adding more drone ships and initiating RTLS Starlink missions would allow reduced pad turnarounds and increased launch cadences. Which direction to go would involve computing the costs vs. benefits of the two approaches.

With drone ships, there are lead time considerations in acquiring one or more additional units. With going to some or all RTLS Starlink missions, there might be non-drone ship limits to further pad turnaround time reductions that make the reduction of sats per launch not worth the additional launch cadence that doing so would allow.

Only SpaceX knows all the relevant values of the variables in these financial calculation exercises. But I will not be surprised if we see at least some experimentation with the RTLS-for-Starlink-missions approach – perhaps even before the end of this year.

I think we may soon have to retire that old chestnut anent Russia. With Ukraine finding new ways to savage Russia militarily and industrially by the day, ongoing retrenchments to its threadbare remaining space program and all of the other problems Russia has – nearly all of which have been self-inflicted it should be noted – how much longer it can be considered to still stand among “the mighty” is a real question.

Jeff Wright,

The R-7 has had a heckuva run, no question. It was Russia’s first big rocket to enter service and, the way things are going, might also be its last to remain so.

I wish for a weekend of erotic abandon with Carmen Electra in a Vegas penthouse. At least my wish is not absolutely foreclosed by the law of cause and effect.

The Bears, Backfires and Blackjacks are pretty things, but being used for evil purposes. I watched their destruction with surprise and delight. More, please, and soonest.

No leader is trying to “kill off aerospace.” Not even Putin – though what he has set in motion is certainly having that effect in Russia. With the exception of a few superannuated dinosaur legacy primes suffering from terminal senescence and incontinence, aerospace is doing just fine pretty much everywhere else.

R-7 is still my favorite manned LV, due to seeing that thing shrug off lightning strikes–launch during winds that would keep others grounded–and most of all—burn on the pad without exploding for the longest time…giving ample time for the crew to escape.

There has been nothing like it before or since.
I wish Putin had never come into power.

I would love to have had some R-7’s here in America next to Redstone…to show kids just how far ahead they were.

Ukraine was in its rights to drone the Bear bombers–but seeing those old turboprops destroyed hit me as hard as Russia destroying the AN-225.

Just once I’d like to see a leader not try to kill off aerospace.

Har far the mighty have fallen.