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SpaceX Starship

Actually I just thought about the whole hatch idea again, realistically you could treat the cut hole just like you do a filler neck on a fuel cell. Pass some backing plates through the newly cut opening, position them behind the opening and bolt the new hatch/device to it, sandwiching the hull in between. Not that welding isn't the best answer, but I could see something like this happen before we're confident in our in-space welding techniques

This sweet video from onboard the Atlas 5 launching Starliner have started trickling in, always awesome to see great footage like this



And Starliner undocking schedule:

 
And all deployments successful. I like when we get that much camera time on orbit

Starliner also undocked this morning, and will be reentering this evening. Those of you in the southwest may be able to see it streaking across the sky if you have a good view of the southern horizon at the right time

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And some footage from the undocking event:

 
NASA Live has live coverage of the Starliner return flight going on right now, and should be live through landing etc. Hopefully we get some cool views of reentry and landing.



And a cool visual of the reentry process:

 
Starliner is well on its way home, deorbit burn complete. It should be in the middle of that visibility window in about 12-15 minutes, and landing in 20-25
 
I think sticking two pieces of similar material together "cold" welds it in space and it acts like a weld here on earth. My memory is very fuzzy on subject.
 
congrats to Boeing. It was a long time coming, but finally they have a workable product. Nice that they threw in the comment about the first land based return of a crew capsule (albeit and empty one). Beating out Spacex on at least that one milestone :laughing:
 
That's super interesting, I wasn't familiar with the concept before. Looks like I've got something new to learn about

The landing on land thing is a funny topic, at one point Dragon was going to have legs that poked down through the heat shield and propulsively land on land, but they nixed it because of the extra time that would have been required to certify the heat shield with holes in it during a very time crunched moment in their past and went back to ole faithful water landings (and the capsules weren't even going to be reused initially at NASAs request) while the Starliner pressed forward with land landings and a reusable capsule. Seems funny and almost backwards looking back



I always lose my sense of scale for how ridiculously large these boosters are. Here's the one that landed today with two people walking around the legs wearing white. Insane.

 
AgitatedPancake said:
The landing on land thing is a funny topic, at one point Dragon was going to have legs that poked down through the heat shield and propulsively land on land, but they nixed it because of the extra time that would have been required to certify the heat shield with holes in it during a very time crunched moment in their past and went back to ole faithful water landings (and the capsules weren't even going to be reused initially at NASAs request) while the Starliner pressed forward with land landings and a reusable capsule. Seems funny and almost backwards looking back
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that will all be irrelevant soon though, when starship starts landing on the chopsticks :laughing:
 
So I didn't know this was coming up soon, but this is super exciting. Next weds, NASA is announcing the companies being contracted to make the next EVA suites. To replace those on the ISS, and be used on Artemis. Long overdue, the suites used on the ISS are super old tech by todays standards, and are encountering more frequent issues

NASA to Pick Next Generation Spacesuits for Moonwalking, Spacewalking
 
Well, here we are on the last day of the month - the FAA pushed their EA for Boca Chica back two more weeks.



Interesting aspect that came to light, the last recorded comment (out of over 19,000) was from NASA. They're on board (which makes sense considering Starship is under contract for Artemis moon landings

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Alright today is another pretty interesting one. First, we got a date for the release of Webb's very first full resolution images - July 16th.

And equally cool, today in about an hour and a half is the announcement of the company or companies that have been chosen to proceed with the next generation of space suit. The list of companies that submitted proposals is long (20ish?), including the likes of SpaceX, Blue Origin, Axiom, Sierra, and other contractors that have done suit work for NASA in the past.

Personally, I'm hoping they funded like 3+. Just like rockets and crewed capsules, I think having redundant tech developed in parallel is a good thing. Especially to ensure potential for competition considering the commercial focus

 
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