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29 Raptor engines. My goodness. This thing should be taking off in the next month or two. Hello, Mars.

The Raptor engine has twice the boost as the Merlin engines. 27 Merlin engines propelled the Falcon Heavy, their recent heavy lifter.

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My wife, who works at NASA, played a role in this launch. She got us these shirts to celebrate. Yet also celebrating with a boot of my Christmas ale. Lol. Figured this thread would be semi appropriate for this.
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Thanks for the recommendation, I needed a new read.
Pulled a loaner edition from our town's digital library affiliation, cool beans.
Surprised it was immediately available.
I had to wait over a month to read Project Hail Mary. That book was hot...

Cheers!
 
Pretty sure there's a ton of "explainer" math already done on this.
One metric worth noting is nothing living could survive the spin-up :)
 
Pretty sure there's a ton of "explainer" math already done on this.
One metric worth noting is nothing living could survive the spin-up :)

William Shatner already signed up :) He has inertial damper technology, so.....

When Star Trek first arrived, nurds everywhere picked the science apart. One of the major flubs was going from stationary to light speed without turning all life inside the Enterprise to jelly. So in second season Gene Roddenberry "invented" the inertial damper, which conveniently (magically) made this incredible acceleration possible.
 
Ok, just wanted to note that the Liftoff was a worthwhile read for the couple of evenings (it's not deep).
I noted there are at least a handful of other tomes covering Musk et al extant, but I've returned to my spacey scifi compilations :)
 
Ok space fans, I saw something last night that I'll ask you about:

Clear starry night, roughly 7 PM eastern a nice meteoroid catches my eye so I'm looking up, and few seconds later I see a double strip of lights with a single brighter light on each end. It was making it's way across the sky at speed I would guess was analogous to near earth orbit, or maybe faster and lower. In perspective, it was longer than anything I'm aware of up there, but I'm no satellite expert. It kind of looked like a zipper, sort of. Lights white or maybe slightly tinged like LED blue.

I watched it for about 10 seconds and it disappeared before crossing to horizon. I guess this could just mean sunlight shining on it was blocked by Earth or someone shut the lights off. Maybe not a UPO, but unidentifiable by me. Also of course no way to determine actual altitude, so size hard to determine. But it seemed very big & long or very low, as If a sky banner plane was towing a very long banner w LED lights.

Anyone have an idea what I might have seen?
 
Ok space fans, I saw something last night that I'll ask you about:

Clear starry night, roughly 7 PM eastern a nice meteoroid catches my eye so I'm looking up, and few seconds later I see a double strip of lights with a single brighter light on each end. It was making it's way across the sky at speed I would guess was analogous to near earth orbit, or maybe faster and lower. In perspective, it was longer than anything I'm aware of up there, but I'm no satellite expert. It kind of looked like a zipper, sort of. Lights white or maybe slightly tinged like LED blue.

I watched it for about 10 seconds and it disappeared before crossing to horizon. I guess this could just mean sunlight shining on it was blocked by Earth or someone shut the lights off. Maybe not a UPO, but unidentifiable by me. Also of course no way to determine actual altitude, so size hard to determine. But it seemed very big & long or very low, as If a sky banner plane was towing a very long banner w LED lights.

Anyone have an idea what I might have seen?


Could it have been a Starlink chain? When I saw one they were all in a row, but maybe could go off center from each other as they maneuver into position?
 
I'm guessing that might have been it, strange new world we live in. The scale and movement across sky goes along with string of satellites.
 
Starship progress! SN15 flies sans drama! :)

[edit] Well that video was taken down for some reason but you can take in the whole thing below :)
 
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The Webb may be the biggest collection of single-points-of-failure to ever be launched into space.
There's gonna be a lot of tight sphincters waiting to see if it actually unfurls properly ;)
 
So far so good.

Given this is 2021 and everything sucks, I can't see this working out.
I'm guessing it will deploy perfectly and then get destroyed by a rogue interplanetary tesla that someone misplaced.

Anyhoo... Here's a pic of a horse from my back year last night. Canon DSLR, 1s, 250mm zoom.
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Things are proceeding apace. They have both terminating arms of the solar shield deployed, and today they jacked up the central mast components to provide room to deploy the shield. Very exciting!

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So....anyone who was paying attention knew that the storyline sold on Sunday of the team "taking a break" was a total pant load, but we had to hold our collective breaths for a day to find out what actually was happening: reactions to unexpected issues, mostly to do with heat management of the tensioning motors for the solar shield and the power system that activates them.

But...they apparently got things squared away, and we should expect the tensioning of the five layers of the mostly-deployed shield to proceed any time now.
Phew...
 
It really is crazy.
Just the closures that held the stowed solar shield wrapping had over 100 actuators to "unzip" it and a bunch more stuff to get it out of the way to allow the shield to deploy...
 
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