Recent content by jan.wolitzky

Why do you persist in calling Starship "fully reusable"? In none of its seven flights to date has the vehicle ever been recovered, no less reused. And there's no indication that this eighth flight will be any different. Never achieved orbit, never been recovered, never been reused.

"The [Starlink] simulators will be on the same suborbital trajectory as the Starship upper stage, with Ship targeting a splashdown in the Indian Ocean." There is no practical use for suborbital communications satellites. But what application does use suborbital re-entry vehicles? Hmmm. . . ...

NASA is losing confidence in SpaceX's ability to deliver on their cockamamie multi-step Starship HLS plan. Last Spring, they started talking about maybe having Artemis 3 not land astronauts on the moon, but just dock with Starship in low Earth orbit. (For comparison, the similar Apollo 9...

Delivering payloads to orbit is the whole point. Let's compare Starship to the 60-year old technology everyone most likes to compare it to, the Saturn V. That craft put a payload into orbit on its first flight. No wasting time fooling around with partially successful suborbital demos...

"The megarocket has performed quite well"? As long as "performing well" doesn't include ever achieving orbit, or ever recovering the "designed to be fully reusable" Starship.

Artemis 2 is not "set to bring astronauts to the lunar surface in April 2026". Artemis 2 will not even orbit the moon. It will be sent on a free-return trajectory around the moon and back to Earth no sooner than that date. Artemis 3 is the first NASA mission planned to bring astronauts to...

The International Space Station has had to change its orbit to avoid space junk at least 32 times. At least six times, the threat was not detected soon enough to perform such a debris avoidance maneuver, and the crew has had to perform a partial station evacuation, closing all hatches and...

Sounds like the auto-destruct sequence countdown... ;-)

Once the Starliner departs, there will be 9 crew aboard the ISS, with 3 seats on the attached Soyuz capsule, and 4 seats on the attached Crew Dragon. In the event of a needed partial (or complete) evacuation (as has happened at least six times, because of potential space junk collisions...

Do you have a reference for this? Even without the extra seats on board?

According to Ars Technica, "the current flight software on board Starliner cannot perform an automated undocking from the space station and entry into Earth’s atmosphere". Apparently, that code, which obviously was part of the uncrewed Orbital Flight Test 2 mission in May, 2022, was deleted...

"Wilmore said the whole mission could be flown 'with no communication at all' with Mission Control if truly necessary": Of course it could. The whole mission could be flown with no astronauts at all, as it was on Orbital Flight Test 2, two years ago.

Care to stand behind your reporting? I'm willing to bet that Artemis astronauts will NOT carry plants to the moon in 2026, because Artemis 3 (or, at least, its lander) won't be ready to fly by then. Even the Government Accountability Office says so.

Just pointing out the huge gap between SpaceX's (and NASA's) hype about their plans for Starship to be landing astronauts on the moon in a couple of years (and Mars soon after), and the reality of Musk's toy. SpaceX never fails to describe Starship and its booster as "fully reusable", yet by...

"Water landing" is the term SpaceX uses in their own description of the mission (<https://www.spacex.com/launches/mission/?missionId=starship-flight-3>). And they say that Starship will "land" in the Indian Ocean, not off Hawaii. 85 m/s is 190 mph, well over the terminal velocity of a human...