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Advanced Concepts / Re: Spinlaunch on the Moon
« Last post by lamontagne on Today at 12:48 am »
An updated system.  Two rotating arms per tower.  As one spins up the other spins down.

They are a bit shorter, as I've lowered the height of the target orbit, and hence the velocity.
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Houston won't be "controlling" anymore than the ULA LCC, Denver support center or the LSP MDC.  All they can do it make abort calls.
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Space Science Coverage / Re: ESA - Voyage 2050
« Last post by MickQ on Today at 12:37 am »
I realize this is a national prestige matter, but I'd think the prestige attaches to the science, not the launcher.   And talking *18 years* in advance, surely some advance in launcher technology can be assumed.    And at some point, launch will become a commodity.   Perhaps an analogy is research at the South Pole - no one cares what ship brought the equipment, just what the research reveals.

In other words, you want to discuss Starship in this thread.

More likely to be Ariane Next, isn’t it ??
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An interesting distinction that CRS-30 has earned: if I've done my spreadsheets correctly, it performed the 300th rendezvous and docking (or berthing) with the International Space Station!

(That does not mean there have been 300 launches to the ISS, as there have been 27 cases in which a spacecraft undocked from the ISS, separated for some length of time, then redocked.)
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https://twitter.com/_mgde_/status/1773516784047378766

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Nowhere else I’d rather be, working with the most dedicated team in the industry 🤍
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Not necessarily, if you were to use the booster as a kick stage in conjunction with the Moon for a slingshot maneuver for a high energy departure into the system, you could use the Moon to help bring the booster back to low Earth orbit. Unfortunately, the outer 20 engines would be useless dead weight without modifications to make them restartable or have them drop off above the Karman line.

This has all been endlessly mathed out in this thread:

https://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?topic=55550.0

TL;DR - booster is designed for boosting from a high gravity well with an atmosphere.  It's not efficient for anything else.

Starships are for 60km and above,  They are great at it, efficient, and sending a bunch in parallel is more efficient than anyone could come up with, including Nuclear Rockets.  (see that thread if you want the details on that)

(My own fault for not being more specific)
I was specifically responding to XVEL’s comment:
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generally in ideal case it is probably equivalent but this is not ideal case and even if booster would be modified to be able to do that it would be still expendable one use only

I was just disagreeing that the booster had to be disposable.  This had nothing to do with the  efficiency of sea level  engines in a vacuum.
 Personally, my stupid wild idea involves modifying a StarShip as a full sized vehicle kick stage. I imagined a stripped down ship (like Ship 26), since there would be no cargo section, stretch the fuel tanks, and have a truncated nose cone fairing which would be dropped just like F9 fairings. The bow would have both a payload/docking adapter and a ship clamp adapter (just like the boosters currently have to mate with the StarShips).
At the stern, have 6 Raptor Vac.(just like what is supposed to be done soon), but remove the 3 center sea level engines and install 4 of the smaller lunar landing engines with vacuum bells in their place.
I know we don’t know much at all about the Lunar landing engines but I figured since they will be so much smaller, and probably only about 10% the thrust as a standard raptor, they would be pretty much for vector control and propellant settling. 
In order for it to be “practical in reusability” :o , I imagined that it would remain in Earth system providing Oberth maneuvers up to slingshot maneuvers utilizing the moon. 
Where things get really iffy is trying aero braking to bring it back down to LEO without heat shield tiles.
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Apparently April 1st is being looked at as the new date. Time will be 17:25 UTC per marine navigation warnings posted above.

https://twitter.com/SpaceflightNow/status/1773502476253004196

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ULA requested a launch date on Monday from the U.S. Space Force Eastern Range for the final Delta 4 Heavy mission.
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https://twitter.com/ulalaunch/status/1773498607489921245

https://twitter.com/ulalaunch/status/1773498611164160165

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The launch of a ULA #DeltaIVHeavy carrying the #NROL70 mission for the @NatReconOfc was scrubbed today due to an issue with a liquid pump failure on the gaseous nitrogen pipeline which provides pneumatic pressure to the launch vehicle systems.

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The team continues to troubleshoot the pipeline and more time is needed to instill confidence in the system. We will continue to work with our customer to confirm our next launch attempt and a new date will be provided upon resolution.
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Slipped to 8:32 pm PDT = 03:32 UTC.

https://www.spacex.com/launches/mission/?missionId=sl-7-18

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...Liftoff is targeted for 8:32 p.m. PT, with backup opportunities available until 11:24 p.m. PT.

Backup opportunity #2 on TS Kelso's listing.
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