Oh my god it’s happening, everybody stay calm!

Orbit, Starlink v3, and a ship catch. These are all monumental milestones. I’ll definitely be watching this one live.

They found another swamp!

I’m here for more launch complexes. This plus the Rocket Lab build out in Alaska are pretty cool for the industry.

the launch mount could be finished in the next five to six months

Nice. I didn’t know what to expect, but finishing it this year sounds great.

The tank farm growth to support 3.2 stacks starts to open up some cool launch options. The scale of the Gigabay is pretty hard to imagine.

The scifi part of my brain wants SpaceX to leave some old Starships in orbit to sell to space station or space tug/depot companies to refit, or mfg companies to scrap. There’s no way any of those uses make sense anytime soon, though.

Alright, so what launches first: Artemis 2 or Starship IFT 12?

Using a rocket as an excavator 🌌🧠

Watching chunks of concrete get hurled in every direction during IFT-1 was insane. That whole flight was. Engines cutting out. FTS not taking it out. Spinning out of control.

This looks legit. I’ll remember the showerhead era fondly, but sometimes the graybeards are right.

Full crew restored (as soon as they dock in a few hours).

It’s a little weird that this will be one of the 8-9 month rotations and we don’t really know the Crew-13 roster, launch dates, or spacecraft. It feels pretty safe to assume that it won’t be Starliner even if the uncrewed one in April goes flawlessly, but maybe I’m too jaded against that program.

The VP of launch clarified on xitter that it’ll stay down until needed.

https://www.reddit.com/r/spacex/comments/1r0dlpb/kiko_dontchev_spacex_vp_of_launch_its_awesome_to/

Building up for the ramp up

I wonder if we’ll see a launch from the rebuilt Pad 1 this year

For launch NET Feb 11. So, they’re hopefully moving up 4 days from the originally planned Feb 15. Not bad.

It hurts to see it come down. The redundancy of two pads with crew capability was great. I can understand the maintenance on that old tower being awful and not having a launch rate that justified it (only 3ish Crew Dragons per year), but it still stinks to lose that capability.

An an explanation of the failure:

During launch, the second stage experienced an off-nominal condition caused by a failed ignition due to a gas bubble in the transfer tube ahead of the planned deorbit burn

Wait, SpaceX owns Twitter now.

What the actual fuck is this timeline.

This paragraph pretty much sums up where I’m at:

Musk’s plan for the merged companies is predicated on several assumptions, including that AI is not a bubble, but rather a technology that will be fully embraced in the future; that orbital data centers are cost-competitive compared to ground-based data centers; and that compute is the essential roadblock that must be solved for widespread adoption of AI by society.

I guess I just disagree with the CEO on all of those.

I guess the Kardashev scale won’t advance itself. I just didn’t expect AI slop to be what prompted it.

I wish they would have contracted this sooner so at least one PAM a year launched to ISS. It stinks that there won’t be one in 2026.

Not that the operator matters all that much, but I would have liked to see Vast gain the experience.

I’d rather just have him step down and let Gwynne fully control the company at this point

Buildings vs tents probably matters a lot less than what’s inside of them, quality control, training, and some of the design issues in the latest versions.

For Phantom and Vaya. Their first rockets are supposed to be a bit smaller than Firefly Alpha. And they don’t seem to have reuse ambitions. I don’t see much of a point, but it isn’t my money.

I wish they would have gotten LC-48 instead. The policy to launch and land from the same complex makes sense to be fair to the other companies who might eventually want to try it (Blue, Relativity, Stoke), but, in the meantime, it must be an inconvenience for the only company actually landing anything.