They do have funding, just not as much as Blue Origin asked for.

Right, but it will be the same as if you fell at that final velocity (25mph based on sakim’s calculations above) with another person on your back. Even though you could do a static lift of the suit using a few fingers, it will still hit like a sack of bricks when you fall.

The problem with jumping in a suit like that on the moon: It might “weigh” only 30 lbs when you are carrying it while walking, but it still has all of that 180 lbs mass when it comes to inertia. So when you land after that jump, you still have to stop the full mass.

I’m not sure you want to. Too little tongue weight, or even negative tongue weight, can be a major contributor to fishtailing and spin-outs.

If that winch jams, you are stuck far from being able to fix it. An elevator could be designed in a way so the mechanism is accessible to the astronauts riding it. Or a device that clamps onto and climbs a static cable or track would be a useful backup. It might even use the same track as the elevator, so they…

Probably worse injuries, though. They will be in a spacesuit with a large backpack of life support gear. The weight of carrying the backpack might be low, (the Apollo backpack weighed 13 lbs on the moon) but it still has all of its inertia (84 lbs for the Apollo backpack) that your body will have to stop when you…

But all of that risk happens before the crew is even launched. By the time the crew board the lander, it’s fully fueled and tested.

The same tanker may be used to deliver multiple loads of fuel. Maybe they have two tankers and alternate them. There’s also a lot of [deleted] in this document, which might indicate some kind of fuel depot.

Politics. Congress has mandated that SLS and Orion are part of the moon project, so until that changes, they have to find a way to make it work. What you describe may be what they do after SLS has completed its minimum number of flights for the mandate.

The ISS is a bit heavier than that, so make it two launches. Although the Starship itself might have more interior livable volume than the ISS does, so there’s that. But your point still stands, that’s a huge amount of whatever they want to ship up there.

Not all gravity slingshots are keyholes.

He is saying stop trying to beat SpaceX. BO only needs to beat ULA. Then BO can be the second of the “two options” that the government wants to maintain.

It’s not unused if the same subcomponent gets used on both the ‘Vette and a Silverado. Not the whole instrument cluster, but some of the plastic pieces that are part of it.

But any future shuttle needs to be stacked on top of the first stage. None of this side-by-side that puts it at risk to debris shedding. And the glide landing is good, but you shouldn’t think it takes “lots of fuel” for propulsive landing on Earth. The Falcon 9 lands using a tiny fraction of its total fuel, (1.3%) and…

Probably a layer of foil to reflect heat, and it has some crinkles in it, causing high contrast reflections.

The orbiter was retired with good reason. It was supposed to be replaced 20 years ago. It had a huge refurbishment cost per flight. It had no useful launch abort. The technology is 40 years old, and most of the people that knew how to build it are retired or dead.

Right click the browser tab, “Mute Site”

Or the White Star Liner

One nice thing about Google: You can enable multiple MFA devices on the same account. So you have one device for you day-to-day, and a separate Yubikey you can stick someplace safe. Either one will unlock it.

Even there, it seems unlikely, since they wouldn’t have very different firmware in one of the three versions. So, maybe, but don’t hold your breath.