Could we be better off scrapping SLS and dumping whatever budget is left into commercial program?

How on earth did you make it through this entire article without making an awful pun about “using the Royal Wii”?

It took SpaceX two attempts on a failed strategy, five attempts to just land intact in the water, and two failed attempts to land on a droneship, before they finally got one of their boosters to land safely. I think Rocket Lab’s well on track, having now done two “get into the atmosphere intact” tests, three intact…

Well, Electron is flying now, and Neutron is just an idea, several years away from flying. If they can cut the cost of Electron by (say) 50%, that either keeps them competitive against all the other small-sat launchers coming online, or gives them a bigger profit margin to reinvest into Neutron.

Yes. The tourism thing was supposed to be a brief side venture for the company, not their main product.

Okay, let me elaborate on the solid boosters thing.

The thing hydrolox is really good at is efficiency (technical term: specific impulse). For any given weight of chemicals, hydrogen+oxygen gives you more energy than basically anything else. I think hydrogen+fluorine beats it by a bit but NOBODY is going to touch multiple tons of liquid fluorine. If you want better…

That part makes them much unloved in the human spaceflight realm. Even if you can kill the thrust (just pop the top off it), having it continue to burn during an abort is highly suboptimal, as the Ares I sims showed.

Anyone using deep cryogenic propellants like hydrolox for a nuclear missile is pants-shittingly stupid.

For a sense of just how vast the universe is, and how sensitive this telescope is, from that one picture...

At launch, the rocket’s quartet of RS-25 engines will provide 8.8 million pounds of thrust, which is 15% more than NASA’s Saturn V rocket from the Apollo era.

Cygnus is well within the payload capabilities of Falcon 9. The mass and diameter are less than that of Dragon 2. I have heard, but could not find a source to confirm, that some simulation work has already been done to validate it on a Falcon 9 booster. Given that Cygnus had been pre-validated for Atlas V, before that…

This threat was empty from day one.

I think the easier thing would be adapting Cygnus to fly on Falcon 9. The first Cygnus with orbit-boosting capabilities is on the station as we speak - but the Antares rocket it flew on is basically dead, because the factory in Ukraine that built the first stage has apparently been blown up by missiles.

I do not believe SpaceX insures their Starlink satellites. They are designed to be very low-cost, essentially disposable. I believe they have launched at least a few that they discovered were defective during launch-prep testing, but it would have cost more to unstack the rocket and swap it out, than to just launch it…

Source? I know the people you’re talking about, but I was under the impression that Jobst cut ties once they were unmasked as such. I was actually specifically recommended him as a replacement for one of the previous speedrun documentarians that was at the center of that whole debacle.

Unfortunately, the microwave frequency bands (Ku, Ka, and V) used by Starlink have poor earth penetration, and it is unlikely your friend would see usable signal reception in those locations.

It’s cheap relative to alternatives.

So while Larrabee was never released, the project did pivot into another space, and saw release under the “Xeon Phi” brand.

While it could be used for that, that could also be accomplished by existing centralized databases. Steam has an entire marketplace for selling cosmetics and “trading cards” - there is no technical hurdle to them also allowing “used game” sales. And so looking for a technical solution is misguided.