Recent content by mfb

Parachutes don't give you precision, so you can only do an ocean splashdown. That's bad for the engines, and the corrosive salt water is even worse. Refurbishing the Shuttle boosters was about as expensive as building new ones. The landing burn doesn't need that much propellant either - only a...

Long March 12A was launched for its maiden flight. It is designed with a reusable booster. The payload reached orbit, but the booster landing failed. Rumors say that the reentry burn only had two instead of three engines, which made the booster come in really hot. SpaceX makes landing look easy...

Launch failure of H3 on its 7th flight, naturally named F8 (F6 hasn't flown yet). It reached a very low orbit but the upper stage didn't have enough hydrogen left to raise that to the target transfer orbit, so the spacecraft reentered over Chile a few orbits later.

Something happened to a Starlink satellite. Could be a space debris strike or some internal issue. The propellant tank got damaged and some debris items were produced that can be tracked. Luckily it happened at an altitude of just 418 km (the satellite was only launched last month), so...

No website that accepts this is worth a recommendation. You are not the first who thinks they can revolutionize physics based on some popular science descriptions and (more recently) AI tools praising everything you feed them. If you had the required knowledge to contribute anything useful, you...

Successful maiden flight for Zhuque-3. The attempted booster landing failed. Looks like an issue during the landing burn, so there is a good chance the next attempt will succeed. Booster reuse will become standard, and companies that don't work on it fall behind.

8 spacecraft are docked to the ISS for the first time Soyuz MS-27 (outgoing crew) Soyuz MS-28 (new crew) Dragon (Crew-11) and 5 resupply missions (Dragon, HTV-X, Cygnus, 2*Progress), occupying all docking ports of the ISS. This also gives the current ISS the largest pressurized volume of any...

A structure that is used under the Soyuz rockets fell down into the flame trench. Here is a before/after picture, other source. The launch that caused the damage was successful in the sense that it delivered a new crew to the ISS, so for the next 6 months nothing needs to change in the crew...

NASA, Boeing Modify Commercial Crew Contract What was widely expected already is now official: Starliner-1 will fly without crew, with a planned launch in April 2026. If successful, Starliner-2 can become the first crew rotation mission. NASA only wants to do three of these now. If (!)...

Only if they use the code editor, or switch to it. It's the [ ] icon.

A full success for New Glenn. Here is a replay. Launch at 1:43:00, booster landing at 1:52:00, payload separation around 2:16:40. They had amazing tracking shots of the booster throughout reentry. The live video broke up during the final seconds, that's something we saw with early SpaceX...

Space (100 km) is an extremely ambitious goal. There are only a few amateur teams worldwide that have achieved it. You'll need years to learn with smaller rockets and probably a 6-digit budget. BPSspace is working towards a space shot. He is funding it with his 6000 Patreon subscribers and...

The second New Glenn sits on the launch pad carrying ESCAPADE, two small spacecraft that want to go to Mars. Originally this was supposed to be the maiden flight in an October 2024 launch window but the rocket wasn't ready. Now the plan is to launch it, keep it near Earth for a year, and then...

Some updates on HLS (archived version) It has a first (?) official rendering of the crew cabin. There is a lot of space for 4 astronauts!

A full success. They tested a banking maneuver late into the reentry. During the flight I assumed that was just to improve the landing accuracy, but TheSpaceEngineer studied the cloud patterns to estimate the trajectory. It's a pretty big deviation - almost a 90 degree turn. The same maneuver...