Recent content by bxr140

“Work to understand why” = root cause investigation. The SW trips on the symptom/effect.

“Developed with the support of the Russian Federation” is quite different than “for Russia”. What that means is: DPRK bought satellite tech from Russia. I’d guess they bought some old generation imager, though I could see it being the whole satellite too (and some level of supporting...

Lol! I was answering your [presumably rhetorical] question about the US government’s better than Starlink options for Ukraine with: T’aint no such thing.

It’s worth noting that such a service doesn’t exist. Starshield isn’t a thing yet and there’s no way The Man would let Ukraine—a country that’s closer to The Enemy Of Our Enemy than Best Buds on the Are They An Ally? spectrum—use DOD satcomm solutions anyway. (Existing or not) There may be a...

Pretty unlikely SX would catch it but certainly non-zero. At the risk of stating the obvious the thing about testing [regardless the design philosophy] is that if you’re not purposely testing for a thing, the probability that you find it ‘by accident’ is pretty much the same as the...

Impressive pics from ULA on the different stages of production. Even the first steps machining the orthogrid is a LOT of work.

Shades of the charity bet threads here with the launch timeline…

That kind of mission really isn’t in SX’s wheel house. Long duration, ‘deep’ space, high reliability, low quantities/mass. The non-rotation (of sorts) of the moon also means that orbiting comms are really only required for far-side operations. Anything near side generally first-principals...

And you don’t wait until construction is done and everything is all buttoned up…

I'm certainly happy to have my interpretation-o-meter recalibrated, but I pretty clearly hear "General such-and-such says Falcon has saved the DOD $40B in defense satellite launch costs". Its ultimately somewhat irrelevant because even if we rack in non-DOD state funded launches--basically...

No question Falcon is cheaper for US taxpayers, but there's some context missing from that statement. Out of the all the launches F9/FH has to date, 25 of them (or less...?) have been DOD (USAF/USSF/SDA/NRO/etc). In round numbers, DOD probably spends $100M per Falcon. Round numbers, let's say...

Why? Its a Mars mission mission with a total budget (including launch) of $80M.

Thinking about this one a little more, if it were me, I’d prioritize minimizing DF battery capacity--and thus mass and volume--based on: Maximum discharge rate during flight. This one's basically the same problem space as Tesla batteries (sometimes) limiting the maximum acceleration of the...

A corollary data point: The space industry builds in what most here I suspect would consider unfathomable margin into battery sizing. For decades the gold standard on satellites has been to limit per-orbit DOD to 20%--usually that's marked against the nameplate or, even more conservatively...

The locals in the valley are generally not sensitive. They're all generally agricultural and just happy to be employed, or they make their livelihood off of VAFB in some way or another...so...more rockets is more job security. There's really very little publicly accessible land use affected...