Recent content by VolkerP

If spaces are allowed, you could go with " X" in Alaska :D

They pulled all the strings they had in this one. congrats!

I am quite sure that the way how things panned out recently has lead to many meetings held behind closed doors inside ULA. No organization is always single-minded. Now is the time to raise their voice for those who demanded changes, but had to succumb under the hierarchy for the last years. Now...

stage separation was just short of 10.000 km/h. I never saw a F9 first stage go so fast before.

no superchargers there...

Independent of Grendals post, I drew this old video up in a second browser tab before reading on in this thread. :D So up to the 1:26 mark, SpaceX has delivered. The second stage does a deorbit burn. We have to see a powered landing of the Dragon capsule yet, and there is no information on the...

While I can see your point, remember that ULA launches military missions and does everything possible to prevent SpaceX to do the same. I have no doubt that SpaceX is willing launch spy satellites as soon as the govt allows them to do sp. And we will have no webcast or onboard gopro footage on...

Any news how it is going at the GF1? I would be interested to learn monthly or quarterly cell production volumes.

I saw it all over the news front pages today in Munich. The driver's a hero there.

I missed the AMA but enough folks on this forum to discuss the following question: Living on Mars will be hard, terraforming it even harder. It has only 0.5% of Earth's atmospheric pressure and no magnetic field to protect from cosmic rays. Increasing atmospheric density is hard to come by...

The frozen oxygen and carbon overwrap reaction sounds plausible to me. I wonder why this didn't blow up the first time since SpaceX started to use superchilled LOX. Was there a change in fueling procedure?

Maybe the rocket names give a hint on the mission profiles? New Shepard - ballistic flight to the boundary of space, like Alan B. Shepard's flight New Glenn - Earth orbit, like John Glenn's flight New Armstrong - to the Moon, like Armstrong's Apollo 11 mission

I am sure they did. It might be necessary to launch a FH under conditions where the middle core cannot be retrieved: Severe weather in the landing zone, preventing the drone ship to operate. A demanding mission where the core takes excessive damage during reentry burn and needs heavy...

The first one is sold. The rest you can find here http://spacex.com/falcon9/preowned/ ;)

I understand that the key to increased payload mass is the amount of fuel left in the center core at the moment of booster separation. And how to reach this without propellant cross feed. If FH requires a modified center core, SpaceX could increase its fuel capacity right from the start. The...