Gas station style roofs wouldn't hurt

"Oh no what do about all this waste heat?"

"Generate more waste heat"

It looks dramatic, like all things on a rocket," Bruno wrote on X. "But it’s just the release of the nozzle

That sounds like something that should just stay on. I'm surprised they aren't grounded. Hopefully the NSSL certification doesn't come before a root cause and corrective action.

I wonder how much "engine out" capacity they would have on a normal flight. This is a pretty big architectural difference vs Falcon and Starship.

Even more politicaly incorrect version: save more money by using the Gateway PPE as the ISS deorbit vehicle

There are definitely Leafs, but not a crazy amoun. Teslas are still king. I think that Leaf lease thing was a weird hack that very few people actually pulled off.

Where is that? I haven't noticed any in or around Denver, but maybe I'm just seeing them but not noticing them (which would also be a good thing).

A suitport is when the whole back opens for donning/doffing. There have been concepts for surface EVA suits where the whole suit stays "outside" of the vehicle and just docks via the suitport so you dont need to worry about tracking regoglith in.

I wish the jump seats could have been plan A for their sake

Yeah, it feels like they're hitting engineering and/or process corner cases. We also might just be emotionally drawing connections between totally unrelated things when there isn't any actual thread to pull on here.

It was inevitable that they'd have some issues after the crazy success streak, it's just frustrating and feels bad that there have been 3 groundings in quick succession. Hopefully they root cause and fix this new issue just as fast as the last two.

The Artemis suit design process is so disappointing. NASA should have thrown more resources at xEMMU, not tried to completely subcontract and fixed price something witout any commercial market.

Is that a suit port on the back? If so, more like new Orlans.

https://www.rocketlabusa.com/updates/

Not as many updates, but you could put this in an RSS aggregator

They seemed like vaporware. I didn't expect a test like this so soon. Cool.

Hey, it's more like a big Vulcan with little legs.

For sure. My car's touchscreen started being intermittent last month, but luckily it doesn't control things like climate, volume, turn signals, getting into gear...

A big part of the motivation for moving on from the ISS is simplifying maintenance and upgrading systems. That reduces the crew time and system volume needed to run the station and needs fewer different spare parts.

What's wrong with switching to multiple smaller stations? I'm not optimistic about Orbital Reef or Axiom being fully up and running by 2030, but a handful of Vast and Gravitics modules in orbit should more than cover what the ISS does now.

I bet Roscosmos is angling for money from the other ISS partners to keep things running.

This sucks for Axiom, who needs all the time they can get before becoming independent.

The earliest modules are inseparable, maybe literally. Zarya is attached to Unity on the US side, which has the truss. Zarya has been so intertwined and might be cold welded to Unity. Zvezda, on the other side of Zarya, still handles a lot of station control. You could replace Zarya with basically a new self-sufficient space station, and, at that point, why take on the baggage of the rest of it.