Time dilationâŠ
Beautiful.
I got to witness the first full-altitude test flight of SpaceShipOne back in 2004, and at the time it seemed that the company would soon be launching tourists with a relatively cheap and quick turnaround time. Virgin Galactic formed and contracted to buy these spacecraft the following year, but here we are all these years later with very little progress other than the one silly tourist flight taking Mr Branson up for a very expensive four minutes of weightlessness.
The whole idea behind this concept was that, yeah, it wasnât as cool as a full orbital flight but at least the technology was cheap, simple and reliable. But after all these years they still require a month of overhaul time between flights? Why even bother anymore? By the time they work out the bugs all the interested billionaire tourists will have flown on a Bezos or Musk rocket and wouldnât want to settle for this short little high-altitude bunny hop.
Edit to add: what little progress has been made came at a very high cost. Three employees were killed in 2007 from an explosion during a pre-launch test and a test pilot died in 2014 when the craft disintegrated in midair. The whole Apollo program only killed three people and it was a hell of a lot more ambitious.
Yeah, this design is a demonstrated death-trap. $450,000 per flight? You couldnât pay me to fly on it.
NASA wheels SLS rocket out to the launchpad for another attempt to get off the ground
NASA will roll its Space Launch System back out to the launchpad at the Kennedy Space Center on Friday to prepare for a third attempt to put its most powerful rocket yet into the sky on November 14.
The rocket has remained in the hangar to shelter from Hurricane Ian, which struck the coast of Florida late September. Engineers have worked to repair and replace components to make sure the vehicle is in tip-top condition to fly to the Moon during its first test flight.
Theyâre ready to wheel the SLS back out onto the launchpad tomorrow at 1201 EDT (0401 UTC). Transporting such a hefty, expensive bit of equipment for the four-mile journey from the hangar to the launchpad is a tricky and delicate business. The process is expected to take about ten hours and NASA intends to livestream every painstaking moment.
[âŠ]
Oh! I missed the Laika-versary!
Poor doog. But I remember these two scenes that make reference to her.
