Lifeboat Foundation

Starships are nothing but mammals.

😀

The Speeder’s design team said the sci-fi sky-bike recently passed flight tests. They expect it to be commercially available by 2023.

After a much-anticipated GAO denial of Blue Origin and Dynetics protests over NASA’s decision to solely award SpaceX a contract to turn Starship into a crewed Moon lander, an in-depth (but heavily redacted) document explaining that decision was released on August 10th.

Aside from ruthlessly tearing both companies’ protests limb from limb, the US Government Accountability Office’s decision also offered a surprising amount of insight into SpaceX’s HLS Starship proposal. One of those details in particular seemed to strike an irrational nerve in the online spaceflight community. Specifically, in its decision, GAO happened to reveal that SpaceX had proposed a mission profile that would require as many as 16 launches to fully fuel a Starship Lander and stage the spacecraft in an unusual lunar orbit.

After around 24 hours of chaos, confusion, and misplaced panic, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk finally weighed in on the GAO document’s moderately surprising indication that each Starship Moon landing would require sixteen SpaceX launches.

That’s a lot of launches.

Learn More.

World Economic Forum.

Continue reading “Here’s what astronauts can teach us about coping with isolation” »

And ArsTechnica seems to be totally missing the point as “delaying” Starship for SOUND AND PRACTICAL SAFETY AND ENVIRONMENTAL QUESTIONS is not ‘delaying’ progress and one needs to simply ask why SpaceX “engineers” can’t up their game enough to actually answer or address those legitimate questions? The answer is rather simple, they probably CAN but the person “in charge” has no with to, incentive to, or will to do so because he sees anyone that questions him as ‘unreasonable opposition’ rather than legitimate concern. Starship could crash and burn on the orbital flight and it would not make a difference at all to the ‘world’ in general. We can and have recovered from worse numerous times while advancing technology and transportation. The FACT that Musk, (and his many rapid fans) somehow “assume” that he and only he can ‘advance’ space access are very much proof that this is not about engineering, ability or purpose but strictly about ego.

To the FAA, Musk seemed to be saying, federal regulators must do their part to ensure the future arrives on schedule. Just as the 20th-century skyscrapers marked the beginning of a new era and eventually launched America into a prosperous future of finance, communication, marketing, and more, the 21st century now beckons.

The skyscraper age will soon give way to the space age.

Continue reading “With a single photo, SpaceX sent a not-so-subtle message to FAA regulators” »

On August 6 SpaceX’s Starship became the tallest rocket in the world — for about an hour.

SpaceX’s Starship SN20 was stacked in early August, making it the tallest rocket ever built. Here’s what’s next for SpaceX’s prospective Moon-bound rocket.

A War of the Worlds vibe added to a time lapse of Starship S20 stacking.

I ran out of superlatives already yesterday — it is just so hard to realize that this is really happening!

Great photo by RGV Aerial Photography!