The rail launch is going to be interesting. Presumably, the sled is separately accelerated, to give the vehicle a little kick and save propellant. It won’t be much, even a 4g acceleration would only get it up to roughly Mach 1.5 before it runs out of rail, but it’s not nothing either. And unless the sleds are single-use, they’ll need to decelerate them somehow.

But man, bring it on! The premise of initially accelerating a vehicle on a rail or launch loop, before the vehicle’s own engines kick in, is probably the closest we can get to SSTO from Earth. At least without using nuclear propulsion.

I’m glad to see Blue starting to aim high, but all of this is heavily dependent on New Glenn’s first flight going well. Fingers crossed, there’s no major problems with the rocket and they can remain on track for this mission.

What’s your reasoning behind the claim that a company that’s been transporting crew to and from the ISS for 4 years, and currently has a vehicle docked to the station, is incapable of launching a tenth mission? Mind that said mission was supposed to launch next week, but Starliner is being a pad princess in orbit and won’t get off the required docking port.

A lot of that time, if not the vast majority, is likely performance testing. That’s trivial to automate and can be run across 100+ systems simultaneously.

Gamers when the game has bugs: >:(

Gamers when the devs delay a patch because they discovered it breaks a core system: >:(

They’re trying to fix bugs, not make existing ones worse. Deal with it, princess.

Fingers crossed this woman doesn’t end up with a Zydrate addiction. It comes in a little glass vial, you know.

I mean if you want to invalidate my lived experience, sure. Played on release on a 5600X, RTX3070 and 32GB of RAM, 1080p, almost everything maxed out. Open areas on Koboh saw a drop to mid-40 fps, but other than that, I had one hard crash and no bugs I noticed.

Right now, the Earth is losing mass at about 55 000 tons per year. Yes, losing. About 100 000 tons of hydrogen and helium escapes the upper atmosphere, partially offset by roughly 45 000 tons of dust and meteorites getting scooped up along our orbit.

Considering this has been happening for millions of years, I think we’re quite safe from affecting the Earth’s mass and orbit within the span of even centuries.

But it’s much more likely that the majority of material mined and processed in space will not be coming down to Earth. It’s much better put to use in orbital construction, or shallower gravity wells like the Moon and Mars.

You’re entirely right that getting to the rocks, and getting the mined stuff to where it’s actually useful, are gonna be a problem. Maybe we’ll finally get some nuclear thermal engines, cause the shite ISP of chemical rockets is really insufficient for these trips and ain’t no one wanna wait on the gravity assists.

Crew Dragon has been solely responsible for the US side of ISS rotations for four years, without incident. 8 successful missions, not counting the privately funded trips. Cargo Dragon has been doing resupply missions since 2012.

NASA has the measurements of all their astronauts and Dragon flight suits for Butch and Suni are already made.