Starship Landing - Stabilized footagepic.twitter.com/tk1sPewESh

— Space Sudoer (@spacesudoer) November 21, 2024

Best close-up shot of L6 using the @SonyAlpha A7RV with Sony 200-600mm lens from 4 miles away! @SpaceX @op_boca pic.twitter.com/KAYCWDdeRo

— Aaron Gonzalez (@aaronadventurez) November 21, 2024

Protect it at all costs!

No but really, this is somewhere in the Indian Ocean, right? Is there... a destroyer nearby? Most advanced piece of rocket tech on earth bobbing in the water there. https://t.co/qWTJli0CyX

— Tyler Rogoway (@Aviation_Intel) November 22, 2024

Centerpole90 said:

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Hate to ask, but can you please provide a banana? For scale.

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Saturn V and Shuttle for scale https://t.co/Mxe3Gkskij

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 22, 2024

Centerpole90 said:

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I wasn't questioning your source, it was a banana joke.

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PJYoung said:

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PJYoung said:

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PJYoung said:

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Ag97 said:

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Just noticed they had one of the 3 engines cut out a couple hundred feet before splash down. Wonder if that was intentional or if something went wrong? Still a pretty even and controlled decent after that, so I'm guessing at that point they didn't need as much power and the shutdown was on purpose?

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hunter2012 said:

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PJYoung said:

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This crazy tidbit about NASA is still living rent-free in my head 6 weeks after I read it. pic.twitter.com/99m4rnSjrZ

— Ari Schulman (@AriSchulman) November 22, 2024

New Glenn from @JeffBezos’s Instagram, light that candle 🔥 pic.twitter.com/h9gJIH3uVD

— Truthful🛰️ (@Truthful_ast) November 22, 2024

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The problem is that NASA has gotten away from the guiding principles that led to success with the early cargo and crew programs.

Some of the new commercial programs have skipped the COTS development phase entirely and have gone directly into the services phaseeven though the contractors are still developing their hardware. NASA also appears to be funding a far lower share of costs than it did during the cargo and crew programs. Additionally, many of the new programs do not have any near-term customers except the government, so NASA is not one of many customersit is the only customer.

And perhaps most importantly, NASA is loading the companies down with requirements. NASA is adding requirements, changing them, and burdening contractors with thousands of requirements rather than hundreds.

"They have shoved a cost-plus contract into a fixed-price environment," one senior government source said. "Instead of a lean contract, there are thousands of requirements for something that has no other customers."

Added an official from a commercial space company working on a fixed-price contract with NASA: "It certainly feels like a lot of people are treating us like we're a cost-plus contractor."

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For example, every year for the last decade, NASA has spent on the order of $3 billion a year to develop the Space Launch System rocket and its ground systems. This is a staggering sum of money for a rocket that is reusing space shuttle main engines and similar rocket boosters. By contrast, for $2.9 billionin total, not just per yearNASA is paying for the development and demonstration of a human lunar lander.

SpaceX's Starship vehicle is far more complicated and is performing as difficult a task as the SLS rocket. But thanks to its fixed-price contract, NASA is getting this service at one-tenth the cost of its traditionally built SLS rocket.

The reality is that NASA can't afford the Artemis Program without leaning into commercial space.

"Program managers need to just try to back off on gold-plating the requirements," one official said. "The government wants a lot of things, but they don't necessarily need all of them for a project to be successful. They're accustomed to ordering exactly what they want as opposed to what they need. Can you meet your mission objectives without all the bells and whistles?"

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One derivative vehicle, the Miura Next Heavy, would use two additional first stages as side boosters, analogous to the Falcon Heavy. In expendable mode it could place up to 36,000 kilograms into an ISS reference orbit, decreasing to 19,500 kilograms if the side boosters are landed back at the launch site.
A second derivative, Miura Next Super Heavy, would use four first stages as side boosters, arranged in a cross formation, an approach Torres likened to Russia's Angara A5 launch vehicle. That would place 53,000 kilograms into an ISS reference orbit, or 13,660 kilograms into a Mars injection trajectory, in fully expendable mode.

The Miura Next Heavy, Torres said in the interview, "is the most commercially attractive for big GTO satellites," with a capacity of 7,160 kilograms to GTO when the side boosters are recovered. The Super Heavy version, he said, is intended more for interplanetary missions. "We are bringing a huge quantity of payload to the moon and Mars." The company is projecting a first launch of Miura Next in 2030, with the larger versions to follow by 2033.

In addition to the launch vehicle projects, PLD Space said it is working on a crewed spacecraft called Lince. The capsule would be able to carry four to five people to low Earth orbit. The company unveiled a mockup of the capsule at the event.

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🔴 Con todos ustedes, el futuro de PLD Space, la familia de cohetes MIURA NEXT.

Serán reutilizables y con capacidad de poner hasta 53.000kg en LEO.#VamosMIURA_NEXT#BeyondbyPLD #Beyond_ @PLD_Space pic.twitter.com/iewVWVflfe

— Space Nøsey (@SpaceNosey) October 7, 2024

pic.twitter.com/Cl4HEwRG8v

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 23, 2024

TriAg2010 said:

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OKCAg2002 said:

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Competition is a good thing in this industry. But I'm just assuming that SpaceX will be cheaper doing SpaceX things than a Spanish knockoff.

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It's a mistake to target an F9 class booster when Starship is on the verge of full reuse. Starship is another order of magnitude lower cost and will clean the clocks of anyone who merely matches F9.

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It looks like Starship's seventh flight is currently NET January 11th based on recent documentation that NASA filed with the FAA.
It appears that the agency's Gulfstream V plane will be used to observe the reentry of Ship 33 which will be over the Indian Ocean. pic.twitter.com/CAlrNesN5c

— Alejandro Alcantarilla Romera (Alex) (@Alexphysics13) November 25, 2024

Two launches in less than 24 hours from two pads in two different hemispheres. pic.twitter.com/wud8IPuOGY

— Rocket Lab (@RocketLab) November 25, 2024

Firefly Aerospace: "We've successfully completed Blue Ghost environmental testing, and we’re now preparing to ship the lunar lander to Cape Canaveral for launch on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket during a six-day window that opens no earlier than mid-January 2025."

Firefly’s first… pic.twitter.com/SszNAEAUzV

— Chris Bergin - NSF (@NASASpaceflight) November 25, 2024