That commute should be illegal.

I move every time I have more than a 15 minute commute. Spending that much time driving is seriously mind-boggling.

Why did they include someone’s opinion about environmental impacts without a fact check? I hope she uses ethically sourced oil.

I have a few friends with EVs who live in apartments. Some people can charge at work or while shopping. When nothing lines up, sitting at a supercharger once every few weeks isn’t terrible.

Hey, they’re a thruster company now!

…Oh, he said they’re going private to work on their rocket again? Cool.

Astra still finding funding has to feel great for the fresh startup scams in the pipeline. There’s still dumb money out there!

Even if they pull off Rocket 4, dedicated small launch has been failing or getting dropped to go bigger. Virgin Orbit shut down. Rocket Lab, Firefly, and Relativity are building bigger rockets. I guess Astra could try to steal a few Electron customers around when Neutron starts flying?

Giant rockets are fun. I just wish it didn’t cost so much.

RIP. Hopefully the instruments can all find homes in other CLPS missions.

$90 million doesn’t feel like that much money in the scheme of things. I wish one new Sentinel ICBM could be sacrificed to more than cover this mission.

For the strongback, they’ve made changes in the past, like recently running liquid methane up it for Intuitive Machines, so that shouldn’t be too big of a deal.

With a great flight rate comes great responsibility.

This is a really bad look for the rest of the launch industry that isn’t able to step up to fill the gap.

Boeing is the prime contractor for SLS. That’s why I brought them up.

I’d include the R-7 family (Soyuz, Molniya, Voskhod, etc.), Proton, and Space Shuttle.

That would be a crazy flex if they pulled it off, compared to entire companies focusing on RPO like Astroscale with their current demo mission and True Anomaly with their failed attempted RPO mission.

That being said, I doubt that any Starlink engineering cameras would be good enough to give them better views than the 2nd stage’s onboard cameras, and Starlink prop systems don’t look like they have enough thrusters or control authority for that kind of thing.

Hopefully they get a longer streak over the next 2 years after finding and fixing whatever caused this and returning to flight.

I would rather have JEM2, but I’ll settle for HTV-XL. Actually, now I want both.

It’s Arstechnica, that has to be intentional

That really seems like it should be Boeing’s job. Prove to NASA why they should use it for high energy probes. Prove the value for heavy GEO sats. Calculate out cost savings from a higher launch rate and bid on contracts based on that.

None of those trades close, but it still shouldn’t be NASA’s job to say so.

SLS and Orion are really impressive from a political standpoint.

Congress shouldn’t design rockets.

Just relight the 2nd stage to go back and get it!

Well a 7 is a rotated L, so cross that one off

Kibo is great, and JAXA has been on the ISS train from almost the beginning. I’m genuinely looking forward to their pressurized lunar rover and commercial station contributions, whatever they end up being.