Main Engine Cut Off

Yesterday was a great day for SpaceX, with the beautiful and seemingly-flawless launch of Inmarsat–5 Flight 4.

Curious that the ultra-secretive Blue Origin said anything about this at all. Getting out in front of it is better than letting news of a test stand failure leak out. I doubt we’ll get any other details on it, but there are a lot of questions here.

Someone over on the Rocket Lab subreddit caught a recently-posted Notice to Mariners.

Masten has successfully fired their newest and largest rocket engine six times. In the lander department, they recently lost Xaero-B during a flight, but have something in the works at Marshall Space Flight Center—interesting choice of location—which sounds quite intriguing:.

Interesting to think that if SpaceX’s constellation ambitions even approach their projections, they’d be exempt from this regulation within a decade.

That makes it the 2017 version of the annual sales I talked about last month.

After SES-10, there was a chorus of doubters saying, “Yeah, but it took a year to refurbish!” This flight should put that to bed, but then again, they’ll probably say, “Yeah, but 6 months is nowhere close to 24 hours!”

This is encouraging to hear. Long coast periods are key to some more complex flight profiles—specifically direct injection into geostationary orbit—and SpaceX has yet to show that ability. It’s one area that ULA still owns with Centaur and the Delta Cryogenic Second Stage.

It’ll be very interesting to see if something like this does come about, but the suggest name is awful. They need to go with something with a long life span, like the Spaceflight Development Office.

You would have a hard time painting Luxembourg, a country with an area less than 1,000 square miles, as expansionist in any regard. And I don’t think they’d be looking to put any of their 1,000 military members on a base somewhere out beyond Earth. And they don’t have any nuclear weapons.