Main Engine Cut Off

Here’s hoping they don’t “bend over backwards” on this one.

While this is posed as an option to help get Inmarsat’s payload off the ground sooner, this is an interesting decision for SpaceX to make in the future, as Falcon Heavy is flying regularly and they are reusing cores.

They also seem to be on the brink of solving the aerodynamic loading issues they’ve talked about in the past. The one issue they haven’t yet solved is how damn expensive these launches are going to be, riding on an Atlas V.

This would be an absolutely fantastic system on small sats.

Doug Messier has some questions regarding the handling of Virgin Galactic’s licensing by the FAA. It’s a very interesting case that could set a lot of precedent in this realm.

The more hardware heading towards Mars, the better.

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I’ll probably stop posting about each test this core goes through at this point, because it looks like they’re going to be doing a lot of them. Firing it once a day until something goes wrong?

Reports out of McGregor—posted over on the SpaceX Facebook group—that SpaceX has fired the JCSAT-14 core again, for over two minutes. It’ll be very interesting to watch how many times they run this core through tests. That was an extremely quick turn around between full-duration tests, so things must be going well.

Yesterday, SpaceX completed a full-duration static fire of the JCSAT-14 core.