OFT-3 sounds like something Boeing would have to cover the costs of. Some contract mod shenanigans to call it Starliner-1 might mean they get paid and the program doesn't get cancelled.
And another Falcon 9 Kuiper launch
Vulcan has a lot in the manifest, so hopefully this goes well
Certifying the prop system must be really bad if they're considering not berthing on the first flight. Wow.
Starliner-1... Uncrewed cargo mission?
Sooo not this year
For Phantom and Vaya. Their first rockets are supposed to be a bit smaller than Firefly Alpha. And they don't seem to have reuse ambitions. I don't see much of a point, but it isn't my money.
I wish they would have gotten LC-48 instead. The policy to launch and land from the same complex makes sense to be fair to the other companies who might eventually want to try it (Blue, Relativity, Stoke), but, in the meantime, it must be an inconvenience for the only company actually landing anything.
After everything that has gone into the ISS, dropping the crew size now would be such a waste. Losing 1 out of 7 crew members, when they are more productive than ever, would cause much more than 1/7 loss of science because of all the background work it takes to keep the station operational.
Extending crew rotations is much less bad than cutting crew, but it still isn't great for spreading experience around the astronaut corps.
We should be talking about more private flights to station, new Axiom modules, and flights of Starliner and Dreamchaser. Not cutting back.
A full flow staged combustion engine without a customer is really weird. Hopefully we find out soon who will use this.
Full article pasted here:
I did not have Commercial Orion on my bingo card
The people demand ACES
Yes, but that was always their plan, right? Imagine if Apollo 10 was supposed to land, but got changed to the flyby mission last minute because they couldn't certify their prop system.