Not to self promote my own community too much, but !astrophotography@lemmy.world if you wanna see amateur photos of space

The starliner astronauts are still up there (and will be until they return on the crew 9 capsule in February). This is the crew that went up before them returning to earth

Holy fuck they did it

He’s just a skeegy little guy

Got the flu and had to cancel my birthday movie party. Most of my friends went to go see the movie anyway. It was the Bee Movie

That shot of the forward thrusters is great!

Some nice colors in the sky If you’re north enough. Sadly I doubt this will be as strong as the aurora back in May, but maybe one day well get them down in Atlanta again

A lot of those tubes run on the inside of the engine. They’re 3D printed into the engine walls as it’s being made

Oh no! Where will I go to see OF spam bots now???

Bye, Bob :-(

Only 7 years ago!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qU7FuAswPW0

The second stage engine cover seemed to get ‘over inflated’ at T+4:07. And you can definitely see it’s in a lower orbit on the final screen right after SECO

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kessler_syndrome

Looks like a $843 million contract to deorbit it sometime in 2030, and the deorbit vehicle is going to burn up as well. They could maybe just send up a starship without any tiles/flaps at that point? Hopefully some of these commercial LEO stations really get going before then to replace it…

On the last test flight a few weeks ago both the booster and ship did powered soft landings in the ocean (even with the ship’s flap melting a bit)

They’re still going to launch the 6 operational starliner flights on Atlas V’s, and Amazon has bought several of them for their Kuiper satellite constellation.

Personally I doubt starliner is going to keep flying once the 6 ISS missions are over, regardless of launch vehicle.

May Christ be with you

They shut it down last September. It’s nsfw spinoff redgifs is still up.

Mercury would be a denser propellant than xenon/other Nobel gasses used for ion thrusters in orbit. There’s been a ton of other insane fuel types proposed over the years which thankfully haven’t been used (although a lot of rockets have and still use toxic hypergolic fuels like hydrazine)

Good vid going over some of these fuels: https://youtu.be/_wLk2j7_KB0

Funnily enough I used the little guy to replace the smaller red camera on the scope after it started failing on me