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Cake day: June 11th, 2023

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  • A missile would not change the re-entry time or location: just break the target into many pieces. In the one case where the US used a missile the target broke into many small pieces which mostly burned up on re-entry but I don’t think that would happen with the ISS. Uncontrolled re-entry of a single large object would, I think, be preferable to re-entry of dozens of them.

    No agreement would have any effect on the headlines saying “US allows its spacestation to crash on city, killing 800 people”.


  • It’s been asserted that they were used for water but I know of no evidence that they actually were.

    Texas regulations require that the design for a methane storage system be done by a registered professional engineer certified to do methane storage systems in Texas and be submitted for approval before construction starts. Thus it’s unlikely that they were “too close together”. More likely they just didn’t work right. Perhaps they had an excessive boiloff rate or too high a leakage rate.

    Speculation: Perhaps they decided to build their own tanks because lead times for purchased tanks were too long. It worked out for LN2 and LOX.

    I wonder why they have not recycled the suborbital tanks?








  • “Runs the risk” means it might happen, not that it will happen. When he said that Starlink was committed to switching to the version two satellites and F9 was not expected to be able to launch them. They would have missed their FCC deadlines. However, they were able to develop the “shrunken” Starlink2 that fits on F9. I also think that both the F9 launch cadence and Starlink sales have exceeded expectations.