Going to the moon in 2024

[Justin]

About a year or so ago I got to go into NASA in Houston. A friend of mine has access to just about everything there and helps train just about everybody it seems. We would walk into a room and everyone knew who he was. Impressive. Got to go into the room where they were making actual suits and such. Put on one of the example helmets and gloves. Got to walk into and around the submerged training area for the astronu... and go into the control command room, just missed a call from Trump they said. Got to get into all the stuff on the floor like shuttle and such. You could see other visitors about 40ft up on a second floor looking down at us from behind glass walls. It was all pretty interesting. At that time they said they were still using 386 CPUs because it takes so long and so much money to certify everything about a CPU and board. That shocked me. I think I heard him say they did finally upgrade.

Nice! I would love to get a tour like that!

A former co-worker of mine worked for NASA, specifically do some things for the ISS. She had some really cool stories.

[Justin]

Starship SN4 is undergoing inspection after the successful static fire test.

Starship SN5 is almost done.

Starship SN6 has started construction:

[BushMasterBoy]

Space Force coming to Netflix...

[Aloha_Shooter]

Space Force has a new recruiting video. An X-37B is scheduled for a liftoff 16MAY20 at Cape Canaveral.

Second commercial is MUCH better than the first. The first time I saw the "orbital collision" one, I just about spit out my drink laughing. I thought it was a spoof the first few viewings; when I found out it was real, I just had to ask if anyone at HQ USAF had bothered asking a space geek before shooting it. The only thing positive I can say about it is that at least some of the airmen (spacemen now?) in the clip were actual service members. Anyone I know that knows anything about conjunction assessment thought it was comical.

[iego]

I know it's not the moon, but the SpaceX Starlink Satellite train is seriously cool.

https://www.space.com/spacex-starlin...ity-guide.html

-John

[Justin]

Starship SN4 successfully had it's second static fire test.

[Gman]

SpaceX manned flight scheduled for tomorrow.

https://www.space.com/spacex-crew-dr...explained.html

[DenverGP]

Launch window is 5/27 2:33pm mountain time.

Currently they are saying 40% chance of no-go due to weather conditions at launch site and/or the abort sites.

Because of the orbital parameters needed to dock with ISS, the launch window is instantaneous, so if it's delayed at all, it'll be postponed to the next launch window, which is Saturday 5/30, around 1:30pm mountain time.

[DenverGP]

Interesting example of statistics:

Nasa has calculated the chance of loss of crew at 1 in 276... their go/no-go requirement is 1 in 270 or better. 1 in 270 doesn't sound that great to me, but equates to a 0.4% chance of crew loss, or 99.6% survival chance.

Originally the shuttle's loss of crew odds were listed at 1 in 500, but later more detailed analysis revealed the early shuttle flights had a chance of crew loss of 1 in 12. After the Challenger and Columbia accidents, increased safety provisions and testing / inspection brought it up to 1 in 90.

One big factor in the 1 in 276 number for Spacex is that the falcon 9 recently overtook the Atlas V as the most flown American rocket currently flying. So lots of data to provide confidence. And the fact that Spacex recovers the first stage means they've been able to analyze things in ways other launch systems never could. They design the rocket, and after launch are able to actually take apart rocket and figure out if everything performed as expected.

[Gman]

I noticed Discovery channel has a repeating program about US returning to manned space flight (NASA & SpaceX: Countdown To Launch) and they're covering the launch tomorrow beginning at 12Noon local time.