SpacedX

Perigee raise burn scheduled for 20 minutes from now in advance of the TLI burn to take place on day 2 of the mission.

Coasting now. Perigee raise manoeuvre 49 minutes into flight.

Core stage separation!

Magnificent! Godspeed Integrity.

LAS battery temperature range issue resolved - go for launch!

L clock continuing to countdown. The T count is on hold. If all goes well, once they give the go for terminal count, the L minus clock and the T minus clock will merge.

Hopefully the battery issue on the LAS is a sensor problem, not the battery itself. That's Major Nicole 'Vapor' Ayers co hosting the live coverage - she's a beast! Used to fly f22 Raptors. She launched to the International Space Station as the pilot of the SpaceX Crew-10 mission.

Can't watch the White Room without thinking of the late Günter Wendt.

Great observation. The dress rehearsal.

Loved the Astrovan cam at the foot of the SLS.

As I mentioned earlier in this thread, the core stage is leakier than our defence. The February launch was delayed due to hydrogen leak and then a helium leak on the upper stage necessitated the roll back and cancelled March's launch window. But this is nothing new. Spacecraft are particularly prone to hydrogen and helium leaks due to the extreme physical properties of these elements, specifically their tiny molecular/atomic size, low boiling points, and the high-pressure, cryogenic environments required to store them. These elements are used because they are efficient fuel (hydrogen) and inert pressurants (helium), but they can escape through the smallest imperfections in gaskets, valves, and seals. This has always plagued launches and scrubs were very common during the Space Shuttle Programme due to hydrogen leaks from the ET. On the positive side, the weather, (another potential shitcanner), is looking highly promising. Remember although the launch window opens at 11.24pm GMT, which is two hours, NASA can attempt launch again during two-hour windows between April 2 and 6 and also on April 30. So the latest that it will fly tonight is 1.24am.

Geddy's pipes are shot, it but it's wonderful to see them relishing every second of the opportunity to play live again. Alex sounded like it was 1974 again. The biggest challenge following Peart is feel. And based on the evidence she definitely has it. Be interesting to see her approach the more challenging material when I see them next year.

Last night. It had been strongly hinted online that this was happening. Right Ms Nilles, see this stool? It was once occupied by the greatest compositional drummer in rock history. It's all yours...no pressure then. (She absolutely nailed it).

Strange comment given that most with even a passing interest in the Beatles would be aware of this. The previous year, none of them played instruments on Eleanor Rigby either.

The Milton End is still as shit as ever - although it has a roof on it now. You read it on Foxes Talk? Must be true then. The 6.57 Crew...the only firm that Millwall regarded as worthy of fighting them. Avoid the Shepherd's Crook at all costs.

This was a localised superspreading event. The concern was the rapidity but I think it is most unlikely to have national implications. The NHS has large stockpiles of MenB vaccinations, so potential availability is no concern. For meningococcal meningitis, benzylpenicillin or third-generation cephalosporins (ceftriaxone/cefotaxime) are the preferred antibiotocs. I'm currently on a course of ciprofloxacin for a severe bladder wall infection which I'm told also reduces the chances of contracting Meningitis B by 80% and is also first line treatment. It isn't working so far.

Russia has lost in the region of 1,280,860 troops in Ukraine since the beginning of its full-scale invasion on Feb. 24, 2022 and faces significant manpower challenges due to heavy losses, attrition from desertion, and difficulties standardising units in addition to calamitous and inept strategic decisions in the field from Commanders and Generals. Compulsory conscription and ongoing recruitment efforts aim to offset these losses but meanwhile they have faced huge logistical issues and shortfalls in training and equipment. A ground war with NATO would obliterate the Russian Federation in terms of their army and economy. The ruble remains volatile, influenced by sanctions, oil export prices, and the government's need to finance its deficit. If the ruble continues falling, making repayment of foreign currency debt ever harder, there is a risk that Russia's banks go bust and the financial system stops functioning. The Kremlin's constant nuclear posturing and sabre rattling reveals much about their frustration over ongoing continued Western support for Ukraine and is clearly a direct response to the energy sanctions imposed late last year by the USA. It is a tactic that could eventually backfire on Moscow because buy threatening to renew nuclear testing and boasting of unstoppable weaponry. Putin risks highlighting Russia's inability to project strength via conventional warfare. In other words, the dictators predilection for frequent nuclear blackmail may actually be a sign of weakness and insecurity rather than strength. Most analysts agree that if Russia were to use nuclear weapons it would likely be in Ukraine, using short range, lower yield ‘battlefield’ nuclear weapons or even tactical/strategic deployment on a city. Russia is thought to have more than 1,000 in reserve. These would have to be taken from storage and either connected to missiles, placed in bombers, or as shell in artillery. Increasingly the rhetoric from Russia suggests nuclear threats are a more direct threat to NATO, not only Ukraine, and could refer to longer range, higher yield nuclear weapons. Vladimir Putin obviously doesn’t have that moral barrier to using nuclear weapons - that understanding that it’s a step toward destroying the planet that both Soviet leaders Khrushchev and Brezhnev had. He certainly doesn’t care how many Ukrainians will die, and how many of them and his own soldiers will perish from radiation sickness later, either. During the Cold War, both Washington and Moscow operated on the principle of mutually assured destruction, the understanding that a nuclear strike from one side would prompt a response in kind, leading to an all-out atomic altercation and mass devastation on a global scale. The leaders of the US and Russia mostly held the view that nuclear weapons offered no real political or military edge against an adversary with secure second-strike capabilities. Beginning with the outbreak of the Ukraine war, Putin shifted this paradigm by wielding nuclear weapons as tools of coercion, aiming to manipulate shared nuclear risks for intimidation and political leverage. In his view, nuclear threats likely serve as instruments of deterrence and psychological warfare, calculated to pressure opponents while avoiding outright use.

As tragic as it was, in my opinion, it is unlikely that Apollo would have succeeded in achieving Kennedy's goal of placing man on the moon by the end of the decade had it not been for the raft of technical changes and the sea change in management that was ushered in by the disaster. Apollo 8 veteran commander Frank Borman almost single handedly saved the Apollo program after the Apollo 1 fire. He went out to Downey (North American) following the disaster and on the back of the 1966 Phillips Report and instilled missing discipline and meticulous care -- things that those engineers had never internalised, since they were never before responsible for astronaut lives. Borman transformed the culture at NAA, without which failure was a real possibility.

Yes, absolutely understood, but as I mentioned Apollo spearheaded integrated circuit technology in order to miniaturise electronics. The Apollo guidance computer was able to fit into the command module (measuring roughly 24 x12.5 x6 inches and weighing 70 lbs) primarily through the nascent use of silicon integrated circuits (ICs) rather than discrete transistors, paired with a specialised, hand-woven pre-written core rope memory technology. While other computers of the era filled entire rooms, the AGC was a masterpiece of 1960s miniaturisation designed by MIT specifically to minimise weight and power consumption for space travel. Also, it was not so much about power, rather, purpose. And to reiterate, the Real Time Computer Complex (RTCC) was the central ground-based computing facility at NASA’s Manned Spacecraft Center (now Johnson Space Center) for the Gemini and Apollo programs that did fill an entire room. Utilising multiple IBM System/360 mainframes, it processed telemetry data, calculated orbital maneuvers, supported mission simulations, and provided critical data to flight controllers and was ultimately the powerhouse to ensure mission success.

Except it wasn't. And what technology specifically do you think was lacking? On the subject of computers, The AGC/navigation platform pioneered the development of real-time embedded computing systems, using integrated circuit technology to miniaturise electronics and developing safety-critical software engineering practices. It was the first computer to use integrated circuits and featured a real-time operating system that allowed astronauts to enter commands. The AGC's innovations laid the foundation for modern computing, including smartphones and artificial intelligence. During the Apollo Programme getting crewed missions to the moon was the job of the Apollo Guidance Computer and the Real-Time Computer Complex (RTCC) which was an IBM computing and data processing system at NASA's Manned Spacecraft Center in Houston. consisting of IBM System/360 Model 75J mainframes, plus peripheral storage and processing equipment - all of which was purpose built and designed for the task. The AGC employed an instruction stack which was prewritten onto rope core memory, and would re prioritise those commands on the fly. IBM engineers also developed the mini integrated circuits that meant computers could be small enough to fit inside a rocket or spacecraft. The RTCC on the ground ensured that the information needed to direct every phase of an Apollo/Saturn mission. It computed what the space vehicle was doing and compared that with what it should be doing. RTCC worked in real-time -- so fast, there was virtually no time between receiving and solving a computing problem. It was a technological marvel. In order to send crewed missions to the moon, you predominately need four things: 1/ The necessary political will. 2/ A gargantuan level of funding - (see the above). 3/ A huge nexus of supply chains, contractors, partnerships and stakeholders 4/ The requisite heavy lift capability. The USA stopped going to the moon because in the midst of an expensive foreign war, growing public apathy and disquiet, a lack of political will and the looming OPEC crisis, Congress withdrew the funding in 1972. They saw little benefit in continuing to plough in, what had been at its peak, 4% of the annual federal budget into repetition of something that had already been achieved. The Apollo Programme was cancelled meaning that the manufacturing plants, the processes, the bespoke tooling, the expertise was either retired, disassembled or moved on, whilst the sole production cycle of the necessary heavy lift capability ceased in 1969 and no one built a replacement until now. Powerful lobbying for the folly of the Space Shuttle Programme shifted the emphasis upon low Earth orbit and the subsequent construction of the ISS meant that space exploration became the preserve of much cheaper unmanned probes and landers that did not require a heavy lift rocket. The old technology of Apollo has become obsolete and defunct whilst Project Artemis is harnessing the new for much more ambitious mission profiles and objectives. it's important to stress that Project Artemis is not Apollo and does not seek to replicate it. Primarily it aims to place far greater mass on the moon for significantly longer durations than Apollo.Obviously the greater the mass the more energy it takes to accelerate it because energy and mass are fundamentally related through the principle of mass-energy equivalence, and both Newton's second law (F=ma) and the concept of kinetic energy (KE = 0.5mv²) demonstrate that more massive objects require greater forces and energy to achieve the same acceleration or velocity. Additionally, Artemis will utilise near-rectilinear halo orbit (NRHO) and distant retrograde orbit (DRO), for different missions and purposes. Artemis IV, for example, will use NRHO for the crew's lunar transit, with the SpaceX Starship Human Landing System (HLS) initially positioned in NRHO before the crew's arrival. All this creates the challenge of fuelling, and the need to refuel in space, which has never been done before. Space X are have been focussing heavily on developing the capability for space fuel transfer which will be a crucial part of any Starship deep space mission planned for the future. Starship upper stages will launch with a minimum amount of propellant onboard to conserve mass for payloads and will therefore there is a requirement to meet up with multiple tanker ships in orbit around the earth and the moon. Moreover, Project Artemis was only approved as recently as 2018 and although some of the architecture is derived from Constellation, this all needs to undergo a thorough programme of testing and validation on an annual budget significantly less than Apollo. They have also had to contend with a pandemic, and a severely weakened global supply chain and significant delays in the design and testing of the next generation of Lunar Lander. Concorde was also designed in the 1960s and first flown four months prior to the first Apollo moon landing and yet it has not been possible to fly passengers on a commercial airliner at twice the speed of sound for approaching a quarter of a century. This in spite modern technology and composites and the concerted attempts of the aerospace engineering sector to develop a successor. It is now purportedly close, but is unlikely to enter service until next decade. Cpt. Jock Lowe, the former chief pilot of British Airway's Concorde fleet recently opined that it may well not be until mid next century - almost 100 years after the design of Concorde - if at all.

Some utterly bewildering decisions and lack of decisive action yes. Agree entirely.

So Artemis 3 has now been redesignated from a crewed mission to the lunar surface to an Earth-orbit rendezvous of NASA's Orion spacecraft with one or more of the program's moon landers scheduled for next year. The programme's first moon landing will now take place on Artemis 4, in 2028, with a potential second landing that same year with Artemis 5. Frankly, I doubt that either will happen this decade