/sci/ - Science & Math

>>15683546
> "So I look at it and I say, well, if I were not to do launch, we simply wouldn’t be able to bill the Space Force for these milestones. So what it does it cost me to continue running launch versus what would it cost me to shut down launch? It’s kind of a wash, honestly, if we continue to get contracts and government support for launch, and the government has said that they really want to support it. I mean, there are three (private or venture-backed) companies right now operating that have put satellites in orbit—SpaceX, Rocket Lab, and Astra—full stop. Firefly’s stuff deorbited in a few days. ABL blew up everything, Relativity failed and scrubbed the program and won’t fly again until 2027 [Relativity says Terran R's first flight is scheduled for 2026].

> "We had four payload flights, and two of them did not work, objectively. They got damn close, but close doesn’t cut it, especially that NASA flight [with the TROPICS hurricane research satellites]. We had a very, very detailed root cause analysis... There was a missing fleck of thermal protection barrier coating on the inside of the upper stage engine [that] caused a small fuel leak ... Had it worked, we might have flown more flights. We might have flown out the TROPICS flights successfully [NASA had two more launches for the TROPICS mission reserved with Astra, then switched them to Rocket Lab after the first one failed].