SpaceX Successfully Launch First 60 LEO Ultrafast Broadband Satellites - theregister
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This is cool. An astronomer caught the Starlink satellites as they began to spread out
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Scott Manley - Deep Space Update - Starlink, Starship, Starliner, Artemis and More
So…
Elon Musk just tweeted that point-to-point (earth to earth transport) with Starship will be single stage.
That’s so fucking cool. The military could rapidly build up an defenses in an area with the things. I’d imagine a personnel/reinforcements/supplies sort of deal until they get bigger Starships, then add payload. They could do recon (think SR-71).
This is turning into some StarCraft shit.
That went from zero to WTF in one sentence 
The escalation that would cause would be catastrophic.
Problems with point-to-point rocket transport:
- You need to launch over an ocean or desert, and be at least dozens of km from any city. So if you are lucky enough to actually have the option at all to launch in the desired direction, it will probably take more time to travel to/from the spaceport than actually fly
- You need to warn everyone that this is a scheduled transport, not an ICBM launch. People tend to get nervous about that. (Note the words “nuclear briefcase” in that article). Which means no out-of-schedule flight, and obviously no military flight without ample warning to the other side.
All in all, it is probably an utterly terrible idea. As much as I am skeptical about Skylon as a satellite launcher, it would be much better suited for suborbital transport than any vertical-launch rocket can be.
Not if you can prove that you won’t drop anything …
That’s a bigger problem, yes. I wonder when this might change. It really depends on people being less nervous about ballistic rockets and their power and potential. The technologies approaches 70 years of existing now and with the advent of more and more small rockets companies it gets into more and more hands.
It sure doesn’t look like that defenses against potential attacks will ease the nervousness … as most of programs that would create such defenses didn’t really succeed or most of them have not been pushed to being completed or further developed.
I look forward to active support structures in the future. Don’t know if they will be built anytime soon though. Those pose somewhat a danger when it comes to accidents. The potential of delivering weapons or executing strikes with them are less pronounced though, as they probably will be slower and safety checks for people and wares can be implemented where these active support structure will be located or where they can be accessed.
Scott Manley tells us about - Northrop Grumman’s OmegA Rocket Fails During Static Fire Test
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I watched the video and read their press release.
“Everything was successful but something was a little off” was essentially their statement. Pretty hilarious that “something a little off” was their nozzle blowing up.
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Maybe… Maybe not. These things don’t play out the way that you think they do a lot of the time.
If you do it to someone like Russia or China. But if you’re fighting an insurgent force and both nations actually agree to land these things? It’s fine.
Plus, there’s a difference between “actual use” and “having on hand for specific situations.”
There are so many things that get developed and not used. Starting with nuclear warheads.
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Or as Elon would put it in one of his famous post test tweets, ‘a rapid unscheduled disassembly’.
yep, it literally was off 
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Believe it or not, RUD is historically a very ‘technical’ term that dates back to the beginning of rocketry. Elon definitely did not coin the term 
Recommended reading at this point is Ignition! by John Clark. It details the history of rocket propulsion and testing different propellants. It’s an awesome read and he’s a hilarious writer who injects a lot of humor into it.
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Scott Manley Deep Space Update - Falcon Heavy STP-2
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Scott Manley - Deep Space Update on Tour - Asteroid Day, Comet Interceptor, Dragonfly
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July 23rd Update
Starhopper video
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