The Space Review

If you're interested about (formerly) classified satellites, Dwayne Day's articles on The Space Review are a great place to find out more. https://www.thespacereview.com/ I remember one story - might be from him, might be someowhere else - of an engineer breaking down when one of the classified programs (GAMBIT, maybe) was finally revealed, because he could finally explain to his family what he was doing all those long nights. For all the engineers that get to discuss what they do on sites like this one, there are others that won't for decades - and I assume that's still true today.

For the space industry, The Space Review[0] is a fantastic, regularly updated collection of essays. [0] http://thespacereview.com/

Annnd…we’re full circle. Again, DC-X was considered a successful proof of concept. Almost 40 years ago. Musk himself said SpaceX was “just continuing the great work of the DC-X project." https://www.thespacereview.com/article/3556/1

The title itself should tell you that the book is there to sensationalize and grind an axe, not to actually provide any historical accuracy. And yep, the author didn't even bother to use primary sources: https://www.thespacereview.com/article/4851/1 It's like recommending a book about Apollo program written by Russians without reading any US documentation. If there has to be a western author, James Harford's Korolev biography is a better put together look into Soviet space program and actually has some proper academic reviews.

There is a follow-up article by the same author: https://www.thespacereview.com/article/1010/1 The photo in question actually got released in the end. You can see it at the top of the article.

50 years ago the last man walked on the moon. Ever since the debate of man vs unmanned space exploration has occurred. For 50 years, the “we must have manned missions have won” …at a great cost to science https://www.thespacereview.com/article/1037/1 “In turn, Michael Griffin said last week, “Like it or not, the Space Station is a feature of American space policy. At this point, the failure to recognize that, accept it, and deal with the consequences in a mature fashion consigns one, in my mind, to the ‘kids table’, while the adults converse elsewhere.”

It's very easy to dramatically underestimate the amount of fuel needed for an effective suborbital trajectory. If you want to travel half-way round the world, then delta-V wise, you're not very far off actually getting into orbit. http://www.thespacereview.com/article/1118/1 That article quotes 7km/s for a 10,000km trip, compared to about 8km/s for LEO. The X-15 (and SpaceshipOne, for that matter) was never trying to actually go anywhere; it just hopped out of the atmosphere and come down again very close to where it took off, with a delta-V of about 1.5km/s. It's worth getting a copy of KSP and actually trying this. It's eye-opening.

Heh, I didn't realise Musk used to do that. I found a well written and interesting article from that period of time (2005), it's not his first announcement of "BFR" but it's worth a read just to remind ourselves how far SpaceX has come. Also it has some tidbits on his roadmap for the vehicle's development: http://www.thespacereview.com/article/497/1 (Fairly sure he's talking about the super heavy lift, using the Merlin 2 and all) >Musk said he that while he would like to slow down the rate of growth the company has experienced since its inception over three years ago, he envisions that SpaceX could grow as large as 400-500 people, but no larger. “Companies do change once they grow beyond a certain level,” he said. “Once everyone doesn’t know everyone, the company becomes slightly different.” SpaceX now has more than 1800 employees.

Thanks for the clarification, I see what you're getting at. I wouldn't interpret his writings as anti-space-travel in any way, but you have to understand Weston's character arc across books 1 & 2. Lewis was arguing against the ideal that motivated many peoples' interests in space travel at the time, and the philosophical underpinnings of their views on morality and humanity. I don't think it's reasonable to suggest that someone of Lewis' intellect would so readily throw the proverbial baby out with the bathwater on one of the greatest frontiers of human exploration. Here, this guy puts it much better than I did: http://www.thespacereview.com/article/1754/1#IDComment332377059 Edit: Adding expository link.

They had been working 24 hour shifts for weeks to make the prior deadline. The delay was mainly due to a problem with the reliability of the mechanical actuators used by the robot. This happens, but it was an embarrassment to all concerned. I just found a good link to the story: http://www.thespacereview.com/article/1319/1 The amount of planning and risk management for large projects like this is amazing. I remember seeing the chart of subsystem deliverables and dependencies for a medium-size instrument (~100M$, far smaller than MSL), printed out from a large-format printer, tacked to a hallway wall. It was about 20 feet long by 4 feet high, printed just large enough to read.

Thanks! note - I can't verify any of the following, it's more - for lack of a better term - aerospace nerd fan theory at this point. Post-collapse, people think that the Buran justification was paranoia. But based on what I've read / seen (though this is getting hard to source, so I might be just good ol' hallucinating here), they weren't entirely wrong. The subtext around that large payload bay had to do with the Soviet pursuit of systems like Fractional Orbital Bombardment System (FOBS) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fractional_Orbital_Bombardment_System that weaponized space. Again, there's a reason for those ASAT tests. There's a reason for the weird specifications set in the early 1970s for the Shuttle. And I don't think deploying a spy satellite alone is it. But this is speculation. AFAICT, nothing was put on paper. It would have been an incendiary WW3 starting act to capture a Soviet asset. But I think it is understandable if certain people within the American blob wanted that capability at hand. I wish I was immortal. I'd drop everything for a decade and try to find people from the time who're still alive (and some still are!) and ask them these questions directly - on the record – for posterity's sake. I suspect, we came much closer to war via space than most people think. And because we didn't, we'll eventually repeat these mistakes. --- Oh and then there was the documented attempt to capture Salyut-7 https://www.thespacereview.com/article/2554/1 Somehow all…

> All his talk about getting to Mars to "maintain the light of consciousness" (...) is actually BS While I hate Elon's politics, I love space exploration, and I believe his motivation with SpaceX is sincere. From the start he made SpaceX with the goal of getting to Mars, and after all these years SpaceX is actually getting near the capability of sending tens of tonnes of cargo to Mars. He's been talking about getting to Mars for more than 20 years, he became a member of the Mars Society in 2001 and wanted to fund a small (unmanned) Mars mission[0], when he wasn't yet a billionaire, but very rich from PayPal, and before SpaceX was founded. Then he invested a big part of his fortune in SpaceX, which was a very risky bet. Even in the early days of SpaceX he planned to make a big rocket capable of getting a big payload to Mars[1] (the "BFR" that the 2005 article is talking about is today's Starship). I wish he had stayed focused on Mars, instead of making Earth's dirty politics even dirtier. [0] https://spaceref.com/status-report/marsnow-19-profile-elon-musk-life-t… [1] https://www.thespacereview.com/article/497/1

> by Jeff Foust [...] ([email protected]) is the editor and publisher of The Space Review, and a senior staff writer with SpaceNews. He also operates the Spacetoday.net web site. So not bad. Just in case anyone else hesitated to look, after the bad taste of today's NYTimes front-page SpaceX hit piece trash. I wish we could leave behind the journalism concept, that ill intent and cluelessness can be fixed by low-level wordsmithing. You get "if you know the topic well, you can see there is a way to closely read and interpret this bit so it's not quite incorrect... even if most everyone reading the whole will be misled". Ah well. Under Avoiding apocalypse, I might have mentioned LEO vs MEO drag lifetimes (years vs millennia). Under Ukrane, IIUC, that all starlink service is geofenced on borders, and finding your export unexpectedly a weapon system can be problematic. [] https://www.thespacereview.com/ [] https://spacenews.com/

There were not thousands of F-1 engines manufactured. There were a bit over a hundred manufactured between flight and test models. The whole "we can't make them anymore" meme has a tiny kernel of truth but it's been blown way out of proportion the more it's been repeated. When the F-1 was manufactured a lot of the actual assembly of parts was done by hand. That meant Rocketdyne's engineers and machinists had a lot of tribal knowledge that was lightly or partially documented at best or not documented at worst. NASA and Rocketdyne maintained all of the designs and documentation and knew everyone involved in the engine manufacturing. In the early 90s a lot of these Rocketdyne people were interviewed [0] and asked to review F-1 manufacturing techniques as part of the Space Exploration Initiative [1]. Restarting production of the F-1 would have been practical but more expensive than the alternate plan to go with an SSME derivative. While the F-1 is an impressive engine it has downsides. It's enormous and heavy. The Saturn V's first stage (S-1C) was 10m in diameter while the Space Shuttle's external tank was 8.4m in diameter. The Shuttle's ET was going to be the core of the proposed SEI rocket (and SLS). With a 8.4m tank diameter it would be more difficult to mount more than two F-1s. With only two engines it would be more dangerous of a vehicle for manned missions as a flame out in one engine could be disastrous. It would also make it more difficult to throttle the engines…

I'm always fascinated by the lack of "space" like exploration projects for the ocean. Seemingly closer access, as if not difficult technical problems, but with greater access to actual resources. Thoughts as to why? http://oceanexplorer.noaa.gov/ Meh link: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/george-spyros/colbert-report-dr-robert_b… One of the biggest issues facing the oceans is a lack of awareness. You can't see what goes on in the ocean the same way you see what happens in a forest or in an African savanna. So people don't know that we waste 54 billion pounds of fish every year while 8 million people die of starvation. They don't know that every single fishery will have entirely collapse by 2048. Or that 90 percent of all large predators in the oceans are gone. And if people could see that. If people could see the amount of waste and destruction in the oceans they wouldn't stand for it for a second. It should be noted however that perviously Dr. Ballard has, in the process of drumming up enthusiasm for increased funding and interest in ocean exploration, touched on the rich bounty of resources yet to be tapped beneath the sea floor. As always, the needs of man and nature are not mutually exclusive should we choose. Balance between the amazing scientific and educational benefits often described by Ballard and the interests of commerce can be achieved if we keep our eye on the prize. http://roastedpinebark.hubpages.com/hub/Ocean-Exploration-Needs-More-F… “The…

Nuclear submarines could be a template for nuclear-powered spacecraft: Space Nuclear Propulsion - https://www.nasa.gov/space-technology-mission-directorate/tdm/space-nu… Submarine vs Submersible vs Spacecraft (2025) - https://braindrippings.substack.com/p/submarine-vs-submersible-vs-spac… The Spacecraft and the Submarine (2008) - https://www.thespacereview.com/article/1202/1

>documented attempt to capture Salyut-7 https://www.thespacereview.com/article/2554/1 This isn’t true. The same article even explains that. From that article: “It takes only some basic fact checking to debunk all the preposterous allegations…”

> They didn't have to increase speeds, they already achieved orbital velocity My undertstanding is Starship didn't hit 17,000 mph [1]. LEO orbits tend to be 17,500 mph and up. Like, I'm not arguing that SpaceX couldn't have circularised on previous tests. But it would have added material risk without any reward. And taking a ship, particularly a re-usable one, particularly a novel one, into its first orbital flight is always exhausting and novel. [1] https://www.thespacereview.com/article/4761/1#:~:text=As%20Super%20Hea…

I wonder how much is a cost-plus billing issue, too… and a contrast between primes with a single customer in mind and a commercial firm chasing a bigger pie than the immediate program at hand https://www.thespacereview.com/article/4498/1

> Alternatively, advanced megaprojects are only achievable through sophisticated large-scale cooperation. In that sense, war is a megaproject. War organized the Manhattan Project, which is still the metaphor we use for any massive scale, sophisticated project. The space race was a cold war endeavor to make ICBMs that weren't obviously ICBMs, and the Soviets were terrified that the Space Shuttle was a nuclear dive-bomber (actually it was for deploying and returning recon satellites) [0]. Cooperation does not necessarily imply peace or post-nationalism: war is strong cooperation on each side of the war, with competition between the two sides. In fact, the cooperation is so strong that actions taken against that cooperation end up being punished as treason much more strenuously than in peace time. [0] https://www.thespacereview.com/article/3855/1

Marco Langbroek, who did the reentry forecast that the linked article is based on, convincingly argues[0] that the bus did separate and reenter separately (in 1981) and what remains in orbit is just the lander. There are several independent pieces of evidence that are consistent with this; the orbital decay pattern, the radar cross section and optical telescope observations all point to only the lander itself remaining. See also his blog[1] for an up-to-date reentry forecast. [0]: https://www.thespacereview.com/article/4384/1 [1]: https://sattrackcam.blogspot.com/2025/04/kosmos-842-descent-craft-reen…

> 1972 March 31 - . 04:02 GMT - . Launch Site: Baikonur. Launch Complex: Baikonur LC31. LV Family: R-7. Launch Vehicle: Molniya 8K78M. FAILURE: The escape stage Block L's engine cut off 125 seconds after ignition due to timer failure.. Failed Stage: U. http://www.astronautix.com/v/venera.html via https://www.thespacereview.com/article/4384/1 via Wikipedia article on the probe.

Had to dig around to find this https://www.thespacereview.com/article/1197/1

It always was the goal My comment from yesterday's news: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39190974 It's always by/for the military: https://www.thespacereview.com/article/3440/1

Here is a better story about the launch and the conditions afterward s. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/air-space-magazine/disaster-at-xichang-… One thing that wiki omits is that the foreign observers were not allowed to leave the launch site for several hours and it appears that during this time the entire area was swept by SAR or recovery teams. Also not noted in Wiki is that the launch took place at 3am, so if everyone was evacuate for safety per the official claim they would have had to have overnight accommodation. Edit add: Here is another and perhaps better link https://www.thespacereview.com/article/2323/1

You can expect one of the really big (Chicxulub-size) impact every 100 million years or so (there is enough uncertainty here that experts all have their own ideas on the exact frequency but typically 25 to 500 million years seems to be the agreed upon range. We keep finding new craters though and then have to increase the estimate). https://www.thespacereview.com/article/761/1 https://skyandtelescope.org/astronomy-news/how-often-do-chicxulub-leve… And endless papers on the subject. TEOTWAKI is a fun rabbit hole to dive in to.

>Also, he3 is plentiful on the surface of the moon, so mining the surface of the moon will be performed to obtain the required fuel, which is the fundamental premise of the movie "Moon". This is repeated a lot, but the practicalities are... questionable. Here's an article I consider to be the definitive criticism of the concept: https://www.thespacereview.com/article/2834/1

There have been near collisions with Starlink satellites and China’s space station: https://www.thespacereview.com/article/4338/1

https://www.thespacereview.com/article/3855/1 Why do you think Outer Space Treaty will matter in event of a hot war between two nuclear superpowers? NPT was signed a year earlier and it has been continuously violated by signatory powers to this day.

This newer research by Bart Hendrickx sheds a new light on the decision. [1] [2] The actual decision to build it was made by engineers, not the party or the paranoid military, and was based on wrong assumptions, like the US military requirements that were already known to be dropped, not making it into the final Shuttle design. [1] https://www.thespacereview.com/article/3873/1 [2] https://www.thespacereview.com/article/3876/1