Veteran Structural Engineer 🚀🛠️ | Tech Enthusiast | Bike Trail Explorer
Calgary
Joined May 2023
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makes sense to me. SAR operators pay for the orbit they need, dawn-dusk or custom planes don't exist on a rideshare bus. the RADARSAT heritage proved that decades ago.
In other words, the returns to carefully constructed SAR missions in non-traditional orbital regimes offered by vanilla rideshare made dedicated launch economically practical even when cheaper alternatives still existed. Not true of many other areas in “new space”.
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Kutryk closing out the iROSA install on the final EVA - good to see Canada hands-on for the ISS power upgrade. Eight arrays, 160+ kW, Redwire wings now with lunar-facing heritage. That roll-out array tech sits in very few hands; worth watching where it goes next.
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my money's on a captured interstellar object. Neptune scattering tends to pump eccentricity more than it flips the inclination that far out. curious what the follow-up astrometry shows
Well, that's peculiar! Rubin Observatory found a space rock with a steep, backward orbit opposite to most planets.
This object, now called R631, orbits beyond Neptune.
Why does R631 have such a strange orbit? Read here: buff.ly/fJX7Uyd
📸 Tony Dunn.
ALT A 3D orbital diagram shows the paths of comet R631 and the planets around the sun, with sweeping green and red orbital planes against a starry background.
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clever solution to a gate problem. that composite wing is flexible enough that hinging the tip makes sense. i'd love to see the load path through the hinge - that lock has to carry some serious bending moment
Here's a neat trick on the Boeing 777X: its wingtips fold up after landing.
Once the plane slows to about 50 knots on the ground, the outer 3.5 meters of each wing automatically hinge upward, reducing the wingspan. It drops the plane from Code F back into Code E limits so it can use the taxiways and gates.
Before takeoff, the tips fold back down and lock. Regualtions also require a system that prevents the plane from taking off if a wingtip isn’t fully positioned and secured.
Flight 15 targeted for Nov 13 - that turnaround tells me Starship is past the anomaly-chasing loop and just building and flying. I like it. And New Glenn qualifying a composite LH2 tank above MEOP says the launch market finally has two players serious about flight rate.
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gotta love Edwards. that dry lake bed exists for exactly this. i'd probably crack wise too if i was still sliding at 200 knots. says a lot about their training
A B-1 bomber suffered landing gear failure at Edwards AFB. As aircraft was skidding down dry lake bed,tower controller asked if they needed assistance.
Through the shower of smoke, dust, and sparks came the response from B-1 bomber crew...
"Dunno - we ain't done crashing' yet."
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agree. the NMA/757 gap has been sitting there for a decade and the business case never closed: $20B+ development with no airline willing to commit launch orders. i'd put my money on new entrants taking the niches neither giant will touch.
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congrats. i assume that's a captive carry with Eve, so glide flights come next. good to see the delta line actually flying. curious what cadence looks like for the test campaign.
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interesting concept. laying a 50m vehicle on its side puts the whole bending load through the ring section and tiles, which were never designed for that. I want to know how they handle the hull under stacked regolith too.
Something interesting I saw displayed at @TheMarsSociety conference I wanted to share.
There are several concepts that look to use @SpaceX Starship on the moon (or Mars) as a horizontally oriented base camp with regolith covering to offer radiation and micrometeorite protection.
This entails controllably laying starship on its side after landing, reconfiguring the CH4 & O2 tanks by removing the fuel transfer tubes, sealing the tanks and adding floors to use the entire volume of Starship for a massive base that would help springboard long term habitation.
This clip shows a large 3D printed model and a description of how it might work.
Learn more at:
developspace.info/starhab
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21 boosters covering 115 flights. i've spent a career around fleet reliability and that is a utilization ratio commercial aviation would struggle to match
113 of SpaceX's 115 Falcon 9 launches this year flew on a booster that had already been to space.
The rest of the world combined: 1 launch on a reused booster, out of 128 orbital launches. That was Blue Origin's New Glenn in April.
China flew 75 rockets this year and Rocket Lab 17. Every one of them used a brand new first stage.
SpaceX did all 115 Falcon 9 flights with just 21 boosters. 51 of those launches were on a booster's 20th flight or later, and the most flown one, B1067, is now on 37.
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I think commercial EO/SAR constellations now double as SSA sensors - states can't control what's known about their own orbits.
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weather modeling is the sleeper application here. numerical models have hit their compute ceiling, ML surrogates run orders of magnitude faster. i'd want this for flight planning alone. curious if anyone's running ML surrogates in ops yet.
This quoted post is unavailable.
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been hearing '777X is coming' since 2019. folding wingtips and the GE9X are real engineering achievements, but i'll wait for type certification before calling a comeback.
Only one of these Boeing jets has yet to be approved for passenger service: the Boeing 777X.
Boeing is about to make a comeback!
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one nitpick - i think that photo is a 1960s sert-era ion thruster, not a starlink argon hall thruster. the physics points stand though. still, 2,500s isp on argon is a great number.
This is the argon Hall thruster on Starlink. 2,500 seconds of specific impulse, 1.5x the first-gen krypton thrusters, with 2.4x the thrust.
And it runs on argon, which is way cheaper than krypton. Without it, Starlink couldn’t even climb from its drop-off orbit to its working orbit. Satellites couldn’t dodge each other, and drag would pull them back down in a few years.
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so much for Project Sunrise economics... though changi is about the best tech stop you can get. qantas keeping the eastbound nonstop tells you the wind numbers still favor it
In 2018, Qantas made aviation history by launching the first nonstop passenger service between Australia and Europe. Eight years later, its famous Perth-to-London flight is making a stop in Singapore, and that detour is sticking around.
The Boeing 787-9 Dreamliner normally covers roughly 9,000 miles in around 17 hours, allowing passengers to travel between the continents without a single stop.
But Middle Eastern airspace restrictions forced Qantas to rethink the route in March 2026. Avoiding affected airspace meant flying farther, making a nonstop journey less practical without restricting passengers and baggage.
The solution? A refuelling stop in Singapore, adding around three hours to the journey.
And there’s a twist: The return flight from London to Perth still operates nonstop.
Qantas has now extended the Singapore stop until at least 31 January 2027, meaning its flagship nonstop service will remain a one-way affair for the foreseeable future.
#Qantas #AviationNews #LongHaulFlights
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21 years since Pinnacle 3701 and I still walk new engineers through it. CRJ200 at FL410 is coffin corner, core lock killed the restart, and six airports sat in gliding range. the energy for a forced landing was there - the crew just burned it troubleshooting a dead engine.
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I love that the headline calls it a challenge to Einstein when the orbital decay matches his predictions exactly. another confirmation of GR in the strong-field regime. FAST keeps pulling these out
Relativistic effects of PSR~J1856--0039 double neutron star system in a 2.36-hour compact orbit: arxiv.org/abs/2607.27333 -> A new challenger to Einstein’s theory of general relativity: astrobites.org/2026/10/11/a_…
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