@Stuck4ger @SciGuySpace RIP Mike Melvill. I was in the Mojave crowd who witnessed that first test flight over the line.
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AWChicago
5.4K posts
So sad to hear of the passing of Mike Melville, SpaceShipOne test pilot, commercial astronaut #1, and all around great human. He checked me out in the Proteus.
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@RadioFreeTom America and the world can always count on him being consistently untrustworthy. Very reliable, the most ever.
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"I didn't want all those stupid kids who went to the playground to come to my party anyway and I hope it rains on them and I don't even like parties or playgrounds"
Aaron Rupar@atrupar
Trump: “We don’t use the Strait. We don’t need it”
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@SciGuySpace Skeptics always need to be reminded how, despite pursuing a different dev sequence for his space company, Bezos has built a string of profitable behemoths within Amazon, leading in cloud services, logistics, ebooks & smart home devices, just to name a few. Doubt if you dare.
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Jeff Bezos joins the gold rush to Terminator SSO (and permanent sunlight in space near Earth).
arstechnica.com/space/2026/03/…
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@FrankLuntz In the end, insurance companies will dictate how far car makers can go when stripping out things related to safety. Don’t think manufacturers want to be producing uninsurable vehicles.
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The NHTSA wants to toss out vehicle standards that don't apply much to autonomous vehicles, like requirements for windshield wipers, defrosters, and defoggers.
“You might want those, they might be nice," said Secretary Sean Duffy. "But do I need them if I don't have a driver?"
Axios@axios
U.S. paves road for vehicles with no steering wheel trib.al/cOe2tcr
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@SciGuySpace STS 120, standing next to one of Pam Melroy’s early military flight instructors yelling “go Pam go”.
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A century after Goddard, what's the most memorable launch you've attended?
arstechnica.com/space/2026/03/…
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@arstechnica Apollo-Saturn, no more design & engineering advances were successfully crammed into a single rocket stack within a mere decade. The world‘s first operationally successful, deep space capable, human space vehicle. Defined the very term “leading edge”. Shuttle and F9 tie for #2.
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A century after the first rocket launch, Ars staffers pick their favorites arstechnica.com/space/2026/03/…
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I feel like such a nerd, running game plans for a DJ set using spreadsheets. Just think of it as a different kind of energy management.
This is for Space House at SXSW of course - I’m on around 7pm
thisisspacehouse.com
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Curiously, if you download the original from NASA and re-upload it then it's fine, but if you speed it up then it thinks its from the documentary. Because apparently speeding up footage is sufficiently transformational to give you ownership youtube.com/watch?v=bXNH7w…
YouTube
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Sigh... once again @NBCUniversal is too lazy to actually check that they own the copyright to footage before claiming it. This is straight from the STS 119 fly around, shot by NASA Astronauts using NASA equipment and soundly in the public domain.
The documentary is a good watch but I'm having to switch out this footage because the publisher isn't doing a basic level of verification of ownership.
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Who had Ariane 6 as the booster that would emerge from the Vulcan/New Glenn/Ariane 6 triumvirate of new rockets to become a workhorse for Amazon Leo?
Arianespace@Arianespace
Second mission. Same ambition. The @Amazonleo satellites for our next mission, VA268, have now arrived at Europe’s Spaceport in Kourou, French Guiana, marking a new step in the deployment of the Amazon Leo constellation. In the coming weeks, Arianespace will begin the launch campaign, from satellite processing to integration on Ariane 6, preparing these payloads for their journey to low Earth orbit. The VA268 mission, designated LE-02 by Amazon, will fly on Ariane 6 in its four-booster configuration, a powerful setup particularly adapted to support the sustained deployment of large constellations. This mission is the second of 18 launches planned under our contract with Amazon, reflecting a long-term partnership built on performance, reliability and shared ambition to expand global connectivity from space. More updates soon from Kourou. #LaunchingAmbitions @ArianeGroup @esa @CNES @EuropeSpacePort
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@SciGuySpace Noticing Starlink TV ads lately. Trying to get out ahead of when Amazon starts heavily and widely marketing Leo to consumers in the next 12–24 months. Competition begins, long road ahead.
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@DJSnM @dpoddolphinpro Wow, just like when a comic used to get on the Carson show and hit, he or she knew they had it made. If they didn’t, it was like what happens now when Scott pulls back the curtain on your tech (and on your marketing spin).
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@dpoddolphinpro I remember the rebuttal video when they complained I had overestimated their performance.
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ARCAspace, the water rocket company which blamed a Scott Manley video for a lack of investors, might not be doing so well.
All of the websites associated with the company are showing Wix unconnected domain pages.
RIP?
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@DJSnM Blue is a very attractive choice for someone who wants to work for an exciting space company with a wide variety of projects and near infinite supply of capital, all without the unnecessary drama that now comes with the badge at certain other places. Best and brightest like focus
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Just found out my neighbors kid took got a job at Blue Origin.
This is in addition to another neighbors whose daughter works there.
Considering there are 7 houses on this street that’s quite a hit rate.
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@SciGuySpace This is not just about manual control over landing, it’s about critical rendezvous and docking management as well. NASA feels it’s important to have human controlled redundancy across all these critical areas. Yes, still electronics and software, but simplified and redundant.
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NASA and SpaceX fought over this issue with Dragon a decade ago. Now, Starship.
“There is disagreement between NASA and SpaceX on whether the provider’s current proposed approach for landing meets the intent of the Agency’s manual control requirement."
arstechnica.com/space/2026/03/…
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@jeff_foust @SciGuySpace They certainly have hoped for target numbers, but we are many flights away from SpaceX being able to figure out what it actually costs them to referb and re-fly those giant ships. Way too early and speculative to know what the $90M actually means.
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Fun fact from Voyager's 10-K filing: the contract to launch the Starlab space station on a SpaceX Starship is worth $90 million.
SpaceNews@SpaceNews_Inc
Starlab Space fully books commercial payload space on planned space station spacenews.com/starlab-space-…
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@SciGuySpace I’d also point out SpaceX and Elon‘s other companies still lose people, and have a harder time filling every position than they used to. They’re still a desirable place to work for many, but prior ease of getting & keeping the best talent is off-peak.
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A week ago I sent some questions to Blue Origin about its "monopoly money" stock options program. An hour ago, CEO Dave Limp tells the company they're launching a new stock options program.
arstechnica.com/space/2026/03/…
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@SullyCNBC Ask anyone in the industry what’s really going on and they’ll tell you it’s effectively closed.
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I’ve been complaining (aka ranting) about the word “closed” for a week for a reason
Eduardo@Eddie753
@SullyCNBC cover this tomorrow?
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@SciGuySpace A good deal of the value of SpaceX is in StarLink, and they will be contending with at least one or two technically competitive players over the next 2-3 years, as will Falcon 9. At least one of those StarLink competitors will likely have superior sales, marketing & support.
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AWChicago retweetledi
That...is not, at all, what the episode "Court Martial" is about. It's about a resentful officer who was passed over, blames Kirk, and tries to destroy the Enterprise.
I have to clarify a lot to people here about stuff like strategy, but don't start getting Trek wrong too.
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@CJHandmer My solution, a meteor impact creates havoc and injures one or two of the others, forcing evacuation for med reasons. Watney was out exploring where the crater is now and they can’t find him, so they assume the impact wiped him out. He’s just injured and partially buried.
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The most physically likely way this disaster would have started on an actual mission is some inscrutable systems failure forcing an evacuation. For example, software update breaks on life support, air goes wrong, and Watney's suit won't press. Rest of the crew have to leave him for dead.
But no-one wants to read a book that starts with "Then the status light went red for no reason."
Best Movie Moments 🍿@BestMovieMom
The premise of The Martian (2015) is scientifically impossible. Author Andy Weir admitted that the atmosphere on Mars is so thin that even a 150 mph storm would feel like a light breeze and could never tip a rocket, but he needed a catalyst.
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