BWJC

Why do super-chilled cryogenic propellants force short or instantaneous launch windows once fuelling has begun? Why do you have to fuel so close to launch? Why do regular cryogenic propellants not have the same restrictions? A thread. 1/20

@wenchance This is going to absolutely *slap* ya'll.

Still very WIP, but in the spirit of #ProjectHailMary I’m working on a fun thing w/ help from @immabed Prompt is: What if the Petrova line was discovered today? Only basic design work rn, will get more fleshed out in the coming days- weeks! #spaceship #toughsf #hardsf #scifi

@docm77 Doc the doctor! I'm glad the guy is probably going to be fine, you did a great thing.

Just had to perform cpr on a guy the collapsed on the street while we biked by back from kids bowling. Cyanotic lips, tongue partially swallowed. The whole nine yards. He came back after 2 mins and started breathing by himself. Others came to help, we stabilized him sideways

@docm77 Apropos of what exactly?

Also, if bad things happen and people disappoint you, try to not dwell on it too long and rather help uplifting others who do right. There are many amazing non-male content creators in the mcyt space. False, Pearl, Gem, Cleo are irreplaceable core members and great friends.

@wenchance BW Industries approves of this message.

I've cooked up some large #posters for y'all to enjoy! Take an up close look at the #spaceships & enjoy the corporate B2B action. If you'd like the hi-res PDFs, you can DL them for free from my ko-fi Link in replies! #space #toughsf #hardsf #scifi #3dartwork #scifiart #blender

@waitbutwhy No point in buying Apple monitors, plenty of other great options. Why bother paying the Apple tax?

I might be the only person who cares about this but I can't believe Apple no longer sells a 32" monitor. Their new high-end monitors are all 27" and you can no longer buy a 32" monitor from them. I can never go back to 27" so I guess I'll be buying non-Apple monitors from now on.

@DJSnM @grok Eewww

I asked @grok to imagine a scene from Flash Gordon as directed by George Lucas in the style of Star Wars

In 1973 George Lucas tried to secure the rights to remake Flash Gordon. I'm so glad he failed, otherwise we wouldn't have Star Wars. But also we wouldn't have the 1980 Flash Gordon movie which is ridiculously good fun with colourful art deco design, rock music and overacting across the supporting cast.

@CJHandmer ICPS is not an Atlas stage, it's a Delta stage (Delta III and IV, but specifically the Delta IV wide upper stage).

An underappreciated fact about the ICPS is that it's absolutely minuscule as it was borrowed from the much smaller Atlas family of rockets. The most modern and successful rockets have a stage impulse ratio well under 10, meaning that the second stage does a lot of the work. With SLS it's more like 75, maybe 10x undersized, and barely brings enough Delta V to even pay for its weight and, based on today's experience, nowhere near enough to pay for its cost and complexity. You won't believe the reason why the rocket was engineered this way.

@CJHandmer No time to pre-breathe for a spacewalk, Starliner would have drifted, Dragon can't dock to Starliner as they both only implement the active side of IDSS, and their would be no other way to 'tow' (plus tow where, Dragon couldn't have docked Starliner to the ISS).

They were stuck about 260 m out. Could someone have EVAed out with a rope and hauled them in before they suffocated to death? Could Dragon have undocked and given them a tow?

Unfortunately the diagrams that are crucial for understanding the implications for loss of 6 DoF control are redacted. But... "Without the precise actions of the crew and flight control team, this event could have resulted in a loss of the Starliner crew." Yikes yikes yikes. NASA is extremely protective of the ISS. SpaceX cargo Dragon had to jump through many hoops to prevent any possibility of damaging it, and Russia has managed to crash into space stations a few times over the years. If Starliner had been uncrewed, NASA would have noped out of that docking instantly. But with crew aboard, they spent a few hours desperately keeping the guidance system on life support and got just enough thrusters working just well enough to limp to the docking - probably saving the crews' lives. And yet, at the time, the "managed narrative" emerging from Boeing and their mouthpieces all over NASA was "this is fine, don't worry about it" as though NASA could expect Butch and Suni to voluntarily crawl back into that death trap and attempt to ride it back to Earth. This is early Soyuz program level failures, where everything went wrong, and a couple of the crews died. We got so damn lucky. I read through 100 pages of recommendations. Not one errant manager is named. Not one recommendation mentions personnel as a potential issue. What are the odds, that of the hundreds or thousands of people working on this program, every single one just happens to be the best person for the job? All they need is for a few dotted lines to be drawn on the org chart and a quick pep talk and their organizational efficacy will magically shift from F to A+? Boeing already spent >$6b on this turkey. That's $3.5m for every day between now and the ISS splashing somewhere in the Pacific - if it manages to last until 2031 without the cracked Russian node letting go. The Administrator stated that post-ISS orbital activity will still require capsules. Right. I'm *sure* Vast and Axiom are positively begging Boeing to let them use Starliner to fail and/or kill their customers on their commercial space stations. There is a path forward here for Boeing, and it isn't performative mickey mouse tweaks around the edges.

@dpoddolphinpro @NASASpaceflight Maybe they were securing it to the tower rather than removing it. Hmm

what on earth 📷 @NASASpaceflight

@StephenClark1 I read NASA's report where they discussed all the possible retirement strategies, and the starkest feature of boosting the orbit is the much higher debris flux. The ISS would be hit frequently, which would create more debris, if boosted to ~800km and left unattended.

TLDR: Somewhere north of 20 metric tons of propellant for a 100-year stable orbit. But if you read my story, you'll learn there are other factors to consider. arstechnica.com/space/2026/02/…

@kresh_v1 @waitbutwhy No.

Nice job Ayatollah

@planet4589 In the table the row [Irid/Kos] has the amount from the 'Deb' column (other debris), and the row for [PRC ASAT] has the amount from the 'DebColl' column (Collision debris). I suppose both rows should be also be renamed and perhaps an 'Other Debris' row added.

@immabed Can you say why you think they are wrong? They look ok to me. (by the way the columns are now 'ASAT debris' and 'collision debris', not specifically the PRC Asat and the Irid/Kos collision)

@planet4589 I'm browsing your excellent charts on your website and found a minor error on planet4589.org/space/stats/ac… . The table for objects in upper LEO has the wrong values for [PRC ASAT debris] and [Irid/Kos debris], they are pulled from the wrong columns in the data source.

@NASAAdmin @waynehale EVA suits are equally capable of loss of crew as the launch vehicles they launch on. The comparison is apt. Wayne is cautioning against accelerating timelines at the cost of safety.

It is disappointing and disrespectful that you would so casually invoke the loss of Challenger on a topic related to EVA suit development. Let me rework my above post to be the opposite of what I wrote, and please tell me if it sounds safer: I shared with them exactly what I told our HLS providers: NASA should do absolutely nothing to help them accelerate and meet their timelines so there is no schedule margin to spare. As an agency, we must never be willing to challenge the requirements and let as much time go by as possible on problems. Is this better? Respectfully, do better Sir.

I met with leadership at Axiom Space yesterday to discuss the development of their spacesuit. It was great to see their facilities and all the progress. I shared with them exactly what I told our HLS providers: NASA will do all we can to help them accelerate and meet the timelines, with plenty of schedule margin to spare. As an agency, we must be willing to challenge the requirements and not let an hour go by on a problem we can solve today. This is imperative to achieving the President’s national space policy.

@CSI_Starbase No block heater?

It's so cold that my car wouldn't start this morning. Some might take that as a sign to buy a Tesla... I think it was a sign that today is the perfect day to finally start recording the episode I've been working on for the past 18 months 🙌🏾. Research and script writing can be extremely depressing at times. I'm always excited when I can finally move on to the fun part.

@dpoddolphinpro Vostok/Voskhod would like a word 😅

The Russian equivalent to this poll only has 1 option, and it's the Soyuz generation 🤣

@Erdayastronaut MAVEN. They're still trying, but comm loss was in December, almost certainly lost.

We're trying to compile a list of hardware / missions that retired or lost in 2025... this is where we're at... are we missing anything?! We've gotta be missing something... Starship V2 B1076 Retired B1086 Lost IM-2 Blue Ghost Retired Lunar Trailblazer Lots of Starlinks

@CJHandmer My seed speed isn't great, but I've also set up a torrent for this if people prefer that: files.imma.page/torrents/

Download from here if Google is not working: …86259b706b44b686b26d39f13d24dd.r2.dev/MarsGlobalTopo… Full cloud-based 7m version is cooking. Yes, I've exhausted blocks and inodes on multiple 4TB SSDs.

Okay team. Here it is. A 28 m resolution global map of the planet Mars, viewable on Google Earth. The starter version with just 271,790,899,200 pixels. One of the most beautiful things I have ever made. Please, enjoy! drive.google.com/file/d/19SoSdM…