Rocket Report: OpenAI’s launch overture; South Korea making progress in space

The Department of the Air Force approves a new home in Florida for SpaceX's Starship.

See full article...

 

[Malmesbury]

a

The Peacekeeper LGM-118 (former the 'MX') is only 88 tonnes. A Falcon 9 has a launch mass of 550 tonnes. The new Sentinels (LG-35) are only intended to be ~38 tonnes.

ICBMs aren't large. They're expensive enough as it is and you need lots of them.

And to close the loop, the ideas on the Minuteman missile was originally a Minimum Cost Design - to be cheaply massed produced.

When the plan got cut from 10,000 missiles to 1,000 a lot of that went away.

But originally, it was all about building the machine to build the machines….

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_N._Hall

 

[SkyeFire]

The Sarmat missile is apparently named after the Sarmatians.

Which seems like an odd choice for Russia, which has really been leaning into their "ethnic identity" schtick during Putin's entire tenure.

 

[Dtiffster]

Not sure I buy it, but Reuters is reporting SpaceX is seeking a late 2026 IPO, citing investors being told by the company (Link, paywall). Rumor is 800 billion valuation, the whole company including starlink.

 

[SkyeFire]

I've been dealing with fiber-optics too much - when I read that Moonshot's launcher would be powered by electromagnetism, my first thought was that they were using lasers (as in "electromagnetic radiation")

<<SIGH>>

Paging Jordin Kare...
(He was a really fun guy at cons, always polite to the fanboys. Gone too soon.)

 

[mcain6925]

This may have been answered elsewhere, but if the Russians can't launch Progress vehicles for several months/couple of years, what does it do to maintaining the ISS's orbit height? Do the US (and Japan now, maybe) have enough capacity to do orbit maintenance without Russia?

 

[Wickwick]

a

And to close the loop, the ideas on the Minuteman missile was originally a Minimum Cost Design - to be cheaply massed produced.

When the plan got cut from 10,000 missiles to 1,000 a lot of that went away.

But originally, it was all about building the machine to build the machines….

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_N._Hall

The Minuteman was only 29 tonnes!

 

[Cthel]

The Peacekeeper LGM-118 (former the 'MX') is only 88 tonnes. A Falcon 9 has a launch mass of 550 tonnes. The new Sentinels (LG-35) are only intended to be ~38 tonnes.

ICBMs aren't large. They're expensive enough as it is and you need lots of them.

Well, unless your name is ATK and you're trying to sell as many giant SRMs as possible

Then you end up proposing a 1,200 tonne ICBM with a 260" diameter SRM first stage capable of throwing 50 tonnes 8,000 miles.

Possibly the best example of "when all you have is a hammer" since the Nova 5S proposal for a SRM-based Saturn V predecessor

 

[Wickwick]

This may have been answered elsewhere, but if the Russians can't launch Progress vehicles for several months/couple of years, what does it do to maintaining the ISS's orbit height? Do the US (and Japan now, maybe) have enough capacity to do orbit maintenance without Russia?

There's a lot of discussion of the options in the thread following the Ars article.

 

[EllPeaTea]

This may have been answered elsewhere, but if the Russians can't launch Progress vehicles for several months/couple of years, what does it do to maintaining the ISS's orbit height? Do the US (and Japan now, maybe) have enough capacity to do orbit maintenance without Russia?

Cygnus can do station reboost. Cargo Dragon can also do it if it has a boost trunk fitted (and I believe that installation of a boost trunk was intended to be an occasional event). HTV-X can't do reboosts.

Edit: Cargo Dragon can also do reboost without the boost trunk, but it's inefficient due to its thruster arrangement.

 

[Wickwick]

Well, unless your name is ATK and you're trying to sell as many giant SRMs as possible

Then you end up proposing a 1,200 tonne ICBM with a 260" diameter SRM first stage capable of throwing 50 tonnes 8,000 miles.

Possibly the best example of "when all you have is a hammer" since the Nova 5S proposal for a SRM-based Saturn V predecessor

That's a new one to me. Multiple chambers? Or one massively huge core?

That's an ambitious proposal. That would be twice the mass (and almost 2x the diameter) of the SLS SRBs!

 

[Cthel]

That's a new one to me. Multiple chambers? Or one massively huge core?

That's an ambitious proposal. That would be twice the mass (and almost 2x the diameter) of the SLS SRBs!

Based on the slide illustration, the ATK 260" SRM was a single massive casing with a single fixed central nozzle and 6 vectorable nozzles around the periphery for steering. I'm not sure if that means it had multiple bores in the grain, or a really funky star-shaped bore.

They also proposed using it as a launch vehicle first stage, capable of delivering 40 tonnes to a 300-nautical mile circular orbit or 10 tonnes to escape velocity.

 

[Torbjörn Larsson OM]

Interesting to see that new industry turns to space for greener footprints.

China launches a lifeboat.

China’s LandSpace almost landed a rocket.

Congrats China!

Another Sarmat failure.

A blunder at Baikonur.

Congrats Russia (not really). Time to go and break out the space trampoline!

 

[InvariantCapitalist]

Interesting to see that new industry turns to space for greener footprints.



Congrats China!



Congrats Russia (not really). Time to go and break out the space trampoline!

Needs theme from Rocky 4, not 1.

 

[Bill Swallow]

Paging Jordin Kare...
(He was a really fun guy at cons, always polite to the fanboys. Gone too soon.)

Never met the man, but I have a copy of his collection of filk songs, "Fire in the Sky". Got a Heinlein-related one on there, "All Debts Are Paid" (as in, 'When the ship lifts, all debts are paid'.)

 

[brokenbeaker]

Sarmat doesn't seem to mean anything in Russian but if it was Shar mat (the Tsar is dead) that's the Russian for checkmate.
At this point, it would be nice if the new Tsar was dead.

(OK I'm corrected - it's named for the Sarmatians, an Iranian people.)

Off topic, but in Turkish check mate is şah (shah) mat.

 

[@inemesitaffia]

Not sure I buy it, but Reuters is reporting SpaceX is seeking a late 2026 IPO, citing investors being told by the company (Link, paywall). Rumor is 800 billion valuation, the whole company including starlink.

View: https://bsky.app/profile/esghound.com/post/3m7bbc64uc223


ESG Hound is 100% sure SpaceX as a company and it's business units individually aren't cash flow positive

 

[Jack56]

Stick to running OpenAI into the ground and keep your filthy paws off Stoke. I'm hopeful that the fact that the talks are no longer going on and that Stoke just raised half a billion that was not led by Altman means that this won't be happening.

 

[FranzJoseph]

Aside from the Sarmatian connection, your initial guess is also semantically incongruous. The Russian term for king in chess, is korol' (король), not tsar (царь). Note also that while tsar starts with the letter ц (making the 'ts' sound), Sarmat starts with с (which sounds like 's') - so there isn't even much of a phonemic or syntactic similarity to begin with (the r in tsar is also softened, whereas the r in Sarmat is the normal hard r - these two sounds are quite distinct to the Russian ear.)

The "tsar" word is only ever used in reference to Russian kings in the past (as in over a century ago, and so is a bit archaic) or in fairy tales, and nowhere else - so mixing it with "mat" as in mate (chess meaning) makes no sense. By contrast, the word "korol'" is also used to refer to modern kings (e.g. the current king of UK), aside from the chess piece. There's is also no meaning for 'mat' in Russian, that has anything to do with death: its specific use in chess is imported without any further reinterpretation or elaboration, and is confined to chess only (though can be also applied to analogies or metaphors involving chess - but basically always has the meaning of, "game over; you lose".) But there's another meaning for "mat" in Russian, outside of chess: it denotes the act as well as the linguistic subset of cursing (as in, crass and foul language); but that's neither here nor there.

It might still work as in "Sar, yebem tvoi Mat'" phonetically...

 

[FranzJoseph]

Interesting to see that new industry turns to space for greener footprints.

Congrats China!

Congrats Russia (not really). Time to go and break out the space trampoline!

Was it a $5,000 AliExpress bot like the last time they tried to show a Chinese dog robot as their own autonomous weapon platform with the clever use of some...

…wowen ninja pyjamas?!?

Looked great in all the Russian military expo photos, though, which is I guess all that matters.

 

[Jack56]

If you can get the mag-lev aspect of a rail acceleration system working well to high g-loading, the best solution might be a hybrid between SpinLaunch and Moonshot Space. That is, make the track a large circle and accelerate over a long period of time. The final acceleration for the ring is about 6 times higher than the straight line of the same length, but the power draw can be as low as you like. And a ring, unlike a tether centrifuge, doesn't need a vacuum anywhere other than the outside ring.

Think big. An equatorial vactrain could double as a launcher. Operating at orbital speeds, you'd be in free fall riding in one. Wouldn't be fast enough for launches to orbit, though - you'd be stuck to the ceiling for that. The launch spur off the ring would climb the Andes in Ecuador to ~5800 m. /s

 

[Chopfuna]

RAH says "Build it on a mountain side, preferably a very tall one, ending at the top"

It will be built on the west side of Pavonis Mons. Perfect for launches from Mars.

 

[Dtiffster]

View: https://bsky.app/profile/esghound.com/post/3m7bbc64uc223


ESG Hound is 100% sure SpaceX as a company and it's business units individually aren't cash flow positive

Given his track record on his SpaceX predictions that's pretty meaningless.

 

[@inemesitaffia]

Given his track record on his SpaceX predictions that's pretty meaningless.

I always like to hear out critics who have real numbers instead of takes. Helps with my blind spots.

It's the Mercury in rocket exhaust effluent from the launch stand story, something that is pretty much impossible unless the soil itself had Mercury that turned me off. hard.

Someone else disappointed me in that thread. Didn't realize a US company using the Netherlands as a tax front won't put it's US income there. And would limit it's profit there and move as much as is possible to the US or some zero tax nation.

 

[randomcat]

Russia’s RS-28 Sarmat missile, a weapon designed to reach targets more than 11,000 miles (18,000 kilometers) away

comrade, if you read the fine print on the contract I think you'll find that the RS-28's range is up to approximately 11,000 miles, anything between zero and eleven thousand is adekvatnyy

 

[Dtiffster]

I always like to hear out critics who have real numbers instead of takes. Helps with my blind spots.

It's the Mercury in rocket exhaust effluent from the launch stand story, something that is pretty much impossible unless the soil itself had Mercury that turned me off. hard.

Someone else disappointed me in that thread. Didn't realize a US company using the Netherlands as a tax front won't put it's US income there. And would limit it's profit there and move as much as is possible to the US or some zero tax nation.

As I said in the original post I am skeptical of the report of the IPO, mostly because SpaceX hasn't shown any sign of needing to raise cash. The more chatter I hear about it, the more I think it is just another secondary sale and the source of the IPO rumors are just people that don't know the difference. To be clear an 800 billion valuation seems high, and maybe it's just Elon wanting SpaceX to be worth more than OpenAI, but if investors actually are willing to fork it over I doubt the employees will complain.

 

[wagnerrp]

Strictly speaking, it would not be a space gun (chemical propulsion in a barrel), but some sort of mass driver – a coil gun, likely. Apologies for the nitpick, I'll get my coat.

A coil gun can be purely electromagnetic, but a space gun requires chemical propulsion? That's a rather ambiguous restriction.

 

[wagnerrp]

These kind of "space endeavors" always look like very thinly disguised weapon development programs designed to skirt treaties and international agreements. Much like the Orion Project that was supposed to power a spacecraft by dropping small nuclear bombs behind it in space.

Not good ones. You're going to have a enormous launch rail aimed at a single fixed target, far too large rotate towards something else.

 

[wagnerrp]

The Peacekeeper LGM-118 (former the 'MX') is only 88 tonnes. A Falcon 9 has a launch mass of 550 tonnes. The new Sentinels (LG-35) are only intended to be ~38 tonnes.

ICBMs aren't large. They're expensive enough as it is and you need lots of them.

This ICBM is large. It's 200t. It's developed from the R-36, which had a 3-4t payload to LEO as the Tsyklon family.

 

[SpikeTheHobbitMage]

I always like to hear out critics who have real numbers instead of takes. Helps with my blind spots.

It's the Mercury in rocket exhaust effluent from the launch stand story, something that is pretty much impossible unless the soil itself had Mercury that turned me off. hard.

Someone else disappointed me in that thread. Didn't realize a US company using the Netherlands as a tax front won't put it's US income there. And would limit it's profit there and move as much as is possible to the US or some zero tax nation.

IIRC, the mercury claim came from a report indicating mercury levels below detectability and people mistook (or misrepresented) the sensor sensitivity limit as the amount of mercury present. There may have been a unit error as well, but my memory is fuzzy.

 

[SpikeTheHobbitMage]

A coil gun can be purely electromagnetic, but a space gun requires chemical propulsion? That's a rather ambiguous restriction.

Launch-scale electrics are typically linear catapults (a sled above the coils) rather than guns (payload inside the coils). Chemical units (scram-gun or traditional cannon) put the payload inside the pressure tube.

 

[wagnerrp]

IIRC, the mercury claim came from a report indicating mercury levels below detectability and people mistook (or misrepresented) the sensor sensitivity limit as the amount of mercury present. There may have been a unit error as well, but my memory is fuzzy.

There were two different samples in the report. One claimed 0.139µg/l, and the other <0.113µg/l, the latter apparently indicating sensor limitations. Regulatory limits are 1.0µg/l. While the report repeated the 0.139 value several times, it once misprinted it without the decimal point as 139, and certain motivated parties (such as ESG) jumped on that as proof of massive pollution.

 

[Dtiffster]

Apparently Russia as part of Putin's Indian charm offensive is transferring the tech for the RD-191 to ISRO. Apparently they plan to replace the engine for the LVM3 (apparently they changed the name of the GSLV to this).

 

[Wickwick]

This ICBM is large. It's 200t. It's developed from the R-36, which had a 3-4t payload to LEO as the Tsyklon family.

That is a big ICBM and still only 40% on an F9

 

[@inemesitaffia]

IIRC, the mercury claim came from a report indicating mercury levels below detectability and people mistook (or misrepresented) the sensor sensitivity limit as the amount of mercury present. There may have been a unit error as well, but my memory is fuzzy.

I read the report itself. There was a typo (decimal point movement/removal) in one entry wrt to Mercury.

The rest of the entries for Mercury were correct (and showed readings at the minimum detectable level) and it was possible to figure out from reading the report itself there was an error

We now know the claim is wrong but in 2026 you'll definitely see some respected source bring it up. Maybe even cite an unretracted source.

 

[@inemesitaffia]

There were two different samples in the report. One claimed 0.139µg/l, and the other <0.113µg/l, the latter apparently indicating sensor limitations. Regulatory limits are 1.0µg/l. While the report repeated the 0.139 value several times, it once misprinted it without the decimal point as 139, and certain motivated parties (such as ESG) jumped on that as proof of massive pollution.

Ninjad thoroughly, except you forgot to add it got laundered with ESG as a named source through CNBC

 

[BrangdonJ]

Isaacman's Project Athena has now been leaked on Google Drive (62-page PDF, draft dated May 2025).

 

[Malmesbury]

I read the report itself. There was a typo (decimal point movement/removal) in one entry wrt to Mercury.

The rest of the entries for Mercury were correct (and showed readings at the minimum detectable level) and it was possible to figure out from reading the report itself there was an error

We now know the claim is wrong but in 2026 you'll definitely see some respected source bring it up. Maybe even cite an unretracted source.

You are releasing super classified information. SpaceX is using Dimethyl Mercury Isomer propulsion.

Original documentation here - https://reactormag.com/a-tall-tail/

 

[Erbium68]

You are releasing super classified information. SpaceX is using Dimethyl Mercury Isomer propulsion.

Original documentation here - https://reactormag.com/a-tall-tail/

Clever and very amusing.
Around the end of WW1 people were trying to improve the efficiency of steam turbines – still not as efficient as compound reciprocators meaning that warships needed both, one for extended cruising and one for war power – and a compound cycle was proposed using mercury for the high pressure turbine, at very high pressure. Various proposals were made for sealing the shaft, none of which were convincing.
Mercury is one of God's little jokes - apparently very useful for all kinds of applications if it wasn't so toxic. The other one is beryllium.

Some years ago I was involved in a conference involving control of hazardous substances and I was swapping horror stories with a French scientist. We had been talking about handling tritium. Someone overheard and said "Tritium, isn't that really dangerous stuff?" to which the French guy replied "oh no, tritium doesn't worry me at all. Mercury and cadmium, that's what gives me nightmares. They don't have a half life."

 

[Markkf]

This may have been answered elsewhere, but if the Russians can't launch Progress vehicles for several months/couple of years, what does it do to maintaining the ISS's orbit height? Do the US (and Japan now, maybe) have enough capacity to do orbit maintenance without Russia?

Except for refueling the ISS cargo dragon Cygnus & HTV could probable keep the lights on til they deorbit. All it takes is money but I doubt the current admin wants to spend a lot of money on it.

Personally I don’t think that Russia will ever launch another Soyuz spacecraft or progress to the ISS.

 

[vanzandtj]

Clever and very amusing.
Around the end of WW1 people were trying to improve the efficiency of steam turbines – still not as efficient as compound reciprocators meaning that warships needed both, one for extended cruising and one for war power – and a compound cycle was proposed using mercury for the high pressure turbine, at very high pressure. Various proposals were made for sealing the shaft, none of which were convincing.
Mercury is one of God's little jokes - apparently very useful for all kinds of applications if it wasn't so toxic. The other one is beryllium.

The earlier one was lead. So convenient. Sweetens the wine. Stops knocking in the ICE. Will we ever really learn that it's poisonous?