>we can speculate though.

We can speculate - but also have to base the speculations on which is more likely. With its vertical integration and the simplified design of F9, SpaceX could build expendable F9s for cheaper than ULA or other competitors - in all likelihood. But they don't so in all likelihood the reuse approach is working for them, giving them even larger profits than being expendable.

>The purchase price of a Falcon9 launch did not decrease significantly after they achieved reusability, they just increased their profit margins.

It's probably more accurate to say the profit is reinvested into Starlink launches and all the other Starlink costs. And of course into Starship. By the time Neutron is ready Starlink will be creating its own profits and SpaceX could drop the F9 price to below $50M. Of course if Starship works then F9 won't be flying at all by then, except for Dragon and any NSSL-2 launches the DoD doesn't want to switch over to Starship yet.

Starlinks in their orbits can be distinguished from an Iridium or other satellites, I suppose. But in the days after their launch Starlinks travel in a line as they slowly climb to their designated orbits, eventually spreading out. A lot will be seen in a single line soon after launch and later there'll be only one or two visible at a time, very spaced out.

I appreciate being appreciated. :)

Check again, I just added some stuff about specific pics of Earth taken by Apollo missions.

My brothers and I tried a few small Estes rocket but didn't catch the bug.

A poster of the solar system is always good. A long one with good detailed renderings of the planets, maybe with facts next to them. She can get into the facts at her own pace. There are almost too many to choose from when "posters of the solar system" is googled. Here's one, although there may easily be others with more visual impact.

You can't go wrong with the classic full photo of Earth taken by Apollo 17, or "Earthrise over the Moon" by Apollo 8. A less frequently seen one includes the Apollo 11 lunar module as it ascends from the 1st Moon landing. That odd looking spacecraft could spark questions over the years that'll lead to many long answers.

For rockets and spacecraft I suggest the forward looking ones that will be around while she's growing up. The newest current one is the Dragon capsule on top of the Falcon 9 rocket. It will be flying crews for the coming years. Photos of it are not rare. The forward looking one is the SpaceX Starship, it's trying to leap two generations of design and technology. It also looks awesome. The SpaceX official Flickr site has some crazy good recent photos. Afaik the file size is good enough to print, if you know someone/some store with a largish format photo printer. Yes, those are real photos, not CGI. If you're not familiar with Starship: it's the tallest and most powerful rocket ever, it's fully reusable (both parts come back to land), and the first flight will be by March.

An iconic picture or two from the Apollo era will be nice but she should be looking forward. The Artemis program will be unfolding into her teen years but I'd downplay the SLS rocket and Orion capsule. They won't be flying for long if Starship is successful. They're here for the present but in design and concept they're old tech, backward looking tech.

My favorite source is Tony Bela, an awesome old-school illustrator who is very up to date. His site has plenty of infographic posters, not too large. I used to love the infographic illustrations in magazines when I was a kid during the Space Race, at 9 or 10 years old and onward. I'd pore over them over and over. Maybe good for her now, or maybe better for later.

If you're not into rockets you can still leave one Easter egg for later. She'll think it's just a cool imaginative picture - and be very surprised to learn at some point it's for real and launched in 2018. Actual astronaut not included, lol.

What age range are we talking about? I have some good ideas but they're more for a 10-12 year old. Maybe an 8 year old. Know a good source for infographic posters and photo posters. More in line with STEM and rockets and spacecraft (real ones) than planets and space itself.

Definitely! My niece put these up as a kid and loved them all her teen years, and more.

No problem. This is actually just a copy/paste from my answer in the SpaceX Lounge.

When Crew Dragon launches it carries a small amount of cargo strapped to the floor in the standard NASA/ISS stowage bags. This also implies there are attachment points for these bags. Stuff these with soft materials and the g-forces are taken care of. Splashdown will be a bit intense but I'd rather risk small injuries vs dying in a spacecraft with fried electronics and potentially deadly internal temperatures. The space station has plenty of soft stuff like empty equipment stowage bags and especially bags and bags of dirty laundry. Doubtless there are a variety of additional straps to improvise with. IIRC some of the ubiquitous storage bags are held to the walls by a cargo netting made with flat straps.

In this scenario descending in shirtsleeves is the only option, there won't be enough umbilical ports for 7 SpaceX suits even if they were available on the station. The Russian Sokol IVA suits have a very different design to supply air to the suit for breathing and cooling.

Good point. The question we don't know the answer to is how quickly the IDA can be reinstalled but NASA is loath to accept anything quickly. Fortunately we have the Crew 6 option.

For those interested in a serious answer: The two issues are spacesuits and seating. Both are custom fitted. This will apply to the two solutions: A) Sending another Crew Dragon to return the 2 cosmonauts & 1 NASA astronaut and B) Adding these 3 to the return of the Dragon currently attached, making a total of 7.

This answer addresses the article. Of course if Russia launches a replacement Soyuz this will be moot. But we don't know if a Soyuz is near readiness.

Option B seems extremely unlikely even though the article makes it sound like it's under consideration. Option A is much safer and much easier to implement. Crew 6 is scheduled to launch in mid-February. That Dragon has had plenty of time to be refurbished and is probably just waiting for loading the consumables. It could be launched with 1 pilot, with 3 empty seats. Could be launched empty but NASA does like manual back-up to autonomy. Plus, the other 3 aren't familiar with Dragon's systems, something they'll need even for their brief flight. Another Dragon is due to launch the Polaris Dawn mission and may be physically available, and I've no doubt Jared Isaacman would agree to postpone the mission if NASA requested it.

Dragon seats and IVA suits are all custom fitted. However, afaik the sizing for the seats is done with various bolt-on pieces. Among the 8 crew on the 2 upcoming launches there are probably 3 seats close enough in size to the 3 unscheduled crew members. The suits will be more difficult. But again, there are a number of suits made for several upcoming flights - and ones from old flights, afaik. The crews didn't get to keep them as souvenirs. Among all these there may be some that are a "close-enough" fit for this unusual circumstance. But the SpaceX suits are a snug fit, that may not work.

IVA suits are very much desired but a descent can be made without one. It's needed in case of sudden depressurization or a fire (in which case the cabin is depressurized to starve the flames). But no American spacecraft has had a problem like this in space. The risk of making a descent in shirtsleeves is very low - definitely lower than in a Soyuz with possibly fried avionics and no way to regulate cabin temperatures. (Yes, the risk isn't zero and it did happen to a Soyuz decades ago, but that hardly applies. And geez, if anyone brings up Apollo 1, I swear you haven't paid attention to spacecraft designs since the 70s.)

Option B involves a longish answer of its own, available on request. I can only see it occurring if there's a drastic emergency requiring evacuating the ISS entirely.

We all have to consider that the personnel costs that used to be the Air Force's are now just transferred to Space Force. So it's all just Department of Defense costs, which are huge. That's costs for salary, uniforms, equipment, healthcare, and other benefits. We have to figure out how many personnel and functions have been transferred to Space Force - afaik it's more than just what used to be in Space Command. (Of course, we can't figure all that out.) I have no idea what research programs are now under Space Force but that could easily be a factor. I think things like that definitely have been increased since the creation of Space Force but can't quote anything. Spending on satellite systems has been going up for years and the rate is increasing.

A major question underlying this: What skills are transferrable from the ISS to a Moon landing? Will experience count? An astronaut who's been on an ISS 6 month rotation will have spent less than 2 days in a spacecraft (that's not the ISS.) Working in zero-g for 6 months isn't really relevant to Artemis until later missions involving Gateway. The most applicable skill will be spacewalks. Very different from moonwalks but both involve operating in a spacesuit for 6 hours and more.

The biggest skill set will be the ability to master skill sets, especially disparate ones. The astronauts who demonstrate this best will be the best candidates. I nominate Jonny Kim, he mastered the skills of being a SEAL and a physician.

He and others will be flying plenty by the end of 2025, which is the most optimistic timeline for Artemis 3. That's time for a lot of 6 month rotations on the ISS. Arty 3 may carry one astronaut from the new class and one "old" astronaut.

Jonny Kim. Being a SEAL and then going to school and becoming a doctor show two very different kinds of the right stuff. Both require incredible dedication - and in the case of becoming an MD, the perseverance has to last for many years, until you're board-certified.

>tells me you don’t pay attention all that much to what actually goes on inside the aerospace industry.

Be careful about making judgements based on one paragraph. I've followed aerospace for decades, since Gemini, since the X-15, and since communications satellites made transcontinental communications possible as an exotic occurrence and then more and more commonplace. Saw the first Landsat images and have followed how it and its successors and offshoots have improved the understanding of land use and climate change and eco-disasters. It's impossible to overstate the extent of the changes to the understanding of ecology. Saw the pale blue dot photo when it was made. Watched Hubble launch and followed the details of the mirror misfortune, the deep reasons, not the popular press ones. All along with the spy satellite connection to the mirror. And yes, the magnificent photos and increase of knowledge about galaxy formation and black holes - and the first exoplanets. Well, enough on me paying attention to the broader achievements.

SpaceX didn't just impress me with the rocketry of the reusable Falcon 9 - and landing boosters 150+ times is especially impressive since no one else has done it once. Deploying Starlink is something that's having a tremendous impact in many fields. Setting up a production line that produces thousands of satellites is unprecedented. OneWeb is doing pretty well with hundreds, I haven't ignored others in aerospace. SpaceX developed the Dragon spacecraft, which includes innovations others inside the aerospace industry did not manage - the Starliner has a lot of compromises and not a lot of innovation. The need for 28 thrusters, some from different suppliers, is the opposite of elegant design. Idk if you include spacecraft with rocketry, I'm just demonstrating that I pay more attention to what's going on inside the space industry than you thought.

I say far more than anyone else, and far ahead, because the F9 has been landing 1st stages for 7 years and the next credible competitor will be Rocket Lab with Neutron. If we posit 2025 for its successful landings that puts SpaceX a decade ahead of the rest. (China is hard to guess about, but I'd be surprised at a landing with reuse before 2024.) SpaceX has developed the first flightworthy full-flow staged combustion engine, with an insanely high chamber pressure. The closest anyone has come with a new engine is Blue Origin with BE-4, a partial flow staged combustion engine with a remarkably low chamber pressure. Tbf, it was the proper goal to set themselves for their 1st powerful engine - but it does help contrast the Raptor with the rest of industry. (I separate its success from Starship's because the latter's is far from assured and would be distracting.) (The legacy aerospace companies worked on full flow staged combustion but didn't progress from what were essentially bench top versions.) Yes, this is all about rocketry but I am once again proving I do pay attention to what goes on within the aerospace industry. I'm also aware Skylon is chasing the SSTO dream. Some company is pursuing suppressed-sound supersonic commercial aircraft. All sorts of stuff is going on. The sensitivity and pixel count of sensors for the next space telescopes, and the supporting data storage, etc, increases incredibly year by year.

The deep science JWST will produce and the various impacts of cheap access to LEO and beyond are to an extent apples and oranges. You said "to me personally", and that's fine, you prefer apples. I pay more attention to the oranges of rocketry and human spacecraft, but I'm definitely aware of the rest. At the end of the day, to me personally what SpaceX has done is a sequence of engineering that's the greatest feat of the last 5-7 years.

Edit: OK, maybe I went a little overboard here...

Where in what I wrote did I say whether Elon deserved a small, medium, large, or minuscule amount of credit? I simply reviewed the sequence of how he became prominent, with no reference to the issues you bring up. You'll note I gave the sequence as "they (SpaceX)" got media attention for advanced rocketry and that added to why Elon got more media attention.

An interesting non-executive will also be part of the panel, Sian Proctor. She was part of the Inspiration4 mission, the first fully private orbital mission. She brings a needed perspective of commercial space and the use of it by private individuals and non-traditional users.

>they’re not the only ones pushing boundaries in the aerospace industry.

They've pushed the boundaries far more than anyone else and far ahead of anyone else. They get media attention for that, and that's a big part of why Elon started getting media attention, along with Tesla. A big chunk of his wealth that made him the world's richest person is in SpaceX. Then for the last ~3 years things snowballed. World's richest made him highly visible and also an automatic target for every word he said. Then all his media attention became bigger than the attention SpaceX got. The sequence is different from your statement. (All this precedes the Twitter disaster.

I still occasionally forget that text on the internet is taken at face value, I forgot to elaborate. Yes, this will never happen, I was trying to illustrate how much of a dead-end it is for France to rely on the Artemis program to get a meaningful number of their astronauts to the Moon.

>SpaceX doesn't wanna show up their biggest partner and patron.

Totally agree. It's expected that in late 2025 SpaceX will be ready to make the test landing of HLS, as contracted for with NASA. The Dear Moon Starship could also be ready. SpaceX could coordinate the missions and have Dear Moon transiting around the Moon at the same time HLS is landing and taking off. This will be at least a year before SLS/Orion is ready for Artemis 3 and would be a great demonstration of why NASA should turn all of Artemis over to SpaceX. But it's very likely Elon won't want to embarrass NASA, their partnership is valuable to him and his goals. (He's also well aware of how deeply Artemis is entwined with politics, of course.) I expect the flights will be made months apart - the potential to take over Artemis will be plain to see but it won't have the look of dunking on NASA. (Of course there's no guarantee Dear Moon will be ready, i.e. crew-rated by SpaceX, in 2025, but it's a real possibility.)

Now now. I attended my high school chemistry class and got an A+. However, that was decades ago and I relied on the kindness of strangers here to learn about CH₄ + 2 O₂ → CO₂ + 2 H₂O and also the Sabatier process, etc.

The Hill makes an article out of an offhand remark, gets the crew capacity of Orion wrong, then misses that Gateway won't be used till probably Artemis 5. It's painful how little regular media knows about our space programs.

Anyway, M. Macron should contract directly with Axiom and SpaceX for a couple of missions for their astronauts and then contract with SpaceX for a Starship ride to the Moon. They won't beat Artemis 3 but they will beat Artemis 4. Macron spoke to Elon just a couple of days ago, I'm guessing he has his email.

De riguer comment: There's no such thing as a "private firm" in the Chinese space industry. Certainly not for one making a rocket with this level of technology.

I'm worried that you got worried over one article on one source - especially since the source was The Guardian. You must have noticed the deafening silence of no other reporting on this being a danger.

I'm a big fan of Starship and its capabilities but there's very, very little chance of landing people on Mars by 2029. Ships can be sent but the infrastructure for in situ production of propellant has to be developed, iterated, and repeatably reliable and hold up long term before sending a crew. Otherwise if there's a failure the crew will end up as dead as Matt Damon without potatoes.

But the article references a study showing there is CO2 in lunar regolith, even though that wasn't the source of the CO2 used in this experiment. So, not too inaccurate for a news article. It's extremely unclear how abundant the CO2 is in regolith, or if that finding has ever been duplicated. I don't recall seeing NASA finding that in the many kilograms of regolith brought back by Apollo. Perhaps it's fairly deep and needed an impact blast to bring it to the surface. Hopefully not too deep to be accessible by some kind of strip mining.

If Starship is successful it will bring back lunar soils by the ton, so real progress can be made on this.