Topic: Interesting stuff about SpaceX Starship (hate the name)

[Nemesis]

The one manned flight of Starliner has now been classified as a CLASS A mishap, the same as the two lost shuttles. 

Apparently it should have been at the time but NASA was convinced not to as they wanted to protect the reputation of Starliner.  There are issues with Starliner where they don't know what the root causes are.  Without the root causes they can't be sure that any fix will actually work instead of making things worse. 

The odds of a manned flight before the end of the ISS seem very low.  Maybe cargo flights. 

[Nemesis]

Vulcan now Projected To Launch Thu • Feb 12th, 2026

Watched the flight it was "successful".  Again it had what appears to be an issue with one of the SRB rocket nozzles failing.  Not a good sign as this is the 2nd occurrence.  I believe this gives these SRBs a 25% failure rate with the nozzles and it can use up to six on one launch.  When the nozzle fails the effective thrust falls, it has been fortunate that the 2 failures were on missions with small cargoes not pushing limits, which allowed the missions to succeed anyhow. 

Seems they went on the low bidder for the SRBs to keep launch costs down.  This is not the same supplier of SRBs for prior ULA rockets.

Seems Amazons LEO has contracted with SpaceX for another 10 Falcon 9 launches.  Whether this is connected with the Vulcan issues above or with the generally slow pace of launches by anyone not SpaceX is unclear.