Elon Musk, at the WSJ CEO Council, says "Starship is a hard, hard, hard, hard project."
"This is a profound revolution in access to orbit. There has never been a fully reusable launch vehicle. This is the holy grail of space technology."
Musk adds that Starship "absorbs more of my mental energy than probably any other single thing."
"But it is so preposterously difficult, that there are times where I wonder whether we can actually do this."
Musk: "I am overdue for doing a Starship update."
Musk: "In order to make a rocket fully reusable, you've got to basically create a rocket that can do about 4%, if not more than 4%, of its mass to orbit – which hasn't happened before."
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NASA announces the 2021 class of 10 astronaut candidates:
Nichole Ayers
Marcos Berríos
Christina Birch
Deniz Burnham
Luke Delaney
Andre Douglas
Jack Hathaway
Anil Menon
Christopher Williams
Jessica Wittner
Nichole Ayers, 32, is a U.S. Air Force major from Colorado, with more than 200 combat hours – and one of the few women currently flying the F-22 fighter jet.
Marcos Berríos, 37, is a U.S. Air Force major from Puerto Rico, and is a helicopter test pilot who holds degrees in mechanical engineering from MIT and Stanford.
NASA awards three companies with over $400 million in contracts to develop private space stations, under the Commercial LEO Destinations (CLD) project:
Blue Origin and Sierra Space – with Boeing, Redwire, and Genesis Engineering – is building Orbital Reef.
The companies plan to have the baseline configuration of Orbital Reef operational by 2027, which it will build into the next decade: cnbc.com/2021/12/02/nas… $BA $RDW
@Peter_J_Beck Rocket Lab is still targeting Neutron on the launchpad by 2024, and hopes to launch a commercial customer on the rocket by 2025. cnbc.com/2021/12/02/roc…
@Peter_J_Beck Beck declined to comment on the price tag of a Neutron launch, but said the rocket “would be a pointless exercise” if Rocket Lab “didn’t think that we would be very cost competitive with with anything that’s currently in the market or or being proposed.” cnbc.com/2021/12/02/roc…
Rocket Lab $RKLB is giving a major update on its planned larger Neutron rocket at 8 a.m. ET, providing the first details about the reusable vehicle since announcing the company was going public.
Watch the livestream:
$RKLB Neutron event starting now:
CEO @Peter_J_Beck: "Where do you start designing a new rocket? Ironically, you don't start at the rocket. You start at the satellite and all the spacecraft you need to launch, and then you start the design process around that."