Other relevant comments:

• “The cause of the engine out, I think was basically a failure in the … engine computer software.” It didn’t seem to be present in any of the other engine computers.
• “The heat shield is looking robust.”
• That engine “glitch doesn’t seem to be too much of an issue”
• Not many changes between flights 14 and 15 “but some of them take a fair bit of work and we’ve got to go inside the tank”

Ah, that’s probably what he had in mind. But really it’s more like the opposite. It seems like SpaceX is causing chaos by abandoning their captive market.

(Unless the term is also used to refer to the relationship between adjacent layers in a vertically integrated company.)

Pedantic semantic point …

“I can tell you SpaceX has already gone captive because we have a whole bunch of customers coming to us and saying, oh my God, can you fly us?” Ranzo said during the company’s 10 September earnings call.

I’m not aware of “gone captive” really meaning anything, at least in British English. The best I’ve found is that, pertaining to animals, it could be roughly synonymous with ‘domesticated’. E.g. tortoises

They should be able to perform propellant transfer tests with the current ships

Interesting, thanks. Now that you mention it, I do think I’ve seen some potential refilling hardware (probe-and-drogue?) on recent Starships. Presumably that’s just for the sake of testing and would not form part of an ongoing pez dispenser variant in the long term?

Back-to-back launches from the same pad, or one launch from each?

Well it does seem like they want LC-39A to be ready soon (potentially soon enough to launch Flight 16), so my guess is that they might as well go with the two-state solution (Texas & Florida).

It’s rare, but astronauts have been off the planet for their child’s birth before.

This got me wondering whether any space agencies make crew assignments for women conditional upon agreeing to a contraception regime, and require pregnancy tests before launch. And whether any of that would even be legal in North America or Europe.

SpaceX has nine more Crew Dragon flights in its backlog, including three additional crew missions to the ISS that NASA recently secured in a $946 million contract extension

Seems like a ‘nice little earner’. I can understand that SpaceX might want to retire Falcon 9 ASAP, so that Starship can take over all the launch pads and other launch site infrastructure. But this got me wondering whether Dragon could go on top of a Frankenstein version of Starship! Probably too much hassle …

So, how much is known about the upcoming ship serial numbers, with regards to what variants they will be?

I’m assuming S42 will definintely be the pez dispenser variant? (And I’m very tempted to assume it’ll be loaded with 42 Starlink sats!)

But what about 43? 44? At some point they need to start their propellant transfer tests.

NSF’s Alex opined on this 10 hours ago, from 08:53 to 08:56 CDT.

Ship Forte now has Ship Forty https://youtu.be/GTIaZaDn-84

If they send the ship to orbit, I wonder where they’ll de-orbit it, given that it won’t be RTLS. Perhaps:

• in their ‘usual’ place for soft splashdowns, west of Australia
• in the Gulf of Mexico
• Pacific, west of California
• Pacific, the cemetery
• near the planned path of Forte, timed so that she can just pick up Ship 41 the day after its splashdown. Strap it alongside Ship 40, and take them both to SpaceX at the same time.

P.S. The sidebar links here but I can’t access that. Would this be better? (I’m not very familiar with the technology or etiquette of Lemmy.)

So in the time that this single Falcon 9 first stage has flown and landed 35 times, its competitor company [ULA] has made 29 total launches. Put another way, this rocket has put more mass into orbit than more than two dozen expendable rockets over half a decade of effort.

This paragraph feels like bullying :)

New spoonerism deployed: GRIN FIDS

A view of sep from the trunk during the livestream at T+9:24

More views from the trunk at T+ :

• 10:28
• 11:18 (which then switches to an internal camera?)
• 12:04

165 launches with the Falcon 9 rocket (no Falcon Heavy missions) last year, up from 134 Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy launches in 2024 and 96 Falcon flights in 2023. The company plans “maybe 140, 145-ish” Falcon launches in 2026, SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell told Time earlier this year. “This year we’ll still launch a lot, but not as much,” she said. “And then we’ll tail off our launches as Starship is coming online.”

Called it!

Voice calls are allowed, so maybe it’s time to revive the 56k modem!

But seriously, as a non-expert I genuinely wouldn’t be surprised if you told me the audio stream was the easiest option, if the approved apps are all somewhat tamper-resistant. (Probably a very different process though, converting 20th Century analogue telephone line signals, versus converting just-decompressed digital audio.)

Out of those 13 missions, I believe only 1 person has flown twice, and he’s not from NASA. He’s Mr Fedyaev.

This mission is the first where all four crew members are using the new SpaceX suit design. (Some details were given by the SpaceX guy at a NASA Crew 12 press conference earlier this year.) So presumably Fedyaev is the only person to have won both types of suit in space. Perhaps he’s giving SpaceX some comparative feedback.

Official NASA’s SpaceX Crew-12 Arrival & Welcome Remarks

• 4:00:30 looks like Fedyaev and Adenot jointly opening the hatch. Don’t remember seeing footage like this before.
• 4:25:45 - 4:26:00 Any Russian-speakers fancy translating Fedyaev’s joke? I fear that I’m missing out :)

This is also the 13th launch of serving NASA astronauts on Dragon. (It’s the 12th operational mission, but there was also Bob & Doug on Demo-2.)

I was especially glad to see the scene at 21:59 and was saying “and that’s just the top 2/5 of the overall rocket”. No matter how often you remind yourself of the size of the thing, it’s never enough!

P.S. I checked, and it’s actually a little over 2/5. More like 42% (my favourite 2-digit number!).

Don’t know if I’m jaded but I’d guess about 5-10% chance of Starliner 2 happening before SpaceX Crew-13.

Relevant Steve Stich comment: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I12pFrHAuQI 38:23 - 39:50 (And also 30:46 - 33:25)

You Tube channel subscriber counts:

• 467M - @MrBeast
• 006.82M - @SpaceX

You might be tempted to see this as representative of the dumbing down of society, but to be fair, many of the former might have just been tempted by some subscriber giveaways. Perhaps space channel subscribers are a bit more committed? E.g. the SN10 live stream has 15M views.

A NASA spokesperson clarified in a statement on Thursday how this change factors into the agency’s ability to fly its astronauts to the space station.

“NASA’s Commercial Crew Program does not specify a specific launch pad for crew rotation missions and maintains a launch capability at Space Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida,” the spokesperson said. “If needed, SpaceX could still support NASA crewed launch operations from pad 39A in the future.”

Gerstenmaier elaborated on this during the 2026-02-09 Crew-12 Prelaunch News Conference.

20:37 “We’re going to do some maintenance on the crew arm. I think the general plan is we’ll keep the crew arm on the ground after we do those repairs, but we’ll be ready to put the crew arm back up again if we need to go back and launch crew from pad 39A.”

23:40 “In the timeframe it takes us to get Falcon and Dragon ready we can be ready to get the pad operational.”

Perhaps he chose to do that because they realized some people had been assuming SpaceX were removing their redundancy of crew launch pad options? It seems that NSF probably did assume that: TWIS 2026-02-07 (3:33 - 4:17).