The Space Thread

(Teslarati): SpaceX to deliver two new Crew Dragon spacecraft to Florida over the next two months. Presumably these will be the IFA (in-flight abort) and crewed vehicles. Meanwhile, Jim Bridenstine continues to posture for his buddies in Congress, who awarded a $4.6 billion cost-plus contract to Lockheed Martin (Ars Technica) for six Orion vehicles for the SLS program, which has yet to produce a single flight.

The SpaceX Starship presentation this weekend continues to make me think about the revolution it represents, and for all the hype and the explanation videos I've seen flying around the Internet, I am not sure how many people have done the straightforward math.

• Falcon Heavy, the most powerful launch vehicle in the world today, can send 30 metric tons to LEO for $90 million in its 90% reusable configuration, a retail price of $3,000 per kilogram.
  • Falcon 9's smallsat rideshare program is offering prices as low as $1,000 per kilogram, but that hasn't flown yet.
• Based on some very rough estimates, Starship/Superheavy would have an ideal amortized cost of somewhere around $100,000 per flight, assuming 1,000 flights per vehicle before refurbishment, and we can probably add $50,000 for fuel and overhead. If it carries 150 tons to LEO, that's a marginal cost of $1 per kilogram. That's not a typo. Even with a generous markup to $3/kg retail, it's a thousand times more efficient than Falcon Heavy.

International air transport currently costs between $1.50 and $4.50 per kilogram (worldbank.org). Imagine commercial orbital transport for the same cost as an international flight. Then consider point-to-point Starship replacing international air transport.

I'm not generally inclined to unfettered optimism, but this model is beyond revolutionary.

Edited by Fighteer on Sep 30th 2019 at 9:59:43 AM

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

I'm deeply skeptical that they'll be able to cut the price a thousandfold, just because extraordinary claims and extraordinary proof and all that. But even if they can cut it be a factor of ten, then that's still a huge development.

Really from Jupiter, but not an alien.

Agreed. $150,000 per flight is a napkin estimate that I made, not anything officially stated by Elon or by SpaceX, and it's likely to take many years to achieve.

• Mass production cost of $2 million per Raptor engine.
• Engines are the most expensive part of the vehicle by a huge factor.
• Max configuration of Starship/Superheavy is 37 + 6 or 43 Raptors. Engine cost: $86 million, round up to $100 million for the complete vehicle.
• Each vehicle flies 1,000 times before major refurbishment, for an amortized marginal hardware cost per flight of $100,000.

This is kind of insane, but tell me I made an error. I could be off in my estimation by a factor of ten and it'd still be revolutionary.

Edited to add: it's still not completely clear if Starship can do suborbital, point-to-point hops without Superheavy. If it can, then that'll significantly reduce the cost-per-flight because you don't have to amortize the booster. I'm pretty sure that's not the plan, though.

Edited by Fighteer on Sep 30th 2019 at 3:05:21 PM

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

Taking a break from SpaceX: "Astra Space's tests contaminated hundreds of tonnes of soil and damaged a building at the Pacific Spaceport Complex Alaska on Kodiak Island." (Twitter)

The underlying article from New Scientist is paywalled, but it seems that Astra Space publicly lied about both the success of their rocket tests and the damage caused when they failed. This is kind of disturbing, not just because they failed to disclose the true results, but because their flights caused enough soil contamination to require special processing. Generally, RP-1 doesn't cause that kind of environmental damage, so what are they using as propellant?

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

Courtesy of Eric Berger on Twitter: NASA's current(?) mission plan for Artemis. [1] It involves three Falcon Heavy launches to the Lunar Gateway for parts of the spacecraft, followed by SLS with the main Orion capsule.

Ironically, the only reusable parts of this system are also the cheapest: the Falcon Heavy first stages, and this all depends on the Lunar Gateway being in place. This is not a plan for 2022, or even 2024. It's a fucking Congressional pork-barrel boondoggle.

I said it in Twitter and I'll say it here: NASA will send its next manned mission to the Moon on Orion and it's going to land at the SpaceX Lunar Hotel and Visitor Center.

Edited to add: I just had this amusing mental image of Artemis blasting off majestically into space and heading for the Lunar Gateway. Then a Starship will pull up alongside and the commercial passengers will wave hi, take selfies, and offer some snacks, then wish them luck as they head off. It'll be like space tourism, or like how parents applaud their toddler for splashing across the kiddie pool.

Then the PA system comes on: "Out the starboard windows, you can see $20 billion of our tax money."

Edited by Fighteer on Oct 1st 2019 at 6:47:59 AM

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

(Teslarati): NASA head calls out SpaceX CEO Elon Musk over Starship event in bizarre statement

I posted about this before, and indeed it was causing quite a bit of buzz on social media last weekend, but now Teslarati has a detailed article on it, mainly noting Bridenstine's apparent hypocrisy in specifically calling out SpaceX for Commercial Crew Program (CCP) delays when NASA and Boeing bear equal if not greater responsibilty.

• Congress underfunded CCP by more than half between 2011 and 2016.
• Boeing has received almost double the share of CCP funds as SpaceX, yet is still behind on its Starliner program.
• SLS, which is overfunded compared to requests, is even more behind than CCP. (I said $20 billion in my previous post; it's going to be more like $40 billion before all is said and done.)
• Boeing has perhaps 5 percent of its total business involved in CCP, and is also developing (and behind on) the SLS core stage, along with many other space and defense contracts, so calling out SpaceX for being "distracted" by its own Starship program is deeply hypocritical on Bridenstine's part.

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By the way, Elon's Starship presentation, as awesome as it was, was in front of a very unfinished rocket. I don't have specific links, although I'll find some later. The Boca Chica Mk 1 Starship was disassembled this past week for the large amount of additional work needed to get it flight-ready. This is not surprising, although I'm sure it gives ammo to the people calling it a publicity stunt. It is unclear if this indicates any changes to the proposed October flight test date, or if Elon's "one or two months" means that we won't see the Mk 1 prototype attempt its 20 km hop before the end of the year.

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Remember Blue Origin? I vaguely remember something about Jeff Bezos and a rocket that's unusually phallic even for rockets. Well, Blue Origin CEO Bob Smith (Was he selected for having the second most generic male name in the English language?) recently gave a ballpark figure (Geekwire) for how much a ride to space on its New Shepard would cost: "hundreds of thousands of dollars", stating that they hope to eventually get it to a point where a middle-class person can afford a ride.

Eric Berger then posted a Twitter poll asking what "affordable to the middle class" would mean to real people, not the middle class that apparently exists mainly in Jeff Bezos' imagination, with the majority of respondents answering in the "below $25,000" range. (Disclaimer: I am a respondent.) Frankly, I'd have made the gradations even more fine, since 25K is the price of a typical new car. An expensive vacation for a middle-class family is $6K to $10K, and I can't imagine paying more than that for what is, after all, a glorified amusement park ride.

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Other tidbits from Ars Technica's Rocket Report:

• Relativity Space secures $140 million in funding. This startup is 3D printing its Terran 1 rocket and hopes to begin flight in 2021.

• Rocket Lab will launch its "As the Crow Flies" mission NET October 14. This commercial payload was switched out at the last minute, showcasing the smallsat launch provider's flexibility.

• Virgin Galactic signed a deal to send Italian researchers to space aboard its suborbital spaceplane next year, marking the first such collaboration between a government and a private company.

• Pegasus XL is ready for its next, and final flight. The air-dropped orbital rocket will loft NASA's Ionospheric Connection Explorer satellite NET October 10. This could be the last launch for Pegasus, as it has nothing else in its manifest and has been dramatically out-competed in cost by other providers.

• Intuitive Machines will launch its lunar lander aboard Falcon 9 in an upcoming rideshare mission. The mission will deliver five scientific payloads to the Moon for NASA. At 1700 kg, it will be the primary payload, but there's enough capacity left on the rocket for other satellites.

• In a weird contrast to his tweet about Starship, NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine told The Atlantic that it would be "fantastic" if Starship beat Artemis to the Moon, and that they would happily use it to send missions if that is feasible. "Our goal is to be a customer, not the owner and operator of all the equipment," Bridenstine said before reverting to form and plugging SLS and Orion for his Senate friends.

• United Launch Alliance has received its final non-compete Air Force contracts. This has been a sticking point with the commercial launch industry, since Delta IV Heavy and Atlas V are much less economical than other options. By moving future national security missions to fixed-price contracts, this somewhat stagnant segment of the launch industry will become a lot more competitive.

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More from Twitter:

• @NASASpaceflight [1]: "The Jason-2/Ocean Surface Topography Mission (OSTM), successfully ended its science mission on Oct. 1. NASA and its mission partners made the decision to end the mission after detecting deterioration in the spacecraft's power system."

Edited by Fighteer on Oct 4th 2019 at 11:01:06 AM

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

News dump!

Commercial Crew Program

From Jeff Foust on Twitter: Boeing is now targeting Dec. 17 for their orbital flight test (OFT) of Starliner, with mid-November for the pad abort test (PAT). This is an aggressive schedule that is dependent on hardware availability, but they claim that everything is built and ready. If true, and there are no issues, we could see the first crewed flight soon afterwards.

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Meanwhile, SpaceX's in-flight abort (IFA) test hardware for Crew Dragon is all delivered and being prepped. (Elon Musk on Twitter) SpaceX completed their OFT and PAT earlier this year, while Boeing completed IFA. This race is getting tight!

Speaking of NASA and SpaceX, (Teslarati) Jim Bridenstine is set to tour the company's Hawthorne HQ on October 10, maybe-possibly-definitely in response to the storm of angry responses his Sep 27 statement generated. This looks like a PR/show-of-confidence move designed to demonstrate that he's on the side of the companies that have been working hard to send humans back to space for the US.

Pegasus XL | ICON

Launch is still targeted for Oct 10 1:25 UTC (Oct 9 9:25 PM EDT), but weather is iffy, at 30% go / 70% no-go. [1]

Electron | As the Crow Flies

Launch is still targeted for Oct 14 23:00 UTC (Oct 14 7:00 PM EDT).

Falcon 9 | Starlink 1

Starlink 1 seems to have been bumped to Oct 31, but I can't find any official data about it.

Starship

I found an interesting Twitter discussion [2] pointing to a Reddit thread that attempts to answer the question: how quickly could enough methane and liquid oxygen be generated on Mars to refuel a Starship for a return flight? The conclusion seems to be that you could do it in two years with the kind of equipment that it would be possible to deliver in a couple of unmanned missions. This aligns neatly with the transfer windows between Mars and Earth. The biggest limiting factor is power supply.

Edited by Fighteer on Oct 9th 2019 at 5:59:33 AM

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

Pegasus XL | ICON

After a weather delay, Pegasus took to the skies aboard its carrier aircraft and launched as planned, successfully delivering its payload to orbit. There was a bit of a heart attack when telemetry apparently failed to show the spacecraft deploying for a few minutes, but it turned out alright. NASA TV streamed the event but the quality was not what I would call fantastic. I don't have a discrete stream link available; I'm sure one will be posted soon.

Commercial Crew Program

CNBC streamed live from SpaceX's manufacturing headquarters in Hawthorne, CA, where Jim Bridenstine and Elon Musk provided an update on the spacecraft. Quite a few space Youtubers joined in with their thoughts: What About It?, NASA Kennedy VR tour

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

Breaking news: TASS is reporting that Russian Cosmonaut Alexei Leonov, the first human to take a spacewalk, has died at 86. (Twitter.) Also, NASA statement.

Leonov is an important figure in the history of human spaceflight, but I'm young enough to admit without shame that I first learned about him because the Soviet spaceship in 2010: The Year We Make Contact is named for him.

Edited by Fighteer on Oct 11th 2019 at 9:14:59 AM

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

From Everyday Astronaut on Youtube: A conversation with NASA admin Jim Bridenstine inside SpaceX HQ

Tim Dodd has gotten really good at doing this kind of interview, and Bridenstine is quite forthcoming about his thoughts and plans on Commercial Crew and SpaceX's role in it. He discusses the Lunar Gateway program and even briefly touches on Starship. Excellent watch.

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

Electron | As The Crow Flies

The launch went off on schedule from LC 1 in New Zealand, placing a technology demonstration satellite from Astro Digital in orbit. This was apparently a fairly unique trajectory due to payload requirements and the need to avoid an unusually dense radiation zone above the atmosphere. Rocket Lab continues to work on reusability, but this launch made no attempt to recover the booster.

Rocket Lab livestream

Refresher: Rocket Lab is notable as one of the few fully private companies routinely performing orbital launches. Its Electron rocket can carry payloads of up to 270 kg to low Earth orbit, and is currently one of the cheapest rides to space for smallsat companies.

As an aside, damn, New Zealand is pretty.

SLS | Artemis

(Ars Technica): NASA has revealed its long-term plan for the Artemis project, including a total of 37 launches and a lunar outpost whose construction is to begin by 2028. It is unclear just how much this increasingly ambitious program would cost. The FY 2020 ask of $1.6 billion is just a small portion of the estimated $6 to $8 billion per year needed.

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Congress may have had enough, in fact. Although I can't find additional support, Eric Berger tweeted that Congress is pushing back and suggesting that NASA return to its original (pre Trump administration) plan for the first manned landings to occur by 2028. Given Boeing's remarkable (even in this industry) delays and cost overruns with SLS and the severe doubt that it could even fly missions before 2021, this seems much more realistic.

Of course, it may be moot if private rocket development (read: SpaceX) proceeds as rapidly as it has been so far. At what point will Congress finally confront the realization that its dogged adherence to the sunk cost fallacy is no longer sustainable? Jim Bridenstine himself is on record as saying that if Starship works as hoped, NASA would be glad to buy rides on it.

Edited by Fighteer on Oct 16th 2019 at 12:19:05 PM

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

International Space Station

The first ever all-female spacewalk will occur today. Astronauts Christina Koch and Jessica Meir are making an emergency EVA to replace a power controller for one of the newly installed lithium-ion batteries that were brought to the ISS by Japan's HTV-8 mission. The battery installation was performed a few days ago, after which the failed component was detected.

NASA will livestream the event starting at 7:50 AM EDT (11:50 UTC).

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

Today is a day for more videos, it seems.

Artemis Spacesuits

NASA has unveiled the new spacesuit that will be worn by Artemis astronauts on the Moon. Well, a prototype of it anyway, and with a rather gaudy color scheme that probably won't make the final version. Watch NASA's original video here and Scott Manley's coverage here.

Everyday Astronaut and Aerospikes

A few months ago, Tim Dodd, the Everyday Astronaut ^note Bringing space down to Earth for everyday people, promised an in-depth study of a rocket engine concept that has attracted something of a cult following among aerospace nerds: the aerospike. What's so cool about the idea of the aerospike is that it purports to solve a problem faced by all rocket engines: the different expansion ratios of the nozzle needed for them to perform efficiently over a range of atmospheric pressures from sea level to vacuum. This would make them ideal for single stage to orbit (SSTO) rockets, a Holy Grail (or unicorn, depending on who you ask) of the rocket industry.

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Well, it's finally here. In this hour-long video, Tim gives us a history lesson of aerospike development, teaches a tutorial on engine nozzles, discusses the problems and challenges with aerospikes, compares the performance of bell nozzle engines with aerospikes, interviews some really important people on the subject ^note (the CEOs of SpaceX, Aerojet Rocketdyne, and Rocket Lab), and then presents his conclusions.

Spoiler: The reason we don't use aerospikes on modern rockets (or, indeed, have ever had an aerospike engine propel a functional rocket) is the engineering challenge. They are just too hard to build for the hypothetical value gained. What you gain in specific impulse you lose in combustion efficiency and thrust-to-weight ratios... never mind the R&D that goes down the toilet after you decide they aren't practical and give up.

Edited by Fighteer on Oct 18th 2019 at 2:46:21 PM

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

SpaceX

• After being taken apart following Elon Musk's presentation, Starship Mk1 has been undergoing a ton of work. The nose cone was cut again (presumably for a refitting), piping and wiring have been installed down the sides where the aerodynamic covers will be, and massive hinges are being installed where the rear fins were mounted [1]. It's getting closer to a functional rocket. Meanwhile, SpaceX has applied for a launch permit covering six months starting in October. SpaceXCentric Youtube video
• Elon Musk met secretly with Boca Chica residents after the September presentation to discuss the buyout offer. Many of them reported feeling pressured, but Musk listened respectfully to their concerns and declared that eminent domain would be an absolute last resort.
• SpaceX has pushed its Starlink 1 launch back to mid-November, for unclear reasons. The current lull is still claimed to be due to delays in customers having contracted payloads ready for launch. Some in the industry are saying that it's so expensive to build the large satellites for which Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy are designed that the market for launch services is simply saturated. Mars notwithstanding, this is probably one of the primary motivations for the company to become its own customer with Starlink. (Teslarati)

Rocket Lab

• Rocket Lab announced plans to use its Electron rocket and Photon kickstage to send payloads of up to 50 kg to the Moon, as well as GEO and L1/L2 capability. The company has continued to improve the performance of its hardware over time and its latest mission apparently was intended to test this so that it feels comfortable introducing this new capability. (Press release)

NASA

• NASA is holding a press conference aboard the ISS for the historic all-female spacewalk conducted this past week. (Twitter), contains link to NASA livestream.

Edited by Fighteer on Oct 21st 2019 at 12:21:34 PM

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

Blue Origin

• Ars Technica: Blue Origin announces a blue-chip team to return humans to the Moon

Apparently, Jeff Bezos has not been sitting inert on his piles of money, cacklingly directing the oppression of warehouse workers. Instead, he's put together a team of major companies to support the lunar descent and landing portion of NASA's Artemis program. Remember that NASA recently announced bidding for this exact thing, so here's Blue Origin's proposal.

I wish them luck. If they can make it work, I'll be cheering along with the rest of humanity. Of course, this assumes the 2024 target for the first crewed Moon mission, which remains very much up in the air (pun not intended) and is primarily dependent on Boeing delivering its end of the flight hardware: namely SLS.

Edited to add a link to Blue Origin's press release.

Edited by Fighteer on Oct 22nd 2019 at 10:34:45 AM

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

SpaceX Starship

@NASASpaceflight on Twitter: Starship Mk1 is being prepared for re-mating in preparation for her test flight. What this means is that the two pieces — the tank/engine section and the payload section — are about to be put back together. They were disassembled after Elon's September presentation. We have been repeatedly promised that the first test flight will indeed occur within two months, which would put it to the end of November.

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

Exos SARGE Launch 4

I wasn't aware of this until I saw it on Twitter, but Exos Aerospace just attempted the fourth launch of their SARGE suborbital rocket, carrying experiments from nine universities and research organizations. The event was livestreamed and covered by NASA Spaceflight.

• Article
• Forum thread
• Livestream

I love the scrappy, low-budget feel of the production. Unfortunately, the launch itself didn't go so well. The vehicle was rolling around like crazy on ascent, appears to have aborted at 41,000 feet, and it came back down in several pieces. The main body of the rocket failed to deploy its chute and crashed. The payloads may have survived; we don't know for sure.

Oh, well. Rocket science is hard.

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

Is there a sweet spot rocket developers ought to gun for in terms of how much money to devote towards a particular design in order to balance overall costs and not having a POS model that just wastes more in the long run?

I have absolutely no idea how specific amounts of money relate to the achievability of rocketry goals. There have been a lot of small launch startups in the past decade, all trying to compete for the smallsat and cubesat market that is underserved by the medium and heavy launch vehicles of government contractors.

Putting your cubesat on an Ariane 5 or Atlas V is massive overkill, and while you can try to buy ride-along space, you're subject to the schedule of the main payload.

However, of all the private companies that have entered the small launch market, only one has been able to succeed at getting payloads to orbit and become profitable enough to move on to really push the technology: Rocket Lab. SpaceX, of course, has been killing the medium lift market and made substantial inroads to heavy lift.

Then you have various suborbital rocketry endeavors, like Virgin Galactic (and Blue Origin, so far — more on that later) which are focusing more on space tourism than on selling commercial lift capacity.

What I think all of these companies underestimate is the sheer effort involved in getting that initial success: in taking the technology from drawing board to orbit and making it reliable. I don't have any real idea how much money is involved, or if that's even a reliable metric.

It helps to have a lot of money to start with. Blue Origin, founded by Jeff Bezos, has been in business longer than even SpaceX, has sunk billions into development, and has yet to produce an orbital rocket. They aren't going to run out of cash, though, since Jeff Who? has effectively infinite resources to spend. SpaceX, in turn, was founded on a shoestring by modern standards, barely avoided failure, but broke into the extremely lucrative government contracting market with its first successful flight, allowing it to spend on the R&D to make the really powerful and reliable technology it needed.

If you look at the differences, you start to see some patterns.

Boeing, Lockheed, Northrop, and similar giant contractors have cozy relationships with government that let them spend basically as much money as they want to develop rockets. They use a model where every single component gets designed, tested, and certified before it ever goes into a finished rocket. When they launch, they expect it to work the first time, every time. Blue Origin is reportedly following a similar model.

SpaceX, on the other hand, adopts a rapid iteration model where every flight is a break-test for some kind of technology. Fly, break, fix, repeat. This lets them mature revolutionary technologies with incredible speed and vastly lower cost. It cost under $400 million to develop their flagship Falcon 9 rocket. The first Falcon Heavy was made from old rocket cores that they had left over from previous versions of Falcon 9. Starship is being developed in fields from rolled stainless steel. If something blows up on the test stand, or on a test flight, that's considered a good thing.

Note that Commercial Crew is being developed under those NASA rules, where everything has to be fully certified before it flies once. This is a major reason why both Crew Dragon and Starliner are so late at making their first manned flights. It's why SLS has cost $20 billion and looks to cost $40 billion before it succeeds at a Moon landing.

Edited by Fighteer on Oct 26th 2019 at 8:16:53 AM

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

Scott Manley just put out a video about Exos Aerospace. I didn't know this either, but apparently it's a rebranding of Armadillo Aerospace, a rocketry company started by John Carmack back in 2000. They were founded to compete for the X-Prize and later the Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge, then moved into the field of recoverable suborbital flight. However, their program kept being marred by failures, Carmack got out in 2013, then some employees acquired the company's assets and started Exos.

Edited by Fighteer on Oct 28th 2019 at 9:49:43 AM

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

Apparently there's a big NASA Q&A going on for Commercial Crew Program today. All the info I'm seeing is on Twitter, without a coherent article to summarize it. I'll look for something with more detail and post it.

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

NASA Artemis

Eric Berger just tweeted an image of the NASA flight plan for the 2024 Moon landing. Looks ambitious.

SpaceX Crew Dragon (CCP)

Jeff Foust just tweeted about an update on the investigation into the static fire anomaly for Crew Dragon DM-1. The important takeaway is that a static fire test of the updated abort system is scheduled NET November 2. The actual DM-2 crewed mission is now scheduled NET March 2020.

SpaceX Starship

The two halves of Starship Mk1 are being transported from the construction site to the renovated launch site in Boca Chica. With Starhopper standing forlornly by, its successor is coming ever closer to its first launch. Images: [1] [2] [3]

Edited by Fighteer on Oct 30th 2019 at 10:49:07 AM

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

Here's the full video of the Commercial Crew Presentation from NASA.

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

And here's the NASA Spaceflight article about Starship Mk1.

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

Jim Bridenstine on Twitter [1]: "At my request, Monday’s @Commercial_Crew Starliner pad abort test will be broadcast live. Transparency for the taxpayer."

I assume that's Monday, November 4. I heartily approve of this and will definitely tune in at some point to see how it goes.

Edit: There's no word about whether SpaceX will livestream the static fire of Crew Dragon DM-2. They haven't before, and a static fire is not the same thing as a pad abort.

Edited by Fighteer on Oct 31st 2019 at 12:32:42 PM

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"