The docking adapters look pretty much the same (interlocking petals, not male/female) and can be active, passive, or both, but Dragon’s is only active. Active has to dock to passive, so two Dragons couldn’t dock.

SpaceX developed a new one that can be active or passive for Starship, which will have to dock with Orion and the Lunar Gateway.

https://www.nasa.gov/image-article/nasa-spacex-test-starship-lunar-lander-docking-system/

Maybe? Soyuz is too cramped, but Dragon might be able to fit extra people. A few years ago a NASA astronaut flew up on a leaky Soyuz, so they looked at using Dragon as a lifeboat:

https://www.space.com/nasa-spacex-dragon-rescue-spacecraft-soyuz-leak

Dragon was drawn up to fit 7 people, with 3 seats on the bottom and 4 on top. They ended up changing the seat angles for reentry, so now they only have 4.

–

Starliner is still their emergency ride home in case a real alarm goes off, but they want to study the leak issue as much as possible before they separate their service module, which burns up during reentry.

This process led to Falcon, which is one of the most reliable rockets of all time. The launch rate and reuse are unprecedented. Iterative design is a big part of how they got there. Their prowess in manufacturing and mass production is another large part of that success.

It sounds like they still have some hope of bringing it back, so, fingers crossed.

It looks like more Venus probes will start launching over the next few years. There’s the Rocket Lab / MIT mission first, then more from the US, China, India, and Russia to close out the decade. Plus ESA’s next probe in 2032.

I think Jared Isaacman is my favorite space billionaire? Not that that should be a thing, but he’s at least spending his money on private missions that move technology development forward.

In 2018, right? When’s the 2nd launch supposed to be?

I hope so, but if they launch on the suborbital trajectory again because they aren’t certain about the Raptor relight for a deorbit burn, then I’m guessing a Starlink won’t be able to deploy and raise its orbit in time to not also reenter.

SpaceX, in a perfect world, just wants to be the railroad to facilitate others who want to build stations, bases, mining, recycling, etc.

As far as the greenness of rockets, recycling would be 5th in the 5 R’s:

• Refuse: refuse to use wasteful rockets? I don’t really know how to apply this one.
• Reduce: I suppose rideshares and vehicles with multiple hosted payloads are good
• Reuse: See: SpaceX
• Repurpose: Wet workshops?
• Recycle: energy intensive and would need tons of infrastructure to process and use on orbit

I’m hoping this is successful enough to put Starlinks on the next one to actually get operational, but the loss of attitude control and lack of Raptor relight don’t make me super optimistic.

Have you heard of Dragonfly? It’s a thousand pound, nuclear powered drone that’ll fly around Titan. Ingenuity has been a great first step (hop?) with these rotorcraft, and I’m really looking forward to seeing what else comes next.

Ouch, Vulcan did its job, but Peregrine can’t get stable sun pointing to charge batteries. Hopefully they’re able to get back on track. The volley of lunar landers in the past few years has been rough.

We’ll see if ULA actually gets sold now that Vulcan finally flew and LM and Boeing want out.

It still doesn’t make any sense to me for Blue Origin to buy them.

Same. I think they can be great for quick and dirty stuff, especially to lower the barrier to entry for non-CS people.

I work with some people who’ve made quick little scripts for things like data processing, starting with ChatGPT, and fiddling with it to get it to work. When I had to do that a few years ago, I started with random forum posts instead. I don’t see those as being meaningfully different.