Starfall - SpaceX's Surprise New Spacecraft
Scott Manley
Not one of Scott's best videos, but it's understandable. The Starfall cargo capsule is not as exciting as a big rocket launch, but Mr. Manley does an adequate job covering all the basics which is more than everyone else in Google land was able to deliver.
Defence Blog got me started. The military is looking to use Starfall to deliver inflatable life rafts. A rocket should be able to deliver a life raft anywhere in the world in one hour.
Poseidon can also carry torpedoes or other munitions in the bomb bay. Poseidon is also used for Search And Rescue. So Starfall could also be used to deliver weapons quickly to anywhere in the world. Could be handy when SpaceX gets their big rocket going and we get real Starship Troopers.
Defence Blog reports on Sceptre ramjet-powered 155 mm artillery shell:
Sceptre is designed to give standard artillery much longer reach. Most extended-range shells use a short rocket burn after leaving the barrel. Sceptre instead carries liquid fuel for a ramjet, an air-breathing engine with no moving parts that keeps pushing the shell for much of its flight. According to Tiberius, the round can strike targets up to 150 km (93 miles) away at speeds of about Mach 3.5, flies above 19,800 meters (65,000 feet), and fires from existing NATO-standard 155 mm howitzers without modification.
In April 2026, Tiberius fired Sceptre from a NATO-standard 155 mm howitzer in New Mexico and achieved ramjet ignition in flight, which the company said was the first time a liquid-fueled ramjet projectile had been launched this way.
Remember Stoke Space? They developed a novel way of making a rocket's stages steerable that depended on regulating the fuel flow to the engines on a ring, so that instead of moving the engine bells in angles to the vertical, the engines are fixed and the fuel flow is varied.
The Battle of Delaware Bay, or the Battle of Cape May, was a naval engagement fought between the Kingdom of Great Britain and the United States during the American Revolutionary War. A British force of three vessels attacked three American privateers that were escorting a fleet of merchantmen. The ensuing combat in Delaware Bay near Cape May ended with the American sloop Hyder Ally capturing the British sloop-of-war HMS General Monk.
Background
Twenty-three-year-old Lieutenant Joshua Barney of the Continental Navy commanded the privateer sloop Hyder Ali during the battles. She was owned by Pennsylvania businessman John Willcocks and was issued a letter of marque. The sloop was armed with 16 six-pounders and had a crew of about 110 men, officers and marines, and was named after Hyder Ali, the ruler of the Kingdom of Mysore and a British enemy.
Hyder Ali? You mean the king of southern India? Yes, that Hyder Ali:
Hyder Ali was an innovator in the military use of rockets, which were used against positions and territories held by the East India Company during the Anglo-Mysore Wars. Although rocket technology originated in China and had made its way to India and Europe by the 13th century, development of accurate cannons had sidelined rockets as a military technology in Europe. Rocket technology was already in use when Hyder's father served (he commanded a company of 50 rocketmen), but it was Hyder who improved them and significantly expanded their use in the military. Technological innovations included the use of high-quality iron casing (better than was then available in Europe) for the combustion chamber, enabling the use of higher-powered explosive charges. . . . Rockets developed by Hyder and Tipu led to a renaissance of interest in the technology in Britain, where William Congreve, supplied with rocket cases from Mysore, developed what became known as Congreve rockets in the early 19th century.
In Hyder's time the Mysorean army had a rocket corps of as many as 1,200 men, which Tipu increased to 5,000. At the 1780 Battle of Pollilur, during the second war, Colonel William Baillie's ammunition stores are thought to have been detonated by a hit from one of Hyder's rockets, contributing to the British defeat.
The WW2 RAF pilots counter attack to the V1 menace was to gain altitude and dive at the flying bomb from the side opening fire with it's guns and cannons whilst using the deflection method of shooting.
If guns and arnament failed or were exhausted it was found and proven that you could tip these flying bombs out of the sky by disturbing their own air flow.
The skilled brave pilots did this by chasing and matching the bombs flying airspeed usually around 320 to 340 mph .They would then place the tip of their wing with great precision under the V1 wing and they would then rock their own wings from side to side to create an airflow disturbance ,which would in turn cause the V1's guidance gyroscope to fail and send the bomb crashing to earth.
Pilots accounts show when they tipped these flying bombs the idea was NOT to touch the V1 in any way but use the wing airflow and aerodynamic pressure to destroy it.
Russia claims that this nuclear powered missle made a 9,000 mile test flight. That's a very good trick. I don't know how it works, but the only way I can think of is that it operates like a ramjet. In that case they would use a conventional rocket to boost it up to cruising velocity where there is enough air coming in. The air is heated in the reactor and then it escapes out the back. If they can do that without spreading radiation far and wide, that would be a VERY good trick.
NATO's designation is Skyfall, which you may remember was the name of a James Bond movie from 2012.
In season 3 of the Netflix show The Diplomat, our players got themselves twisted in knots over a Russian submarine that was carrying a Poseidon drone that sank off the coast of England.
While these weapons are fearsome, I don't think it is worth worrying about them. I mean, we already have enough nuclear armed conventional missiles to destroy the world should someone get a burr up their ass.
On the plus side, they might prompt our nuclear engineers to develop our own miniature nuclear reactor, assuming they haven't already done so and are just keeping it under wraps. Miniature nuclear reactors could be very handy for just about anything people want to do. Assuming they can figure out how to deal with the radioactive byproducts.
Significant activity on Russia's Novaya Zemlya archipelago indicates an impending test of the nuclear-powered Burevestnik cruise missile, known as Skyfall by NATO. - OilPrice
Google Maps doesn't show lines of latitude or longitude. I adjusted the view so that the line of longitude that runs through our target is vertical, i.e. the North Pole is directly above Novaya Zemlya at some unknown distance. Looking around, I found a couple other maps of the arctic that do have some better information.
Reading Starship Troopers (a zillion years ago) and we've got soldiers dropping from orbit. I went looking for pictures of such, but bupkis. Well, how about HALO jumps? They're not from orbit, but they can be jumping from 8 miles up, which has so little air you might as well be in space, and I found this image.
Why am I thinking about Starship Troopers? Because the Air Force is building a new missile base on Johnston Island:
Remember back at the beginning, back before the first Starship prototype was even built, when Elon was talking about how the Starship was going to revolutionize international travel? It was kind of a hair-brained scheme, but evidently someone at the Air Force was paying attention, because they realized it could be used to transport cargo as well as people. Any kind of commercial shipping isn't going to use a rocket, they use cargo ships because pound for pound, they are much cheaper. But if you have an emergency somewhere and you need to get a bunch of stuff somewhere quickly, a rocket is just the ticket.
But the Starship is designed to carry people. It's going to be a little tougher on people than an airliner, but soldiers are pretty tough, so it shouldn't be a problem for them.
Landing in remote regions occupied by enemy forces might be a problem though, so we might want to drop our troops in, like paratroopers. We don't have a technique for doing that from orbit, at least not yet, but Starship can manage reentry, and at some point it's velocity will be low enough that troops could safely exit the vehicle, so we would have Starship paratroops, i.e. Starship Troopers.
It's going to be a few years before we get to this point, but it's undoubtedly coming.
Johnston Atoll is in the middle of the Pacific Ocean:
Cleaning out my bookmarks this morning (a futile endeavor, it will never be complete), I came across this old post that I never published, probably because I had more to say, but I got distracted, so it fell in the bit bucket. Anyway it was originally written back in June 2024 and since it seems to be complete enough as it is, I'm posting it now.
Pleasant Beach Scene
I clipped these from an RT video. I had to watch it twice before I realized what I was looking at. I was expecting death, destruction and explosions, but there is none of that.
A few seconds later
Just that these water spouts suddenly appear. There is a smoke cloud in the lower left, but whatever caused it didn't appear to injure anyone. Unfortunately there wasn't any sound in the video, or maybe there wasn't any sound to hear. Things falling through the air don't make a lot of sound, do they?
Ukraine fired several American ATACMS missiles at a target in Crimea. They may have been aiming at the naval base in Sevastopol or a nearby communications facility. Russia claims to have intercepted most of the missiles with their own anti-missile missiles. So these water spouts might be from the debris from the destroyed missiles falling out of the sky, and not from the bomblets that the ATACMS missiles can carry.
The Aldrin Mars Cycler is new to me. It might work out, but right now it strikes me as extremely sketchy. And the business of using solar panels to generate power on Mars also sounds marginal. A nuclear power plant would be better. Of course, a nuclear power plant would be a big chuck of mass. Question is whether a nuclear power plant would weigh less than six acres of solar panels.
This guy (at least I think it was this guy) eventually got a model rocket to take off and then land vertically, which is cool, but this video showing all his failures is cooler.
Starship S33 Explosion and Re-Entry after Anomaly | RUD Starship S33 Flight 7
SpaceXtudio
I don't know why anyone uses the acronym RUD (Rapid Unscheduled Disassembly). Why don't they just say it dun blowd up? Either someone was either trying to be clever when they coined the term, or they were lost in acronym land and everything had to have an acronym, so they coined this one.
SpaceX launched their big booster with a Starship on top this week. The booster returned to the launch site and was caught by the outstretched arms of Mechazilla. The Starship itself did not fare so well, exploding on the way up to orbit and giving us this light show.
Koyaanisqatsi is a 1982 American non-narrative documentary film directed and produced by Godfrey Reggio, featuring music composed by Philip Glass and cinematography by Ron Fricke. The film consists primarily of slow motion and time-lapse footage (some of it in reverse) of cities and many natural landscapes across the United States. The visual tone poem contains neither dialogue nor a vocalized narration: its tone is set by the juxtaposition of images and music. Reggio explained the lack of dialogue by stating "it's not for lack of love of the language that these films have no words. It's because, from my point of view, our language is in a state of vast humiliation. It no longer describes the world in which we live." In the Hopi language, the word koyaanisqatsi means "life out of balance".
Is that a Saturn 5 rocket taking off? Yes and no. 22over7aintpi explains in a comment:
In case you were wondering there are two rockets featured in this sequence. The first is a Saturn V on the launch pad, the second is the first Atlas-Centaur Missile launched on May 8, 1962. No one was hurt in that explosion and clues to why it exploded are a flapping liquid nitrogen line by the vernier engine and the venting liquid hydrogen some seconds into flight. The failure was determined to be caused by an insulation panel that ripped off the Centaur during ascent, resulting in a surge in tank pressure when the LH2 overheated. Beginning at T+44 seconds, the pneumatic system responded by venting propellant to reduce pressure levels, but eventually, they exceeded the LH2 tank's structural strength. At T+54 seconds, the Centaur experienced total structural breakup and loss of telemetry, the LOX tank rupturing and producing an explosion as it mixed with the hydrogen cloud. Two seconds later, flying debris ruptured the Atlas's LOX tank followed by complete destruction of the launch vehicle. The panel had been meant to jettison at 49 miles (80 km) up when the air was thinner, but the mechanism holding it in place was designed inadequately, leading to premature separation. The insulation panels had already been suspected during Centaur development of being a potential problem area, and the possibility of an LH2 tank rupture was considered as a failure scenario. Testing was suspended while efforts were made to correct the Centaur's design flaws.
I prefer to think the dragon legends come down to us from a previous civilization that had mechanized, flying war machines like the A-10 Warthog. After that civilization collapsed and the art of heavier-than-air aircraft was lost, how would you explain something like an A-10 to your kids? "There were fire breathing monsters that flew through the air and destroyed everything in their path". That's how.
I like Graham Hancock, the guy who's always postulating the existence of an advanced human civilization a zillion years ago, except I just now had a thought. What if this advanced civilization actually created humans from the biological material at hand (like all the existing plants and animals)? Created us as an experiment, and when the experiment started to get out of hand, they bailed out. Kind of like the archetypal mad scientist in horror movies. He brews up some mystical stew in a large pot and it reacts too well, starts bubbling over and eventually expands to take over his lab, the building and the town. Yeah, at this point the mad scientist bails out and I suspect a similar scenario prompted our createors to bail out as well.
It is doubtful we would ever find any evidence of such a civilization on account of the ice age glaciers that ground everything to dust. And if we ever did find any evidence, I doubt whether we would recognize it, much less understand it.
This footage captures a major attack unfolding in Ukraine, with Zelensky claiming it was caused by an ICBM—missiles designed to deliver nuclear or conventional warheads and nearly impossible to intercept.
I like this excerpt. Al Jazeera is usually all Israel-bad all the time.
The strike on Tuesday came roughly 40 minutes after an Israeli military spokesperson posted a warning in Arabic on social media, notifying people in and around a pair of buildings in the southern suburbs of the Lebanese capital that they should evacuate the area.
He did not explain why the buildings were being targeted, other than to say they were near “interests and facilities” associated with the Hezbollah group.
The warning prompted many people to flee the busy, densely populated neighbourhood, even as others, including a few journalists, kept watch. By the time of the attack, the building had been evacuated and there were no reports of casualties.
Minutes before the missile brought down the building, two smaller projectiles were fired at the roof in what Israel’s military often refers to as warning strikes, according to the AP journalists at the scene. It is a practice Israel has followed in strikes in the Gaza Strip.
