I think the main point was that I was right last time. BTW, I don't watch any youtube, I stopped watching TV when I was 19.

The number of ground causalities from booster stages landing on land, intentionally, is greater in China than in Russia (well, Kazakstan.)

Other than the people on the ground, who died from booster stages landing on land.

This is false, as I've pointed out repeatedly in the past.

Look at how SLS does it.

Look at how Energia did it.

Look at how Shuttle did it.

The core stage does not relight for any of these.

All of them did it on the first try, too.

Who knows, maybe they'll add a bit more propulsion to the payload so that the booster doesn't quite enter orbit and comes down in a controlled fashion?

That's the standard Russian and US solution to "big stage coming down uncontrolled". Which you just saw being used with SLS, and was used by Energia and Shuttle.

For the record, there are plenty of photos that say that evacuations aren't always successful.

I'm fully aware of why these launch sites were built inland, and that new Chinese rockets use a coastal launch site. And that Russia never built a launch site on their east coast for the same reason.

Perhaps you'd use a mobile phone tower plus a Starlink ground station -- satellite back-haul is already a thing in the mobile phone industry.

One nit is if they actually have customers in those cells -- no one lives near the LMT, NOEMA, or the IRAM30m, but actual people certainly do live near Haystack.

Have you noticed that some Starlink use in Ukraine is to plonk it down in the middle of a village or urban area and let 100 people connect to it with individual phones? Way cheaper than a mobile phone tower. Albeit annoying that you have to stay within wifi range to use it.

OK so that changed. I had put in reservations for Owens Valley, Haystack, and the LMT in Mexico and was notified that the first 2 cells were opened... but that was quite a while ago now.

Other ones not there off the top of my head:

EHT: Kitt Peak and Mt. Graham AZ; IRAM 30m uphill from Grenada; NOEMA in the French Alps, and I know that Thule Greenland is using Starlink. The South Pole will likely want to use Starlink.

VLBA: Arecibo (the VLBA antenna didn't fall down)

This particular CZ-2F rocket drops its boosters in an area that has some villages. Toxic fuel, too.

Edit: Speaking of toxic, I wonder why there's so much toxic downvoting in these discussions?

I know VLBI very well, and there's still a problem even if you take beamforming into account.

You can get Starlink at several EHT stations, so I'm not so sure how true that is. For example, Haystack.

Maybe that changed more recently?

Even better, "we" launched a Korean satellite to the moon 2 months ago, and "we" will launch a Japanese lander to the moon in a couple of days.

This rocket is a bit small to send this satellite to L1 -- it's in a low earth orbit which happens to be SSO.

Zero Chinese have died on earth, other than the villagers downrange from their inland launch sites.

CZ-5B was also previously used for China's next generation capsule.

Only about $2mm of Beresheet's funding came from a government, so there's some hairsplitting here.

It isn't human-rated yet. This test has to be passed first.

This capsule lacks most of the life support system, btw.

Edit: It's surprising how many sub members appear to think you can human-rate a spacecraft without flying it! Remember the challenges Boeing is still having with getting Starliner human-rated?

I mean that given the fraud at Skype, it's probably a bad idea to uphold them as your best example.

The article says that Arianespace expected to break even for 2021, including a subsidy.

How did 2022 turn out? Well, Arianespace had to give OneWeb some of their money back, Ariane 5 launched twice and one launch only had a single satellite, Vega C will probably launch twice, and woo hoo, 1 Soyuz launch in February.

Yes, that on-time completion of Ariane 6 really helped their financials! That plus the Amazon order means they didn't need any launch subsidies in the most recent ESA budget.

Oh, wait.

Given the fraud at Skype around secret intellectual property, I don't think that's the best example of anything but fraud.

The unit of Airbus that designed the A380, which had the wrong length wiring due to a French/German software mismatch, and then was only built for 14 years before running out of orders? I mean, Boeing commercial aircraft has had some disasters, but so has Airbus commercial. You definitely don't want to be the person throwing stones out of your glass house.

> Just to illustrate the reliability point: JWST was launched on Ariane, partly because it was such a proven, established platform with a good track record.

That was a barter agreement with NASA, not any kind of competition. SpaceX didn't exist when that barter was decided, but ULA certainly did.