hard to believe its been 25 years. I remember watching CSPAN at my grandmothers on a friday night watching the live coverage of STS-88 Mating the Russian Zarya Module to the US Unity node.

I'm pretty NASA signed the deal knowing full well that they were taking a big risk. The chances of Starship HLS being a Long Poll item for Artemis III were high. They chose Starship HLS knowing that it had a long and risky critical path.

And In fairness to NASA....and I may not have all of these details correct, but they didnt have many choices. the NASA Reauthorization Act required them to select two different landers for HLS, but the budget only funded one and under funded them at that. Starship was all that they could afford. Congress has since gone back and funded a second one.

Or just more people being exposed to the blue marble effect the better.

that goes way back to the early days of spacex. its a jab at ULA that was getting their engines from Russia. and at Russia itself because Musk felt screwed when he tried to buy a couple ICBMS for his original mars idea.

the people that hate musk are going to find something wrong with it "The Ship blew up on landing" and the musk lovers will do the opposite when things actually go wrong.

And the many more people he fired through DOGE? What will they do and how justified is that?

Not an Aerospace Engineer by any measure but I would say that one was pretty much by the numbers.

Last Flight for Block 1 Booster, Block 2 Ship and Pad A in its current Configuration.

Hold for wap-spotter

I played with it some last year. not much has changed since I used it in a GIS class in 2007 in college.

I'd argue a lot has changed, though mostly extensions and bottlenecks in QGIS.

Cant's speak much for arcgis, but it is bloated usually for me so I use it sparingly.

I was talking about ArcGIS.

It was said somewhere that one of the previous ditches in the ocean. the booster remained a little too intact and floated into Mexican waters creating a navigational hazard. So the idea was also to make sure it broke up on splashdown.