Kevin Zagorski (but colder)
@KevZag
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currently: winter ops, south pole telescope '23-'24 • space 🌌 and tacos 🌮 • previously 🚀
South Pole Station, Antarctica
Joined February 2009
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Some personal news: After a much needed break from space work, I'm stoked to be joining the University of Chicago Astronomy & Astrophysics department supporting winter operations at the
@SPTelescope
in Antarctica for the next year.
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LAN parties are not so common anymore in the hyper connected world of 2024 but at South Pole, when the satellites are down, it might as well be 1997 all over again.
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It took a bit longer to make it all the way down here but the G5 certainly delivered...
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tfw you can't get to the machine shop bc antarctica is antarctica-ing a little too hard today :(
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South Pole Geostorm Day 2:
Looking good in green 💚
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We recently switched to Microsoft Teams company-wide.
A bunch of rocket engineers discovering they can group edit an excel doc is a thing of beauty...
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Nominal 1st stage recovery 😄
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I wish all the luck in the world to my friends at Blue but this is not the look of a rocket that's going to launch for the first time in seven weeks... Hope everybody has refundable tickets for the holidays.
Hello, mate. We recently completed our final major mate operation on
#NewGlenn
’s 188-foot first stage, merging the aft with the mid module.
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You've given me a lot of grief over the past 6+ years, but damn I feel good seeing you on a wing.
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A special shoutout today to all the awesome engineers and technicians who design, build, test, fly, and maintain this new generation of suborbital spacecraft.
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Soooo we made orbit yesterday and I have some feelings... 1/
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Ever see a rocket engine combustion chamber completely split in half during a hot fire test?
👇 Now you have 👇
Courtesy of the good folks at
@NASA_Marshall
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It looks like Firefly made another big step and completed their Alpha wet dress rehearsal in the last few days. Almost ready to light that stick!
📷: somebody on linkedin
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@SpaceX
@Firefly_Space
@relativityspace
@blueorigin
@ulalaunch
@AerojetRdyne
There's the bar.
If a space company can't openly commit to their employees' welfare as strongly as a *sporting goods store* they don't get to throw around those "space access for the good of the Earth" slogans anymore. Thems the rules.
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Right now there are 4 different commercial rockets at 4 different launchpads/runways across the country getting prepped to go to space, none of which were flying even a few years ago. That's pretty dang spectacular if you ask me.
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I don't know who owns Virgin Orbit's flight data IP now, but a super cool thing to do would be to release the data and internal reports for the Flight 1 and Flight 6 failure investigations. They would be very valuable case studies for the rest of the launch industry to learn from
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A pitch for the space journos:
The anti-healthcare trigger laws in Texas and Mississippi have now triggered. Alabama is now positioned to enforce pre-Roe bans. What are the space companies in those states going to do now to enable their employees' access to healthcare?
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You never really appreciate the amount of infrastructure that goes into a rocket launch until you need to put it all on wheels...
Here's some shots of our awesome payload integration trailer from a test run last week.
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Always nice to have space neighbors next door when you need to borrow a cup of LOX.
@RocketLab
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Happy Summer Solstice from the South Pole! The sun reached an annual peak of 23.5 degrees above the horizon yesterday. 🌞
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BREAKING: I am announcing a company to produce grilled cheese sandwiches. They will be great! In Phase 1 I will construct 1 grilled cheese sandwich. In Phase 2 I will construct 11,865 grilled cheese sandwiches.
Please DM for investment.
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You vs. the Starship she tells you not to worry about
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I would understand the doggedness if the HLS contract funding was existential to Blue Origin as a company, but Jeff Bezos' net worth alone could fund the entirety of NASA's budget for a decade. This is an embarrassment for our industry.
New: Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin has sued NASA, dragging its fight to win a chunk of lunar lander funding into a new phase that could trigger another lengthy pause to SpaceX's contract.
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Bored?
Try hand drilling through a spring steel coil under high shear load using the only carbide drill bit within 900 miles.
You will certainly not regret hand drilling through a spring steel coil under high shear load using the only carbide drill bit within 900 miles.
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Give them to university rocket groups you cowards.
Notably, Virgin Orbit has not yet sold the 6 or so rockets that were in various states of manufacturing and assembly, as well as its intellectual property.
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Are we *really* throwing a hissy fit about safety approvals for launch vehicles on NASA's Day of Remembrance?
Statement from the FAA just now re the SpaceX SN9 flight: “We will continue working with SpaceX to resolve outstanding safety issues before we approve the next test flight.”
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The photos from today's LauncherOne flight are just awesome, but when you adjust the horizon to better show the 747 pitch angle... 😲
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Pretty incredible to be in a place where "golden hour" lasts for a couple weeks...
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It's not every day you get the chance to plant a giant US flag at the geographic south pole of the world, but it's pretty cool when you do 🇺🇲🦅🎆
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One year ago today a colleague and I dialed into a zoom with a local medical group to see what, if anything, VO could do to help the looming national ventilator shortage due to COVID. By the end of the mtng we sketched a concept. Within 24 hours we were testing a prototype.
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Watching this 30 ton, 70 foot long labor of love perform a clean drop and then steer herself toward space is one of the most incredible things I've ever seen.
Go
@Virgin_Orbit
.
Go LauncherOne.
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Cosmic Girl landed, crew safe
LauncherOne Rocket 3 in orbit
Doesn't get much better than this.
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TFW you're looking on craigslist for a telescope and come across what seems to be an actual Hubble Telescope manufacturing fixture for sale...
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I've found that in far too many cases in industry the "Engineer to Engineering Manager" pipeline causes a double problem: You tend to lose productivity from a strong technical contributor while gaining a weak people manager. Interested to hear how people have seen this succeed.
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Going to be a busy month in the machine shop finishing up the new geographic South Pole marker for 2025.
also, these safety glasses are peak style and it will be really difficult to not steal them when I leave.
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"In 2017, Starliner had an accident during a ground test that forced the president of a different subcontractor to have his leg medically amputated."
excuse me what.
“Getting a valve maker or propulsion system provider to write down, 'Yeah, I screwed that up' ... that's never gonna happen."
Boeing and Starliner’s propulsion system provider Aerojet Rocketdyne are privately feuding over the spacecraft’s valve issues
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I still find it amazing that Soyuz descent capsules are all marked up with instructions in the event a random person stumbles across it before recovery teams do.
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Pro-tip: If you want to be taken seriously as a competent space launch company it's probably not a good idea to show an aerospike as your upper stage engine... 😑
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At $10 billion this is the most expensive single payload ever launched on a rocket.
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3/1/2024 - The last demobilizing flight has departed and Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station is officially closed for winter. Temps are dropping too low for aircraft to safely operate so our 40 winterover crew members won't see a new face for 8 months. See ya'll on the other side.
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if somebody at mcmaster-carr really thought that massively inflating my job title on a shipping label would make me walk around to everyone at work and show off the new catalog they sent me...
they were 100% right.
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@NASA_Marshall
Sequence of events is shown below. This was tested with a printed GrCop-42 combustion chamber containing witness lines and a composite nozzle with a known crack. Nozzle goes away first followed by the chamber unzipping itself at the barrel.
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There's too many hot takes on Twitter about the "race" between SpaceX and Boeing. This pic shows what it's actually all about: Two roads to orbit from US soil. Beautiful.
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did an unemployed social scientist write this?
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Life at the South Pole is fun but the side effects from all the directed energy weapon research down here can be... interesting.
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Right now there are three commercially developed smallsat launchers on their respective pads readying for spaceflight. That's pretty dang cool to think about!
@VirginOrbit
@Astra
@RocketLab
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Alongside many of my colleagues, today is officially my last day with the LauncherOne program
@VirginOrbit
. Ten years is a long time to do anything but I was fortunate to have opportunities to be involved in so many different projects during that time.
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Pictures from happier times at Masten. Some of the best engineers I know have had their fingerprints on that hardware. What an outsized loss for the industry.
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I was one of these "fresh grads" working these same hours 10 years ago. I'm still trying to recover from that insanely unhealthy mindset.
For any early career folks or college students that follow me, know that you don't have to give into "hustle culture" to build badass things
We only have a small handful of fresh grads
@VardaSpace
But they all have their nose to the grindstone, get to the office 7:30a and leave 12-14 hours later
No better way to get ahead early in career than joining a fast-growing startup and outworking your peers
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Late stage development/qual testing is really where SpaceX and Blue Origin's divergent approaches to production pipelines come into play. There aren't many assembled BE-4 engines so an anomaly like this can create a big schedule hit downstream.
Scoop – One of Blue Origin’s BE-4 rocket engines exploded during a test firing in Texas on June 30, according to CNBC sources.
The engine was to be delivered this month to ULA for Vulcan’s Cert-2 launch. More:
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but why does starship need *more* payload performance...?
Musk said SpaceX has made a "late-breaking" change to Starship/Super Heavy stage separation, switching to a hot-staging approach where the ship lights its engines while a few booster engines are still firing. He estimates a ~10% increase in payload performance with this.
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🎶the best part of waking up,
is shooting rockets into spaaace🎶
Virgin Orbit
#TubularBells
is off bright and early tomorrow morning.
Livestream: 5:30am Pacific
Takeoff: ~6am Pacific
Drop: ~7am Pacific
Sayonara, Rocket 4. Thanks for being easier than R3
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This company currently has 4 C-suite executives and just 2 engineers, per LinkedIn.
Good luck.
Radian Aerospace, a startup emerging from stealth after raising a $27.5 million seed round, is aiming to develop a fully-reusable spaceplane called Radian One, to carry cargo and crew to low Earth orbit:
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Well that was something I've not seen a rocket do before...
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Now with Flight 2 we've finished the job. Made orbit. Launched satellites. I have so much gratitude towards all my teammates, past and present, who have worked so hard for so many years to make yesterday’s result a reality. 11/
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happy to report our telescope operations are extremely safe from the recent crowdstrike outage.
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Always great spending time with
@Virgin_Orbit
's Cosmic Girl. Main cabin is stripped down but the upper deck is where the action happens.
#AvGeek
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Being at the rocket factory late at night comes with the upside of watching prop technicians rocking out to nsync while assembling a booster engine. A magical sight to behold.
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two thoughts:
1.) sheet forming primary vehicle structures is the right move both from a business and practical perspective.
2.) it is *wild* that you would spend so much capital on large structure additive development (not to mention PR focus) and then just not do it anymore!
Relativity Space is going “all in” on its larger Terran R rocket, CEO
@thetimellis
says, effectively shelving Terran 1 after a single launch – a strategy shift that also sees it introduce traditional metal-bending manufacturing in its 3D-printing design:
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48 hours. Silence is loud.
Not a word from spacex publicly more than 24 hours after significant harassment stories drop.
Imagine what that says to current employees who have been (or are currently) targets of harassment. It's really disappointing.
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No, the Atmospheric Research Observatory isn't evil or haunted, it just looks that way sometimes.
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Everyone did everything. From building a test site from an empty slab in the desert to picking up parts at local machine shops. Lots of learning during this time. (Pro-tip: Just because someone can design a rocket engine doesn't mean they're qualified to paint a test stand...) 6/
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Busy transportation day here at South Pole Station with arrivals and departures of a KBA Twin Otter and White Desert Basler BT-67. We also welcomed the South Pole Overland Traverse (SPoT) convoy which has spent the past month towing fuel bladders all the way from the coast.
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Coming up for air for a minute to thank all the folks passing along kind words of encouragement. We're not there yet but we have a good design, an even better team, and all the motivation in the world.
Back to work.
″[It is] a very, very simple and robust design that we can get out to the people who are in the most need, and the hospitals that are in the most need, of devices like these very, very quickly,” Virgin Orbit’s
@KevZag
says:
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Last time I saw this exact Centaur tank it was in a shed at
@MojaveAirport
. Nice to see it being put to educational use.
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An incomplete list of people to ask:
@SpaceX
(TX)
@Firefly_Space
(TX)
@relativityspace
(MS)
@blueorigin
(TX, AL)
@ulalaunch
(AL)
@AerojetRdyne
(AL)
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A ton of changes happened over the next few years. The rocket got bigger and changed from pressure-fed to pump-fed, we moved from dropping off WhiteKnightTwo to our own dedicated 747, we spun off from Virgin Galactic and became Virgin Orbit, and we moved to Long Beach. 7/
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A big upside of the sun closing in on the horizon for the first time since May is that we can finally see the crazy polar terrain again. Beautiful wind-blasted sastrugi as far as the eye can see...
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I'll be honest I knew nothing about
@chamath
before his company bought a 49% stake in
@virgingalactic
last week other than that he was a "Silcon Valley guy". Just listened to a
@Recode
interview with him and was genuinely impressed by what I heard.
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I still remember the day I realized we weren't a tiny launch startup anymore. I was assembling my desk in our largely empty new building in Long Beach and a facilities team member walked up to me and said "Hey you know we have people who can do that now, right?” 8/
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When I joined VG almost 9 years ago (woof) as an intern on the SpaceShipTwo program the very first meeting my manager brought me to was a concept design review for a smallsat launcher upper stage engine. At that point, LauncherOne hadn't even been publicly announced yet. 2/
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One of the downsides of maturing as a propulsion engineering group is that you tend to start naming parts more ✨officially✨ like "Flow Straightening Manifold" instead of fun and confusing names like "Bird Cage", "Super Bird Cage", and "Nicholas Cage".
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Three of the same payloads that flew on SpaceShipTwo on Friday are going to space *again* tomorrow on New Shepard.
Science experiments.
Flying to space.
On two different US-built vehicles.
Less than a week apart.
This is WILD.
Blue Origin plans to conduct its next New Shepard suborbital test flight tomorrow morning from West Texas. No people will be on board the vehicle, but the capsule will be filled with experiments.
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brb forwarding this to our flight sciences team to make them cry
Day 72 of daily cursed rocket photoshops:
LauncherFive
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VO has grown and matured a lot over the last few years especially. Subsystem development is hard but thorough system integration and qualification is *so* much harder. 9/
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Our 1st Demo Launch last May didn't get as far as we would have hoped but watching L1 follow through a pitch perfect pull up after engine start was incredible to see. You just can't test that kind of thing before you actually do it. And Flight 1 proved we could. 10/
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J-2X going everywhere but space 😢
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Looks like the
@ablspacesystems
team is making great progress toward their first RS-1 launch up in Kodiak!
(📷 LinkedIn)
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One year since my team took one last picture in front of our last rocket before the doors closed. Still feels good to know that our machines were continuing to build flight parts when we left.
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I am very much looking forward to the inevitable behind the scenes interview with the Blue Origin graphic designer who was told to make all these bananagrams infographics.
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My first exposure to the program was that meeting where I watched a design engineer not much older than I argue back and forth about fluid dynamics in a rocket injector with a technical advisor from NASA who had decades of propulsion experience. 3/
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It's lunch time so I finally was able to catch up on the update of rocketlab's new thicc boi.
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Challenging conventional approaches to propulsion and space launch was exactly what I wanted to do in my career. I was hooked from day one. 4/
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Whoa. I remember being in high school and running into Grant and Kari randomly at a rural NY airport terminal while I was on my way to FIRST Robotics Nationals. It felt like meeting a couple of Yankees players while heading to a T-ball game!
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