Fuel filter dislodged and gummed up the engine.

No you're correct. They did make orbit on their most recent launch, just lower than the intended one.

Ah, we've reached the beginning of the end, it seems. It was always somewhat questionable whether they could make their business case close, either for demand reasons or because this tech doesn't scale up to let you launch larger satellites.

> The Falcon family won't retire before 2030 the earliest because it's flying Dragon missions to the ISS

Probably, yeah, although Dragon missions don't RTLS so SpaceX can give up the landing pads while still fulfilling their ISS contracts.

Is there any personal/keepsake item you'd like to take to the moon?

ULA has been mumbling to themselves in a corner about engine parachute recovery since 2007 if not earlier, maybe even before the merger. It's not going to happen.

Eh, it took SpaceX several years to scale to that sort of launch cadence. I certainly wouldn't expect Old Space to miraculously reach a flight every other week within a year.

> why ULA went with BO has never really made sense can anyone tell me why?

Aerojet's AR1 engine was way behind in development. In short, they didn't want to design it unless someone else was paying for it and that made development drag out. BO, on the other hand, was building the BE-4 on its own dime regardless of whether someone else was interested in buying them. Aerojet basically has no ambition as a company.

A flat water surface might as well be concrete. It will reflect sound waves. The goal is to dampen the sound so you spray it through the air to disrupt the sound waves instead of reflect them.

One of the goals of Artemis is discovery, measurement, and experiments with lunar surface materials like ice in polar craters. Lunar surface materials are, by definition, on the moon, not Earth.

Full moon "articles" are basically the lowest of low effort content. Full moons happen on a schedule (a schedule that other people have already worked out for the news sites so they don't have to do any original work), there's basically nothing new to say about them, but you can still run advertisements against those articles. The moon also conveniently dovetails with the reader demographics who think astrology and horoscopes have real power. It's basically free money, and I think that's the causal driver because we know that news rooms have been in decline for a while. Real journalism is hard work and costs time + money, clickbait is effortless and cheap to churn out.

Lockheed gets their feed from the Orion capsule. This contract is just for the SLS rocket.