I was able to see that launch too! Rocket Lab always cooks with their mission patches. I can’t wait for things to really pick up in the next two years

I think the goal is to figure out which sections of the ship are least resilient to tile loss. That would better inform the design of future versions of the ship, which are aiming to be more readily reusable. Doing it to save weight doesn’t make sense given the locations/the whole ablative layer

Neither of them are perfectly accurate. I thought more streamlined nacelles might look cool for the Enterprise-D. Yolo lol

That looks like the second stage’s engines to me

Genuinely at a loss for words rn

A booster will look sick after a few flights tho

The window seems to be 7:45PM-1AM. Is it actually going off at the start of the window?

Do you know what the streak of light in the bottom of the picture is?

Cool

This is beautiful

Being able to walk under Discovery’s engines at Udvar-Hazy is amazing

New Glenn is beautiful. I don’t want to hear anyone saying otherwise

You’re a real one 🙏

They removed a chuck of it off of both sides between the flaps. They need to reduce mass and catch hardware will ultimately need to go there. Last flight they had some aluminum tiles on that area and they based the heat shield redesign off of which aluminum tiles melted

Its pretty snazzy if I do say so myself