Lupi

The astronauts are comin' home!
You should see them streak across the sky thru reentry, and you might even hear the sonic boom! As the tweet says, should be over the course of 12:05 to 12:20 ish.

I'm probably gonna find someplace like the bridge downtown and try to set up a long exposure, probably fail at that, but have fun regardless

i've not caught an atlantic return yet, i always miss 'em

This is their second attempt at doing so, the first ended in failure for a handful of issues that compounded, but to my understanding those problems came from not testing the thing with enough imagination, not throwing enough curveballs in testing to find the problems. See this explanation for more on that.

They took a lot of lessons from that and put it into this one, and if there's one player in the current field that I believe can pull off "landing off the moon" like that, it's ISRO, so. I don't wanna say I'm confident, but I have a good feeling.

sometimes mistakes cancel out. apparently I was not at 18mm (widest angle) on my lens, but the way I had it framed was inadvertently perfect, you can see it disappear into the clouds just at the top of the frame, after which we never saw it further.

I ALSO CAUGHT LIGHTNING WITH THIS ONE!!! right by the heron!!!

Antares used a ukrainian-built first stage and a russian-produced engine.

So, when the Ukranian factory got blown up by the russians, that kinda put Antares in a bind.

They're gonna give a go at a new first stage, but for now, this is the last Antares.

In a way, this Antares launch is the end to a period of in spaceflight that began in 1991, with the collapse of the Soviet Union.

With the USSR gone, the former Soviet aerospace industry was a wreck, to say the absolute least of it, as all the former state-owned Design Bureaus found themselves scattered across several states, not to mention extremely short on funding.

In short, this scared the US State Department, because Oh No! All the talented folks who know how to build rocket might get poached by _{[INSERT CONTEMPORARY US ADVERSARY HERE]} to build nuclear missiles for them! We Cannot Allow This!

The scattered aerospace industry being broke ALSO meant they were cheap to work with, in a lot of cases, so these two factors combined would bring about a whole new era of international collaboration in spaceflight.

It was the era that brought us Shuttle flights to the Mir space station. It gave us the International Space Station, as NASA ripped out half of Space Station Freedom to fuse with the Russian Mir-2
It gave us SeaLaunch, where Boeing partnered with two former Soviet Design Bureaus to launch the Zenit rocket from an offshore platform. Remember Zenit, it'll become relevant again later.

And, relevant to the matter at hand, it gave us several great instances of Russian engines on American rockets.

This one's a long one, i had to draft it twice because it was too long the first time, and I wasn't gonna do that a third time so here we go. Beware. There's history below the cut.