I’m Anthony Colangelo.

Chris Gebhardt for NASASpaceflight.com with a ton of Falcon Heavy updates, including SLC-40 work, the Falcon Heavy engine start sequence, and the final Falcon Heavy flow leading to its launch date in late December.

Very special thanks to the 117 of you out there supporting Main Engine Cut Off on Patreon for the month of October. Your support keeps this blog and podcast going, and most importantly, it keeps it independent.

The first of Vulcain 2.1 engine arrived in Germany ahead of its December test firing, which will kick off a 15 month-long test campaign.

Getting through the bureaucratic red tape was one of the more recent goal post movements by reusability doubters. There goes that. The biggest piece of work left for SpaceX is to get Falcon 9 Block 5 flying, and with it, prove out minimal refurbishment between flights.

Really interesting stuff from SES, who is always looking to push the industry forward. The current era of GEO is coming to a close, and this sounds like the structure of the next.

It took 81 hours of printing followed by about 10–15 hours of assembly, integration, and testing. I lost count of all the test prints I ran, the bad prints I’ve stopped, and all the circuits I tested, but including those would push the numbers much, much higher. But it’s finally complete.

We’re seeing the same strategy from several players in the market with several launch vehicles—ULA with Atlas V, Arianespace with Ariane 6, and ILS with Proton Medium. Cutting costs and optimizing launch vehicles to compete at current Falcon 9 prices is going to work for the next few years, at least.

SpaceX’s Gwynne Shotwell gave a talk at Stanford last night, and several redditors were in attendance. They’ve posted their notes over at r/spacex, and there are some really interesting tidbits in there, specifically regarding BFR, its launch site, and its production.

Plain and simple: missions to the Moon are hamstrung by Orion—specifically by the European Service Module and its pitifully-small delta-V budget.

Peter B. de Selding wrote a nice report over at Space Intel Report on comments made by SpaceX Senior Director Tom Ochinero at APSCC 2017.

If you’ve been listening to and/or reading my stuff for a bit, you probably know Jake Robins of WeMartians. He and I both do podcasts with fairly regular formats and topics we cover (he more than I…), and have been wanting an outlet with a loose format where we can discuss things outside of our typical realms (but still space-y). And most importantly, we wanted a place to hang out and talk space on a regular basis.

I wonder how many—if any—of those ACES improvements will find their way into this Centaur upgrade. Interestingly, ACES was not mentioned once.