They are not currently stranded, and were never considered stranded, except maybe for the few days between Starliner’s empty return and the Crew-9 Dragon’s arrival.
Today’s flyby will be the first to significantly ‘tilt’ the spacecraft’s orbit and allow it to see the Sun’s polar regions, which cannot be seen from Earth.
Huh, it never occurred to me that we haven’t seen what the Sun looks like from above or below the plane of the solar system.
Technically the solar system is a multi-body system, and everything nudges everything else, but the mass of the earth is far greater than the mass of the asteroid, to the point that it doesn’t matter.
You jest, but the Kennedy Space Center is in Florida. Putting the world’s busiest spaceport out of commission might put a damper on future asteroid deflection missions…
Why not invest in a bunch of the smaller companies like Rocket Factory Ausburg, PLD Space, MaiaSpace, HyImpulse, etc? They won’t all be successful, but if just a couple of them are, the competition would put Europe in a much stronger position than if they were to establish Euro-ULA.
It’s wasteful, immediately hazardous to any crews, and eventually (if not also immediately) harmful to the environment with any wreckage and other pollution that may be produced.
Interesting, I interpret “Europe must embrace a cultural shift towards speed and innovation” in almost exactly the opposite way.
Ariane 6 was essentially an outdated design before it even launched. All of the major American and Chinese launch companies are operating or developing reusable rockets. The launch startups which wrote the open letter are some of the only European organizations actively pursuing reusability, something Arianespace has ignored for far too long.