Official votes for the 2020 Astro Awards!

What are your top three Tim?

Tim, what are your top three???

Tim, thank you for providing this opportunity to participate. I have found this a fantastic thought exercise about long term impact. Cleaning up and/or maintaining our near-earth environment is not terribly sexy but an amazing achievement of Russians. I hope to see more plans along these lines. The asteroid sample is out of this world! Of course, starship is the game changer for all. In my mind, most of the other achievements are others trying to catch up and demonstrate their tech. I have to disagree with most of the group about Dragon. Dragon has been doing it's work perfectly for so long and the only change was it passed muster for human space flight, so only an administrative achievement, not technical. I look forward to more posts here.

Yeah, I’m really curious about this too. Presumably the seats are fixed in one position (or do I presume wrong?) Would there be any advantage in them “self-levelling” during the various reorientation manoeuvres? As in swinging (in a controlled fashion!) in contrary motion to the Starship’s gymnastics so as to remain (as far as possible) seated in the same orientation? (Presumably only truly relevant once under the influence of serious gravitational forces inside the atmosphere.) Or would this just make everyone even sicker than ever?!!

Launch America , SN8 , and meteor collection mission my top 3

Eric Sowder

I'd be interesting hearing about the G-load on humans with respect to the free fall and sudden breaking / landing maneuver. No matter how cool this looks, you don't want to create a "vomit ride" coming down from orbit.

It's a difficult decision, but, , , the test flight of SN8 truly broke new ground. Star Ship is a new space access system with fully reuseable first and second stages. Another breakthrough for SpaceX. It offers another 10:1cost reduction for space access, after Falcon 9 reduced space access costs by about 10:1

I think it’s between sn8, demo 2, and first landing of orbital class booster

Raziel

Giving a top 3 would be too easy for everybody :-)

I agree, in my mind I thought "for man" - demo 2 and "for mankind" sn8 flight.

Mars Mountain

It’s really tough for me to decide between the first crewed Dragon demo flight/mission with Bob and Doug and Starship’s SN8. I know it may be childish because there may be more science-contributing events, but I was in tears for both of these.