John Crewe · Director of Vehicles

Yep, I sure can. We sort of think of them in three different ways, although the two are sort of under the same umbrella of ship-to-ship docking. So with ship-to-ship docking, there's two aspects we're looking at. So there's the direct hard attachment, which the prime example is the Constellation and Merlin. And then there's ship-to-ship docking as a general, which is just any ship with a docking port connecting to another one. So first up we're doing the Connie and Merlin hard docking. That is well underway. We've got to the point where the vehicles are attached to each other and you can get in and out. And we're now at the point of just sort of dealing with all the quirks of having two vehicles physically joined together intentionally, which has thrown up some weird physics problems that we're just working through.

John Crewe · Director of Vehicles

I'll come back to the bit of ship-to-ship docking. Ship-to-station docking is also well underway. We've got a fairly functional prototype at this point. We're just working out some of the last technical hurdles for that before we enter full production on that. So that's you taking your large ships and docking at any of the orbital stations or other places that have these large extended docking tubes that I think you saw on ISC. So that's the order of battle there, really. We're doing the Constellation Merlin docking first, then we're doing ship-to-station docking, and then at some point after that, we'll do the ship-to-ship, purely because there's less of a need for that right now. The Constellation Merlin thing solves some tech problems for ship-to-station docking. Ship-to-station docking is needed for ships that are coming. Ship-to-ship is a sort of nice-to-have that we will do, but it's not as important as those other two.