Rendered at 01:35:21 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Cloudflare Workers.
modeless 2 hours ago [-]
Successful Raptor on-orbit relight demo! That should clear the next flight to go to orbit and deploy operational satellites! Big milestone for the program.
And the ship landing was so soft it didn't even explode! That's never happened before. And it's still connected to Starlink too. The ship's cameras are still working underwater! I wonder if they will be able to recover it intact?
We're getting some great views of the heat shield post-reentry. That's great data for the heat shield team. The heat shield is the biggest remaining question mark in the whole program. Reflight without heat shield refurbishment will be required for the whole architecture to work, and it's never been done before. None of the heat shields so far looked reusable without refurbishment, including this one.
They have a much biglier support vessel this time, almost 300ft long IIRC. So maybe they can recover it?
stinkbeetle 25 minutes ago [-]
It might be possible. Allegedly they had previously asked the Australian government about towing the ship back to a port.
Marine recovery can be much more difficult than it might seem though. Towing this nearly 200ft structure weighing a decent fraction of the weight of the boat that is not designed to be seaworthy, potentially full of explosive gasses and that could rapidly start breaking up and taking on water, nearly 300 nautical miles back to shore, would be quite difficult and dangerous. I would be impressed if they ever do it.
chasd00 15 minutes ago [-]
yeah it's suppose to tip over, explode and sink. Not sure what they're going to do with it now. If some other country comes in and salvages intact Raptor3, flight computers, and all the other ITAR regulated tech SpaceX may have a big problem. SpaceX will probably ask the airforce to gift them a jdam delivery or something.
aejm 9 minutes ago [-]
They can relatively easily sink it, and in fact are required to be able to in order to get their US FAA launch license. As part of the environmental assessment specifically, but I could be wrong on that.
For those curious, they have recovery teams on sight who can essentially shoot it to further puncture the hull or attach explosives even. They have experience with their Starship boosters not sinking off the coast of Texas and floating into Mexican waters.
1 hours ago [-]
agent86 1 hours ago [-]
> That should clear the next flight to go to orbit and deploy operational satellites!
Mid-stream they said they were deploying 20 real V3 Starlink satellites.
At the end of the stream the said all 20 had checked out as well.
FLHerne 47 minutes ago [-]
They were real satellites but deployed on the suborbital trajectory of this flight, so will have burned up over the Indian ocean about the time that the ship re-entered.
The goal was to get about 20 minutes of testing the new satellites in space, not for them to have any chance of becoming operational.
Starship hasn't been entering a full orbit so far because it would be really bad if the relight burn did fail - chunks of ship would rain down a few days/weeks later on some random area anywhere within 27° of the equator. On a much smaller scale this has been an internationally embarrassing problem for China's LM-5.
everfrustrated 1 hours ago [-]
They need to be in orbit to deploy the satellites into a useful orbit. These ones only lasted for 20 minutes before breaking up.
testing22321 14 minutes ago [-]
> None of the heat shields so far looked reusable without refurbishment, including this one.
What about this one looks not reusable without refurbishment?
To my eye it’s by far the best we’ve seen, no burn through on flaps, etc
maxlin 2 hours ago [-]
My brain refuses to resolve the effect of it as anything but CGI. Event though it isn't.
staplung 1 hours ago [-]
Summary: almost, but not quite entirely successful.
Launch successful. Booster separation and boost back burn looked good. Booster failed to relight some of its engines and hit the water hard. Successfully deployed the 20 starlink satellites. Successfully reignited an engine in flight to prove potential for de-orbit burn on future flight. Re-entry looked good and less spicy that some previous attempts (subjective). Such a soft landing that the ship flopped into the water without exploding and floated for a good long while (possibly still floating for all I know). Got some great drone footage flying over the heat-shield.
So the ship itself is looking increasingly good (so far) but they still seem to be having some issues with the booster.
smallmancontrov 46 minutes ago [-]
Speaking of which, are there any fan theories on why the boosters seem to have persistent issues? Or is the plumbing still churning fast enough that we keep seeing N=1 issues for successive designs?
laughing_man 4 minutes ago [-]
The leading theory, from what I can tell, is slosh. The flip on separation is relatively violent, and while there's not much fuel left compared to the amount at launch, it's still heavy enough to do damage.
ceejayoz 28 minutes ago [-]
The 12th flight was the first to use the third generation Raptors, so this is only their second flight test.
appplication 2 hours ago [-]
It’s interesting the cognitive dissonance this brings out in me. As much as I think Musk carries a fairly reprehensible aura, I would still like to see SpaceX succeed. Space has a funny, transcendent way of inspiring us.
qwerpy 10 minutes ago [-]
I’m glad that of all places, HN is still able to grudgingly put aside red/blue team sports to appreciate really cool science and engineering.
pstuart 3 minutes ago [-]
Agreed. Separating those thoughts are valuable here and in life in general.
But like a lot of tech, the cool shit can have serious negative effects as well and it's important to be able to, again, acknowledge both appropriately.
The success of SpaceX has made him the richest man on the planet, and his money makes him dangerous.
amanaplanacanal 2 hours ago [-]
The tiny part of SpaceX that is actually about space, yes. Unfortunate that it has been bolted onto the hulk of Musk's AI fever dreams.
Geee 1 hours ago [-]
It is still about space. AI and space computers are just the vehicle to fund it all.
refulgentis 1 hours ago [-]
Billions of AI capex for a model that’s consistently forgettable and space computers, presumably data centers in space, are funding SpaceX?
Isn’t the opposite?
SpaceX has an extremely profitable launch program and a profitable Starlink. It’s a straightforward would be better off financially without X and X.ai.
smallmancontrov 58 minutes ago [-]
Cash: rockets fund AI
Equity: AI funds rockets
Of all the places that money parted from fools winds up, this is not the worst of them.
yieldcrv 2 hours ago [-]
Even at $38/share it will still be number 20 on the fortune 500 by marketcap
Too bad for Elon gullibles its at $113/share
but its a great company at $38
hagbard_c 2 hours ago [-]
You don't need to virtue signal your dislike of Musk-the-person to be allowed to show your admiration for the exploits of SpaceX. I don't care what you think about Musk and I'm pretty sure I'm far from the only one. Yes, SpaceX is doing great, hopefully other companies will follow their clear lead and make space access more reliable and 'affordable' so that those great wheels-in-the-sky may one day become reality.
feshbach 31 minutes ago [-]
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pudgywalsh 1 hours ago [-]
Actual, literal Nazis got us to the Moon and frankly no one cared. Not then, not now. Try separating politics from the advancement of humanity, you'll feel better.
WalterBright 58 minutes ago [-]
In "V2" page 179 Dornberger writes:
"Do you know that your closest colleagues (including von Braun) have stated in company at Zinnowitz that it had never been their intention to make a weapon of war out of he rocket? That they had worked, under pressure from yourself (Dornberger) at the whole business of development and only in order to obtain money for their experiments and the confirmation of their theories? That their object all along has been space travel?"
The men had been arrested by the Gestapo and were going to be executed. Dornberger was also threatened with arrest, but he managed to get von Braun and the other released.
GolfPopper 9 minutes ago [-]
From by Tom Lehrer's "Wernher von Braun"[1],
Don't say that he's hypocritical
Say rather that he's apolitical
"Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down?
Good info Walter, but I wasn't trying to get too deep.
Point is to not judge a book by its cover.
486sx33 51 minutes ago [-]
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qarl2 1 hours ago [-]
You're conflating politics and ethics.
adastra22 1 hours ago [-]
Von Braun used the Nazi war machine to make his rockets. Musk ran DOGE. They’re both political figures by their own choices.
feshbach 25 minutes ago [-]
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infinitewars 2 hours ago [-]
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maxlin 2 hours ago [-]
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tuhx 2 hours ago [-]
100%
mjcl 1 hours ago [-]
Do you include spreading lies on twitter about Paul Pelosi as part of "what it takes?"
AlexErrant 2 hours ago [-]
I apply this mindset to Trump/politics too.
I fucking _loathe_ Trump. I still hope he makes America better. But god I fucking hate him. I think his policies are garbage, but I'd love to be proven wrong. All I see is bribery and nepotism... but yknow, he (finally) nominated Jared Isaacman. I'll fucking take it.
Musk is anathema. But yknow, I'm glad he's started the companies he has.
WalterBright 2 hours ago [-]
> Musk carries a fairly reprehensible aura
What's your favorite reprehensible thing about him?
atq2119 1 hours ago [-]
I don't think your comment adds value to the discussion. By now, you either know what's reprehensible about Musk or have decided to either ignore it or support it, and by extension be reprehensible yourself.
But in case any bystanders genuinely wonder, my personal "favorite" is him doing what is clearly meant to be, or at least unambiguously invoke, a nazi salute not just once but twice, and standing by it (plus, of course, his political activities in that direction).
WalterBright 41 minutes ago [-]
If he meant it to be a nazi salute, why did he do it in conjunction with saying "I give my heart to you"?
Currently on TV is a WW2 documentary narrated by Tom Hanks. It's pretty good, with significant coverage of nazis. I recommend watching it. I'm a bit of a history wonk, and have read extensively about WW2. I'm afraid I don't see any parallels between the nazis and Musk.
ceejayoz 26 minutes ago [-]
> If he meant it to be a nazi salute, why did he do it in conjunction with saying "I give my heart to you"?
Go on - would you give the latter link's "my heart goes out to you" gesture publicly at, say, work, or outside a synagogue?
smallmancontrov 25 minutes ago [-]
He's done "I give my heart to you" on video, too, and it looks nothing like the nazi salute that he clearly did at the inauguration, twice, in celebration of the victory of far-right populist politics in the USA.
The rhetorical parallels between Musk, his affiliates, and the nazis should be clear to anyone with remedial knowledge of history, let alone someone who calls themselves a wonk: scapegoating racial outgroups isn't a subtle strategy and Musk's pursuit of the strategy is not subtle.
WW2 is the end of nazi politics, not the beginning. In the unlikely case that you missed the parallels in good faith, I recommend the Richard Evans books to learn about the beginning and middle of the nazi movement.
23 minutes ago [-]
486sx33 52 minutes ago [-]
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estearum 1 hours ago [-]
Using his billionaire megaphone and telling his millions of followers that a rescue worker was a pedophile, just because basic geometry foiled Musk's plan to look like a Tony Stark action hero <3
Truly top shelf reprehensibility
Would be fucking pathetic and disgusting even for a person with no platform. Downright despicable for a person with such a gigantic following.
WalterBright 1 hours ago [-]
> telling his millions of followers that a rescue worker was a pedophile
Only after the rescue worker, on live TV, said to millions that Musk could stick his submarine up his ass.
olyjohn 1 hours ago [-]
Not even on the same level, dude. Not even close.
bathtub365 1 hours ago [-]
He has billions of dollars and still can’t help but stoop to pathetic immaturity.
WalterBright 34 minutes ago [-]
It was an intemperate comment, sure. As was the rescue worker's insult when Musk was trying to help.
defrost 27 minutes ago [-]
Front line rescue workers and first responders are famously required to be polite to looky lou's wanting to make tragic events all about themselves and their dumb PR stunts.
WalterBright 7 minutes ago [-]
Musk offered money and the services of his crack engineering team. Now, he probably went about it the wrong way, but dismissing it as a looky lou is a bit unfair.
Musk has also done dumb PR things like provide free Starlink service to people cut off after the hurricane.
estearum 59 minutes ago [-]
Lmao imagine defending this hahahaha
How many people have you heard being told to "Fuck off" or "fuck you" or "Shove it up your ass?"
Hundreds? Thousands?
How many people have you heard being called a literal pedophile? Three?
Get a grip lmao
WalterBright 17 minutes ago [-]
"pedo boy" sounds like an insult, not a charge. Musk has said it was a common insult among schoolboys in S Africa. While I don't know if that is the case or not, I do know that different countries have different insults. And it does sound very much like a schoolboy insult. I'm sure all of us can remember schoolboy insults from our youth.
This is evident from you changing his word from "pedo boy" to "pedophile".
I remember once a book of Japanese insults that was passed around at work in the 1980s. We all thought it was very funny, and for the next month or two heaped such insults on each other.
My dad was stationed in Britain during WW2. The GIs encountered a bit of culture clash. To an American "knocked up" meant getting pregnant. To the Brits, "knocked up" meant being tired. Imagine the ensuing hilarity...
estearum 9 minutes ago [-]
Months after he apologized for the initial false "pedo" claim, Musk claimed in an email to Buzzfeed that Unsworth (the rescue diver) was "a child rapist" who "moved to Chiang Rai for a child bride who was 12 years old at the time."
Musk hired a private investigator to confirm the pedophile allegations.
Try again kiddo. Absolutely pathetic. Defending this shit is a moral failure for you too.
> Writing in an email to Buzzfeed reporter Ryan Mac, Mr Musk went further. He told the reporter to "call people you know in Thailand, find out what's actually going on and stop defending child rapists".
> He alleged that Mr Unsworth, 63, had spent decades visiting and living in Thailand and had recently moved to Chiang Rai in northern Thailand "for a child bride who was about 12 years old at the time".
ceejayoz 9 minutes ago [-]
> Musk has said it was a common insult among schoolboys in S Africa.
Consider that maybe "derogatory things wealthy white South Africans say about people in the apartheid era" is not a great standard to live up to.
dag11 11 minutes ago [-]
"Bet ya a signed dollar it's true." - Musk's follow-up
It went so, so far beyond a schoolyard taunt. All of my friends and I remember the debacle clearly, and it's the moment we all went from childhood idolizers of Musk to feeling pretty sick about the dude.
pudgywalsh 1 hours ago [-]
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estearum 1 hours ago [-]
What's authentic/"not phony" about literally making shit up about another person?
I'm genuinely confused so please explain step by step.
Do you think everyone around you is just brimming with unevidenced allegations of pedophilia to fling around at strangers, and finally we have the One True Authentic™ to just bravely say the big words out loud?
pudgywalsh 1 hours ago [-]
Spergy autist rocket guy says something crazy on Twitter that no one cares about anymore and you are still seething about it eight years later.
I don't think it's Elon that has the problem.
estearum 56 minutes ago [-]
Haha nothing funnier than grown adults (??) who are so infatuated with big wockets that they seem to forget basic concepts like "moral character" if there are big wockets anywhere in the vicinity. So smart.
ajuc 1 hours ago [-]
False accusations and lies are evil. It's not a debatable statement. Trying to spin it into a positive is not going to work.
20 minutes ago [-]
smallmancontrov 1 hours ago [-]
Double Sieg Heil at a US inauguration, buying twitter to boost nazis, sabotaging his US competitors by pulling up the subsidy ladder he just finished climbing, gleefully dumpstering the peanut butter rations for the starving African kids. "Favorite" isn't the word.
tuhx 1 hours ago [-]
Reddit been lying to you
mrexroad 52 minutes ago [-]
… says a post from a 25min old bot account?
Snark aside, I’m curious: what about the comment you replied to is a “Reddit lie?” Pretty much everything act mentioned is well documented. Do you disagree with the assumptions made about motivations for the acts?
smallmancontrov 1 hours ago [-]
My eyes don't lie.
y0ssar1an 1 hours ago [-]
Not me! I'm rooting against SpaceX lol
Starship is the SpaceX Cybertruck - lots of impressive engineering, but still doomed by terrible design choices from you-know-who. Stainless steel is just such a terrible choice for a rocket this large. Doomed the whole enterprise.
I know launches are exciting. Landings, doubly so. But eight launches to get to the moon is not a good rocket. Sorry.
amazingamazing 1 hours ago [-]
which rockets have you worked on? are you in the aerospace industry?
at-fates-hands 1 hours ago [-]
>> Stainless steel is just such a terrible choice for a rocket this large.
Honest question, but what do they usually use?
ggreer 23 minutes ago [-]
Aluminum alloy and carbon fiber, because both have high strength to weight ratios. Steel is denser, so its specific strength isn't as high. But it retains strength at both lower & higher temperatures, and it's much cheaper. It's also cheaper/quicker to modify a steel design, as welding is easier than aluminum (at least for low carbon steels used in Starship). And if the same structure were made of carbon fiber, it would likely have to be fabricated from scratch.
I think choosing steel has helped Starship, as it allowed the ship to survive reentry and land in the ocean despite heat shield failures. Had the ship been made of aluminum, I'm certain earlier missions would have broken up when the aluminum heated up and lost its strength.
enraged_camel 1 hours ago [-]
Your takes are hotter than a launch pad with all 33 raptors firing!
Garrrrrr 1 hours ago [-]
and costs taxpayers billions compared to our working models 60 years ago. Great innovation
FL33TW00D 1 hours ago [-]
I remember the Saturn V being caught by chopsticks in mid air too.
Starship is fantastic value for money compared to Artemis!
PopePompus 18 minutes ago [-]
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1 hours ago [-]
ACCount37 2 hours ago [-]
Starship landed in the ocean intact and only slightly on fire!
NolF 1 hours ago [-]
That just seemed to be standard venting, methane if I'm not mistaken.
fsloth 2 hours ago [-]
Whoa the acceleration from the start surprised me. It’s huge and it just … zipped off the pad like a bullet (ok not real bullet but still).
ACCount37 2 hours ago [-]
They juiced the engines up big time with the Raptor 3 upgrade. The rest of the stack is leaner and meaner too, but engines are the single biggest upgrade.
It's why they have plans to elongate the stack further. If they have this much TWR to go around at liftoff, they can afford to cash in that extra thrust to pack more fuel.
andsoitis 2 hours ago [-]
> they have plans to elongate the stack further
Elongate the stack.
ACCount37 1 hours ago [-]
Pun employed intentionally.
georgeburdell 2 hours ago [-]
Seems like the booster landing burn did not light all the engines and so it crashed into the water.
fastball 1 hours ago [-]
Re-light seems to be one of their biggest remaining obstacles in a lot of these flight tests.
ChuckMcM 2 hours ago [-]
Yup. Some of the Youtubers (like NASA Spaceflight) had video of it hitting the water pretty fast and hard. That said, this is the only test failure so far. I'm cautiously hopeful they get Ship to touch down. (it will explode after it does because of physics but stepping lightly onto the ocean will be a win)
ChuckMcM 2 hours ago [-]
And I sit corrected as it was able to lay down without rupturing the tanks and 'sploding. So that's another win.
What I find really amazing and cool is that while its reentering the engineering team can drive it around and look at heating effects on tiles/spars/etc all while retrieving telemetry by Starlink. What many people don't realize is that early capsules were the shape they were because that was the limit of what they could simulate for re-entry forces. The ability to get real time confirmation of systems response in re-entry is a capability that we've never had. So there's that.
So at this point it looks like they are down to un-reliabile raptor relights on the booster.
Congrats to everyone who worked on this.
dylan604 21 minutes ago [-]
The size of ship being big enough to create a hole in the ionization to continue to communicate with Starlink is something that I think gets underappreciated.
usehand 2 hours ago [-]
I guess they also failed to explode it
chasd00 21 minutes ago [-]
from what i understand it kind of is a failure. It's suppose to tip over, explode, and sink. That way you don't have all this ITAR regulated tech floating around in international waters.
pclmulqdq 1 hours ago [-]
I am pretty unconvinced that any of the past explosions of starship used that feature. It’s very convenient to have an “explode” button so you can say all of your rocket detonations were intentional, but they are often leaking fuel or dropping chunks before they explode.
This was a great flight, though.
cucumber3732842 2 hours ago [-]
>it will explode after it does because of physics
Is this just a fancy way of saying lightweight fragile aerospace tube with hot stuff all over the outside and flammable stuff on the inside will not respond well to falling on it's side or is there some other thing going on here I don't know about.
ChuckMcM 1 hours ago [-]
Sort of? Everything is weight. And since it isn't a design feature to lay down in water there isn't any weight budget for making that modality survivable? So typically when it falls (and this thing is really tall) the interior tanks detach from their mounts and hit the inside walls and rupture. The skin is still hot, oxygen and remaining fuel mix and it goes boom. This time we had fires but no boom. I look forward to hearing what was different.
m4rtink 1 hours ago [-]
Starship is quite a bit sturdier thanks to the stainless steel used & very efficient engines that make it possible to have the structure heavier.
We had it demonstrated in the past with Starship surviving multiple burnthroughts and now in failing to explode. :-)
ACCount37 2 hours ago [-]
No, that's exactly what happens. Most of the time.
There was a couple of times when SpaceX accidentally soft landed a Falcon 9 first stage into the ocean, and had it just float around. They're yet to do that trick with Starship though.
EDIT: Of fucking course.
1 hours ago [-]
DetroitThrow 2 hours ago [-]
How many times have they managed to catch it in the last 8 or so missions? There have been a few misses like this already with the boosters
stephc_int13 2 hours ago [-]
It was going in the water anyway, but yeah, it touched visibly faster than it should have.
2 hours ago [-]
ButlerianJihad 2 hours ago [-]
The actual objective was to crash very slowly into the water, and to that end, I believe they planned for about 13 out of 33 to light for the "landing burn". But only about 5 lit up at that time, giving them a higher-speed crash-landing. However, the landing site was exactly where they needed to be, and done in complete safety, so that is good.
They had been explaining the post-ignition abort from last week, and showed how 4 out of 33 engines had failed to light on the first stage. This was due to some kind of pump malfunctions. They said that if 1 or 2 fail, it's OK to launch, but more than 2 is an automatic abort. So they were able to replace the finicky motors and fully test them out.
Who knows what caused the underthrust for the landing burn, but at least all 33 engines were operational at launch, and they got plenty of data from this test run, and all Starlink v3 satellites have been deployed successfully for their "suborbital speedrun", so this test flight is doing really awesome!
ls612 2 hours ago [-]
Damn so this probably means another identical suborbital flight in 6-8 weeks. It is looking less and less likely that we will see either prop transfer or a ship catch this year.
davmar 2 hours ago [-]
i don't think so - the ascent looked good. i don't think they need to put the ship on another suborbital trajectory because the booster landing burn failed. also, i don't think this impacts prop transfer or ship catch - both are separate problems.
ls612 2 hours ago [-]
I think this is technically true but that they want a seamless suborbital flight (like the last two for the Block 2) before they move forward on those other goals.
eightysixfour 1 hours ago [-]
Why wouldn’t they only care about seamless ship flights, to get some value out of the launches, while they’re still learning and figuring out how to light booster?
NetMageSCW 2 hours ago [-]
They don’t have to catch the booster to test any of that.
wat10000 2 hours ago [-]
The “chopstick” catcher arrangement seems awfully fragile. Would the ground equipment have survived this if it had been a real catch?
pixl97 2 hours ago [-]
Yes, because it would have landed a few hundred meters out from the chopsticks. It swings in towards the catcher as part of its slowdown. If it doesn't slow down, that doesn't happen.
tenuousemphasis 2 hours ago [-]
They generally initiate landing aiming just off shore and only adjust to the landing pad after everything is nominal. So yes.
consensus1 1 hours ago [-]
Rockets have a self destruct feature to avoid exactly this type of contingency
arjie 28 minutes ago [-]
Incredible. I missed the launch but exciting to see the remarkable success. Boy am I hoping we go to the Moon and to Mars and to all the other places!
s08148692 2 hours ago [-]
Real time reentry plasma field will never get old. Amazing
andsoitis 2 hours ago [-]
Goosebumps.
And the visuals from Starlink for the entire journey is freakin' awesome.
dylan604 17 minutes ago [-]
With a decent soundtrack as well instead of the boring atmospheric stuff associated with space themes
Its amazing to see this beast and think that all the firey stuff isn't the primary energy source (although totally necessary to pushing the mass out the back fast enough).
The reason it’s very small is that almost all of the energy in hydrogen and oxygen is not stored in the chemical binding energy of these things going together.
The vast majority of it is stored in just the rest mass energy of the protons and the neutrons, which chemical burning doesn’t affect at all.
And the ship landing was so soft it didn't even explode! That's never happened before. And it's still connected to Starlink too. The ship's cameras are still working underwater! I wonder if they will be able to recover it intact?
We're getting some great views of the heat shield post-reentry. That's great data for the heat shield team. The heat shield is the biggest remaining question mark in the whole program. Reflight without heat shield refurbishment will be required for the whole architecture to work, and it's never been done before. None of the heat shields so far looked reusable without refurbishment, including this one.
Edit: Spashdown video https://x.com/SpaceX/status/2080804682918764619
Marine recovery can be much more difficult than it might seem though. Towing this nearly 200ft structure weighing a decent fraction of the weight of the boat that is not designed to be seaworthy, potentially full of explosive gasses and that could rapidly start breaking up and taking on water, nearly 300 nautical miles back to shore, would be quite difficult and dangerous. I would be impressed if they ever do it.
Mid-stream they said they were deploying 20 real V3 Starlink satellites.
At the end of the stream the said all 20 had checked out as well.
The goal was to get about 20 minutes of testing the new satellites in space, not for them to have any chance of becoming operational.
Starship hasn't been entering a full orbit so far because it would be really bad if the relight burn did fail - chunks of ship would rain down a few days/weeks later on some random area anywhere within 27° of the equator. On a much smaller scale this has been an internationally embarrassing problem for China's LM-5.
What about this one looks not reusable without refurbishment?
To my eye it’s by far the best we’ve seen, no burn through on flaps, etc
Launch successful. Booster separation and boost back burn looked good. Booster failed to relight some of its engines and hit the water hard. Successfully deployed the 20 starlink satellites. Successfully reignited an engine in flight to prove potential for de-orbit burn on future flight. Re-entry looked good and less spicy that some previous attempts (subjective). Such a soft landing that the ship flopped into the water without exploding and floated for a good long while (possibly still floating for all I know). Got some great drone footage flying over the heat-shield.
So the ship itself is looking increasingly good (so far) but they still seem to be having some issues with the booster.
But like a lot of tech, the cool shit can have serious negative effects as well and it's important to be able to, again, acknowledge both appropriately.
The success of SpaceX has made him the richest man on the planet, and his money makes him dangerous.
Isn’t the opposite?
SpaceX has an extremely profitable launch program and a profitable Starlink. It’s a straightforward would be better off financially without X and X.ai.
Equity: AI funds rockets
Of all the places that money parted from fools winds up, this is not the worst of them.
Too bad for Elon gullibles its at $113/share
but its a great company at $38
"Do you know that your closest colleagues (including von Braun) have stated in company at Zinnowitz that it had never been their intention to make a weapon of war out of he rocket? That they had worked, under pressure from yourself (Dornberger) at the whole business of development and only in order to obtain money for their experiments and the confirmation of their theories? That their object all along has been space travel?"
The men had been arrested by the Gestapo and were going to be executed. Dornberger was also threatened with arrest, but he managed to get von Braun and the other released.
Don't say that he's hypocritical
Say rather that he's apolitical
"Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down?
That's not my department!" says Wernher von Braun
1. https://youtu.be/QEJ9HrZq7Ro?t=14
Point is to not judge a book by its cover.
I fucking _loathe_ Trump. I still hope he makes America better. But god I fucking hate him. I think his policies are garbage, but I'd love to be proven wrong. All I see is bribery and nepotism... but yknow, he (finally) nominated Jared Isaacman. I'll fucking take it.
Musk is anathema. But yknow, I'm glad he's started the companies he has.
What's your favorite reprehensible thing about him?
But in case any bystanders genuinely wonder, my personal "favorite" is him doing what is clearly meant to be, or at least unambiguously invoke, a nazi salute not just once but twice, and standing by it (plus, of course, his political activities in that direction).
Currently on TV is a WW2 documentary narrated by Tom Hanks. It's pretty good, with significant coverage of nazis. I recommend watching it. I'm a bit of a history wonk, and have read extensively about WW2. I'm afraid I don't see any parallels between the nazis and Musk.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plausible_deniability
https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Schrodingers...
Here's what Musk actually does when he intends that gesture: https://www.reddit.com/r/centrist/comments/1i8ajx0/video_of_...
And here's what this one looked like: https://www.reddit.com/r/gifs/comments/1i6par1/elon_musk_vs_...
Go on - would you give the latter link's "my heart goes out to you" gesture publicly at, say, work, or outside a synagogue?
The rhetorical parallels between Musk, his affiliates, and the nazis should be clear to anyone with remedial knowledge of history, let alone someone who calls themselves a wonk: scapegoating racial outgroups isn't a subtle strategy and Musk's pursuit of the strategy is not subtle.
WW2 is the end of nazi politics, not the beginning. In the unlikely case that you missed the parallels in good faith, I recommend the Richard Evans books to learn about the beginning and middle of the nazi movement.
Truly top shelf reprehensibility
Would be fucking pathetic and disgusting even for a person with no platform. Downright despicable for a person with such a gigantic following.
Only after the rescue worker, on live TV, said to millions that Musk could stick his submarine up his ass.
Musk has also done dumb PR things like provide free Starlink service to people cut off after the hurricane.
How many people have you heard being told to "Fuck off" or "fuck you" or "Shove it up your ass?"
Hundreds? Thousands?
How many people have you heard being called a literal pedophile? Three?
Get a grip lmao
This is evident from you changing his word from "pedo boy" to "pedophile".
I remember once a book of Japanese insults that was passed around at work in the 1980s. We all thought it was very funny, and for the next month or two heaped such insults on each other.
My dad was stationed in Britain during WW2. The GIs encountered a bit of culture clash. To an American "knocked up" meant getting pregnant. To the Brits, "knocked up" meant being tired. Imagine the ensuing hilarity...
Musk hired a private investigator to confirm the pedophile allegations.
Try again kiddo. Absolutely pathetic. Defending this shit is a moral failure for you too.
> Writing in an email to Buzzfeed reporter Ryan Mac, Mr Musk went further. He told the reporter to "call people you know in Thailand, find out what's actually going on and stop defending child rapists".
> He alleged that Mr Unsworth, 63, had spent decades visiting and living in Thailand and had recently moved to Chiang Rai in northern Thailand "for a child bride who was about 12 years old at the time".
Consider that maybe "derogatory things wealthy white South Africans say about people in the apartheid era" is not a great standard to live up to.
It went so, so far beyond a schoolyard taunt. All of my friends and I remember the debacle clearly, and it's the moment we all went from childhood idolizers of Musk to feeling pretty sick about the dude.
I'm genuinely confused so please explain step by step.
Do you think everyone around you is just brimming with unevidenced allegations of pedophilia to fling around at strangers, and finally we have the One True Authentic™ to just bravely say the big words out loud?
I don't think it's Elon that has the problem.
Snark aside, I’m curious: what about the comment you replied to is a “Reddit lie?” Pretty much everything act mentioned is well documented. Do you disagree with the assumptions made about motivations for the acts?
Starship is the SpaceX Cybertruck - lots of impressive engineering, but still doomed by terrible design choices from you-know-who. Stainless steel is just such a terrible choice for a rocket this large. Doomed the whole enterprise.
I know launches are exciting. Landings, doubly so. But eight launches to get to the moon is not a good rocket. Sorry.
Honest question, but what do they usually use?
I think choosing steel has helped Starship, as it allowed the ship to survive reentry and land in the ocean despite heat shield failures. Had the ship been made of aluminum, I'm certain earlier missions would have broken up when the aluminum heated up and lost its strength.
Starship is fantastic value for money compared to Artemis!
It's why they have plans to elongate the stack further. If they have this much TWR to go around at liftoff, they can afford to cash in that extra thrust to pack more fuel.
Elongate the stack.
What I find really amazing and cool is that while its reentering the engineering team can drive it around and look at heating effects on tiles/spars/etc all while retrieving telemetry by Starlink. What many people don't realize is that early capsules were the shape they were because that was the limit of what they could simulate for re-entry forces. The ability to get real time confirmation of systems response in re-entry is a capability that we've never had. So there's that.
So at this point it looks like they are down to un-reliabile raptor relights on the booster.
Congrats to everyone who worked on this.
This was a great flight, though.
Is this just a fancy way of saying lightweight fragile aerospace tube with hot stuff all over the outside and flammable stuff on the inside will not respond well to falling on it's side or is there some other thing going on here I don't know about.
We had it demonstrated in the past with Starship surviving multiple burnthroughts and now in failing to explode. :-)
There was a couple of times when SpaceX accidentally soft landed a Falcon 9 first stage into the ocean, and had it just float around. They're yet to do that trick with Starship though.
EDIT: Of fucking course.
They had been explaining the post-ignition abort from last week, and showed how 4 out of 33 engines had failed to light on the first stage. This was due to some kind of pump malfunctions. They said that if 1 or 2 fail, it's OK to launch, but more than 2 is an automatic abort. So they were able to replace the finicky motors and fully test them out.
Who knows what caused the underthrust for the landing burn, but at least all 33 engines were operational at launch, and they got plenty of data from this test run, and all Starlink v3 satellites have been deployed successfully for their "suborbital speedrun", so this test flight is doing really awesome!
And the visuals from Starlink for the entire journey is freakin' awesome.
[Edit note: Starship and Booster are methalox, yes. The physicist is talking generically, not about this launch specifically)