Heard ‘em say “centimetres, not yards” regarding the accuracy of starships’ splashdown. So next flight, it might do some neat stuff itself as well \O/
As much as I have started to dislike the public head figure of spaceX, I do love this stuff. It’s so inspiring. Truly an historic launch today.
Agreed. Elon should focus on doing the cool stuff which he is exceedingly good at rather than, well, everything else he has been doing lately.
My “Give A ****” dial has always been rather low for any project that guy has touched (other than PayPal which I use daily). But now I truly could care less. His rocket could land on the Moon, build a city on top of a trillion kilos of ice which SpaceX discovered and plant a giant American flag in the middle of it all and I would feel nothing but sorrow.
I see where that’s coming from. However, the idea of big f’in rockets throwing hundreds of tons into orbit per flight and then getting turned around like a 737 to do it again within a week is going to transform space in ways that are hard to comprehend.
It will if he can do it. But space shuttle was meant to fly fortnightly… and that never happened.
Space is hard. I’m impressed that privately held companies are even able to do orbital launches, much less all the innovation that’s been happening recently - and not just SpaceX, ULA had a pretty hairy launch just recently that the redundancy in the system managed to save the mission which was pretty impressive 
Heads-up for those of us who wait for MSFS 2024 to do something or are interested in these launches:
T-90 minutes approximately for flight 6.
Here is a stream:
Got it on the big screen. Perfect timing if nothing goes wrong!
Me too.
T-10min.
Aww, no catch. Rest looks good so far though.
Seems like there was some damage to the tower during the launch.
It’s a shame the rockets are too big to do drone ship landings like the Falcons used to…
Relight looked OK, pretty short burn but it looked good
Reentry looked pretty great. Definitely the least toasty ship so far.
Still some burnthrough apparent on one of the fins from the video, but I guess the new design of the next test shape will fix that.
Probably. After the past flights they should have a decent idea what is the problem. But we won’t know until the first redesigned ship has reentered I guess. That kind of engineering is hard.
I am curious about the smaller flaps on the new one. They look cool, but will they provide enough steering? Again: Probably. The engineers have a lot more data than we could have. But we will see.
So the next flight will be interesting for several reasons:
My guess is also that we will have to wait a bit longer for the first Starship catch because of the above points.
If you are very enthusiastic about SoaceX, you should probably not read this. You have been warned.
I am sure it is all true. But even if it is exaggerated and biased, I loved it. There are few humans I loathe more than Musk (two actually). Any failure on his part fills me with schadenfreude. So long as no one is hurt, the more explosions, the better.
Having said that, SpaceX’s model of loss acceptance is built into their engineering plan. What NASA did is only possible with a government entity. The break/improve/break/improve model is not a bad one if you can absorb the losses. SpaceX is the world’s most protected government contractor. So they can continue to handle the losses and improve.
The same guy wrote another article critizicing SpaceX approach at iterative design with the starship, you may find that interesting.
I’d be in the same boat if every explosion wasn’t essentially Musk taking a huge pile of tax money, keeping half for himself and torching the other half, figuratively speaking.
True. But he is infinitely rich already. More important to me is that he loose the aura of renaissance genius that has defined him in the eyes of most Americans for the last decade. Let him be rich but let him eat crow.
It’s less the being rich part that gets on my nerves, it’s being wasteful with other people’s money. The “this money wouldn’t be spent better anyway” argument is aging like milk, IMHO.