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
I wouldn't be surprised if we end up seeing a heat shield refurbishment attachment to the launch tower that allows technicians to access the side of the ship to patch up between flights without leaving the pad. They're going to need some kind of solution for the many back-to-back HLS refueling flights.
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.
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.
And the visuals from Starlink for the entire journey is freakin' awesome.
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.
[Edit note: Starship and Booster are methalox, yes. The physicist is talking generically, not about this launch specifically)
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“We got all the heat shield data we needed and then some! ”
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.
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
Point is to not judge a book by its cover.
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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?
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.
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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.
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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.
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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!
Basically. It's a rough work-life balance at SpaceX and as people get older, they want to live their lives and not live at work.
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Equity: AI funds rockets
Of all the places that money parted from fools winds up, this is not the worst of them.
How can that be, you might ask?
The V2 program was an incredibly expensive program, and sucked up enormous resources. But the V2 proved to be an inconsequential weapon, and did very little damage, because its guidance system was primitive.
The V1, ironically, was effective. Not because it wreaked critical damage on Britain, but because it was cheap to build and deploy, and the British spent a great deal of resources trying to stop it.
It reminds me of the current drone warfare.
Hitler also demanded that it be used to attack London, blowing up civilian homes, when it would have been much more effective attacking the staging areas for D-Day.
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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.
But at the end of the day you know what you saw. Reflects very poorly.
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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...
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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?
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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 fantastic value for money compared to Artemis!
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Also are you willing to stake money on that claim? How about this: If before July 25th, 2036, any version of Starship made primarily of steel (HLS, future Mars versions, etc) has an apogee above 2,000km, you pay me $1,000. If not, I pay you $1,000. If you like, we can bet some other amount up to $10k. And if you prefer, the loser could donate the amount to a non-profit/charity of the winner's choosing.
This way they got way more heat shield data, which is, I think, their most critical item they need to learn from and iterate.
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.
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Musk has also done dumb PR things like provide free Starlink service to people cut off after the hurricane.
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.
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.
Musk hired a private investigator to confirm the pedophile allegations (which failed, of course).
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".
Reminder:
> "pedo boy" sounds like an insult, not a charge... This is evident from you changing his word from "pedo boy" to "pedophile".
'motherfucker' is a common phrase even outside of strictly english - speaking countries , and very few people go on to explain how the person had sex with a mother.
'pedo boy' is impossibly uncommon, regardless of what the singular defending belligerent claims, and furthermore he went on to publicly accuse the person of actual pedophilia.
yeah : i'm sure it didn't fail in court due to unlimited deep pockets and lawyers on retainer.
is there anything beyond willful ignorance ? You and I have had differences of opinion before, but yeesh -- talk about a hill to die on, defending elons' shite behavior during that phase.
Musk won the lawsuit.
Musk also publicly apologized.
Please continue your defense.
All it has to be is common in S Africa where he grew up. As I mentioned before, different cultures have widely varying common forms of insults.
> furthermore he went on to publicly accuse the person of actual pedophilia.
That was after being sued for $195 million. I've also remarked that I am not defending libel. A common insult is not libelous.
P.S. People successfully sue rich people all the time, because that's where the money is.