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.
And the ship landing was so soft it didn't even explode! That's never happened before. And it's even still connected to Starlink. 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.
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)
Too bad for Elon gullibles its at $113/share
but its a great company at $38
Without X, with a worse administration, without him keeping a positive demeanor even with people without vision trying to drag him down due to their careless ignorance, all this could have come to an end.
And the visuals from Starlink for the entire journey is freakin' awesome.
This was a great flight, though.
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.
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?
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.
Do you prefer your reprehensibles to sanitize all their communications via a communications department and social media manager like every other phony CEO and politician out there?
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.
georgeburdell•58m ago
wat10000•51m ago
pixl97•49m ago
tenuousemphasis•49m ago
stephc_int13•49m ago
ButlerianJihad•48m ago
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•46m ago
NetMageSCW•43m ago
davmar•42m ago
ls612
ChuckMcM•38m ago
cucumber3732842•34m ago
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.
ACCount37•20m ago
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.
ChuckMcM•7m ago
DetroitThrow•24m ago
fastball•2m ago