I have to admit that my enthusiasm for anything SpaceX is doing has absolutely crashed due to Musk’s insanity and all the disgusting insider dealing they’re getting regularly involved in these last few months.
It’s such a tragedy. I’ve gone from fanboy who watches every single launch to “meh”.
The nazis essentially created our first space program, looks like it’s happening again.
Yep, exactly.
I remember the double-return of the first F9H boosters (that one-two sonic boom 🤯) and watching them land side-by-side. I remember watching the successive starship iterations get closer and closer to landing, then iterate on the reentry effort, and watching plasma partially eat through one of the stabilizers without fully wrecking it on a fucking livestream. THAT was wild. And it was the most excited I’ve been about science and engineering I’ve been in a long time.
And now I simply cannot separate the fact that the company is owned and run by the guy who did a seig heil to the fascist authoritarian when he took office, and who is now actively helping tear apart the very institutions that set SpaceX up for success - amongst fucking everything else in this country that has ever given us a competitive advantage. It’s heartbreaking and deeply infuriating.
I wonder if they’ll make it past the Indian Ocean this time.
Nope. Not until they’re going for a Ship catch. It has to come down somewhere and the only places it can safely come down are either the ocean or the catch tower. So until they get the catch hardware to a state where they believe it would work out, every Ship is going to fly a trajectory that ends in the ocean.
So no orbit. Noted
I’m ready for another starship test! Maybe mid may
Hopefully we get another improvement on this one. They need to nail the thermal protection, hope it isn’t insurmountable.
Any news on active cooling systems or is that once everything else fails?
I haven’t heard any news on active cooling systems recently. Is thermal protection the biggest hurdle? The ships on flights 4 through 6 all survived to splashdown.
At the moment, the bigger issue seems to be whatever vibrations/oscillations caused the destruction of the ships on flights 7 and 8 before they reached orbit.
Either way, I’m looking forward to the next flight test.
But they didn’t survive intact did they?
I haven’t heard anything for a while and I was just asking for an update if anyone knows anything.
It seemed to me they changed something to cause those vibrations/oscillations so to fix it they could just change it back. Like to me it seems solvable.
But in regards to the reusability of the heat shield, I haven’t heard of any progress? So wouldn’t it still be regarded as the biggest issue?
Alright, load up the billionaires and send them to mars!
Amen to that, I’ve got a list, but i’ll settle for all of them.
