Preliminary indication is that we had an oxygen/fuel leak in the cavity above the ship engine firewall that was large enough to build pressure in excess of the vent capacity.
Apart from obviously double-checking for leaks, we will add fire suppression to that volume and probably increase vent area. Nothing so far suggests pushing next launch past next month.
Reminds me of one of NASA's reckless ideas, abandoned after Challenger in 1986, to put a liquid hydrogen stage inside the cargo bay of the Shuttle orbiter [0]. That would have likely leaked inside that confined volume, and could plausibly have exploded in a similar way as Starship.
- "The astronauts considered the Shuttle-Centaur missions to be riskiest Space Shuttle missions yet,[85] referring to Centaur as the "Death Star".[86]"
This sounds like one of those "and also" things. I'd say you add fire suppression AND ALSO try more to reduce leaks. It's got to be really difficult to build huge massive tanks that hold oxygen and other gases under pressure (liquid methane too will have some vapor of course). Are leaks inherently going to happen?
This is meant to be a human rated ship of course, how will you reduce this danger? I know this stuff is hard, but you can't just iterate and say starship 57 has had 3 flights without leaks, we got it now. Since I have no expertise here, I can imagine all kinds of unlikely workarounds like holding the gas under lower pressure with humans on board or something to reduce the risk.
While the video post does mention "Right in front of us", and it may have appeared that way to the pilots, it wasn't. Gauging relative distance and altitude between aircraft in flight can be notoriously deceptive even to experts, especially in the case of intensely bright, massive, unfamiliar objects at very high speed and great distance.
The RUD was in orbit over 146 kilometers up and >13,000 mph. I'm sure using the FlightAware tracking data someone will work out the actual distance and altitude delta between that plane and the Starship 7 orbital debris. I suspect it was many dozens of miles away and probably still nearly orbital in altitude (~100km).
Yes, both spectacular and beautiful. I guess Starship can now say what the legendary comedy actress (and sex symbol) of early cinema Mae West said:
"When I'm good... I'm very good. But when I'm bad... I'm even better." :-)
Combined with another tower catch, that's two spectacular shows for the price of one. Hopefully the onboard diagnostic telemetry immediately prior to the RUD is enough to identify the root cause so it can be corrected.
Inadvertently perfect timing for this footage. Glowing and backlit by the setting sun, against clear and already darkening evening sky... couldn't plan the shot any better if you tried.
Let's hope no debris came down on anyone or anything apart from open water.
Given that the engine telemetry shown on the broadcast showed the engines going out one by one over a period of some seconds, I could easily imagine some sort of catastrophic failure on a single engine that cascaded.
It could be many things, plumbing to the engines, tank leak, ect. You could see fire on the control flap actuators, so the ship interior was engulfed in fire at the same time the first engine was out.
Does anyone know the timing of when the breakup actually occurred?
I’m curious because I was on a flight to Puerto Rico from Florida at 3pm ET they diverted our flight. They didn’t really give us many details but said the “landing strips were closed”. Our friends on a slightly early flight diverted to ST Thomas. We were going to divert to a nearby airport in Puerto Rico (we were going to land in Aguadilla instead of San Juan) so I feel like these diversions wouldn’t be related but the timing seems pretty odd.
Side note: annoying that twitter/X requires login. I'd have sworn Elon said he was removing that requirement to login to view tweets (I think he discussed it with George Hotz).
> This is insane. You shouldn't need a twitter account at all unless you need to write something
George:
> Why did you put the pop up back?
Elon:
> We should not be prohibiting read-only scroll
So there seems to be agreement that twitter shouldn't require an account to read (view) posts. The Twitter Space is from 23 Dec 2022 so perhaps things changed since.
It’s crazy how fast that ship is moving and how big the explosion was that it looks like something much, much lower in the air went boom. It was transitting the sky faster than a commercial aircraft does. So it gives an impression more like a private aircraft breaking up at 5-10k feet.
Separation is much closer to the launch pad in Texas, the booster barely makes it downrange at all before turning around. This being filmed from the Bahamas with this much lateral velocity, gotta be the Ship breaking up. Likely the FTS triggered after enough engines failed that it couldn't make orbit / planned trajectory.
I dont think so. I think it is the breakup, with a large mass visible. most of the material will continue on until it parabolically renters and burns up in a visible manner
Nope. That's definitely an explosion (source: I'm in the rocket business). However it may not be an explosion of the whole stage. Probably of the engine section.
I think this was the first test of StarShip v2. I'd be surprised if everything worked after they redesigned the whole StarShip. That would be like refactoring Microsoft Windows by hand-typing new code and expecting it to run without errors on the first try.
While the telemetry was still going, you could see Ship engines going out one by one. Earlier when there was video there was what looked like flames visible inside one of the flap hinges, definitely shouldn't be there on ascent. Presumably something failed internally and caused the Ship to shut down before reaching target trajectory, at which point either FTS or the failure itself caused it to blow up, as seen on the Insta reel.
Or slightly wrong. An FTS is programmed to be conservative. Particularly on unmanned flights. Doubly particularly on reëntry. Triply so on experiments bits.
Another failure, another few months of figuring out why this isn't working and can't stick to its flight path. They caused chaos for many commercial planes, so they'll definitely need some full reports to the FTA to know what they're doing about this, why the debris is falling over flight paths, and so on.
First Shuttle orbited astronauts and successfully recovered all intended components. Every Saturn 5 was successful, the 3rd flight sent a crew to lunar orbit, and the 6th put a crew on the moon.
To date a Starship has yet to be recovered after flight - and those launched are effectively boilerplate as they have carried no cargo (other than a banana) and have none of the systems in place to support a crew.
Some people are really fetishizing iterative failure - but just because you are wandering in the desert does not mean there is a promised land.
and guess what? they finally got it right and now falcon 9 is not only extremely reliable but quite cheap for everyone.
NASA (with the shuttle and saturn V) had a completely different idea on rocket development (and blue origin seems to follow their mindset), which is fine. but to say that this is "failure fetish" when spacex has an amazing track record is just hating for the sake of hating.
SpaceX’s track record is too fetishized by the Musk fanboys. Falcon 9 has some weird Demi god status even though the launch vehicle is no different than the competitor like Soyuz.
Starship IS an impressive achievement while they speed up development process with real-world hard data
New Glenn IS an impressive achievement while taking their time to develop a vehicle that reached the orbit on first time
Per wiki on Apollo
> Landing humans on the Moon by the end of 1969 required the most sudden burst of technological creativity, and the largest commitment of resources ($25 billion; $182 billion in 2023 US dollars)[22] ever made by any nation in peacetime. At its peak, the Apollo program employed 400,000 people and required the support of over 20,000 industrial firms and universities.[23]
Different budget, different number of people working on this stuff and different mindset. Actually the Apollo program was also iterative and it paid off.
The Apollo program was inventing all of this technology, and using only extremely rudimentary computers, still doing many calculations with slide rulers.
SpaceX has all of the Apollo program's work to build on, and computers that could do all the computing work that the Apollo program ever made, in total, in probably a few minutes.
Do you not count the Saturn 1B rocket capsule that caught on fire on the pad and burnt the Apollo 1 astronauts alive?
What about Apollo 13?
> but just because you are wandering in the desert does not mean there is a promised land
The "promise land" in this analogy is visible past the desert. What's not known is what route to get there.
In your tortured analogy, the people who "are really fetishizing iterative failure" are not doing that; they're fetishizing the fact that the person walking through this desert is trying, and if they hit a barrier, they iterate and try again until they reach the promise land. Along the way they are accomplishing what was once thought to be impossible.
The command module fire had zero to do with the Saturn V. Apollo 13 again was the command and service module, and in that case the crew was "returned safely to the Earth".
NASA put people on the first flight of the shuttle to space, which turned out after the fact to have 1 in 12 chance of killing the crew. Can't do that in 2025.
Apollo 6 (2nd Satun V launch) was "less than nominal" and warranted a congressional hearing. It did succeed, but luck played a part. George Mueller declared later that Apollo 6 was a failure for NASA.
>Some people are really fetishizing iterative failure
Subassemblies that made up Saturn V went through several hundred (inflation adjusted) billion dollars' worth of iterative failure before the Apollo program was announced.
The only reason it WAS announced was all of the iterative failure that had been paying off.
The day JFK uttered "shall go to the moon in this deck-aid", the F-1 engine had already been exploding and failing for three years.
My memory is hazy, from a brown bag I went to at work 15 years ago, but they blew up around 50 F-1s before one worked right.
And while the Saturn isn't an upgraded Jupiter it is EXTREMELY closely related to Jupiter and Jupiter had a shit-ton of failures before they got it right, turned around, and used all of that knowledge to build Saturn.
The shuttle programme was signed off in 1972, had it's first flight in 1977, and it's first crewed flight in 1981. Starship has been going for 5 years (albeit on the back of lots of other SpaceX work.) It's getting to orbit in the same time that Shuttle took to 'fly' on the back of a 747. A few lost ships is a pretty small price to pay for going twice as fast on delivery.
It’s pretty weird to get any engineering thing right on the first test, no? The entire development strategy would have to be based around that goal. I think the standard engineering strategy would be to test early and often.
I hadn’t thought about it before, but, especially during the Cold War, the US government had a big incentive to appear infallible that SpaceX doesn’t have. Are we sure there weren’t more tests in secret? USG also has access to huge tracts of land that is off limits, and rocket tests are easily ‘national security issue’ enough to justify being conducted in secret. Just a thought.
Maybe match some achievements from 60 years ago, like having a rocket that can put someone on the moon, back when the largest supercomputer in the space program had less FLOPS than my watch.
> To date, no Starship has been recovered after flight.
This is irrelevant, as none of the flights included any plans to recover the Starship. The objective for each flight has been to dump the vehicle in the sea at the target zone.
That “first success” was actually on the back of a long series of related rockets with technology and engines inherited from a huge missile program. Those NASA eggheads didn’t start from zero on a shoestring budget and make things work on the first try! The Saturn V was just a stretched version of the Saturn series of rockets. These all cost hundreds of billions in today’s money to develop!
Second, they’re not “the same thing”. A single-use piece of technology has very different design constraints and engineering considerations as a reusable piece of technology.
A single-use weapon is a bomb. A reusable weapon is a sword. Just because you can shove a fuse into some explosives doesn’t mean you can forge a sword that won’t shatter on first use.
An equivalent example from space technology are explosive bolts. NASA uses them extensively, SpaceX never does… because they’re not reusable and not up-front testable. They’re expensive too. So instead they iterated (and iterated!) on vacuum-rated actuators that can serve the same role. This is a non-trivial exercise that resulted in a few RUDs. This is why NASA didn’t even try! It’s harder and not needed if reusability was a non-goal.
> First Shuttle orbited astronauts and successfully recovered all intended components.
There were 16 taxi and flight tests with Enterprise before the launch in 1981 (Approach and Landing Tests - Enterprise) where the first 8 were uncrewed. Just saying there were prior test flights using it.
There was something like 4 years of testing before the proper launch.
That "landing" (is it still considered a landing if it's chopsticked a few meters before it touches the ground?) is so unnatural it almost looks fake. So big and unimaginable that it feels like watching fx on a movie!
The close-up camera right after was interesting, I thought it captured on the grid fins, but it looks like there are two small purpose-built knobs for that.
Yeah, that shot is so clean and smooth it feels like a render. Absolutely iconic even after a dozen rewatchings. The iris flares and the framerate… gotta hand it to whoever planned that shot and placed that camera. A+ videography.
If cutting edge engineering with conventional physics looks fake to you folks imagine what a hard time you’re going to have with real videos of actual UFOs.
IIRC, the grid fins are not strong enough to support the rocket, and reinforcing them would add too much weight to the vehicle.
The plan is to catch the second stage the same way, and the starship in flight now is the first to have mockup pins to test the aerodynamics and see if they cause issues during reentry.
I found the same when the first Falcon Heavy executed the simultaneous booster landing. Watching them both come down, within moments of each other at neighbouring pads was incredibly cool.
Its sad that Gerry Anderson never got to see this. It's like something from a Thunderbirds episode.
You can hear some sounds in the stream that I think are one of the presenters weeping during the launch and landing sequences. I think I would be similarly awe struck to witness such a thing
The clearance is amazing -- probably bigger IRL than it looked on the camera, but it looked like only a foot or two between the chopsticks arm and the top of the rocket! The control algorithms on the gimballed engines must be insanely precise.
Since I’ve never seen an f9 landing, watching ift5 land was kinda mind blowing. Even 6k away you can tell it’s really big but moved with a grace and smoothness like a hippo in water only with crackling flame.
Oh no they lost the ship after the booster landed! Seems like they lost an engine, then I saw fire around the rear flap hinges in the last images before they cut out, and then the telemetry showed more engines shutting down until it froze.
During ascent I also noticed a panel near the front fins that seemed to be loose and flapping. Probably not related but who knows.
Back a few years ago. This was the starship that in 2024 would reach Mars with humans, with so much space taken by crew and materials, and almost no fuel, and "10 times cheaper". And currently is an empty shell. Nice fireworks and show, but no meaningful payload yet. Not even LO. And this will be ready for 2026 artemis mission?
I’m not a big fan of Elon Musk, but this is just the typical executive talking up their product and to some extent being overly optimistic about timelines. You’d think with the quantity of software engineers in HN this would be obvious, but the (rightful IMO) disdain for Elon Musk is resetting people’s brains.
This is version 2 of Starship, with some upgrades, such as longer starship.
"Upgrades include a redesigned upper-stage propulsion system that can carry 25 per cent more propellant, along with slimmer, repositioned forward flaps to reduce exposure to heat during re-entry.
For the first time, Starship will deploy 10 Starlink simulators" [1].
Will be interesting to hear the postmortem on the second stage. The booster part seemed to work pretty flawlessly with the exception of a non-firing engine on boost back which then did fire during the landing burn.
If the person doing their on-screen graphics is reading this, I wonder if you have considered showing tank LOX/CH4 remaining as a log graph. I believe it decreases logrithmically when being used (well it would if you keep 'thrust' constant) so that would create a linear sweep to the 'fuel level' status.
I don't believe they throttle the engines up or down much during the second stage burn. Fuel decreases ~linearly and thrust is relatively constant. Acceleration increases as fuel mass decreases.
I would be surprised if that was the case, my reasoning to that is that computing where a thing is going, when it's under going with changing acceleration AND changing mass, is pretty complicated. Especially if you already have the capability to throttle the engines and keep 'a' constant.
They might, I'm not saying your wrong, I'm just saying that I cannot imagine how you would justify the added complexity of doing it that way.
reminds me of the classic joke:
a man walking down a street, stops and asks another person if they know what time it is. The person responds: I'm sorry as I don't have a watch on me, but you see that car parked over there? when it explodes, it should be 5pm
Yeah, I prefer this "when this comment is XY old" format the most when communicating internationally. Closely followed by UTC, of course.
I hate having to convert from some time zone which I don't know by heart; with the additional risk of getting daylight savings or something wrong and missing the event.
I wonder how much of the second stage flight is autonomous and if they need to continually need to give it a go to continue, or if it aborts automatically after some time of lost telemetry. But maybe it already exploded anyways.
Or if you would like additional commentary and extra camera views, there are independent channels such as Everyday Astronaut, NASASpaceFlight, Spaceflight Now, etc.
uBlock Origin blocked any ads if there was any and I didn't have any issues (Ungoogled Chrome). I didn't pay for Twitch and TVV LOL Pro works fine for me.
What worries me about space innovation is the fact that there is such little margin for error. Materials are being stressed so much while trying to defy the laws of physics that the smallest angle error, the smallest pressure mismatch, smallest timing error, and boom. This did not happen when we were inventing cars, trains and air planes. Now imagine these risks, while you're halfway to mars. Is it possible that we just have no found/invented the right materials or the right fuel/propulsion mechanism to de-risk this, and that is where we should be allocating a lot more resources?
The requirements of orbital launch are unyielding. If you make a car 50% heavier, it will have worse mileage and handling, but it will still get you where you need to go. If you make a spacecraft 50% heavier, it will never reach orbit.
> This did not happen when we were inventing cars, trains and air planes.
Cars are small, and they still go up in flames routinely all on their own (for older cars, aged fuel lines rupturing is a top cause, for newer cars shit with the turbocharger), it just doesn't make more news than a line in the local advertisement rag because usually all it needs is five minutes work for a firefighter truck.
Trains had quite the deadly period until it was figured out how to deal with steam safely - and yet, in Germany we had the last explosion of a steam train in 1977, killing nine people [1].
Can someone please please PLEASE tell SpaceX PR/Streaming team that the speed (per SI system) is measured in meters per second, not kilometers per hour? The speed of sound is approx 300 m/s, orbital velocity is approx 8,0000 m/s (depending on altitude), free fall acceleration on Earth is 9.81m/s, 1.63m/s on the Moon, the speed of light is apporx 300,000,000 m/s, people learn these numbers in middle school. It's not 1000 km/h, or 28,000 km/h, it just looks so weird.
Edit: ok, acceleration is meters per second per second, but my point stands.
I understand the appeal of using the same combinations everywhere, but I thought the great thing about the metric system was that it was easy to convert. So 8000 m/s is 8 km/s.
...which has nothing to do with NASA the US government organization, or the NSF (FYI). It's just some independent streamers who apparently know you can't get trademark claims against you by the federal government.
NASA allows them to place cameras as media on nasa property some are even permanent. and are credentialed media for launches. so I am guessing NASA is okay with it.
NSF was started by Chris Bergen, a meteorologist by trade and a space exploration enthusiast, in early 2000s as a hobby forum (good old phBB) for people to chat about space and rocketry. I'm sure he couldn't even dream about becoming so popular so he didn't spend too much time coming up with a name (ie to protect himself against copyright infringement lawsuits). In fact I'm sure he would love to change the name now as they try to cover space programs all over the world (it's too late as people know them as NSF).
So you wouldn’t exactly get a copyright claim when abusing the NASA logo but it’s still illegal.
I couldn’t find anything about the NASA word itself though, just some articles reciting guidelines by NASA not to imply an endorsement by NASA. I don’t know how that’s enforced though.
Spoken like someone who is generating their opinion from their channel name alone.
Those "independent streamers" provide live launch streams with multiple feeds using their own equipment and to top it off they have numerous very knowledgeable hosts for all their streams. At this point I suspect they are covering every US based launch from all the major players. Hell, today they broadcasted both the New Glenn and Starship launches less than 24h apart.
But yeah, let's get hung up on an organization name that originated as an Internet forum for discussing all things....... NASA!
Amazing. 2nd ever catch of the booster via the 'chopstick' arms. Looks like the starship itself won't be splashing down west of Perth, instead telemetry has been lost (assuming RUD - "Rapid Unscheduled Disassembly").
It is amazing to see the number of fairly significant changes they tested in this launch. I guess that is the advantage of private space flights and rocket launches where the speed of development is must faster than in a place like Nasa or any government run space program.
I am not surprised that stage 2 failed because they were testing with a lot of the thermal tiles removed.
That was so impressive. I was lucky enough to live in Florida and see the rockets go up. Standing on the beach and watching the first Falcon Heavy launch will be something that will always stick with me. Great job SpaceX.
Failure of an entirely new, previously thought to be impossible combination of technologies.
This is like complaining that your first attempt at new programming language paradigm resulted in a compiler that is slow and sometimes has internal errors!
Clever product placement of iPhone and Starlink and excellent storytelling. Space age technology used to connect astronauts to their loved ones on earth. Can’t be done any better.
The first Falcon 9 landing happened after 8 attempts at controlled splashdown or landing. Time from the first attempt to the first successful landing was a little over 2 years. In the year after their first successful landing, they succeeded in 5 out of 8 attempts. This wikipedia article has details: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falcon_9_first-stage_landing_t...
Starship has had 7 tests in the past 20 months. The first test barely got off the pad due to engine failures. The stages failed to separate, so it was blown up shortly after liftoff. The second test did separate, but the booster blew up shortly after stage separation and the ship blew up shortly before engine shutdown, raining debris across the Atlantic similar to today. The third test got to space, but the booster landing burn failed and the booster impacted the ocean at close to the speed of sound. The ship couldn't maintain orientation and burned up on reentry. The fourth test succeeded at all goals (soft booster splashdown and successful reentry, though the flap did burn through). The fifth test was a success (booster catch and soft ship splashdown, though again with some flap burnthrough). The sixth test aborted the booster landing due to antennas on the tower being damaged by the rocket exhaust at launch, but did splash down softly offshore. The ship also reentered and splashed down on target.
Today's ship failure is a setback, as it will likely take a few months for the FAA investigation to be completed. That said, SpaceX still seems likely to recover a ship intact this year, and at that point it will only be a matter of time before they can launch an order of magnitude more stuff into orbit than they can with the Falcon 9 fleet (and at much lower cost).
SpaceX started Starship development in 2012. Despite 12 years of work, its best test flight reached space but not orbit, sending a banana to the Indian Ocean.
While NASA's SLS began in 2011 and successfully flew around the Moon in 2022.
Blue Origin's New Glenn also started development in 2012 and reached orbit on it's first flight with an actual payload.
When they say SpaceX is fast, what do they mean exactly?
It's similar to last time if you saw that, the first stage will come back towards the launch site and they will try to catch it with the landing tower chopsticks, while the second stage does a soft landing in the ocean after going halfway around the earth.
As far as new stuff, they are trying to deploy some simulated satellites from the second stage and will try to relight one of the engines.
I also saw mention somewhere that this is V2 of Starship upper stage? Somewhat longer, and I’m sure a bunch of other changes to enable mass simulator deployment.
Space X has failed after 3 billion US tax payer dollars to take a banana into low earth orbit. Needless to say we aren't going to Mars last year watching a woman in a long dress floating in the cargo bay behind a curtain of glass windows playing a violin for entertaining the dozens of astronaut's which don't have space for food, water, belongings or life support.
Feels like one SpaceX could and should deal with by DMCAing the channels. Even if getting people watching their official channel instead isn't that important to them, stopping people rebroadcasting their content whilst faking their brand identity to scam people feels like the most legitimate reason for sending takedowns going...
The most important payload for this flight was data. The ship was always going to be lost so from a standpoint of testing this was a huge success! I'm excited to see how quickly they resolve whatever happened and get IFT 8 going.
Beefed it the day after New Glenn makes orbit on the first try. Different philosophies, I know, but if I were at SpaceX I would be pretty unhappy right now.
I absolutely cannot relate to the HN excitement over rockets. What is the point? What are we going to do with them? It feels like half religion half misplaced techno-positivism.
(Also a person who actively platforms outspoken neo-nazis runs the company that is launching them)
Many of the techie people on HN undoubtedly dreamed of building and flying rockets at some point in their tweens / teens till the harsh realities of the material world took over. So they are vicariously living childhood dreams... Just like many "normal" people live theirs by following sports teams or celebrities. To each their own :-)
It sometimes feels like it: everything blows-up and thread here is like "what a success", Second stage explodes - "beautiful" (while trash is falling into ocean).
Yeah there is a huge amount of rationalizing how the debris aren’t a problem. Everyone is certain it will burn up before hitting the ground, and if it doesn’t, it will land somewhere that doesn’t matter… but I don’t think anyone knows that for sure?
Rockets are cool but it’s everyone’s planet, if this continues to make a huge mess, do us regular earth citizens have recourse?
It seems like they have the chopsticks catch down pretty well, but the ship exploded over the Atlantic so there's gonna have to be more tests before the ship can think about an RTLS test.
More generally, getting the ship to work reusably seems like it will be a considerably greater challenge than reusing the boosters.
Except for that whole second stage and payload part.
Actually I thought there would be less risk with the second stage changes, significant as they were, than the second catch. (Maybe there was less risk, of course, and the dice just didn't roll that way).
@elonmusk
Preliminary indication is that we had an oxygen/fuel leak in the cavity above the ship engine firewall that was large enough to build pressure in excess of the vent capacity.
Apart from obviously double-checking for leaks, we will add fire suppression to that volume and probably increase vent area. Nothing so far suggests pushing next launch past next month.
> They burned billions of public funds, literally.
Wrong. Public funds are not paying for Starship development but for the HLS variant development, at significantly lower cost than the HLS lander from Blue Origin. Which likely still doesn't cover the entire funding even for Blue Origin. A lot is paid by those space companies themselves. A NASA developed lander (Altair from the Constellation program), would probably have cost around an order of magnitude more.
Every one of these are like right out of a sci-fi novel. It makes me truly excited for our future in a way little else out there does.
Between this, AI (even in its current LLM form), and mounting evidence suggesting the entire solar system is teeming with at least microbial life, we are going to become an interplanetary species far sooner than many “skeptics” imagine.
We are just one more lander / sample mission / whatever away from having solid proof of life elsewhere in the solar system. That is gonna jumpstart all a huge race to get humans out into deep space to check it all out.
People worry about AI stealing their jobs… don’t worry. We need that stuff so humans can focus on the next phase of our history… becoming interplanetary. Your kids will be traveling to space and these (very overhyped, don’t get me wrong) LLM’s will be needed for all kinds of tasks.
It sounds crazy but I maintain it’s true and will happen sooner than you’d think.
I can 100% guarantee to you that the children of anyone born today will not travel to space in any significant number. There is nothing in space to travel to until we build extremely complex habitats, and that can't be done with manual human labor, it requires mostly automatic drones and maybe a handful of human controllers living in the ship that brought them there.
And building habitats that any significant amount of people (say, 1000) could actually live in will take a loooong amount of time and a huge amount of resources. And the question of "why would anyone waste time and resources on trying to live in conditions more inhospitable than anything the Earth can ever become, even with a major asteroid crashing into it in the middle of a nuclear war and a global pandemic?" will crop up long before more than one or two of these are finished.
> I can 100% guarantee to you that the children of anyone born today will not travel to space in any significant number
Someone born today will have children living into the early 2100s. The first flight ever was a little more than a hundred years ago. Using your kind of logic, no one would have predicted most of the technology we take for granted today.
> It makes me truly excited for our future in a way little else out there does.
Hate to break it to you, but Space X isn't it. You can't have a CEO that is not aligned to the truth and reality to lead a company into something that is beneficial for humanity.
I like how chopsticks catch (a very impressive feat) completely distracts everyone from totally fucked timeline and already spent budget on mars mission. Its like any criticism is being drowned in loud cheers. Only time will tell, but I hope I will be wrong on this one
What's the criticism exactly? Like I don't get your point? Yes they are behind on timelines and on Mars, does that mean that we should post reddit-tier cynical comments every time about that? I'm not saying that you're doing that, it's more that I don't get why this is surprising.
And on the other hand, it's also funny to see how "skeptics" (whatever that means in this case) dismiss or belittle achievements that were claimed to be impossible a few months or years ago (for example, the chopstick landing). It's like a never ending treadmill of
this is impossible->okay it happened, that's cool, but now xyz is impossible.
Plus, it seems normal to me that people care less about some sort of budget details or delays than really cool technical feats.
I’m in a slightly different boat. The CEO’s rubbish behavior sucks, but the company shouldn’t be diminished by that. The people behind SpaceX are a modernd day Apollo Program. Absolute marvels of engineering.
They are making the impossible merely late. Which, you know, is still pretty fucking cool.
I’d love to see any other country or competitor catch a stainless steel rocket larger than the Statue of Liberty that was just cruising back to earth at sub orbital velocity. Everybody else is so far behind it’s not even funny.
Spacex is cool as shit. Screw the “skeptics” and haters. Some people have a complete lack of imagination.
Still a failure in my book, it blew up before it could deliver its payload so they couldn't do many the tests they intended to do.
It is possible they will have to add one more test launch to their schedule, delaying commercial operations because of that.
It is not a complete failure, but to me, it is more failure than success, even by SpaceX test flight standards.
Compared to the previous flight, that I consider a success, the booster catch was nice, but it is not the first, and they have plenty of tries left to perfect it, so it is not in the critical path.
they didn't get the telemetry after, what it was, 16 min(?) hope they'll find the reason which will be hard without black boxes like on airplanes. as every engineer knows it works flawlessly only at the end. if ever.
the booster was the same, great, but not surprising.
SpaceX has a way of making the nearly impossible expected. We have forgotten quite quickly that booster catch is still a very experimental feature. Return to base on this flight wasn't routine yet.
Looks like second stage broke up over Caribbean, videos of the debris (as seen from ground):
https://x.com/deankolson87/status/1880026759133032662?t=HdHF...
https://x.com/realcamtem/status/1880026604472266800
https://x.com/adavenport354/status/1880026262254809115
Moment of the breakup:
https://www.instagram.com/reel/DE52_hVSeQz/
Preliminary indication is that we had an oxygen/fuel leak in the cavity above the ship engine firewall that was large enough to build pressure in excess of the vent capacity.
Apart from obviously double-checking for leaks, we will add fire suppression to that volume and probably increase vent area. Nothing so far suggests pushing next launch past next month.
https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1880060983734858130
Reminds me of one of NASA's reckless ideas, abandoned after Challenger in 1986, to put a liquid hydrogen stage inside the cargo bay of the Shuttle orbiter [0]. That would have likely leaked inside that confined volume, and could plausibly have exploded in a similar way as Starship.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shuttle-Centaur
- "The astronauts considered the Shuttle-Centaur missions to be riskiest Space Shuttle missions yet,[85] referring to Centaur as the "Death Star".[86]"
I wonder if it's related to the loose panel flapping about at the left of the screen here: https://youtu.be/qzWMEegqbLs?si=aUlI6zfkH3bZCmVm&t=111
This sounds like one of those "and also" things. I'd say you add fire suppression AND ALSO try more to reduce leaks. It's got to be really difficult to build huge massive tanks that hold oxygen and other gases under pressure (liquid methane too will have some vapor of course). Are leaks inherently going to happen?
This is meant to be a human rated ship of course, how will you reduce this danger? I know this stuff is hard, but you can't just iterate and say starship 57 has had 3 flights without leaks, we got it now. Since I have no expertise here, I can imagine all kinds of unlikely workarounds like holding the gas under lower pressure with humans on board or something to reduce the risk.
7 replies →
I'm not sure there's fire suppression effective enough for this type of leak (especially given rocket constraints)
20 replies →
Would be unpleasant if there was crew. Of course this thing is pretty far from human eating.
10 replies →
[flagged]
55 replies →
> (as seen from ground)
As seen from a plane in the air with the break up right in front of it:
https://old.reddit.com/r/aviation/comments/1i34dki/starship_...
While the video post does mention "Right in front of us", and it may have appeared that way to the pilots, it wasn't. Gauging relative distance and altitude between aircraft in flight can be notoriously deceptive even to experts, especially in the case of intensely bright, massive, unfamiliar objects at very high speed and great distance.
The RUD was in orbit over 146 kilometers up and >13,000 mph. I'm sure using the FlightAware tracking data someone will work out the actual distance and altitude delta between that plane and the Starship 7 orbital debris. I suspect it was many dozens of miles away and probably still nearly orbital in altitude (~100km).
Spectacular light show though...
27 replies →
Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion
2 replies →
That is absolutely insane. Honestly, I would probably assume a MIRV given the current environment.
What a strangely beautiful sight. While I was excited to see ship land, I'm also happy I get to see videos of this!
Yes, both spectacular and beautiful. I guess Starship can now say what the legendary comedy actress (and sex symbol) of early cinema Mae West said:
"When I'm good... I'm very good. But when I'm bad... I'm even better." :-)
Combined with another tower catch, that's two spectacular shows for the price of one. Hopefully the onboard diagnostic telemetry immediately prior to the RUD is enough to identify the root cause so it can be corrected.
I felt.. bad watching that breakup, it reminded me of Columbia.
6 replies →
As long as the debris has no effect wherever it lands, I agree with you
31 replies →
Looks like something out of a sci-fi movie.
14 replies →
Excitement guaranteed
>What a strangely beautiful sight.
"My god, Bones, what have I done?"
It’s a pretty expensive way to make fireworks.
Inadvertently perfect timing for this footage. Glowing and backlit by the setting sun, against clear and already darkening evening sky... couldn't plan the shot any better if you tried.
Let's hope no debris came down on anyone or anything apart from open water.
I take it if SpaceX debris hit and destroyed a boat the owner can claim damages from SpaceX?
Does international space law allow for this?
27 replies →
Given that the engine telemetry shown on the broadcast showed the engines going out one by one over a period of some seconds, I could easily imagine some sort of catastrophic failure on a single engine that cascaded.
It could be many things, plumbing to the engines, tank leak, ect. You could see fire on the control flap actuators, so the ship interior was engulfed in fire at the same time the first engine was out.
15 replies →
There's a flickering flame briefly visible on the flap hinge of the second stage in the last footage it sent down.
Most Sci-Fi real footage I have ever seen.
Edit: Reminds me of "The Eye" from star wars Andor
https://youtu.be/9lrr0CWHDGA?t=43
Wow. It reminds me of the comet scene from Andor. I wonder if suborbital pyrotechnics will become a thing one day.
> one day
today!
Watching those videos, my hand naturally looks for the roller ball from too much time playing missile command
Probably one of the most expensive fireworks (but probably still cheaper than the first Ariane 5 launch), but it looks very cool.
I think the N1 test flights are also a contender. I still remember something about kerosene raining for 15 minutes after the explosion.
Does anyone know the timing of when the breakup actually occurred?
I’m curious because I was on a flight to Puerto Rico from Florida at 3pm ET they diverted our flight. They didn’t really give us many details but said the “landing strips were closed”. Our friends on a slightly early flight diverted to ST Thomas. We were going to divert to a nearby airport in Puerto Rico (we were going to land in Aguadilla instead of San Juan) so I feel like these diversions wouldn’t be related but the timing seems pretty odd.
Depending on the precise launch time (4:36/4:37 PM CST) "Ship exploded at ≈T+00:08:26": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starship_flight_test_7
I'm not worried about the Starship itself, but it looks kinda dangerous. Is it?
It's very likely it exploded on purpose by SpaceX after it wasn't showing good data (aka Flight Termination System). Specifically over water.
Is there a video you don't need to log in to view?
The fourth one (instagram) doesn't require login.
Side note: annoying that twitter/X requires login. I'd have sworn Elon said he was removing that requirement to login to view tweets (I think he discussed it with George Hotz).
Found it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FkNkSQ42jg4&t=49m30s
Elon:
> This is insane. You shouldn't need a twitter account at all unless you need to write something
George:
> Why did you put the pop up back?
Elon:
> We should not be prohibiting read-only scroll
So there seems to be agreement that twitter shouldn't require an account to read (view) posts. The Twitter Space is from 23 Dec 2022 so perhaps things changed since.
6 replies →
https://mastodon.social/@BNONews/113840549980938951
for the record I was able to watch without logging in, on Firefox Linux
Where will this debris land? Can it impact airplane routes?
https://x.com/DJSnM/status/1880032865209184354
>Commercial flights are turning around to avoid potential debris.
27 replies →
east of Turks and Caicos Islands in the Caribbean. Draw a line from Boca Chia to Turks and keep going
1 reply →
HN comments is just reading strangers steam of consciousness now?
1 reply →
It’s crazy how fast that ship is moving and how big the explosion was that it looks like something much, much lower in the air went boom. It was transitting the sky faster than a commercial aircraft does. So it gives an impression more like a private aircraft breaking up at 5-10k feet.
The last one is stage separation, not an explosion. You can clearly see the "exploded" rocket continuing to fly afterwards.
Separation is much closer to the launch pad in Texas, the booster barely makes it downrange at all before turning around. This being filmed from the Bahamas with this much lateral velocity, gotta be the Ship breaking up. Likely the FTS triggered after enough engines failed that it couldn't make orbit / planned trajectory.
I dont think so. I think it is the breakup, with a large mass visible. most of the material will continue on until it parabolically renters and burns up in a visible manner
No, if that was taken from the Bahamas, that's an explosion connected to the loss of the 2nd stage.
Staging happens closer to the Texas coast and I don't believe you'd have line of sight to it from the Bahamas.
1 reply →
That's for sure not stage separation, that's an explosion from the FTS rupturing the ship tanks.
4 replies →
Nope. That's definitely an explosion (source: I'm in the rocket business). However it may not be an explosion of the whole stage. Probably of the engine section.
1 reply →
[dead]
[dead]
[dead]
[dead]
[dead]
[dead]
Does anyone know where the debris landed? In the ocean? Or just burnt out in the atmosphere?
Wasn't going fast enough to fully burn up. There'll be small pieces of debris scattered over quite a large area.
More views:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=-S8CK6LgnD4
https://x.com/DavidCaroe/status/1880036195985682710
Even more:
https://x.com/jp_ouellette/status/1880029255813459973
https://x.com/Sitting_Analyst/status/1880033972748709995
https://x.com/nickpags45/status/1880028951885816056
1 reply →
I have a boat and want to pick up floating heat tiles in the ocean, do you think we can find the parts by Puerto Rico?
No
I think this was the first test of StarShip v2. I'd be surprised if everything worked after they redesigned the whole StarShip. That would be like refactoring Microsoft Windows by hand-typing new code and expecting it to run without errors on the first try.
Where can I find the heat tiles? Will they be landing near Puerto Rico?
What a show
https://www.instagram.com/reel/DE54iL7xbZL/?igsh=dTNtZ2Q4aHl...
It's beautiful. Looks like something out of a sci-fi movie.
Cue Aerosmith song.
Looks like work of the Flight Termination System. Something measurable had to go very wrong.
While the telemetry was still going, you could see Ship engines going out one by one. Earlier when there was video there was what looked like flames visible inside one of the flap hinges, definitely shouldn't be there on ascent. Presumably something failed internally and caused the Ship to shut down before reaching target trajectory, at which point either FTS or the failure itself caused it to blow up, as seen on the Insta reel.
1 reply →
> Something measurable had to go very wrong
Or slightly wrong. An FTS is programmed to be conservative. Particularly on unmanned flights. Doubly particularly on reëntry. Triply so on experiments bits.
3 replies →
It wasn't FTS, it just blew up: https://x.com/SpaceX/status/1880033318936199643
3 replies →
Another failure, another few months of figuring out why this isn't working and can't stick to its flight path. They caused chaos for many commercial planes, so they'll definitely need some full reports to the FTA to know what they're doing about this, why the debris is falling over flight paths, and so on.
First Shuttle orbited astronauts and successfully recovered all intended components. Every Saturn 5 was successful, the 3rd flight sent a crew to lunar orbit, and the 6th put a crew on the moon.
To date a Starship has yet to be recovered after flight - and those launched are effectively boilerplate as they have carried no cargo (other than a banana) and have none of the systems in place to support a crew.
Some people are really fetishizing iterative failure - but just because you are wandering in the desert does not mean there is a promised land.
>Some people are really fetishizing iterative failure - but just because you are wandering in the desert does not mean there is a promised land.
i guess you didn't follow the falcon 9 failures right? here's two minutes of failures https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bvim4rsNHkQ
and guess what? they finally got it right and now falcon 9 is not only extremely reliable but quite cheap for everyone.
NASA (with the shuttle and saturn V) had a completely different idea on rocket development (and blue origin seems to follow their mindset), which is fine. but to say that this is "failure fetish" when spacex has an amazing track record is just hating for the sake of hating.
i would recommend, if you have the time, the book liftoff, by eric berger https://www.amazon.com/Liftoff-Desperate-Early-Launched-Spac... -- it was the book that opened my eyes to why spacex works like they do.
SpaceX’s track record is too fetishized by the Musk fanboys. Falcon 9 has some weird Demi god status even though the launch vehicle is no different than the competitor like Soyuz.
5 replies →
Apollo WAS an impressive achievement
Starship IS an impressive achievement while they speed up development process with real-world hard data
New Glenn IS an impressive achievement while taking their time to develop a vehicle that reached the orbit on first time
Per wiki on Apollo
> Landing humans on the Moon by the end of 1969 required the most sudden burst of technological creativity, and the largest commitment of resources ($25 billion; $182 billion in 2023 US dollars)[22] ever made by any nation in peacetime. At its peak, the Apollo program employed 400,000 people and required the support of over 20,000 industrial firms and universities.[23]
Different budget, different number of people working on this stuff and different mindset. Actually the Apollo program was also iterative and it paid off.
The Apollo program was inventing all of this technology, and using only extremely rudimentary computers, still doing many calculations with slide rulers.
SpaceX has all of the Apollo program's work to build on, and computers that could do all the computing work that the Apollo program ever made, in total, in probably a few minutes.
44 replies →
> Every Saturn 5 was successful
Do you not count the Saturn 1B rocket capsule that caught on fire on the pad and burnt the Apollo 1 astronauts alive?
What about Apollo 13?
> but just because you are wandering in the desert does not mean there is a promised land
The "promise land" in this analogy is visible past the desert. What's not known is what route to get there.
In your tortured analogy, the people who "are really fetishizing iterative failure" are not doing that; they're fetishizing the fact that the person walking through this desert is trying, and if they hit a barrier, they iterate and try again until they reach the promise land. Along the way they are accomplishing what was once thought to be impossible.
The command module fire had zero to do with the Saturn V. Apollo 13 again was the command and service module, and in that case the crew was "returned safely to the Earth".
Congratulations for neatly excluding Apollo 1, Columbia and Challenger's crews, may their memories rest heavy on your conscience.
Your supposed excellent programs killed people.
NASA put people on the first flight of the shuttle to space, which turned out after the fact to have 1 in 12 chance of killing the crew. Can't do that in 2025.
https://x.com/eager_space/status/1879291376418120184
Apollo 6 (2nd Satun V launch) was "less than nominal" and warranted a congressional hearing. It did succeed, but luck played a part. George Mueller declared later that Apollo 6 was a failure for NASA.
https://web.archive.org/web/20080120112115/http://www.hq.nas...
https://web.archive.org/web/20080227133401/http://www.hq.nas...
>Every Saturn 5 was successful
>Some people are really fetishizing iterative failure
Subassemblies that made up Saturn V went through several hundred (inflation adjusted) billion dollars' worth of iterative failure before the Apollo program was announced.
The only reason it WAS announced was all of the iterative failure that had been paying off.
The day JFK uttered "shall go to the moon in this deck-aid", the F-1 engine had already been exploding and failing for three years.
My memory is hazy, from a brown bag I went to at work 15 years ago, but they blew up around 50 F-1s before one worked right.
And while the Saturn isn't an upgraded Jupiter it is EXTREMELY closely related to Jupiter and Jupiter had a shit-ton of failures before they got it right, turned around, and used all of that knowledge to build Saturn.
The shuttle programme was signed off in 1972, had it's first flight in 1977, and it's first crewed flight in 1981. Starship has been going for 5 years (albeit on the back of lots of other SpaceX work.) It's getting to orbit in the same time that Shuttle took to 'fly' on the back of a 747. A few lost ships is a pretty small price to pay for going twice as fast on delivery.
Oh wow a company in 2020s is compared to company in 70s. Wow nice benchmark. We are going to be good as guys from 50 years ago.
Imagine Mercedes said it, or Intel or anyone. They would be a laughing stock.
2 replies →
It’s pretty weird to get any engineering thing right on the first test, no? The entire development strategy would have to be based around that goal. I think the standard engineering strategy would be to test early and often.
I hadn’t thought about it before, but, especially during the Cold War, the US government had a big incentive to appear infallible that SpaceX doesn’t have. Are we sure there weren’t more tests in secret? USG also has access to huge tracts of land that is off limits, and rocket tests are easily ‘national security issue’ enough to justify being conducted in secret. Just a thought.
So what does a rocket company need to do to be imrpessive in your eyes?
A Mars cargo mission, according to the timeline spacex set for themselves. https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-F2HFqsVkiZc/YT9bPpXSKDI/AAAAAAAAG...
7 replies →
Maybe match some achievements from 60 years ago, like having a rocket that can put someone on the moon, back when the largest supercomputer in the space program had less FLOPS than my watch.
11 replies →
Go to the moon, land a rover, wander about, come back with everyone alive... should be easy right?, I mean, it's already been done... RIGHT????
We'll have to get to parity with what we were doing 50-60 years ago.
The reusability is awesome, of course. More of that!
And also, still gotta get the basics right. Oxygen/fuel leaks aren't a great look (spoken as a not rocket scientist).
It needs to give him a job :-)
I will say, though, that booster catch is one of the coolest things I’ve ever seen.
Yes- very impressive feat of engineering.
> Every Saturn 5 was successful
On the other hand every Russian N1 wasn’t.
Rocketry is hard. It’s seems proven that if you’re a government space agency it’s even harder.
> To date, no Starship has been recovered after flight.
This is irrelevant, as none of the flights included any plans to recover the Starship. The objective for each flight has been to dump the vehicle in the sea at the target zone.
practically infinite resources and "classified" failures
As others have pointed out: Compare the budgets.
That “first success” was actually on the back of a long series of related rockets with technology and engines inherited from a huge missile program. Those NASA eggheads didn’t start from zero on a shoestring budget and make things work on the first try! The Saturn V was just a stretched version of the Saturn series of rockets. These all cost hundreds of billions in today’s money to develop!
Second, they’re not “the same thing”. A single-use piece of technology has very different design constraints and engineering considerations as a reusable piece of technology.
A single-use weapon is a bomb. A reusable weapon is a sword. Just because you can shove a fuse into some explosives doesn’t mean you can forge a sword that won’t shatter on first use.
An equivalent example from space technology are explosive bolts. NASA uses them extensively, SpaceX never does… because they’re not reusable and not up-front testable. They’re expensive too. So instead they iterated (and iterated!) on vacuum-rated actuators that can serve the same role. This is a non-trivial exercise that resulted in a few RUDs. This is why NASA didn’t even try! It’s harder and not needed if reusability was a non-goal.
I think wandering in the desert is done because there is a promised land. Yes, it doesn't mean that it exists.
But if you don't wander, you'll never find out. You gotta believe
I mean, yeah, it's a lot easier to build a rocket that only goes up.
> First Shuttle orbited astronauts and successfully recovered all intended components.
There were 16 taxi and flight tests with Enterprise before the launch in 1981 (Approach and Landing Tests - Enterprise) where the first 8 were uncrewed. Just saying there were prior test flights using it.
There was something like 4 years of testing before the proper launch.
Musk derangement syndrome
you are quite stupid or purposely ignore Falcon 9
[dead]
Right. Those are fair comparisons /s
That "landing" (is it still considered a landing if it's chopsticked a few meters before it touches the ground?) is so unnatural it almost looks fake. So big and unimaginable that it feels like watching fx on a movie!
The close-up camera right after was interesting, I thought it captured on the grid fins, but it looks like there are two small purpose-built knobs for that.
The times we live in!
You have perfectly described the feeling I had regarding the first belly flop demo (at least I think it was the first one?)
https://youtu.be/gA6ppby3JC8?si=wY7TQsbR_wxoud75&t=70 (ten seconds from the timestamp)
Yeah, that shot is so clean and smooth it feels like a render. Absolutely iconic even after a dozen rewatchings. The iris flares and the framerate… gotta hand it to whoever planned that shot and placed that camera. A+ videography.
3 replies →
If cutting edge engineering with conventional physics looks fake to you folks imagine what a hard time you’re going to have with real videos of actual UFOs.
2 replies →
IIRC, the grid fins are not strong enough to support the rocket, and reinforcing them would add too much weight to the vehicle.
The plan is to catch the second stage the same way, and the starship in flight now is the first to have mockup pins to test the aerodynamics and see if they cause issues during reentry.
It seems like they'll need a lot of different vehicles to catch the second stage given the number of pieces I saw in the video.
I was surprised they were landing them on those fins, makes more sense now.
I found the same when the first Falcon Heavy executed the simultaneous booster landing. Watching them both come down, within moments of each other at neighbouring pads was incredibly cool.
Its sad that Gerry Anderson never got to see this. It's like something from a Thunderbirds episode.
You can hear some sounds in the stream that I think are one of the presenters weeping during the launch and landing sequences. I think I would be similarly awe struck to witness such a thing
I heard someone say it's like trying to land the Statue of Liberty. Turns out the statue is actually shorter.
The clearance is amazing -- probably bigger IRL than it looked on the camera, but it looked like only a foot or two between the chopsticks arm and the top of the rocket! The control algorithms on the gimballed engines must be insanely precise.
Since I’ve never seen an f9 landing, watching ift5 land was kinda mind blowing. Even 6k away you can tell it’s really big but moved with a grace and smoothness like a hippo in water only with crackling flame.
View of previous catch (flight 5) from a very distant vantage point was even more incredible for me. You can see the scale of things right there
https://x.com/shaunmmaguire/status/1845444890764644694
https://youtu.be/Vzyaud250Xo
https://youtu.be/ntmssdzp_qY
Anyone has similar view of this landing?
Edit: distant view of flight 7 by the same person
https://x.com/shaunmmaguire/status/1880044690428645684
Oh no they lost the ship after the booster landed! Seems like they lost an engine, then I saw fire around the rear flap hinges in the last images before they cut out, and then the telemetry showed more engines shutting down until it froze.
During ascent I also noticed a panel near the front fins that seemed to be loose and flapping. Probably not related but who knows.
Edit: Here's a video of the aftermath. Strangely beautiful. https://x.com/deankolson87/status/1880026759133032662
> fire around the rear flap hinges
I believe it's pretty hard to have a fire at that altitude. You need a leak of both methane and oxygen, and an ignition source.
I wonder if perhaps one of the engines split open and the exhaust wasn't going into the engine bell?
I mean blowing liquid oxygen on something with a hot heat source beside it typically turns things to fuel you wouldn't expect. Like metal.
4 replies →
What a celestial bonfire. It indeed has a haunting beauty.
[dead]
[dead]
Back a few years ago. This was the starship that in 2024 would reach Mars with humans, with so much space taken by crew and materials, and almost no fuel, and "10 times cheaper". And currently is an empty shell. Nice fireworks and show, but no meaningful payload yet. Not even LO. And this will be ready for 2026 artemis mission?
I’m not a big fan of Elon Musk, but this is just the typical executive talking up their product and to some extent being overly optimistic about timelines. You’d think with the quantity of software engineers in HN this would be obvious, but the (rightful IMO) disdain for Elon Musk is resetting people’s brains.
Guy is a serial liar and you are making excuses on his behalf.
2 replies →
The taxpayer is paying for these lies
6 replies →
Ask NASA about MSR
This is version 2 of Starship, with some upgrades, such as longer starship.
"Upgrades include a redesigned upper-stage propulsion system that can carry 25 per cent more propellant, along with slimmer, repositioned forward flaps to reduce exposure to heat during re-entry.
For the first time, Starship will deploy 10 Starlink simulators" [1].
https://arstechnica.com/space/2025/01/heres-what-nasa-would-...
[1] https://www.theaustralian.com.au/world/musks-starship-ready-...
I found an article from earlier in the week about the changes for this version of the upper stage: https://arstechnica.com/space/2025/01/a-taller-heavier-smart...
Will be interesting to hear the postmortem on the second stage. The booster part seemed to work pretty flawlessly with the exception of a non-firing engine on boost back which then did fire during the landing burn.
If the person doing their on-screen graphics is reading this, I wonder if you have considered showing tank LOX/CH4 remaining as a log graph. I believe it decreases logrithmically when being used (well it would if you keep 'thrust' constant) so that would create a linear sweep to the 'fuel level' status.
I don't believe they throttle the engines up or down much during the second stage burn. Fuel decreases ~linearly and thrust is relatively constant. Acceleration increases as fuel mass decreases.
Don’t they throttle back at MaxQ?
3 replies →
I would be surprised if that was the case, my reasoning to that is that computing where a thing is going, when it's under going with changing acceleration AND changing mass, is pretty complicated. Especially if you already have the capability to throttle the engines and keep 'a' constant.
They might, I'm not saying your wrong, I'm just saying that I cannot imagine how you would justify the added complexity of doing it that way.
6 replies →
When this comment gets 44 minutes old it's going to be T-0.
reminds me of the classic joke: a man walking down a street, stops and asks another person if they know what time it is. The person responds: I'm sorry as I don't have a watch on me, but you see that car parked over there? when it explodes, it should be 5pm
This comment was very helpful and exactly what I wanted to know opening this discussion, and made me chuckle on top of that, thank you!
Thank you, I was trying to convert Central Time to something understandable.
All their systems and logging are running in UTC, why can't they just give launch times accordingly.
Yeah, I prefer this "when this comment is XY old" format the most when communicating internationally. Closely followed by UTC, of course.
I hate having to convert from some time zone which I don't know by heart; with the additional risk of getting daylight savings or something wrong and missing the event.
Catch was successful again, very impressive.
They may have lost the second stage, though.
Yes, very much looks like it.
I wonder how much of the second stage flight is autonomous and if they need to continually need to give it a go to continue, or if it aborts automatically after some time of lost telemetry. But maybe it already exploded anyways.
5 replies →
Space is hard.
"we currently don't have comms on the ship"
edit: the spacex stream just confirmed the loss.
5 replies →
That could have been kinda sorta intentional. No big deal.
I miss the time before X broke so many things, like official streams being on Twitch where I've already paid for ad free viewing.
For future reference, you can stream SpaceX launches from the SpaceX website. They tend to be higher quality. I've never seen an ad there.
My big gripe is that X videos don't seem to support Chromecast at all. I used to watch SpaceX launches on my TV :(
Load it in Chrome and cast the tab. Sucks that you have to involve your computer for the duration, but that's the most reliable way to do it IMO.
Just watch the everyday astronauts coverage on YouTube! Great commentary, and feed from the official space x stream as well as their own cameras
Space.com's YouTube channel always has a mirror of the official SpaceX livestream:
https://www.youtube.com/@VideoFromSpace/streams
Or if you would like additional commentary and extra camera views, there are independent channels such as Everyday Astronaut, NASASpaceFlight, Spaceflight Now, etc.
I now use AirPlay to extend a MacBook screen to my TV and play the stream that way. But it's so needlessly complicated compared to before :/
> X videos
cough cough
There is an Android TV App apparently: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.x.xtv
uBlock Origin blocked any ads if there was any and I didn't have any issues (Ungoogled Chrome). I didn't pay for Twitch and TVV LOL Pro works fine for me.
Couldn't you make a twitch stream of it? X isn't injecting ads into the video, so just open it on X and stream it to twitch.
I'm glad it's not on Twitch. I don't like it being on X but twitch is worse since it's extremely hard to get any working Adblock on there.
What worries me about space innovation is the fact that there is such little margin for error. Materials are being stressed so much while trying to defy the laws of physics that the smallest angle error, the smallest pressure mismatch, smallest timing error, and boom. This did not happen when we were inventing cars, trains and air planes. Now imagine these risks, while you're halfway to mars. Is it possible that we just have no found/invented the right materials or the right fuel/propulsion mechanism to de-risk this, and that is where we should be allocating a lot more resources?
It definitely happened with planes, we have a century of improvements that made them much much safer.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aviation_safety#Statistics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fatigue_(material)#de_Havillan...
What makes you think this didn't happen in other industries? See the first iteration of the de Havilland Comet for a great example.
The Space Industry to date has killed many fewer people than planes, trains, or automobiles.
> The Space Industry to date has killed many fewer people than planes, trains, or automobiles.
Except as a proportion of passengers. In which case it's killed several of orders of magnitude more.
1 reply →
The requirements of orbital launch are unyielding. If you make a car 50% heavier, it will have worse mileage and handling, but it will still get you where you need to go. If you make a spacecraft 50% heavier, it will never reach orbit.
> This did not happen when we were inventing cars, trains and air planes.
Cars are small, and they still go up in flames routinely all on their own (for older cars, aged fuel lines rupturing is a top cause, for newer cars shit with the turbocharger), it just doesn't make more news than a line in the local advertisement rag because usually all it needs is five minutes work for a firefighter truck.
Trains had quite the deadly period until it was figured out how to deal with steam safely - and yet, in Germany we had the last explosion of a steam train in 1977, killing nine people [1].
[1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kesselzerknall_in_Bitterfeld
I wonder if the second stage failure was related to the metal flap seen here on the very left of the image: https://imgur.com/a/VS8IPdv
I watched this with my very young daughter and she pointed that out, she will be fascinated if that is the case!
Can someone please please PLEASE tell SpaceX PR/Streaming team that the speed (per SI system) is measured in meters per second, not kilometers per hour? The speed of sound is approx 300 m/s, orbital velocity is approx 8,0000 m/s (depending on altitude), free fall acceleration on Earth is 9.81m/s, 1.63m/s on the Moon, the speed of light is apporx 300,000,000 m/s, people learn these numbers in middle school. It's not 1000 km/h, or 28,000 km/h, it just looks so weird.
Edit: ok, acceleration is meters per second per second, but my point stands.
They are likely appealing to the common population who mostly think of speed in mi/h or km/h due to car speeds
I understand the appeal of using the same combinations everywhere, but I thought the great thing about the metric system was that it was easy to convert. So 8000 m/s is 8 km/s.
The problem is with the "hours" part. Which, not accidentally, is not even part of the SI.
4 replies →
Tim Dodd is live as well:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Px_b5eSzsA
Video of the breakup - https://www.instagram.com/reel/DE52_hVSeQz/
Pretty sure that's the flight termination system in action. It did well!
Two years ago: I really didn't think they'd make all those engines work at the same time. They did.
Waiting for the day when they can load more than a banana. But I fear, the planet will be uninhabitable before that's a thing.
This NASASpaceflight stream is up now: https://www.youtube.com/live/3nM3vGdanpw
As is Tim Dodd’s
https://www.youtube.com/live/6Px_b5eSzsA
Aside from coding, this is my favorite use of multiple screens.
> Aside from coding, this is my favorite use of multiple screens.
Great observation. I also do this. :-)
...which has nothing to do with NASA the US government organization, or the NSF (FYI). It's just some independent streamers who apparently know you can't get trademark claims against you by the federal government.
NASA allows them to place cameras as media on nasa property some are even permanent. and are credentialed media for launches. so I am guessing NASA is okay with it.
2 replies →
NSF was started by Chris Bergen, a meteorologist by trade and a space exploration enthusiast, in early 2000s as a hobby forum (good old phBB) for people to chat about space and rocketry. I'm sure he couldn't even dream about becoming so popular so he didn't spend too much time coming up with a name (ie to protect himself against copyright infringement lawsuits). In fact I'm sure he would love to change the name now as they try to cover space programs all over the world (it's too late as people know them as NSF).
1 reply →
I’m not sure about the NASA name itself, but apparently the graphic stuff is protected by a special law:
https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-14/chapter-V/part-1221
So you wouldn’t exactly get a copyright claim when abusing the NASA logo but it’s still illegal.
I couldn’t find anything about the NASA word itself though, just some articles reciting guidelines by NASA not to imply an endorsement by NASA. I don’t know how that’s enforced though.
1 reply →
Spoken like someone who is generating their opinion from their channel name alone.
Those "independent streamers" provide live launch streams with multiple feeds using their own equipment and to top it off they have numerous very knowledgeable hosts for all their streams. At this point I suspect they are covering every US based launch from all the major players. Hell, today they broadcasted both the New Glenn and Starship launches less than 24h apart.
But yeah, let's get hung up on an organization name that originated as an Internet forum for discussing all things....... NASA!
5 replies →
Amazing. 2nd ever catch of the booster via the 'chopstick' arms. Looks like the starship itself won't be splashing down west of Perth, instead telemetry has been lost (assuming RUD - "Rapid Unscheduled Disassembly").
Anyone able to do some quick math to guess where the pieces might land based on the velocity+altitude?
Bits might end up in africa on land somewhere...
It is amazing to see the number of fairly significant changes they tested in this launch. I guess that is the advantage of private space flights and rocket launches where the speed of development is must faster than in a place like Nasa or any government run space program.
I am not surprised that stage 2 failed because they were testing with a lot of the thermal tiles removed.
It didn't get to the point of testing the thermal protection system.
That was so impressive. I was lucky enough to live in Florida and see the rockets go up. Standing on the beach and watching the first Falcon Heavy launch will be something that will always stick with me. Great job SpaceX.
Coders who require at least 7 iterations to properly implement a data entry form here grousing over a spaceship failure on the 7th iteration.
Failure of an entirely new, previously thought to be impossible combination of technologies.
This is like complaining that your first attempt at new programming language paradigm resulted in a compiler that is slow and sometimes has internal errors!
I noticed a strange debris at https://www.youtube.com/live/6Px_b5eSzsA?si=1hAiLjTrb7KUVaW7...
thought it was ice from the outside but now i'm curious
Speaking of exploding rockets, watch the hypnotic ending of Koyaanisqatsi with haunting music by Philip Glass:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OacVy8_nJi0
According to the comments, the footage in this scene is a Saturn V on a launchpad and then an Atlas-Centaur Missile.
Congratulations to the 14,000 SpaceX employees for their accomplishments.
What happens if the ship has exploded? Is there any kind of danger?
The flight paths are planned specifically so any potential debris has a high chance of landing in the ocean.
If it actually exploded (either on its own or because the flight-termination system kicked in) most of it should burn up on reentry though.
What happens if it doesn't explode and they just lost control over it? I'm mostly curios of the risks at that altitude.
8 replies →
Clever product placement of iPhone and Starlink and excellent storytelling. Space age technology used to connect astronauts to their loved ones on earth. Can’t be done any better.
Really says something when manufacturing and space launch cycle times are faster than some software projects.
Ikr, they’re testing 1 vehicle a month people, I’ve seen software projects tested slower
Seems they lost the ship , it is supposed to be v2 and had several changes
US scientists and engineers are second to none in the world. But they are distant second to their own marketing guys in innovation.
Rapid unscheduled disassembly!
RUD is in fact an old joke in rocketry, I believe invented by engineers to poke fun at marketing "innovation".
Cool video of the upper stage breakup from Turks and Caicos
Any idea how long it took them to get the Falcon right?
Or is comparing dev timelines for both a moot point because they are different classes of rockets
The first Falcon 9 landing happened after 8 attempts at controlled splashdown or landing. Time from the first attempt to the first successful landing was a little over 2 years. In the year after their first successful landing, they succeeded in 5 out of 8 attempts. This wikipedia article has details: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falcon_9_first-stage_landing_t...
Starship has had 7 tests in the past 20 months. The first test barely got off the pad due to engine failures. The stages failed to separate, so it was blown up shortly after liftoff. The second test did separate, but the booster blew up shortly after stage separation and the ship blew up shortly before engine shutdown, raining debris across the Atlantic similar to today. The third test got to space, but the booster landing burn failed and the booster impacted the ocean at close to the speed of sound. The ship couldn't maintain orientation and burned up on reentry. The fourth test succeeded at all goals (soft booster splashdown and successful reentry, though the flap did burn through). The fifth test was a success (booster catch and soft ship splashdown, though again with some flap burnthrough). The sixth test aborted the booster landing due to antennas on the tower being damaged by the rocket exhaust at launch, but did splash down softly offshore. The ship also reentered and splashed down on target.
Today's ship failure is a setback, as it will likely take a few months for the FAA investigation to be completed. That said, SpaceX still seems likely to recover a ship intact this year, and at that point it will only be a matter of time before they can launch an order of magnitude more stuff into orbit than they can with the Falcon 9 fleet (and at much lower cost).
WOW, the footage of Starship reentry was amazing
i still can't believe they can actually catch that first stage. it makes no sense, but works!
SpaceX started Starship development in 2012. Despite 12 years of work, its best test flight reached space but not orbit, sending a banana to the Indian Ocean.
While NASA's SLS began in 2011 and successfully flew around the Moon in 2022.
Blue Origin's New Glenn also started development in 2012 and reached orbit on it's first flight with an actual payload.
When they say SpaceX is fast, what do they mean exactly?
The last SLS launch was in November 2022. The next one is in April 2026. That is 42 months between launches.
Starship may not go 42 days before the next launch. SpaceX's Falcon 9 + Heavy has launched on average once every 12 days since 2010.
And while Starship was "in development" since 2012, that doesn't mean it was prioritized. The first prototypes were only made in 2018.
> as SpaceX seeks to make life multiplanetary.
What a waste of time and resources.
Anyone care to give the non spacey folks like me the highlights of this launch?
It's similar to last time if you saw that, the first stage will come back towards the launch site and they will try to catch it with the landing tower chopsticks, while the second stage does a soft landing in the ocean after going halfway around the earth.
As far as new stuff, they are trying to deploy some simulated satellites from the second stage and will try to relight one of the engines.
I also saw mention somewhere that this is V2 of Starship upper stage? Somewhat longer, and I’m sure a bunch of other changes to enable mass simulator deployment.
2 replies →
Preparing to launch 4:37pm CT (~45mins after this comment)
First 10mins watching gets you to space with engine shutdown.
38mins after launch engine turns back on. 10mins after that reentry starts. 1:06 after launch is the landing.
I think that covers it.
Space X has failed after 3 billion US tax payer dollars to take a banana into low earth orbit. Needless to say we aren't going to Mars last year watching a woman in a long dress floating in the cargo bay behind a curtain of glass windows playing a violin for entertaining the dozens of astronaut's which don't have space for food, water, belongings or life support.
> Space X has failed after 3 billion US tax payer dollars to take a banana into low earth orbit
Literally just lofted some satellites.
4 replies →
You mean like later after it happens?
of course, no space x event is complete without the scam fake streams
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_1VbZoYSyzA
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jMG8BbUjwRk
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a-uQNSxqQHY
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4PYuUj777a0
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mqsGPQnAP-M
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nAC4JzHqRk4
It is incredibly to me that Google doesn't seem to give a shit about this. It would be so easy to fix.
Feels like one SpaceX could and should deal with by DMCAing the channels. Even if getting people watching their official channel instead isn't that important to them, stopping people rebroadcasting their content whilst faking their brand identity to scam people feels like the most legitimate reason for sending takedowns going...
5 replies →
Reminds me of the train wreck of searching for “ChatGPT” or “OpenAI” on the apple App Store — all scam results.
Actually similar to how Twitter used to be. (Of course now it has other problems.)
3 replies →
look similar. the same person milking google for ads money? must be another service providing fake 'watches' and 'subscriptions'.
Youtube key stakeholders' KPIs improve as well the Youtube ad revenue. I don't understand what you're on about. (/s)
Where do they get channels with half a million subs? Are those hacked?
to be clear, it seems like the feed on some of these are scraped from official ones, but include links to crypto "giveaway" scams.
it's funny how good the algorithm is to recommend this to you so you (I) can report it
All of the downsides of a heavily censored and politically editorialized platform, with none of the anti-fraud upsides.
Are these YT channels just mirroring the official one?
There is pretty much always at least one "live" "spacex" stream on Youtube. Typically with lots of viewers. This has been going on for years.
Google/Alphabet just sucks and should be dissected.
They were mirroring Twitter stream and switched to Elon talking about crypto within 10 seconds of the launch. Don't ask me how I know.
at least some do, but they are also inserting links to crypto scams.
1 reply →
That’s hilarious
I blame SpaceX for this as they do not have official youtube stream. This is just amateurish.
They used to, before Musk bought Twitter.
The most important payload for this flight was data. The ship was always going to be lost so from a standpoint of testing this was a huge success! I'm excited to see how quickly they resolve whatever happened and get IFT 8 going.
[flagged]
Beefed it the day after New Glenn makes orbit on the first try. Different philosophies, I know, but if I were at SpaceX I would be pretty unhappy right now.
NG also failed the landing, so not really?
New Glenn lost its booster yesterday. Space is hard, tests will have failures.
Impressive string of success
The launch was a failure though.
Sorry, I only watched the chopsticks part
"rapid unscheduled disassembly"
> This marketing jargon speak for explosion is lulz
Wow that was incredible
I absolutely cannot relate to the HN excitement over rockets. What is the point? What are we going to do with them? It feels like half religion half misplaced techno-positivism.
(Also a person who actively platforms outspoken neo-nazis runs the company that is launching them)
The reason is pretty simple. The technology you are using right now, was created with knowledge that was obtained in orbit.
If you use GPS, you are inherently reliant on satellites, delivered with rockets.
Some of our resource shortages can be covered via resource acquisition in space.
Pushing the space frontier, is far more interesting and important, than mobile phone screen size, or fidelity.
It opens an entire new area to the sciences.
Also big explody tube warms the cockles of my heart.
Rockets are good. They give us hope that one day we ll explore the stars. Let people enjoy the small wins.
Also, the (IMHO false) hope that we can escape the planet after we destroy it. Well, maybe the few richest will be able to do that ...
Also the hope that we can go on vacation to the lunar hilton, or orbital O'Neill colony.
Many of the techie people on HN undoubtedly dreamed of building and flying rockets at some point in their tweens / teens till the harsh realities of the material world took over. So they are vicariously living childhood dreams... Just like many "normal" people live theirs by following sports teams or celebrities. To each their own :-)
> half religion half misplaced techno-positivism
It sometimes feels like it: everything blows-up and thread here is like "what a success", Second stage explodes - "beautiful" (while trash is falling into ocean).
Yeah there is a huge amount of rationalizing how the debris aren’t a problem. Everyone is certain it will burn up before hitting the ground, and if it doesn’t, it will land somewhere that doesn’t matter… but I don’t think anyone knows that for sure?
Rockets are cool but it’s everyone’s planet, if this continues to make a huge mess, do us regular earth citizens have recourse?
LGTM. Ship it.
It seems like they have the chopsticks catch down pretty well, but the ship exploded over the Atlantic so there's gonna have to be more tests before the ship can think about an RTLS test.
More generally, getting the ship to work reusably seems like it will be a considerably greater challenge than reusing the boosters.
Unbelievable. Congrats to the SpaceX team, again. Thank you for bringing the future into the present.
It was a failed launch though. Upper stage blew up.
I mean it's really the booster catch that's revolutionary here. Doing it twice proves that it's not a fluke.
"rapid unscheduled disassembly"
they did it!
Except for that whole second stage and payload part.
Actually I thought there would be less risk with the second stage changes, significant as they were, than the second catch. (Maybe there was less risk, of course, and the dice just didn't roll that way).
"Rapid unscheduled disassembly"
@elonmusk Preliminary indication is that we had an oxygen/fuel leak in the cavity above the ship engine firewall that was large enough to build pressure in excess of the vent capacity.
Apart from obviously double-checking for leaks, we will add fire suppression to that volume and probably increase vent area. Nothing so far suggests pushing next launch past next month.
Musk've had Cybertruck QA team on this one.
[dead]
[flagged]
Extremely shallow take on what is undoubtedly the rise of America's next great space era
The entire program is likely cheaper thus far than a single SLS flight.
> They burned billions of public funds, literally.
Wrong. Public funds are not paying for Starship development but for the HLS variant development, at significantly lower cost than the HLS lander from Blue Origin. Which likely still doesn't cover the entire funding even for Blue Origin. A lot is paid by those space companies themselves. A NASA developed lander (Altair from the Constellation program), would probably have cost around an order of magnitude more.
I wouldn't worry too much. It costs more than that to add a bus lane in America.
Musk is going to end up killing a lot of people unintentionally.
Can someone tell me what's the point of all this? To export capitalism outside of solar system?
The point of a fully reusable launch vehicle? Similar to a fully reusable airplane or a car, I suppose.
We have various interests in sending things to space, why not do it cheaply?
Survival of our species, for one. Never the mind short-sighted folks like yourselves clawing us back the entire way.
It's the opposite of the survival. When locust consumes everything around, it dies out.
2 replies →
Just to Mars, and maybe the asteroid belt. See [0].
[0] Expanse, The.
To export the enjoyers of capitalism (a.k.a. humans) outside this planet, to visit the stars.
beautiful although one wonders what they're trying to escape
Every one of these are like right out of a sci-fi novel. It makes me truly excited for our future in a way little else out there does.
Between this, AI (even in its current LLM form), and mounting evidence suggesting the entire solar system is teeming with at least microbial life, we are going to become an interplanetary species far sooner than many “skeptics” imagine.
We are just one more lander / sample mission / whatever away from having solid proof of life elsewhere in the solar system. That is gonna jumpstart all a huge race to get humans out into deep space to check it all out.
People worry about AI stealing their jobs… don’t worry. We need that stuff so humans can focus on the next phase of our history… becoming interplanetary. Your kids will be traveling to space and these (very overhyped, don’t get me wrong) LLM’s will be needed for all kinds of tasks.
It sounds crazy but I maintain it’s true and will happen sooner than you’d think.
> Your kids will be traveling to space
I can 100% guarantee to you that the children of anyone born today will not travel to space in any significant number. There is nothing in space to travel to until we build extremely complex habitats, and that can't be done with manual human labor, it requires mostly automatic drones and maybe a handful of human controllers living in the ship that brought them there.
And building habitats that any significant amount of people (say, 1000) could actually live in will take a loooong amount of time and a huge amount of resources. And the question of "why would anyone waste time and resources on trying to live in conditions more inhospitable than anything the Earth can ever become, even with a major asteroid crashing into it in the middle of a nuclear war and a global pandemic?" will crop up long before more than one or two of these are finished.
> I can 100% guarantee to you that the children of anyone born today will not travel to space in any significant number
Someone born today will have children living into the early 2100s. The first flight ever was a little more than a hundred years ago. Using your kind of logic, no one would have predicted most of the technology we take for granted today.
> mounting evidence suggesting the entire solar system is teeming with at least microbial life
?
> It makes me truly excited for our future in a way little else out there does.
Hate to break it to you, but Space X isn't it. You can't have a CEO that is not aligned to the truth and reality to lead a company into something that is beneficial for humanity.
Weyland-Yutani
Hi there
I like how chopsticks catch (a very impressive feat) completely distracts everyone from totally fucked timeline and already spent budget on mars mission. Its like any criticism is being drowned in loud cheers. Only time will tell, but I hope I will be wrong on this one
https://thedailywtf.com/articles/the-cool-cam
What's the criticism exactly? Like I don't get your point? Yes they are behind on timelines and on Mars, does that mean that we should post reddit-tier cynical comments every time about that? I'm not saying that you're doing that, it's more that I don't get why this is surprising.
And on the other hand, it's also funny to see how "skeptics" (whatever that means in this case) dismiss or belittle achievements that were claimed to be impossible a few months or years ago (for example, the chopstick landing). It's like a never ending treadmill of
this is impossible->okay it happened, that's cool, but now xyz is impossible.
Plus, it seems normal to me that people care less about some sort of budget details or delays than really cool technical feats.
[flagged]
4 replies →
I actually get this take, but for me it's the ultimate distraction and a way to legitimize the CEOs rubbish behavior.
"How can he be wrong when he is a genius and can land a rocket in two chopsticks?"
I’m in a slightly different boat. The CEO’s rubbish behavior sucks, but the company shouldn’t be diminished by that. The people behind SpaceX are a modernd day Apollo Program. Absolute marvels of engineering.
They are making the impossible merely late. Which, you know, is still pretty fucking cool.
I’d love to see any other country or competitor catch a stainless steel rocket larger than the Statue of Liberty that was just cruising back to earth at sub orbital velocity. Everybody else is so far behind it’s not even funny.
Spacex is cool as shit. Screw the “skeptics” and haters. Some people have a complete lack of imagination.
No, they are making the possible very late.
2 replies →
Starship started development in 2012. SLS started development in 2011, New Glenn in 2012.
SLS flew in 2022 around the moon. New Glenn just flew, reaching orbit with an actual payload.
Starship hasn't reached orbit, the best they did was send a banana to the Indian ocean.
Remind me again how SpaceX is the fast company?
4M viewers. comparable to top politics events.
ship looks to be lost. this was the main part, so it's almost complete failure.
these tests are designed to fail — the data collected now will ensure they don't blow up with actual people on them. test seems like a success to me
Still a failure in my book, it blew up before it could deliver its payload so they couldn't do many the tests they intended to do.
It is possible they will have to add one more test launch to their schedule, delaying commercial operations because of that.
It is not a complete failure, but to me, it is more failure than success, even by SpaceX test flight standards.
Compared to the previous flight, that I consider a success, the booster catch was nice, but it is not the first, and they have plenty of tries left to perfect it, so it is not in the critical path.
they didn't get the telemetry after, what it was, 16 min(?) hope they'll find the reason which will be hard without black boxes like on airplanes. as every engineer knows it works flawlessly only at the end. if ever.
the booster was the same, great, but not surprising.
1 reply →
You're assuming the viewer count is accurate? That seems rather naive.
Let us say 2/3rds of a failure.
SpaceX has a way of making the nearly impossible expected. We have forgotten quite quickly that booster catch is still a very experimental feature. Return to base on this flight wasn't routine yet.
Almost a complete failure except for second ever caught first stage...
BTW they first tested a redesigned version of Starship today.
Booster works, we've seen that before. No satellites deployment, no new heat shield test. Separation works. But that's it.
Now the 'funniest' thing, this piece falls back where the ships are waiting. I hope it will miss this time too.
2 replies →
Starship test successfull: - engineers did that Starship explodes: - Musk's failure!