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Comment by bigiain

1 day ago

Yeah. I know that feeling.

That tower catch. That _had_ to be a new version of Kerbal, right? The physics looked good, but there's no way that was real...

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bigiain

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mrandish  1 day ago

Indeed. The one that still flips a bit in my brain is the two Falcon rockets landing in unison side by side. I'd say it was high-end CGI except no director would approve an effects shot of orbital rockets landing in such a perfect, cinematically choreographed way.

It would just be sent back to ILM marked "Good effort, but too obviously fake. Rework to be more realistic and resubmit."

  • somenameforme  1 day ago

    Just to link that: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wbSwFU6tY1c&t=1793s

    Such an unbelievable moment. And I also think an indicator of how much better society could be if we focused more on doing amazing things. The comments on YouTube are just filled with hope optimism and general awesomeness. FWIW that link goes straight to the moneyshot - it's always so much better if you watch it all the way through. It's an amazing broadcast.

    • mrandish  1 day ago

      When I was in elementary school back in the 1970s, I read every sci-fi book in the tiny school library. They were all old, even then. Early stuff by Asimov, Heinlein and Bova. Paperbacks on cheap pulp with cover paintings of rockets sitting upright on alien terrain. Tiny people in space suits climbing down ladders to explore a new world.

      With the Apollo moon landings in recent memory, I'd read those sci-fi books late at night with a flashlight under the covers of my bed and then fall asleep thinking about how "I'll still be alive 50 years from now. I'll get to actually live in the world of the future. Maybe I'll even work in space." And by the time I graduated from high school it was already becoming clear things were going much to slow for me to even see humans colonizing Mars. And that was reality until about a decade ago.

      So, yeah. Watching the live video of the first successful Starship orbital launch with my teenage daughter... I got a little choked up, which surprised me. Felt like discovering a very old dream that's been buried too long. And somehow the damn thing's still alive. Or maybe I just got something in my eye. Anyway, I know it's too late for me to ever work off-planet. But maybe not for my kid... so, the dream lives on. It just had to skip a generation.

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  • TMWNN  1 day ago

    Seeing a rocket land vertically goes against almost 70 years of what we "know" about rockets. Falcon 9 rockets landing on legs seem unnatural enough; now we have a rocket, the size of a 20-story building, landing on chopsticks.

    There are lots of vertical-landing rockets ... in science fiction, and only before Sputnik in 1957. Once actual space programs came about and lots of engineers understood just how difficult landing a rocket is compared to launching it, they all went away. Fictional vehicles became more and more complex to make them "realistic" (that is, consistent with real spacecraft on the news), or just didn't bother with the details at all and went to quasi-magic technologies like in Star Wars and Star Trek.

    SpaceX is taking us to the future by going with something from the past.

    • perilunar  1 day ago

      SpaceX landing and catching boosters is amazing, but landing rockets is not new: all the Apollo LMs, indeed everything ever landed on the Moon was done with "vertical-landing" rockets.