Awesome seeing condensation moving up as fuel gets loaded
Awesome seeing condensation moving up as fuel gets loaded
I think that NASA is happy. It’s a very tight timeline for starship and the spacesuits from Artemis, but, despite decades of work and plentiful funding, Orion seems to be the slowest part of the critical path. I think that we’d be hearing a lot of public criticism if SpaceX was dragging the chain.
They’ve made Orion look bigger than Starship - I don’t know whether to laugh or cry
If anyone wants to know when the launch is happening in their local time zone: https://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/fixedtime.html?msg=Starship+launch+&iso=20231117T07&p1=104
What happens with booster 9 and hot staging is one of the most interesting questions about starship at the moment. I can see three possibilities for it - booster 9 gets scrapped without flying and they skip to booster 10, it gets modified for hot staging or it gets launched with minimal modifications. I think modifications before flight are the most likely, but it would be really interesting to see what happens with an unmodified booster. Just how much damage would hot staging do? Pretty much any outcome would be spectacular!
The article is worth it just for the pictures! Great shots from the early shuttle days
I can’t wait to see this happen in real life! Part of me finds it hard to believe that hot staging won’t destroy the first stage, but the length of time it survived after FTS detonation does help give me faith that this is a much stronger rocket than we’ve ever seen before.
Aside from the awesome satellite that was launched, I was amazed by the quality of footage during the landing. Rock solid HD from both the 1st stage and the barge. It’s not long since dropping out was universal, and it’s a great example of how much better starlink is than any other satellite internet.
Soft landing for super heavy ✅ Starship cruising in space ✅
A couple of engines failed, but wow, so much improvement on each flight.