Spaceception

So already planning towards V3 of the vehicle? I wonder how it translates to GTO to orbit. The old users guide assumed 100+ mT, and 21 mT to GTO. Could it send a payload to GEO and still return in 1 launch, or is that just beyond its capability?

Today's flight almost made them ready to pursue orbital testing. So I think that'll be their main goals for the 4th flight - fix attitude control, make sure the pez dispenser works, relight the Raptor engine(s). Recovery and reentry will still be more stretch goals, but I feel like the booster will have a good shot to make a soft landing at least. B11 can avenge SN11!

I love the coming age of big space habitats. No more cramped modules, this is the 21st century, we orbit in style.

Engine chill

Propellant transfer complete

And it sounds like they've got elevator music going now

Talking about Starlink (maybe) being able to maintain a signal through reentry. Payload door opening.

SECO! Starship is cruising!

Looks like they lost the booster before soft landing, but they got close.

Boostback!!

All 33 engines!!! Onboard views!

Propellant load complete!

T - 4:30 minutes! It's awesome to hear them talk about Starship production lines. It also sounds like they'll make flight 4 prep more quickly after this launch.

T - 10 minutes!

Stream is up on their account. The promo video they released is playing at the moment. Talking about wanting to gather data about reentry. Today's goal looks to be making it to space, to conductf their tests.

I wonder how many triple headers within 24 hours they'll have this year. They've had 2 already, the second breaking their own record they set weeks previously, and also had a double header this past week.

This may be an interesting video for you guys. I like the channel a lot. This isn't focused on Nova, but instead the business side of Stoke. He has a more restrained opinion about them, and is worried about funding and potential markets amid already established providers.

It's real! Start the countdown! EDIT: And if you're waiting for the official word

I don't believe so. Looking through old web captures, they don't even mention the FAA, and the landing attempt was a small blurb. This was the first droneship attempt https://web.archive.org/web/20150717181812/http://www.spacex.com/news/2015/01/10/spacex-launches-fifth-official-mission-resupply-international-space-station And the second attempt: https://web.archive.org/web/20150723152319/http://www.spacex.com/news/2015/04/14/liftoff-falcon-9-and-dragon-begin-crs-6-mission-resupply-international-space-station No mentions of an investigation, just talking about the landing attempt and what went wrong. Looking for FAA investigations on Falcon 9 between Jan/Jun 2015 (encompassing the first droneship landings, and before CRS-7) didn't bring anything up either, but maybe someone who's better at digging through search engines will prove me wrong. It looks like as long as SpaceX showed landing (or the lack therof) boosters posed no risk beyond what a normal fight would have, they weren't concerned.

Yup, they had a planned upgrade for Falcon 1, 1e, that would upgrade both engines, stretch the tanks, and increase payload from ~.45 to ~1 mT. They had 6 expected customers for it, 2 moved to Falcon 9 when they cancelled it.

I mean yes, you can say they were "blowing up rockets" but this was after already, and successfully, stage separating to deploy a payload, nothing about this hurt the overall mission or threatended its success. They had a booster coming back from space that would otherwise crash into the ocean (like everyone else's boosters), and they wanted to reuse said boosters eventually, why not give it the hardware to try and bring it back if you can? For a long time on webcasts, and even after landing (and reflying) boosters, SpaceX referred to them as experimental landings, because they were. The DC-X, referred to often in these discussions, was a subscale vehicle that did a few high altitude hops, but nothing like what the Falcon 9 boosters went through, this was largely uncharted territory, and there were doubts about how much it financially made sense. It's just how you're framing it. Is it a bad thing they were blowing up rockets, because landing wasn't working early on? Or is it a good thing because they had to learn how to do it in the first place, and you're looking for more information about it?

CRS-7, I think I remember watching it live on a news channel in some waiting room TV (not medical, I think an autostore or similar?), because my family was running errands that day. The launch failure was a surprise, and I ended up looking it up when we got home. To @Kerwood Floyd The failure was in late June, and it took them until December to fly again, almost 6 months. 9 months later in September, AMOS-6 blew up on the pad, and it took them 4 months to return to flight, And yes, they did do mishap investigations, this is the one for AMOS-6 https://web.archive.org/web/20200519183949/https://www.spacex.com/news/2016/09/01/anomaly-updates. This was the CRS-7 report from SpaceX as it was ongoing about a month after the failure. https://web.archive.org/web/20150721152601/https://www.spacex.com/news/2015/07/20/crs-7-investigation-update

If they manage a comeback after all of this, I'd be a little impressed. The only thing keeping me from being really impressed is how much of this is not having enough investors, and how much is their fault? My impression from loosely following the news is that taking Astra public in the first place was a bad idea, at least when it's such a young company (since Rocket Lab seems to be making it work - or isn't suffering at least).

It looked official, and a lot of other people ran with it before realizing what it was, but it was spread fairly far across space twitter in a short amount of time, so there was some delay in people getting excited, and then realizing it was fake (I, and a lot of people got carried away). I think this is the best I've got (click to expand), they retweeted their own post, but below that was a link to, I think, the license announcement for IFT-2. But they were just suspended.