Beccab

Oh trust me it isn't just you, there's a reason my screenshots show basically two angles and one is almost straight from the top

Recreated the new Lockmart lunar lander but now the render doesn't look like it was made for the Space Exploration Initiative in 1990

This one shouldn't be too much of a problem, as Starship will probably have little to no horizontal velocity during the final part of the descent - if that's correct, the direction Starship will turn doing the bellyflop depends only on the direction the engines are pointing.

Static fire preparations are beginning!

While I'm here, I missed this from a month ago:

Entry burn

Liftoff Nice views of the ascent at dawn

Startup begins, go for liftoff

This is FY, which means the current no later than date is 30/09/2023 for an orbital Starship propellant transfer test

Fingers crossed!

What

They also have quite big expansion plans in the US, starting to launch there later this year (and I think with Neutron being solely from the US)

That's almost every surviving starship in one picture Edit: also, there's this Reportedly, this part of the escorting cars of Indonesian president Joko Widodo, who met with Musk very recently and is rumored to be attempting to make Indonesia the first non-US Starship spaceport. This is all speculation and unconfirmed informations of course, so make of that what you will Edit 2: looks like at least the first part is correct

Actually, given that it's 1703's first flight it seems plausible - they've updated coverage with Starlink as well recently, which gave a lot better signal on the way down

Raptor R57 was also delivered

Yay! Correct me if I miss anything: - Mega Bay is about 34 feet taller than the High Bay but much wider, to allow for much more parallel stacking of Starship parts (2-3 work stations in the high bay, 10-12 in the new one); this means that booster and ship construction rate can ramp up - The booster that was being stacked during the tour (later in the video confirmed as B7) has as attitude control system the ullage thrusters that use excess gas, the working of which was mentioned in the last tour; a symilar system is implemented in the ship - The new chines on the booster are 120 degrees apart, and are used to increase the surface area coming down for landing as well as to contain the COPVs. The current design is pretty rudimental and expected to change in future iterations, for example they would work better by being larger at the base than at the top - Whether it's better to continue with grid fins or switch to normal aero surfaces has been discussed frequently, just like grid fins positionment and design; advantages of the grid fins is that they are more consistent during transonic than a flat surface, experience gained with F9, and smaller actuator size compared to a more traditional flat surface. Another thing that could change is the number of grid fins, as two or three (like the original ITS) could also work, and size has already shrank a lot with improvements in the design - Plans for S24 deployer (payload etc) are not definitive. There's now yesterday's extract on fairing pressurization - A big hinged door can be added on future ships, but the smaller it is the better as long as it the mechanism doesn't jam up - The B4/S20 plan to land just shy of an orbit in front of Hawaii seems to have been inherted by B7/S24; there's little need to do more for the test launch, considering the low probability that reentry succeeds (and not too high chances for the overall flight) EDIT: rewatching this part, it's actually unclear what they are talking about - it either means it's the same plan as 4/20 or it will do a very little longer burn to go for one full orbit - Reentry angle will be similar to the Shuttle, ~170 degrees - S20 is now retired, no more tests or flights are planned for it. They've learned enough from the SN test flights, now it's time for orbit - TWR will be quite high for a vehicle this size, 1.5 - The current ship lifting points are unoptimal, they will need moving to a non-heat shielded part - Catching the ship too is still in the future plans; to do that, you're going to need to have something coming out of the ship, and how that will work is still being debated. There's also discussions about moving the forward flaps more to the leeward side, since while they do work the way they are now they are very suboptimal - the perfect forward flaps would be in a different location, size and position. They could potentially be removed entirely in one scenario (like in ITS and BFR) - think Mig-105 - The permanent building that is beginning construction (called Starfactory or something like that iirc) will fully replace tents, but not the high bays. Next part will be about (and on) the launch tower, raptor 2s and also Merlin engines

Expendable F9 looks extremely weird for some reason

Yep, plus there's also the problem of stacking the payload in the fairing and all. We're still at least a year away from the first non-starlink payload so it makes for a good interim solution, but seeing how it transitions to larger doors will be interesting. Does anyone have a size comparison between an F9 fairing and Starship payload bay?

Looks like we're gonna have to wait for tomorrow for more info on this