Spaceception

Apparently, they reached the minimum test burn, and are going for the full ~8 minutes! Hopefully everything is good when they check the stage later.

Mainly Stellaris lately, there's a new update coming that I'm looking forward to.

I disagree further.

I'm going to try and catch it live, I missed it last time.

Starship can't be reused if in SSTO mode. And this contract is something like a year away, while SpaceX seems to be specifically aiming for orbit by July. Which I think is a more reasonable prediction than this time last year when they vaguely predicted the end of 2020, while they were still dealing with cryo issues, Raptor was less developed, and only Starhopper had been flown. At this point, they're flying full scale prototypes every month or so, and finally have a couple boosters on the way. Raptor production seems okay. If last summer's tweets about its development are any indicator, it looked like they were making 10 Raptors a month. This attempt to orbit is a bit more than 3 months away, and might slip out to fall anyway (either because of hardware issues, or general testing delays), so between that and their current stockpile (if needed), it should be enough.

You ever used the Saturn V to fling a block into orbit? https://spacenews.com/spacex-bid-on-launch-of-nasa-cubesat-mission/ Someone pointed this out elsewhere, but: And Did SpaceX bid Starship at a lower price than Electron?

It's almost a year past the announcement. But I half expect Starship will take its duties eventually anyway, especially if they win the HLS contract.

SN11 is getting close to a static fire. EDIT - About 12 minutes or so And according to them, they're aiming for orbit this summer with SN20 and BN3. https://www.nasaspaceflight.com/2021/03/starship-sn11-spacex-orbital-flight-summer/ Apparently, BN1 won't fly, but will do everything else, and SN18 and 19 will be skipped like SN12-14. If they really do that, they must be confident in most of the systems and hardware at this point.

I wonder what the test objective will be. Will they semi-replicate SN5/6 and Star/Grasshopper, and go a couple hundred meters up and down just to feel things out? Or will they go a bit more downrange, shut off the engines, and turn around for landing, given that Starship has done some more ambitious flights already? Iirc, the thrust puck has room for 4 raptors, and 2 could be used for landing.

I am looking forward to the launch, and it'll be really cool to see, but..

I seem to remember that they were planning on having a full heatshield for supersonic high altitude tests. I'm sure someone else knows for sure if I need to be corrected, but that's supposed to be the step right before orbit.

Is that heatshield patch bigger or about the same size as SN10s?

I hope we see BN1 fully stacked over the next few weeks. I suppose they'll do that after rolling out SN11, and they'll do that before stacking SN15's nose and fins.

Well... At least it landed first. It's in a bigger piece than the previous two though, so maybe they can still get good data from it?

That was awesome! Leaning a bit, but in one piece!

Something like 100,000 people signed up for MarsOne. I know that's not the best metric by a long shot, and most probably can't afford a ticket, but it might be a benchmark of sorts. But I feel we're talking about moving to Mars as is, and assuming the justification and motivation remains the same over time. But if there's a moderately decent population (in the thousands at least?), and a lot of infrastructure and living quarters in place, the idea of moving to Mars will become much more tolerable than today. By that point, there very well could be hundreds of thousands to a million people or so willing to take the plunge.

That was really catchy

A couple weeks to go in February, I wonder if they'll push to have Superheavy stacked by the end of the month.

I dunno, it looks like a partially built booster, that's under final assembly. I wouldn't be surprised if it'll be flight ready like SLS and Vulcan is supposed to be soon. Didn't they keep New Shepard vague until it wasn't? I don't think it'll be quite "open the doors one day and launch a fully built rocket out of nowhere", but it might be close.

Did they repair it or something then? It must not have been too serious if they're using it again.

Well, isn't the engine flip supposed to be replaced with a thruster flip at some point? And then one engine would work once it's already upright?

Well, hopefully SN10 can go up within a month. Third times the charm?

SpaceX is live, T-3 minutes

Could they do a static fire at least?

I wonder how the plumbing will look for the 20 Raptor ring on the outside, and if they'll have to redesign for it. Also, is there just plumbing for up to 4 Raptors, or do they plan to have 4 Raptors instead of 2 for the first B1 flight?