Ultimate Steve

It's 5 pm central right now...

Just under an hour left in the test window, some of that probably has to be detanking, so I would say at least 30 minutes usable?

According to Tim Dodd the drone is heading back, away from the hopper...

Did you watch the first stream by accident? That sounds exactly like what happened one hour ago. They are going for a second attempt right now but no official stream yet.

I will honestly be SHOCKED if this is true, but the people on NSF are talking about them trying again tonight. Given that the hopper is/was still venting and nobody has approached the pad yet as far as we have seen... Wow.

That fire did not look nominal, it looked worse than the one a few days ago, like a leak. I don't want to be pessimistic, but this might mean a week or a few of delay.

They have four "ceramic tiles" on Dragon to test for Starship. Interesting.

I think I heard two more before they fly people. They do have to speed up to make this year, though. Their past three flights took a year, and now they have to double cadence... Which shouldn't be that difficult considering how slow their cadence is.

OOoooooo It's back! This is gonna be good!

If they intend to do anything beyond LEO, they sort of have to be able to dock to each other for refueling. Granted, it would be very difficult to transfer crew if the spacecraft are still docking butt to butt. However, if Starship is to go to any space station, present or future (they have said a bit about ISS docking) they need to be able to dock, so I would imagine they should. The initial prototypes probably won't have this, but I would definitely expect the crew versions to. I am fairly certain that a docking port can be made lighter than 20 spacesuits, and definitely lighter than 100 spacesuits.

I remember the whole getting up part from when I had mine out. I didn't actually say anything that loopy. When I had mine out I was really into rubik's cubes (not so much any more sadly) and afterwards I was so exhausted and groggy that I couldn't do one (admittedly it was a tiny one). I wasn't able to feel my tongue for hours afterward. be careful with your mouth. I was like "Why won't my mouth close?" and then I realized it was my tongue. You'll also lose track of where things to soak up the blood are due to the numbness. Also I had solid food 2-3 days later and it still made me bleed a little bit I think. Good luck!

Where did this come from? Is it new?

Seems to be a bit of a roll oscillation on stage 2 (or 3 depending on how you count). Edit: Was stage 1 or 2, not 2 or 3, it was the core.

Wait... so Old tower - Falcon/SS pad - SS Tower or SS pad - Old Tower serving both vehicles - Falcon pad ? Probably the second one. Ooh more tweets

Artemis has a logo now.

The fuel is MMH and the oxidizer is NTO. The leak was just in the NTO system, and only a tiny amount leaked. It leaked backwards through a supposedly one way valve into the helium pressurization system. When the helium system went to full pressure (to pressurize the fuel tanks for engine firing) this fuel was pushed back through the one way valve at very high speed and pressure. The fuel, through a combination of impact damage and combustion with the valve upon impact (which was not expected) destroyed the valve and the helium pressure blew the whole vehicle apart, including the tanks. Then, the propellant burned. The leak was too tiny to notice, it would have only taken a tiny bit of NTO to cause that damage.

And even if rapidly, fully reusable rockets reduce jobs, the new industries created by those rockets (asteroid mining, tourism stations, MOAR space probes, planetary bases, etc) that are related enough to the rocket building skillset will definitely provide employment.

Yeah. If this had happened with any other rocket, even Falcon 9, there would be a big delay and probably an investigation. Except Delta IV of course, it's designed to do that.

I believe It did a successful static fire a few minutes before this.

Fire is out now. Chris B is calling it off nominal. I don't think we will see a hop tomorrow. Video of the fireball:

Fusion isp is crazy high. I think the lowest number I've seen is 10,000 seconds. I've seen numbers of 100,000+ seconds, but given that our spacecraft will be an SSTO and won't be as thermally efficient and needs to be indirect to cope with the neutrons (unless electric props to get it a few km away from the airport are lighter than the modifications plus the efficiency loss) so we can assume it to be on the low end of that, but that's still at least 10,000 seconds. Antimatter thermal definitely beats fusion thermal in terms of energy density and specific impulse. I'm not sure if it will beat it in practicality, though. Lose power and your entire spaceship (and a decent chunk of the planet it's next to) get blown away, assuming we have enough antimatter to get to the nearest star system... For an SSTO lander, though, there would be significantly less antimatter on board. Still amounts large enough to do bad things, though.

Was watching hopper stream. Large fireball just engulfed the hopper. It's still there. Not sure if that was a methane leak or what? Did not seem normal, made no sound according to Tim Dodd. Update. Starhopper did a static fire and then caught on fire afterwards, the fireball was part of the fire I think?

Assuming a closed cycle fusion engine can be made and neutron shielding will fit into the mass budget (which I am confident about with specific impulses like that) then the only exhaust will be the reaction mass and the tiny bit of helium that builds up in the reactor. The neutrons will gradually make the reactor more radioactive over time, but this will not be an issue unless it crashes, and even then it would be way less of a problem than a fission reactor, as the only radioactive fuel for the fusion is tritium, and only small amounts of it are needed. Only a few seconds worth at most will be in the reactor at any given time, and if containment is lost there will be a brief blast and then nothing as the reaction will pretty much stop instantly. In most respects, fusion is safer than fission. Edit: In a D-T fusion reaction, neutrons and helium are produced. Helium doesn't really matter, but the neutrons are the dangerous part that need the shielding.

Today is a static fire, not the hop. If the static fire goes well, they are aiming to hop tomorrow.

By the time we are making first contact, I am fairly sure we would have engines efficient enough to SSTO from most world's, at the very least fusion (tens of thousands of seconds isp).