RealKerbal3x

Looks like they're preparing SN20 sections for a full side of tiles:

As tater said, this is kind of irrelevant to the current discussion, but I'll just quote what I posted yesterday about this.

Yup, it looks at the moment like they'll be skipping right ahead to 20.

The test is orbital, just because it won't go all the way around the Earth doesn't mean it's suborbital. Starship will achieve orbital velocity. And SN15 doesn't have mounts for vacuum-optimised Raptors, a stage separation system, or a full heatshield. It's incapable of participating in the orbital test flight. The current plan is to use SN20, which will have the aforementioned features.

Yeah. That might be deliberate, so they have some overlap in case Vulcan gets delayed further.

The question is: are they replacing the engines, or removing them entirely for detailed inspection? I guess we'll know soon.

Atlas is going to be around for a while longer, but Delta only has 3 launches left.

The update hasn't released yet, the official post was just an announcement.

Well that sounds like just about the least safe way you could use a rocket

An important point here is that if we can't shift the paradigm from 'rockets fly infrequently and are dangerous and expensive' (as they have been for much of their existence) to 'rockets fly often and are safe and cheap', we're not really going anywhere in space as a species.

Aircraft are rapidly reusable, and they have certainly had tragic losses of life because of ground crew error. With the volume of flights planned, these things are bound to happen. They just have to make those events as improbable as possible, and the best way to do that is just fly a load of times and fail a load of times before they put crew on it.

Maybe? You do have to take into account how massive Starship is when full of propellant, though. Isn't it like 1200 tons fully loaded?

Technically, the RVacs (at least the current versions) can run at sea level without flow separation in return for a slight loss of efficiency. So they should be able to run all 6 Raptors in an abort scenario. Starship is intended to be made safe for crew not through an abort system (which would be impractical for the large crews SpaceX eventually intend it to carry), but through being extremely reliable and fault-tolerant. As a result, crewed Starship is a long way off - it could be a thousand flights before it's trusted with a crew. Of course, it'll probably never be as safe as modern commercial airlines for the simple fact that it's a rocket. But it might well be safe enough that you could fly on it without fearing for your life - perhaps comparable to the early days of passenger air travel.

Considering that I made my account less than 4 years ago and my rep is now north of 6000, the amount of time I spend here might be excessive. It must be a combination of how nice this place is and how much I like to see meaningless numbers next to my name go up

This is what is really going on when you radially attach an unnecessary number of Vector engines to the bottom of a fuel tank.

As far as I know the forward section is empty. I don't know if they pressurise the forward section (I'd be inclined to think they don't), but it's not filled with propellant.

YouTube version if you want to watch without Twitter compression:

The actual launch mount they'll use to launch Starship-Superheavy is the six-legged structure at far right (it's not complete yet). The structure just left of it is the launch/integration tower, which will eventually be much taller and feature an integrated crane for stacking the stages.

I imagine that, in the eyes of critics, Starship won't be a 'real vehicle' until it's accomplished its aspirational design goal of landing humans on Mars. In reality, it's a transformative vehicle even if it never gets that far.

They'll be making landing attempts from the start. They probably won't actually reuse them until they stop making water landings, though.

They managed to bring stage 1 back at least!

Liftoff! Second stage engine failed to ignite?

I never want to hold again.

Hold, they're evidently working some kind of issue. Edit: Looks like upper level winds are the culprit.