CatastrophicFailure

Musk said in one of his Tim Dodd interviews that they may—MAY— be able to eliminate the forward flaps entirely, ala the OG ITS. I reckon we’ll see a lot of tweaking of the design over the next few flights, and maybe less pointy-ness. And speaking of the next few flights… next year Starship MIGHT fly more than the vaunted Saturn V did over its entire lifetime.

This first unit will mostly be a tech demonstrator, it’s meant for two people on the surface for a week. Further iterations to support longer stays with more people will make better use of that space. I doubt they’d put much up there right now, wouldn’t want it falling on your head if the landing was a bit hard… Speaking of such, for the math wizards out there: if you climbed all the way to the ceiling and let go in lunar gravity, how fast would you be moving when you hit the floor, and what height drop would that be comparable to on earth? Y’know, for… reasons… Keep in mind, any samples coming back any time soon are gonna have to fit in Orion. That nice boulder is gonna have to stay where it is for a while.

I’ll just leave this here…

Oh, hallelujah! I guess I can return all these black candles, goat’s blood, and voodoo dolls I was about to use to curse certain… entities. Think I kept the receipts…. speaking of cursed, I asked for a Kerbal hallelujah chorus and got… this…

OFT-5 launch captured from ISS: And this:

I, like so many others, am out of likes for the day, so here’s a bunny with a pancake on its head: This is legal grounds for divorce in seventeen states. And Puerto Rico. Just sayin… and now for something completely different: speculation that it’s just a LN2 purge, but still, dang impressive that they got it back on the stand and loaded cryogen on board in a matter of hours after the very first catch.

Also also: FLIGHT SIX

My money says aborts & goes into the drink.

also: ‘Tis official. Not happening tho, don’t bother setting your alarms. Why? Because I could actually watch. So, scrub to Monday afternoon.

There’s zero chance of a high-speed impact on the tower area. Falcon 9 has a glide ratio of around 1:1, that is dang good for a metal tube with a bunch of cups poking out one end. You can really see this on some RTLS videos, it’s coming back at a very visible angle of attack. Superheavy has been designed to do even better, with long strakes like New Glenn, better grid fin position and a better mass to size ratio. If the engines don’t light, or don’t all light, or the computer detects anything at all out of spec, the booster goes in the drink. If something is going to go all Kerbal, and I do think it’s ballsy as heck for them to try this so soon, but they DO have more experience in landing boosters than anyone else, if something does go wrong, it’ll be the booster contacting the tower at slow speed and ripping itself open, or smacking into the ground like that Chinese rocket the other day. So lots of FIRE!, and flying bits of metal, but not the blast wave of a detonation. It will look spectacular but seems like something they could design the tower to withstand, with light damage if not unscathed. The arms are probably most vulnerable, but fairly easy to replace as well.

A tenner says they do. Ok, KSP-educated crash analysts, what’s your analysis? Interesting that it’s the outer ring of engines. Are there panels missing on the very outer edge for each engine or were they always exposed like that? Also: All Things Serve the Beam.

Live view from the FAA:

I learned in KSP that a blood sacrifice to an eldritch abomination from outside reality can turn living beings into spaghettified Cronenberg horrors experiencing a new definition of pain and suffering and they STILL. DON’T. DIE. I thought this was KSP.