CatastrophicFailure

[Narrator] that confidence was misplaced. …anyone else still up?

“Competing”

It is weird how many new rockets have been going up in the middle of the night. I’d think especially for a maiden flight they’d want daylight for better video data, if the payload doesn’t demand elsewise. SLS, Vulcan, now Nooglin….

Welp, not necessarily. The header tanks are in the nose for balance as much as anything else. When you have tons of “permanent” living space there instead that alleviates some of that extra ballast.

Shotwell, When the Thing was Pitched:

Not to mention they get to test and iterate societal PIDs for Mars... If you want a really thrilling ride there's always Ares I...

As the parent company is effectively defunct, said contact is probably a now-former employee doing this in their spare time and quite likely with their spare budget as well. I think perhaps the forum has devolved to some rough equivalent of highly-limited low-propriety “free trial.” So basically, we are lucky to have this forum at all and it may or may not wink out of existence at literally any moment not unlike the universe itself. Then let us eat, Kerbal, and be merry, for tomorrow we may diet. 502 error incoming in 3… 2…

Yes, the boostback burn deliberately ended early since they aborted the tower catch.

There’s something foul afoot…

Y’all are being a little ungenerous here. Mexico has both its counterpart to the FAA (Agencia Federal de Aviación Civil) AND an actual space agency (Agencia Espacial Mexicana). They even sent an astronaut up on the shuttle back in the 80s. So it’s not like this is some out-of-context problem, government… ambiguity aside. I had to go down a bit of a rabbit hole but it’s worth noting that there still is no legal, internationally-recognized boundary between “airspace” and “spacespace,” only “suggestions” like the Karman line that are mostly for record-keeping. Generally airspace above 60k feet is uncontrolled, and Starship is above that for nearly all of its reentry, by the time it “comes to a stop” and starts a controlled fall it’s still well above typical airliner altitudes. I think it’s overall safety has been more than proven at this point, wrt a full-on breakup that could cause significant damage on the ground. The biggest real risk seems to be shedding tiles, which is a relatively LOW risk overall, as tile bits are highly unlikely to do any harm. Passing over a decent sized city like Matromoros is a potential risk, but most of the bad stuff would be over by then I think. Starship just needs to do what it’s already demonstrated it can do over Mexico, the dicey bits are all over SpaceX territory. Anyways, SpaceX has known this was coming for a very long time, so I’m sure that the relevant Mexican authorities have also know for a long time, as SpaceX has been in active communication with them all along. They DO know what they’re doing, after all.

Asteroid deterrence .

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: