CatastrophicFailure

Watching that gonna be like…

Yeah but… that’s usually exactly what you don’t want during separation… didn’t a Falcon 1 fail for exactly that reason? And what about the performance hit from re-orienting the Starship? This ain’t Kerbal after all… I mean, I’m sure they’ve considered all this and what not but still, mind kinda blown right now… Gonna be one interesting launch, that’s for dang sure… and of course the headlines will read, “massive SpaceX rocket nearly spins out of control!”

Wait, what?!

I remember reading somewhere that Falcon 9 actually has a "glide ratio" of around 1:1, not bad for a long metal tube.

This. And not a complete waste, either, they'd still get tons of useful data on the minutiae of stacking operations/part clearance, all for relatively little risk. I would expect either way to see multiple stackings/unstackings before launch day just to get the flows down.

Ninja'd by @Spaceception.

This. Certainly seems to be alot of them. I thought the whole point of the hexagon tiles was to avoid seams and the straight pathways for hot reentry gas they create?

So, all of us fudging it with AIRBRAKES this whole time were actually ahead of the curve.

Oh come on, we ALL know Elon plays KSP, such an arrangement isn’t even lightly hexed.

Aaaand just in time for a poke in the eye...

The face when watching Nauka dock...

That's the incredible thing about it, even if it falls short in multiple aspects, it's still an absolute paradigm changer.

D'oh! I've been geoblocked!

Sounds more like hammer time. Yeesh. Anyone get the feeling Nauka doesn’t want to be there? What’s Russian for “cursed?”

A proper Space Viking funeral for Pirs. This is the way. Also @DDE what is this, and why aren’t we funding it??

This thing happened: Isn't it just the cutest? This lil guy took off like a shot when I was out mowing with the tractor and probably saved his litter mates from an awful fate. One more pass and… Of course, it couldn’t go perfectly. These two bolted for the underbrush once we found the nest to return the first guy. Checked back a couple hours later and he was still there, but the other two hadn’t come back. Hopefully momma bunny gets them all sorted out soon.

*GASP* Maybe what we’re seeing here isn’t for standard Starship, it’s a pathfinder for lunar Starship. The shape of the door makes much more sense then, if there’s a (planned) crew compartment above.

That doesn't seem conducive to "rapid, reliable reusability..." Seems like a lot of work, and potential failure points if the same tiles are going on and off over & over. There's been talk of tethering two starship nose to nose for artificial grabbity, I wonder if they could use some single point of attachment beneath an opening nose tip, kinda like the docking port on Dragon? Would need some stabilizing arms that brace the leeward side. Or just attach the lifting mechanism only to the leeward side with some kind of cantilever, like the ol' balanced hammer physics trick... I also wonder if, knowing they're being watched 24/7, they deliberately position stuff like this the wrong way with just enough view for a tease, just to mess with all of us. Er, nevermind... Seems like a big chunk is inaccessible tho?

FYI, Soyuz 18a. Also MS-10, technically.

Prolly a similar musical thing to this…

IIRC they very, very specifically added a lockout system so that couldn’t foreseeably happen again.