CatastrophicFailure

My wife insisted we pause the movie to watch the launch. Neener.

Ahem...

Hmm... really surprised they don’t try to reclaim the tiles, they must have no trouble with producing them in numbers then.

Starships are ungainly and vulnerable... but also cheap (see: @tater's tank cost analysis) Blow the chomper payload door(s?) as soon as SS is subsonic, payload lands in separate, pressurized, guided containers, Starship crashes... potentially right into a nearby soft target, or not. "Payload" doesn't even have to be troops here to be effective, get the troops in some other way, use SS to land armor, supplies, etc. If you consider SS "expendable" in this way, there's plenty of options for actually getting material on the ground without all the SS-specific hoopla.

You see, Ivan— Cannot see Ivan. Ivan is gone. Car very fast. Much shhhh. dogeski.

*squints* D’oh, ninja’d by the next page.

IIRC they’re still working on something rather like it, tho probably without the nifty hydrolox V8. Tory was just mentioning it on Twitter the other day.

Saw that, too. The retort is that supposedly, the rumor came from NSF L2, from a source who is very reliable. Grains of salt may be involved.

This is so cute I think I just grew ovaries.

Well, they’ve got that one... it functions perfectly, as a mock-up...

The USAF: Would be veeeery interesting to be a fly on the virtual wall during those Air Force/SpaceX zooms...

Elon must’ve laughed his S off when he heard this... probably a lot sooner than the rest of us. Next earth-shattering BO tweet: BO committing to reusable upper stage. And then: National Team redesigns HLS lander, now looks like this. [pokes @kerbiloid with a stick]

I was never here. @kerbiloid was...

Caught this gangly, awkward little bundle of adorable on camera last night: Then guess who I just found hiding in the grass: Guess I'm not mowing today after all.

Quantum orbit. It is simultaneously in orbit and not in orbit. Also, this thread: Tho I suppose that’s better than squirrels. Schrodinger’s Launch Tower too, apparently.

Unlikely, the HUGE, important difference between SupeeHeavy and F9 (other than, well, size) is that SuperHeavy can hover. This really cannot be stated enough, it’s what makes all the difference here. SuperHeavy can hover, that’s what allows the pinpoint accuracy and zero-ish “touchdown” speed this needs to work. If SH is off a couple meters, it can stop, and then correct (fuel remnant notwithstanding). The real load on the tower should be relatively minor. F9, OTOH, has to cut its engine at exactly the right moment to stop just before it hits the deck, and can’t really correct its course in the final moments before touchdown, as such (we saw this, sort of, in the FH core that “aborted” and went shooting off sideways), so trying to “catch” it is a nonstarter. Also: Vandy getting some action again.

All the needed components exist as separate pieces: giant, superstrong structures; strong, fast hydraulics; robotics; booster-landing accuracy; massive shock absorbers, etc. What SpaceX needs to do is combine them all together. Which is NOT to say this isn’t a huge engineering challenge, but it’s far easier than conjuring something entirely new up from scratch, like belly-flopping Starship. The more I think about it, the less kooky catching the booster seems.

Also: Mind=blown.

now you can see it again, with explanation.

:48 Douglass A-3 controlled crashing landing on a carrier. 40,000lbs doing well over a hundred mph all stopped without damage by a chunk of metal not much bigger than, well, your arm. Turns out, metal is really strong. And engineers are really smart. SpaceX has lots of both. Humanity has made moving building-sized things before: The rest is just details at thus point.

SpaceX is already gonna be tempting fate with such a tricky, untried arrangement... best not to go tempting the Kraken, too.

Operate the shock absorber mechanism in reverse at the moment of liftoff and pick up a tiny performance noose too.

Looks kinda like the original design for the space shuttle... yo dawg I herd you like space shuttles...

Man, sometimes I really miss wheeling around terrain like that. Then I remember, oh yeah, it’s also hot as cojones out there, too.