CatastrophicFailure

The argument made is that bolting it on is potentially introducing another point of failure into an already rather uncertain system. Don’t entirely buy that myself, seems like pretty straightforward engineering for an aerospace company, however it looks to be a moot point. There’s pix up on. NSF today that show the nosecone clearly tack-welded in place today.

Also, SpaceX has a much better version of MechJeb.

There’s a couple pictures over on NSF as well as some chatter that the nose might indeed be bolt-on. The structures inside seem far too substantial for mere alignment jigs, they look meant to hold significant force. If that’s the case, the assorted plumbing inside could be some sort of quick-disconnect fittings, or just short sections of flex pipe with bolt-together flanges.

This could be one of those ultimately historic days that’ll never be remembered... the last sunset without a complete Starship in the world.

The Spacewalk of Shame... Still confounds me that there’s no provision to charge payload batteries on the pad.

No sooner than Sunday now.

Firing three Raptors at once is gonna be a BIG step, I reckon it’ll take a few tries before everything is just right. IIRC it took a while for the first SN single static fire, too.

Front-end flippy-flap stubs spotted in the wild: Assuming it survives that long (my money’s against it), with three Raptors how much fuel could SN8 realistically carry? Enough for 100km? How bout a downrange-then-boostback like said first stage?

Kinda just describes the whole year, right?

But can you play the breakdown from In The Air Tonight?

Someone mentioned that the trees are still full of sap and such, and really don’t like to burn (the underbrush is another matter). But cars and buildings are painted with flammium and conflagrium (and literally fueled with explodium) so... Also... At least they already have their costumes picked out. and they better be bringing candy...

Interesting local-ish connection: Starlink is already doing good in the world.

On another note, this is interesting. Apparently SpaceX was willing to consider an expendable Starship for the Air Force.

The math is easy (for those so blessed ), but what does the reality actually look like? It took Neil & Buzz a bit of experimenting to figure out the best way to move around on the surface, and that was with a space suit basically doubling their weight. How will people actually move about inside a room large enough to actually do so, while staying controlled? We never see this accurately portrayed in movies & such. Might get ugly if someone jumped too far and knocked the bowl of water over into the moon cat. Also, best view yet:

I really want to see footage of people just moving around in lunar (or Martian) gravity. No heavy space suits, nothing to encumber them. Would one walk across a 9-ish meter room or just sort of single-bound it? Would that be practical inside with some sort of ceiling? The Apollo LEM wasn’t nearly big enough inside for anything like that. Oh and water. I want to see how a sizable bowl of liquid behaves in low gravity, if only because it’s never really been done AFAIK. And of course, sooner or later we need to send cats to the Moon. The Moon needs a Cat a Room.

How about the National Team lander’s photocopied switches for... parachutes. Also, closeup of SN7.1’s fate:

Anything to fix the traffic there. Never seen a bunch of people in such a dang hurry to get to AND from work. It’s like Mariokart around that place during shift change.

It’s like herding cats with ADD at a laser show...

but what @Scotius said...

I would expect they’ll do like they do with F9 landings: have the trajectory aiming for a spot Just offshore, only actively correcting onto the pad once under thrust and stable. I expect SN8 to make one L of a splash.

In honor of yesterday’s last week’s today’s this week’s weather...

Maybe he knew something we didn’t all along...

Oh wow, that’s what it’s supposed to look like? I always thought it was some sort of ekranoplan.

Canning day! So of course, the power goes out.