CatastrophicFailure

—SN4, probably

Do you have the craft file posted anywhere? I need to pick it apart and discover it’s secrets.

@sevenperforce I’m curious to hear how you made that pusher work...

Can’t quite tell if he stopped or actually hit it first, but they had to move it so he could finish his turn and pull up to all the reporters and the flarping head of NASA all dignified-like.

Watch the winglet on the right...

...after a minor incident with a helicopter...

Meanwhile SN4 is still stuck out there feeling awkward...

This is absolutely relevant...

Static fire! Then... er... another fire...

Nah, just rent one very large turtle.

fart.

And here it is:

Dude, that was yesterday. Today’s test is still on. ...right?

Bleh. And I’ll be stuck in training all day.

Exactly. Theres a staggering amount of theoretical wealth in some metallic asteroids, it’s not that far off to say there’s literally chunks of precious metals on the surface just waiting to be scooped up. Tho I think the market for things like iridium and cobalt, other metals that will be essential in the coming widespread adoption of EVs will be more lucrative, especially as environmental and humanitarian concerns continue to grow around their extraction here at home. The rub is making retrieving such from deep space actually profitable. At the current cost of things, it simply is not. With the paradigm shift Starship could bring, well, it might be. Part of that is just figuring out if it’s even worth perusing in the first place. But whatever one’s own opinions on the matter, there are currently several outfits who do think it’s worth investigating, even with today’s costs.

Here’s another example: asteroid mining is currently not a thing because it’s just too expensive. It’s too expensive to even go out there and just find what might be mineable. Fast forward a few years, SS is operational, each launch costs a couple million. Well now NostromoCorp can, for only a few million total, send out several dozen StarLink-based mass-produced prospector probes to go prospecting. It doesn’t matter if some of them fail, it’s even expected. It doesn’t matter if lots of them fail, heck it doesn’t even matter if most of them fail, only a few need to actually work in order to return useful data and make the mission a success, that’s an enormous risk reduction. Today, it’s several million just to study the feasibility of sending out a single probe which absolutely cannot fail because if it does the whole project is bust.

The space shuttle had a number of failure modes during launch that were not survivable purely because of its bizarre design. That design itself made it impossible to ever be “reliable enough.” Firstly, Starship won’t suffer those same flaws (tho it may have different ones), it can shrug off multiple engine failures, even, ahem, catastrophic ones. It has no finicky solids to worry about. It can’t have a repeat of the two Falcon failures since it won’t have pressurant tanks within the fuel tanks. But more importantly, what really gives Starship the possibility of eventually becoming “reliable enough” is its flight rate. The shuttle flew, what, 135 times? Once up and going, SS could conceivably exceed that in less than a year, even a few months. An average of one flight a day is well within SpaceX’s plans, and that is a lot of flight hours to get all the bugs out, though it will take time. We don’t plan these days for the wings simply falling off an airplane, in the early days of aviation this was a very real threat. Crew rating Starship based on “reliable enough” will take a lot of launches, but with the planned flight rates this actually becomes plausible.

Wow. Really puts in perspective how close the launch site is to the tank farm. Yeesh.

Good Kerm, that just looks ridiculous. Maybe once it actually happens some congresscritters will realize the absurdity of the whole situation and nix that titanic fund drain called SLS. I’m not holding my breath, but...

I’m getting this too, as are others on Twitter. Seems to be a bug. Kinda bad optics, really...

wiz00tle.

ITS HIIIIIIIIIIIIIM!

So, they get a nice fee and he’s now part of their space program, right?