CatastrophicFailure

I’m not a flat-earther, will you carve my name into a rock anyways? IIRC, the exhaust plume just spreads out so much in a vacuum (seeing rockets rising on columnar plumes on earth really messes with your... perspective here) that there’s not nearly enough force left to dig out a crater. It’s also only close enough to interact with the surface for a scant few seconds, and then at very low throttle. I believe you can see crater-like rays emanating out from the LEM on some of the later “aerial” shots from Lunar Surveyor, but they’re also heavily smudged by footprints.

No, no, no! He’s the Lead Moderator, you can’t just fire him! Well, you can’t just fire him, you have to relieve him of command under the articles of the UCMJ* and remand him to custody pending a courts-martial. And be sure you take his ban-hammer key nuclear option after all... *Uniform Code of Moderator Justice

Well, I mean, like, they are doing, er... fascinating things with lab-grown meat these days... ...oh. Ok, but still... My mind remains boggled that they seem to be targeting 20+km for the very first flight of this thing... I suppose that's a big advantage of having two prototypes in the line, and being quick and cheap to build more... they can afford to risk losing one without it being a huge blow to the program.

One reason why, as Elon recently noted, they’ll be sending two ships at once. Which of course I can’t find again. So here’s confirmation that Starship will also be used as a Venusian blimp. First one to say something about the Hindenburg gets a dirty look.

I shall follow this particular thread with great interest.

I’ll see that & raise you... And also:

If you look real close at some renders, it looks like there’s actually eight legs. So, if accurate, that would give some redundancy. But, Musk said it’s not accurate, so for all we know they’ve gone back to the “Giant Bouncy House” recovery model.

@Selective Genius Yup, that reads like a scene from a sitcom, alright. Sounds like you almost had a date* right there if she hadn’t been pranking you back... and was better at CPR... *the kind that gets HR involved and leads to a settlement...

Your irony is better.

Aw, man. You mean no more Super Kerbal Russian booster? Tho there would be a certain irony announcing after a mission that “the Eagle has landed...”

More of the mars copter! I still wanna know how that thing deploys!

I can’t imagine they’d have something so delicate sticking out in the airstream like that. @tater is quite right, best take anything with a nice big salt lick, but changes to the gear/fin design have been popping up a lot in the scuttlebutt lately.

He could just say that he... digs it...

Ahah! Right off the bat, we see the new landing leg/fin design. They shall, indeed, be separate parts. And horizontal processing too, at least to some degree. Gonna be a big TEL.

First there was Pirate Metal... Then there was Space Metal With submarines!... And now, there’s: Dwarf Metal.

Happy lil’ Starship.

Nothing of... huge interest. Top left looks like up inside, looking at the lower tank butt. You can see the manifold for the fuel lines, similar to recent SLS photos. Top right is a tank dome hidden behind shipping containers. bottom left is just the flank of the beast. Bottom right is the same tank dome closer.

Likely a big reason why they chose to go the AI route, with human oversight. It doesn’t have to be perfect, it only has to pare out a small enough number of potential collisions that the human overseers can reasonably verify and actively monitor.

Not at all, eventually they’ll all just clump together and can be moved out of the way with a gentle push...

And Starlink will have its own automatic anti-collision system, as well as ground monitoring by multiple systems. How is that even relevant? A sat that’s low on fuel will be safely deorbited and no longer a concern. Also: Yeah, this whole non-issue is just ESA grandstanding for their own product.

Just for comparison, on average there are around 12,000 aircraft in the air at any given time*, which are much bigger than Starlinks, in a much smaller “shell” of space. They are highly regulated, and very rarely hit each other at altitude. The whole Kessler syndrome thing is way overblown. People forget that space is big. Really, really, big. And the farther out you go the bigger it gets. And most things that aren’t far out don’t stay up forever. *And as high as 19,000 at once, I recall reading.

“Don’t dead, open inside” Not unusual for airplanes, rockets tho... I’d be surprised to see SLS bits just sitting out like that, or even Atlas. Musk does want to make the whole mess more airplane-like, tho, hmm...m

I love that there are bits of rocket ships just laying around outside like that. Looks like they’re working on a new tent Quonset hut shelter space, too, and maybe the beginning of another ring jig? Now, if I were the head of that there steelworks, knowing there were drones overhead all hours of the day, I’d start leaving all kindsa stuff laying around just to mess with people... 10m steel ring... surplus space shuttle wing... giant rubber chicken with a sailor hat and a vat of mayo from Costco...