CatastrophicFailure

The irony that it's gotten 5 likes...

Wait, what? Where did the Like button go? *pokes @cubinator with a stick*

And are demonstrably an order of magnitude more dangerous.

Some very informative replies upthread. @kurja don’t just take their word for it (although you certainly could), you can validate all this yourself in KSP. It’s also worth noting, tho, that adding thrust does reach a point of diminishing return when dealing with that pesky atmosphere. At some point your air drag losses will exceed your gravity losses if you just keep piling on thrust.

Tossing this up here, just cuz I’ve not seen it before: Aaaaaaaalmost there...

No update on when, still.

They’ve run out of things to launch ATM. They’re ready, customers aren’t. And Starlink is targeted late next month. Hang on, digging up article... Ok, boom. But fret not, next year there could be as many as 24 Starlink launches (maybe 4 this year still) on top of all the other customer launches. Back to that lovely two-week cadence! hopefully.

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.