CatastrophicFailure

@tater‘s tweet... that’s SN4, I’m guessing, there for fit checks. No idea where they’d fly from nearby.

Let’s all hope they’re all firing in the same place, in a very orderly fashion... I’m hoping for an hour’s delay myself, that’s right when I’m heading home. Can you imagine it, tho? Happy cows bounding around as light as deer in a great domed pasture! Ooh! Ooh! The cows could literally jump over the moon! And all that moon-cow poop to fertilize the grass or ferment into more methane.

And then... ?!? Wait, what?

...assuming there’s no more fleeing turbines... Also...

Apparently an engine bit decided it no longer wanted to continue the relationship...

This demands a live webcam!

So, take this with a grain jug of salt, but... Probably just Musk being Musky.

@purpleivan Have you tried “paste as plain text?” Sometimes this seems to make a difference.

Depends on mass and aerodynamics. Alan Shepard hit nearly 12g on his suborbital flight. Dunno if an F9 could take that, but I’d think the aero forces would damage it first, hence the entry burn. That negates both the worst of the compression heating and aero deceleration. Entry burn. They use the engines to slow down just enough before hitting the “denser parts of the atmosphere” that it’s all manageable.

Keep in mind, tho, this is a Falcon Heavy core. It’s significantly different than an F9 booster, and right now they don’t have any spare Heavy cores, since they’ve seemed bound and determined to go visit Davey Jones upon landing. Or shortly thereafter. AFIAK this is true in real life. Quick, aggressive decelerations result in less heating at the cost of much greater structural loads. Makes sense, since you lose speed much faster and minimize that time in compression heating.

As long as they don’t put anything back upside-down.

My wife left for a week in Shanghai today. Right now she’s over Siberia. That just kinda trips me out.

Hope she’s fast, those fairings must be coming down halfway to Africa. and they’d better bless the rains...

Not here, specifically, but I do get it on other websites, and I’d love if someone could explain what’s going on.

And, it's good!

So, TEA/TEB, then? Kinda surprising given how many times it’ll need to be restarted on a mission...

It’ll be a long time yet before we get windows. These two are strictly test vehicles, they won’t have cargo bays either. They’re only to test if the whole crazy idea actually works. That was my first thought, too, something they’ll buff off later. Tho it’s interesting they’re only using it now, and randomly in the middle. Also interesting:

Meanwhile, back at the ranch on topic... BC Starship gets some contrast.

Don’t bother, because... I can personally attest that my dear ol’ mum’s computer has well over 127,000 unread emails, and is approaching exponential growth since she doesn’t know how to sanitize forwards and won’t delete anything without reading it first. And then forwarding it to everyone. So you’re fighting a losing battle there, G. So please do my OCD a favor and hit that “mark all read” button as many times as you need to.

. . . Dude...

Then it would for sure never come back...

This is... quite the change... For reference, that’s about here: Gonna be a long schlep back. I hope they get it tied down good this time.

Well, this is encouraging: