PakledHostage

Myself, I don't think Barking Sands is too out to lunch for Starship catch testing, if they're going to do it somewhere other than Texas. They initially talked about having Starship come down near there anyway, so clearly it's close to their existing testing trajectories. It also has thousands of kilometers of empty ocean to the west and south of it. It is a Naval facility, but it has been used for 3rd party testing in the past, such as for some of the Pathfinder aircraft missions.

I have my PPL and checking NOTAMs is something I have to do every time I go flying, but I have been having a heck of a time finding anything about this launch. Admittedly I don't ever fly in US airspace or in oceanic airspace, so maybe it would be easier to find for someone with different/more experience, but this is the best I could find: ATCSCC Advisory ATCSCC ADVZY 065 DCC 01/16/2025 ZSU ZMA ZNY AIRPORT DEPARTURE DELAYS MESSAGE: EVENT TIME: 16/2340 - 17/0100 USERS CAN EXPECT DEPARTURE DELAYS FROM WITHIN ZSU, ZMA, ZNY AIRPORTS TRAVERSING ZMA AND ZNY OCEANIC AIRSPACE OF UP TO 60 MINUTES DUE TO DEBRIS RESPONSE AREAS (DRA) 3 AND 4 ACTIVATION. UPDATES WILL FOLLOW IF NECESSARY. EFFECTIVE TIME: 162347 - 170130 SIGNATURE: 25/01/16 23:47 I couldn't find where (or when) DRA 3 and DRA 4 were defined, but the text suggests that they were established in advance as contingency in the event of a launch problem, and then activated 23:47 UTC on Thursday. Presumably they are the two areas outlined in yellow in the maps above? Also, the idea that debris wasn't a hazard to aircraft because anything that made it down to the flight levels would be light weight is silly. Apologists will downplay the hazard, but hitting even something light weight while flying at Mach 0.8 will cause damage.

What about Barking Sands Missile test range on Kauai? It's on the northwest coast of that island and close to the trajectories currently in use for Starship tests.

For the record: This is not some clickbait crap. VASAviation is a very informative aviation channel.

More nice footage: https://www.instagram.com/reel/DE6GXMtMiJF/?igsh=MXQzbm5sM3g1YWlzYQ==

Over on Reddit, someone claiming to have been flying in the area at the time posted that ATC broadcast "attentional all aircraft due to space vehicle mishap, we have a debris field from xxxx to xxx to xxx, standby for individual instructions to vacate the debris field". It's in the same thread where the video that @Minmus Taster posted above was posted by the guy who claims to have filmed it.

I don't understand the relevance of the corridor? I looked for NOTAMs and TFRs and didn't see anything. The fact that aircraft were demonstrably in the vicinity suggests that there weren't any restrictions, so evidently the authorities weren't concerned enough about a launch failure to issue anything? We know that several aircraft were forced to hold or divert after it happened, but it seems to have been a reaction rather than pre-planned.

Yeah. I expect it will delay further launches pending an investigation. It's hard to say that it's inconsequential when aircraft are being held and diverted in a large area north of Puerto Rico to avoid raining debris. Even a G5 out of Teterboro was delayed. I expect it's owner will be having a chat with Elon. Those billionaires all socialize in the same circles, right?

Venus at 60 km is no more immediately dangerous than the surface of Mars. It's arguably less so. You could go outside on a balcony or to work on the exterior of the habitat in what amounts to scuba gear (e.g. a neoprene suit and respirator). And many common materials like plastics (e.g. HDPE, PVC), Teflon, glass, some stainless steels, etc are unaffected by sulfuric acid. Structures can be protected from it. You would also build redundancy into the station, just as you would have to on Mars. Gravity wells and ISRU are a different matter, but given a choice between moisture farming on Tatooine Mars, or living in a cloud city on Bespin Venus, I would choose Venus.

Counterintuitively, Venus has the most habitable environment in the solar system, other than Earth. It's just not on the surface. The habitable zone is about 60 km up in Venus' atmosphere, where gravity, pressure and temperature resemble those of Earth. Earth air is also a lifting gas for a balloon in that atmosphere at that level. Maybe one day, we'll build an outpost there with rockets arriving by propulsive landings on the floating station.

Some years ago on this forum, there was an overly ambitious effort to put up a cube sat. The thread included lots of debate about what the satellite should do. It devolved into some weird "science objectives", but one of the other ideas was to just launch a camera and downlink images of Bob, Jeb and Bill in Earth orbit. Well now, more than a decade later, it seems YouTuber Mark Rober has given anyone the opportunity to do just that with his upcoming "Sat Gus" launch. Donate 30 USD to their charity (providing underprivileged kids STEM exposure) and you can upload a photo to serve as a foreground image for a picture taken from orbit.

Just in time for the holidays.

I love rocketry. In what other industry can you end a test with two hulks of burning wreckage floating in the ocean and regard the test as successful?

[Wrings out blanket]

I am not trying to spoil anyone's fun. I find it hard to believe that anyone is more excited and impressed with yesterday's success than I am. I just think comparing the achievement to Apollo 11 is a bit much. There have been several massive achievements in space flight over the past decades, but Apollo 11 was in a class of its own. It was the fulfillment of a dream that spanned millenia. It united mankind. As one of the astronauts in the documentary "In the Shadow of the Moon" (Mike Collins?) said: People all over the world, who they met afterwards said "we did it!" Yesterday's catch was cool, and pretty good for a mere bunch of apes (to paraphrase Elon Musk), but let's keep it in perspective.

Yesterday's test was spectacular, but Apollo 8 needs a mention. The Voyagers too. And Cassini/Huygens... Plus all the Mars rovers... let's not lose perspective. This was a progression of the landing a booster on legs idea. All of what they learned doing that fed into this achievement. To achieve the goal of rapid reusabilty, they next need to successfully catch the Starship. And both craft need to be able to come back in a state where they can be reused. There is still a lot of work to do. What impresses me as an engineer who's worked in aviation most of my career is that SpaceX is trying this, and sticking with it long enough to be within sight of pulling it off. Aerospace is a conservative industry. Tory Bruno's tweet cited up thread touches on exactly this. Doing what SpaceX is doing is hard to justify when you're answerable to the banks and fund managers who are your big shareholders. But SpaceX has a bigger vision, and they're willing to put a lot of their eggs in that basket. I am happy to see their progress. It's a massive engineering achievement, and it gives us all hope for amazing things to come. But there's still a lot of work to do . As I said, let's not lose perspective.

Yeah, we have to remember that we live in a bubble. This is super cool to all of us, but many others don't care. My wife told me this morning to turn off the replay I was watching, because "nobody cares". And I asked on my work's company chat after flight 4 if anyone had watched and all I heard was crickets. Apollo was before my time, but from what I can tell from the historical record, almost everyone cared about Apollo 11. Sadly this, only a few of us nerds care.

The contrail at 22 seconds in the second video is interesting. FlightRadar24 doesn't show anything in that part of the sky so it was probably military (without ADS-B enabled). There was a NASA WB-57 Canberra up at 44000 feet, but it was in the wrong part of the sky, relative to the pad. (Sunrise was at 99 degrees true, and the contrail was north of that.) There was a Texas Department of Public Safety King Air out over the water, but it was down at 3300 feet, and there were a whole bunch of GA aircraft sightseeing from the margins. (I wouldn't have wanted to be up there with them, with everyone looking at the rocket and nobody looking out for other air traffic... fortunately nobody hit each other.)

Aren't you lot presuming to know what the bureaucrats are thinking, with all this criticism of the regulatoty process and related talk of the relative impacts of thunder vs. sonic booms? Or is it open knowledge what's behind the delays? Don't get me wrong. That's what internet forums are for (i.e. presuming to know what others are thinking and responding accordingly), but I feel the need to point it out in light of some of the discussion up thread.

This is interesting and it makes sense, but where did you read this? Is that also how they currently recover boosters? From the footage, it always looks like more of a pure suicide burn?

Possibly, but something the size of a skyscraper falling at the speed of sound (and containing the unburned fuel that was supposed to have slowed said skyscraper to a stop) would pack quite a punch when it crashed after the engines failed to relight... There are only so many contingencies they can realistically design for.

I was last there for the STS101 launch, so you've been there more recently than me and I am afraid my advice would be very dated.

I had this video in a playlist because, when I first saw it late one night years ago, I had to get out of bed and go downstairs to play it again on the big screen. I just showed it to my kids, and was reminded how beautiful it is, so thought I would share:

Very fair. But there's a lot of suggestion that SpaceX should be given free pass where others are bound by the rules. It goes both ways. Some of the rules may not make sense in the strictest sense, but that's a problem with the rules specifically, not the process.