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9 hours ago, CatastrophicFailure said:

What I read there is another typical "leave us alone" statement of vagary by the FAA. The license may come as early as next month, but they haven't actually said there's no possibility it won't come as early as today.

They could have said "The license will be issued in October".

Or "The license *won't* be issued in September".

But they didn't.

Meaningless. It'll come when it comes.

Edited by RCgothic
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1 hour ago, RCgothic said:

What I read there is another typical "leave us alone" statement of vagary by the FAA. The license may come as early as next month, but they haven't actually said there's no possibility it won't come as early as today.

They could have said "The license will be issued in October".

Or "The license *won't* be issued in September".

But they didn't.

Meaningless. It'll come when it comes.

"Teams are working together and I think we're optimistic sometime next month," - acting FAA Administrator Polly Trottenberg

I think that's more than a 'nothing' statement, but that's just my opinion.

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This has to be teaching SpaceX a lot about spacesuit development, I wouldn't be surprised if they're getting started on more advanced EVA suits for planetary environments (or already have a while ago), given how the development of this, comparatively, simpler suit is going.

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38 minutes ago, magnemoe said:

Yes that looks a bit weird, had been smarter to use the end pieces seen here to round off the edge of the heat shield for less drag and better look. 
My guess is that its an test of these edge tiles. 

It's apparently over vents

 

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Something that crosses my mind when I see stuff like this, even though it's probably already evident, is that it's interesting that they took a lot of inspiration for Falcon 9's development in Starship's test program. Where they started out with basically a minimum viable rocket, and gradually upgraded everything over time to block 5, Starship is going down a similar path while still in development before they declare it operational. Raptor 1-3 (and possibly 4+ in the next several years), stretching Starship's tanks, adding hot staging, not to mention the more fundamental changes like carbon fiber to steel, and 12 to 9m.

If they had decided to freeze the design earlier and focus on orbit, could they be flying right now? Maybe, maybe not, steel was still a relatively recent change for that, but they also likely want to avoid getting themselves stuck in a potentially limiting design like Falcon 9, and not having more room to work on reusability and turnaround, at least not without more of a cost. So they're working on a design they like while everything is still in flux.

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