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PSA: SpaceX Starship's 7th Integrated Test Flight scheduled for Thursday January 16th at 4:00PM CST

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“Achieving materially positive payload margin to a useful orbit with a fully & rapidly reusable rocket has eluded prior attempts. Many have tried to embark upon this path only to give up when it became clear that their design would have negative or negligible payload margin.

This is an extremely difficult problem to solve, given the strong gravity of Earth, whereas it is easy on Mars and trivial on the Moon. In the early years of SpaceX, I was not sure that success was even in the set of possible outcomes!

Fortunately, it just barely is, but requires doing unusual things like shifting the mass needed for final velocity attenuation and post-landing stabilization of the rocket (so it doesn’t tip over in wind) to the ground, rather than carrying heavy landing gear on both stages.”
This is great and all but it's going to take some time for people to gain confidence that this can be done safely, particularly for manned flights. Would you want to fly on a rocket that was doing it's 4th trip of the day and only had a few hours between launches? What kind of safety checks are there? I'm not suggesting it's not done properly or safely, but it's going to take many, many rapid flights with zero mishaps before people start to trust this thing.
 
Beaten to low earth orbit by bezos on his first try. Sad.

What?

The Falcon 9 v1. 0 rocket successfully reached orbit on its first attempt on 4 June 2010. Its third flight, COTS Demo Flight 2, launched on 22 May 2012 and launched the first commercial spacecraft to reach and dock with the International Space Station (ISS). The vehicle was upgraded to Falcon 9 v1.
 
Whose ship is in orbit and whose is scattered across the ocean?
Derp.

As of March 10, 2024 and based on Celestrak data processed through the NCAT4 analysis toolkit, 59% of all active satellites belong to SpaceX. Active satellite include all satellites LEO, MEO and GEO orbits used for communications, navigation, earth observation, weather and science.
 
Don't you just love the difference between the PR focused coverage these days vs the sober, fact-laden coverage back when NASA was running things?

Yeah, me neither.

At the end of this video, when they acknowledged the failure of the payload part, their voices are so phony and cheerful as they reassure us that everything was basically a huge success.

Made me think of

The operation was a success but the patient died.​
Other than that, Mrs Lincoln, how did you like the play?​

 
When do one of these billionaires lose all their fortune by a massive f up? That debris could have taken out multiple airliners
I was wondering about that, too. Those pieces aren't burning up before they hit ground. I imagine they were over water, but still. This would not be a good headline

Cruise Ship Sunk by Space-X Debris
 
Starship has not. I don't need Grok to tell me that.
Bezo's ship did while starship became confetti. Again.

I get that you badly want to dunk on Musk, but Bezos hasn’t tested his ship yet.
The first stage booster landing attempt for Blue Origin failed in this last test.
They have a ‘demonstrator’ that is still attached to stage 2 in orbit on this test.

This "Blue Ring Pathfinder" demonstrator is designed to validate Blue Ring's communications, in-space data collection, tracking and command systems while still attached to New Glenn's second stage, Blue Origin wrote in a an NG-1 mission description in December 2024. Such data collection will last for about six hours on NG-1, if all goes to plan.
 
Ok. And you probably believed your leaders when they said Biden was sharp as a tack too.

Everyone has to learn they can’t always trust the government and propaganda like this.

Lol. Look at specialtime’s response. You’re doing so good. ;) Go for the kill!

Edit to add: Never mind, you broke him already!
 
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Not as effective as you think that is bruv. We all see you. What a loser.
I would like to see and we want to see them succeed as this is our manned space program now. I think Musk jumped the gun on capturing the boosters and even needing to reuse the boosters as we just dont have that many space flights compared to airliners.

I think Musk is a big dick but if the US is going to rely of his space program for many of our launches they need to succeed and he had a lot of Nasa people go to work for him at least in the early days.
 
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