Unbelievable! Watched with my 4 year old, he was full of questions about why the ocean was turning to nighttime, what satellites are, about going to another planet, about the earth being so blue and if we “ever even knew that before”.
Just wonderful stuff. So excited for the future.
dvt · 2h ago
So awesome, I hope to have kids one day precisely for this reason! One of my fondest memories is my dad quenching my curiosity (with a drawing, to boot!) of how satellite dishes work when I was 6 or 7.
monero-xmr · 2m ago
My kids learning to ride a bike - the moment you release your hand for the first time and they just go and go. When my son learned checkers, and then when he beat me the first time. When my daughter told her first original joke at a family dinner and everyone died laughing.
The moments truly never stop. Every single day they amaze and surprise you, fill you with so much love and joy and appreciation.
One time Bill Gates was asked what gave him joy and without missing a beat he said his children. Nothing is greater, nothing gives you more meaning, nothing is more ultimate than the sacrifice and patience and wonder and fulfillment of having children.
apical_dendrite · 44m ago
I can't feel enthusiasm for the accomplishments of a man who cackled with glee while taking food and medicine from the world's poorest children.
Before Trump and DOGE I was enthusiastic about SpaceX. I literally have Eric Berger's book on SpaceX directly in my line of sight on my bookshelf. Now I hope the fucking thing explodes.
gibolt · 40m ago
Pretty sure the DOGE intent was good, but real efforts were mostly sidelined for the Trump pony show. Thus the 'fighting' words that followed when the BBB tax cut showed up.
apical_dendrite · 32m ago
Don't let Elon off the hook. Nobody is going to disagree with the general concept of "the government should be more efficient". But what they did was the equivalent of a child pulling the wings off a butterfly - it was destructiveness for the sake of destructiveness by gleeful children, wrapped up in their own feelings of power. Putting USAID through the woodchopper - to use Elon's phrase - meant the destruction of the world's largest donor to humanitarian organizations. It meant that the poorest people on Earth suddenly and without any recourse or planning lost access to medications and food. It meant that we stopped manufacturing and distributing things like the special formulas that are given to children experiencing famine. We stopped distributing medications for HIV and cholera. We broke promises that we had made all over the world to incredibly poor people who put their trust in us.
This destructiveness was all based off of conspiracy theories and ideology. There was no rational or responsible thought process that went into it.
And the same process repeated, and continues to repeat, across many critical areas. Cancer research. Vaccine research. Public health.
This was psychopathic, evil behavior that will result in millions of deaths.
And Elon is just cackling like he's the cleverest boy of them all.
Fuck him and fuck his rocket.
gibolt · 18m ago
Consider what would have happened if Elon wasn't there. Likely the same. The people wanting those things cut are still present.
I wish he hadn't gone along with them, but there likely had to be concessions before attempting to make progress. When it became clear cost savings and efficiency wasn't the actual goal in the White House, Elon left.
Qworg · 7m ago
Come now - you really believe that Elon saw DOGE as a good faith effort to cut costs in the government?
For someone with such a vaunted intelligence, he was either dumb or complicit. "Working things out from first principles" would have had him leave after the very first step.
stephen_g · 7m ago
What do you mean "gone along with them"? Seems like a strange kind of reality-distortion to try and convince youself that Musk was misled into doing those terrible things as part of DOGE, when he actually just wanted to do it himself...
apical_dendrite · 4m ago
Sorry, but this is just not accurate. Killing USAID was Elon's baby,
based on the stupid conspiracy theories that he's imbibed. He is the one who tweeted that he was spending his weekend "feeding USAID to the woodchipper" instead of going to fun parties.
This was never about government efficiency - that was always a fig leaf. Wonton destruction does not create efficiency.
bamboozled · 30m ago
My comment was flagged because I asked if the parents comment was satire?
There is a lot to be optimistic about regarding space flight, but boy are there some issues going on back at surface level.
I love the idea kids look at rockets and get excited about it all, my kids do it too and it's a major source of joy for me too, but I mean, fascists on the moon and private space industry? Yay Give me the Apollo era anytime.
itishappy · 27m ago
> fascists on the moon and private space industry? Yay Give me the Apollo era anytime.
The Apollo program was built in no small part by Nazis.
Were the outputs of the project privately owned by them after receiving massive levels of tax payer funding?
bamboozled · 32m ago
My comment was flagged because I asked if the post was satire?
There is a lot to be optimistic about regarding space flight, but boy are there some issues going on back at surface level.
I love the idea kids look at rockets and get excited about it all, my kids do it too and it's a major source of joy for me too, but I mean, Nazi's on the moon ? Yay
mikewarot · 1h ago
I'm amazed the thing landed right next to the Buoy, and was seen from the BuoyCam.
gibolt · 38m ago
This has happened many times so far. Control to reach a specific landing point is quite good (when things don't go boom first)
enkonta · 5m ago
Well that's part of what makes this interesting. Some part of it did go boom. Looked like a COPV or something exploded sometime after payload deployment
14 · 30s ago
I can't help but think of one cray thing...This is absolutely amazing to watch. The fact that there are cameras at every stage showing exactly what is happening. Being able to see the curvature of earth all in hi-def. But the entire time I watch this I just keep thinking even with all this proof you still will not convince some people that the moon landings are real and that the earth is not flat. They will say these are just AI videos used to trick people from the truth.
It just amazes me that technologies have come so far that at one end we can really show that the earth is truthfully a sphere but also at the same time technology has come so far one can claim this is just another video created by AI and is not actually true.
chasd00 · 1h ago
Just saw the splash down. I think this was 100% successful test.
kersplody · 1h ago
Not quite, but it's a major milestone. Still quite a bit of work to go on the rapid reusability part (burnt flaps, oxidized body, missing tiles, tile waterproofing). Starship might actually deliver payload to orbit on flight 11.
ericcumbee · 1h ago
It accomplished all the goals for this flight. That’s 100% successful
rlt · 1h ago
They mentioned in the stream they were intentionally stressing the ship on reentry.
But yes, “rapid reusability” is a ways off. I expect they’ll be spending weeks inspecting and repairing ship and booster before reflight for a few years, but they’ll drive it down over time.
TBD how “rapid” the reusability ends up being in the end.
dotnet00 · 59m ago
The push for rapid reusability seems somewhat at odds with the push for large scale production of ships.
It seems like if they can get boosters to rapid reuse (a much easier goal), and churn out ships at sufficient scale, they can afford to take time inspecting/refurbing each ship as part of a pipelined approach.
ACCount37 · 50m ago
The stated goal was always to have a lot of ships, and also to have them be reusable.
Starship is a fuel-hungry beast - it can get to LEO by itself, but it needs a lot of tanker launches to go beyond. And if your goal is a Mars colony, you don't want to be limited to one launch per launch window.
paulhart · 50m ago
Their scenario is that the ships are mostly going to be "fuel mules" to ferry propellant to the ship that is destined to go somewhere (i.e. Mars) - so if you want an armada to travel to another planet, you need a much larger fleet of supply vehicles to prepare your armada. Hence the need to mass produce them.
avar · 27m ago
If "rapid reusability" was a proxy goal for maintaining a given launch pace we wouldn't need any of this.
We could just construct 200 Space Shuttles and spend months refurbishing them after every flight, and still send one up every week.
The goal is to drive down launch costs, time is money, and a system that requires time consuming refurbishments is more expensive.
gibolt · 35m ago
Not at odds at all. It doesn't matter how fast you can make them if each one costs $5-10 million. Much better to amortize that over 100+ flights and not waste the booster.
Once the tanker version is needed, a ship ship could go up 5+ times a day. The logistics of backfilling a pad with a new ship is much more involved
Geee · 1h ago
Yes, although one booster engine failed at the start. Not a big deal. :)
imglorp · 23m ago
They said ahead of time they were shutting one booster engine down to test redundancy.
itishappy · 12m ago
They did that too, but they also had an early engine failure. No big deal, they're redundant, and the booster they caught during flight 8 suffered worse.
ericcumbee · 6m ago
that was on the landing burn. they had a engine out on the ascent.
rlt · 1h ago
The nice thing about SpaceX’s rapid iteration philosophy (and having Starlink as its first “customer”) is that they can account for engine unreliability by building extra margin into early launches, fly with reduced payloads, collect data on failures, and improve the reliability over time.
Landed on target in the Indian Ocean! Engines relit successfully and it touched down vertically (and then promptly exploded, which I guess was the plan :)
niteshpant · 1h ago
I thought it exploded after it landed?
decimalenough · 1h ago
Well, yes, it landed in the ocean by design and toppled over because that's what happens when you land a 50m tall spaceship vertically in water.
schoen · 1h ago
This sequence of events (even though expected!) reminds me a lot of the Monty Python and the Holy Grail speech:
> Listen, lad. I built this kingdom up from nothing. When I started here, all there was was swamp. Other kings said I was daft to build a castle on a swamp, but I built it all the same, just to show 'em. It sank into the swamp. So, I built a second one. That sank into the swamp. So, I built a third one. That burned down, fell over, then sank into the swamp, but the fourth one... stayed up! And that's what you're gonna get, lad: the strongest castle in these islands.
(although I suppose this ship fell over, then burned down, and then sank into the ocean)
bombcar · 57m ago
It’s basically a direct description of the reusable booster tests.
nsxwolf · 1h ago
That was expected. It’s not meant to land on water.
gibolt · 33m ago
It is, for the purpose of this test. Don't want it coming back down on land somewhere unexpected :)
Polizeiposaune · 1h ago
That's the expected result for this test flight.
bombcar · 1h ago
There wa supposed to be an earth shattering kaboom. And there was.
pengaru · 1h ago
> I thought it exploded after it landed?
It landed on the sea, there was no barge afaik.
chasd00 · 2h ago
Was cool to see the pez dispenser door start to open and all that vapor get sucked outside.
The booster ditch was super cool, hover then just cut the engines and let it drop.
JKCalhoun · 1h ago
Some kind of failure in the lower engine area.
Figure it's going to burn up on entry?
EDIT: made it. I suppose it was meant to blow up on landing in the ocean? It would have been nice to examine the burned components — but perhaps they had not intended to retrieve it that far away anyway.
dotnet00 · 1h ago
The walls are 3mm thick steel, they're very likely to buckle and tear when it tips over, the residual methane vapor gets out and there are plenty of sources of heat to ignite it.
They don't claim to have any plans of recovering the wreckage, but they have previously fished up wreckage for study, so it's still possible they decide to do that.
BurningFrog · 1h ago
It's not meant to perform well after landing in water, is how I would phrase it.
m4rtink · 1h ago
Maybe just some part of the construction (possibly even just the strinngers or simply some nook or cranny that is fully eclosed) got presurized or was pressurized for the whole time by just air that could not escape.
That would be fine for the fligt so far - until it started to heat up from re-entry heating. The stainless steel would be still fine if heated to hundreads of degrees, but the expanding gass could maybe make the enclosed volume to rupture ?
Or a mix of methane and oxygen accumulating somwhere and exploding - but that seems less likely to me in a near vacuum environment during re-entry.
dotnet00 · 1h ago
IIRC they have pressure vessels in the lower fins with some of the gasses they need. Maybe one of those was damaged and burst. To me it looked like something blew out the bottom of one of the fins (maybe got too hot) and hit the skirt.
pixl97 · 1h ago
It made it, but there was some toastyness on the bottom of the lower flaps. This said, it is less bad than we've seen on the other 2 landings.
ls612 · 1h ago
Sounds like they removed a few too many heat tiles before launch.
decimalenough · 2h ago
Everything nominal so far and payload deployment was successful for the first time. Re-entry starts at around T+0:45.
loeg · 2h ago
Which is in about 4 minutes.
pixl97 · 1h ago
And it splashed down successfully too.
pram · 1h ago
Are the tiles on Starship going to need replacing after flight like the Shuttle? There isn’t a permanent material that can handle all the heat yet? Serious question, my space expertise is only from KSP.
dotnet00 · 1h ago
The intention is to need minimal to no replacement between flights. Part of the purpose of these tests is to figure out how to do that.
The tiles themselves work fine, but how to best mount them? where do you need them? Can you make them thinner? do you need anything underneath? what kind of gap do you need between tiles? Those are the things they're hoping to understand in these tests.
The Shuttle tiles were technically reusable AFAIK. The issue was that they were very fragile and the Shuttle for the most part could not tolerate any heat getting through the tiles (being aluminum), so every flight needed to have a perfect heat shield. Starship is a bit better on that end, as stainless steel is a lot more capable of tolerating heat and I think the tiles are a bit less fragile. Still, would be ideal to figure out how to not drop any tiles.
themafia · 20m ago
> every flight needed to have a perfect heat shield.
Which is a little easier to do when your craft is shaped like a plane and not a simple cylinder. The loading and positioning were easier to model and then achieve in flight.
The shuttle also flew with repair kits and glue that could be used in a vacuum. The astronauts could perform an EVA and work to replace damaged tiles and there were published plans on how to do so. NASA unfortunately figured out very late that using the Canadarm to image the bottom of the shuttle immediately on achieving orbit was extremely necessary given the icing problems of the external tank.
floating-io · 1h ago
Remains to be seen. That's what they want, but it's never been done before. (edit: clarity: they do NOT want to replace them after each flight.)
They're currently experimenting with things such as actively cooled tiles (which I presume were installed on this ship, since they were on the last two).
I personally think the likely best case is that they'll have to go over the ship and replace some here and there before launching again.
ericcumbee · 1h ago
Even if they don't get to a no replacement....they still already have a massive improvement over Space Shuttle. The Space Shuttle basically every tile was unique, and and the pattern was different between the different orbiters. A good bit of the months of refurbishment of the Orbiter between flights was heat shield repairs. SpaceX has already shown from when they completely retiled one of the ships. they have cut down the time to replace a single tile down to minutes instead of the hours it took with the shuttle. The Tiles are also alot more standardized so they can be more mass produced than shuttle tiles.
floating-io · 41m ago
Absolutely!
I think there are still a few unique tiles on Starship around joints and such IIRC, but either way, the number of tile types is much smaller for Starship.
To my thinking, the sane sequence will be launch; catch; survey and maintain (heat shield and other items); and then launch again 24 hours later if everything checks out.
And that will be an absolutely massive improvement over what we have today, let alone what we had with the Shuttle.
I'm keeping my fingers crossed...
decimalenough · 1h ago
Successful splashdown! Looks like they nailed all the objectives, and not a moment too soon.
K0balt · 1h ago
Looks like they hit all the objectives!
Splashdown right next to the buoy!
Awesome to see it all go right.
jprd · 1h ago
They did it. Damn.
Pigalowda · 2h ago
So the starlink simulators its deploying right now are empty platters that will burn up in the atmosphere from what I understand. Next missions they’ll be real statlink sats. Are these different than regular sats? It sounds like they’re able to handle more bandwidth but I don’t know.
decimalenough · 2h ago
Starship will be deploying the next gen v3 satellites, which weigh about 2 tons each. A single Starship launch with 60 of these deploys more capacity than 20 launches of a Falcon 9.
xeromal · 43m ago
Wow, that really puts it into perspective
kersplody · 1h ago
Next flight should be a mass simulator of at least 100 tons to orbit. This flight was around ~10 tons to almost orbit.
The economics of Starlink basically require high cadence Starship launches with 50+ Starlink v3 satellites on each flight.
Teever · 59m ago
Isn't starlink a revenue generating endeavor already?
daemonologist · 43m ago
Yes; I think it would be more accurate to say that the economics of Starship basically require high cadence launches with lots of v3 Starlink satellites (because only the big internet constellations can financially justify launching so much payload to orbit right now).
jdminhbg · 2h ago
Yes, they're bigger than the current Falcon 9 rockets can launch and can handle more bandwidth.
Just wonderful stuff. So excited for the future.
The moments truly never stop. Every single day they amaze and surprise you, fill you with so much love and joy and appreciation.
One time Bill Gates was asked what gave him joy and without missing a beat he said his children. Nothing is greater, nothing gives you more meaning, nothing is more ultimate than the sacrifice and patience and wonder and fulfillment of having children.
Before Trump and DOGE I was enthusiastic about SpaceX. I literally have Eric Berger's book on SpaceX directly in my line of sight on my bookshelf. Now I hope the fucking thing explodes.
This destructiveness was all based off of conspiracy theories and ideology. There was no rational or responsible thought process that went into it.
And the same process repeated, and continues to repeat, across many critical areas. Cancer research. Vaccine research. Public health.
This was psychopathic, evil behavior that will result in millions of deaths.
And Elon is just cackling like he's the cleverest boy of them all.
Fuck him and fuck his rocket.
I wish he hadn't gone along with them, but there likely had to be concessions before attempting to make progress. When it became clear cost savings and efficiency wasn't the actual goal in the White House, Elon left.
For someone with such a vaunted intelligence, he was either dumb or complicit. "Working things out from first principles" would have had him leave after the very first step.
This was never about government efficiency - that was always a fig leaf. Wonton destruction does not create efficiency.
There is a lot to be optimistic about regarding space flight, but boy are there some issues going on back at surface level.
I love the idea kids look at rockets and get excited about it all, my kids do it too and it's a major source of joy for me too, but I mean, fascists on the moon and private space industry? Yay Give me the Apollo era anytime.
The Apollo program was built in no small part by Nazis.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wernher_von_Braun
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Paperclip
There is a lot to be optimistic about regarding space flight, but boy are there some issues going on back at surface level.
I love the idea kids look at rockets and get excited about it all, my kids do it too and it's a major source of joy for me too, but I mean, Nazi's on the moon ? Yay
It just amazes me that technologies have come so far that at one end we can really show that the earth is truthfully a sphere but also at the same time technology has come so far one can claim this is just another video created by AI and is not actually true.
But yes, “rapid reusability” is a ways off. I expect they’ll be spending weeks inspecting and repairing ship and booster before reflight for a few years, but they’ll drive it down over time.
TBD how “rapid” the reusability ends up being in the end.
It seems like if they can get boosters to rapid reuse (a much easier goal), and churn out ships at sufficient scale, they can afford to take time inspecting/refurbing each ship as part of a pipelined approach.
Starship is a fuel-hungry beast - it can get to LEO by itself, but it needs a lot of tanker launches to go beyond. And if your goal is a Mars colony, you don't want to be limited to one launch per launch window.
We could just construct 200 Space Shuttles and spend months refurbishing them after every flight, and still send one up every week.
The goal is to drive down launch costs, time is money, and a system that requires time consuming refurbishments is more expensive.
Once the tanker version is needed, a ship ship could go up 5+ times a day. The logistics of backfilling a pad with a new ship is much more involved
> Listen, lad. I built this kingdom up from nothing. When I started here, all there was was swamp. Other kings said I was daft to build a castle on a swamp, but I built it all the same, just to show 'em. It sank into the swamp. So, I built a second one. That sank into the swamp. So, I built a third one. That burned down, fell over, then sank into the swamp, but the fourth one... stayed up! And that's what you're gonna get, lad: the strongest castle in these islands.
(although I suppose this ship fell over, then burned down, and then sank into the ocean)
It landed on the sea, there was no barge afaik.
The booster ditch was super cool, hover then just cut the engines and let it drop.
Figure it's going to burn up on entry?
EDIT: made it. I suppose it was meant to blow up on landing in the ocean? It would have been nice to examine the burned components — but perhaps they had not intended to retrieve it that far away anyway.
They don't claim to have any plans of recovering the wreckage, but they have previously fished up wreckage for study, so it's still possible they decide to do that.
That would be fine for the fligt so far - until it started to heat up from re-entry heating. The stainless steel would be still fine if heated to hundreads of degrees, but the expanding gass could maybe make the enclosed volume to rupture ?
Or a mix of methane and oxygen accumulating somwhere and exploding - but that seems less likely to me in a near vacuum environment during re-entry.
The tiles themselves work fine, but how to best mount them? where do you need them? Can you make them thinner? do you need anything underneath? what kind of gap do you need between tiles? Those are the things they're hoping to understand in these tests.
The Shuttle tiles were technically reusable AFAIK. The issue was that they were very fragile and the Shuttle for the most part could not tolerate any heat getting through the tiles (being aluminum), so every flight needed to have a perfect heat shield. Starship is a bit better on that end, as stainless steel is a lot more capable of tolerating heat and I think the tiles are a bit less fragile. Still, would be ideal to figure out how to not drop any tiles.
Which is a little easier to do when your craft is shaped like a plane and not a simple cylinder. The loading and positioning were easier to model and then achieve in flight.
The shuttle also flew with repair kits and glue that could be used in a vacuum. The astronauts could perform an EVA and work to replace damaged tiles and there were published plans on how to do so. NASA unfortunately figured out very late that using the Canadarm to image the bottom of the shuttle immediately on achieving orbit was extremely necessary given the icing problems of the external tank.
They're currently experimenting with things such as actively cooled tiles (which I presume were installed on this ship, since they were on the last two).
I personally think the likely best case is that they'll have to go over the ship and replace some here and there before launching again.
I think there are still a few unique tiles on Starship around joints and such IIRC, but either way, the number of tile types is much smaller for Starship.
To my thinking, the sane sequence will be launch; catch; survey and maintain (heat shield and other items); and then launch again 24 hours later if everything checks out.
And that will be an absolutely massive improvement over what we have today, let alone what we had with the Shuttle.
I'm keeping my fingers crossed...
Splashdown right next to the buoy!
Awesome to see it all go right.
The economics of Starlink basically require high cadence Starship launches with 50+ Starlink v3 satellites on each flight.