OV9

Mito Man wrote: Sun Oct 13, 2024 1:44 pm The booster landed on the launch pad, caught by the chopsticks. Just watching on tv, but the landing doesn’t look real!

Quite incredible and barely believable I agree.

Starship itself got a bit melted again on re-entry but still seemed to make a gentle splashdown impressively close to the camera drone they'd stuck in the Indian ocean

Have they actually made it into orbit yet?!

DaveE wrote: Sun Oct 13, 2024 10:37 pm Have they actually made it into orbit yet?!

No but the performance of the booster and starship seems to be more than enough to do that when they want to. The Starship was several hundred kilometres altitude a the peak of it's suborbital flight yesterday.

Haven't looked into their long term test plan but I imagine we'll see a few more launch and catch tests before an orbit.

That is ridiculous and utterly wonderful, what a piece of engineering.

Dave!

I don't really care for space travel and rocketships yet that is absurdly fascinating to watch, incredible design.

That's a great video. I know they've done a lot of landings before with other rockets, but the size of that thing and the speed and accuracy of it coming down is quite remarkable.

You can really visualise in your mind big rockets going up and coming down as a routine occurrence with this tech. It's a great platform to build some proper space infrastructure from.

Just fabulous.

It does look otherworldly

The rate at which it decelerates gets me. I saw some telemetry from the previous IFT#4 and the booster does -3g for five seconds just before touchdown (clutchdown (patent pending)) so a casual 500km/h to 0km/h with a kilometer of altitude.

When you see the relative size of the bumpstop/pad thing (that's attached to the booster) and the size of the rail they have to land that on, it's pretty incredible

Especially when you consider the sheer size of Starship - it's 31 feet taller than a Saturn V

I didn’t realise at the time that it sat on those small nubs, thought it was sitting on the larger fins.
The precision is crazy.

It’s amazing what Elon’s money can do when he’s kept well away from the work

Elon may be a nutjob but he’s giving some amazing scientists the funding to develop some absolutely phenomenal tech.

Edit- zed beat me to it

Also importantly he’s somehow got the right group of scientists and engineers. Look at Blue Origin or Virgin Galactic - pretty much a joke at this point. Boeing not much better.

I always imagine they have a team of babysitters employed purely to keep him away from important things and tell him what he wants to hear

He first wanted to buy a Russian rocket but for some reason couldn’t, so started it all from scratch, like him or loathe him it is him who has let this happen and that’s amazing.

Still struggling with the scale, either none of the footage is good or my mind refuses to aknowledge it.

Dave!

Started from scratch? Makes it sound like someone broke who built a rocket factory from a shed in his garden

He used $90million of what he got after being kicked out of PayPal to hire people who knew what they were doing.

He is very good at talking a good game and managing to secure absurd amounts of government funding.

He is the reason we see electric cars, whether it’s his influence, secret squirrel funding skills or he is head of the billionaires club, it’s still making these things possible.

At least it’s more interesting than Bezos who just takes more of our money.

Dave!

“Self made billionaire”