Looks small.
This is from a live feed just after the stacking point. Humans in monsterously tall cherry picker for scale:
Starship has been fully stacked
11–20 of 51 posts
Re: Starship has been fully stacked
#12Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, its so hard to get a sense of scale, our brains just don't have a reference
To note, there is a human standing in every picture except for one as far as I could see. While it isn't too good of a reference since the size difference is so big, it's at least something.
I found a human in every picture.
The last one was hardest, but in the white cherry picker in the air, and beside the orange cherry picker on the ground.
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/E8HaippVIAEsnIG?format=jpg&name=...
Re: Starship has been fully stacked
#13Anyone know an estimated static fire/launch date? I'm open to a meetup (and cold beverages under a canopy) within visual distance of the pad.
Re: Starship has been fully stacked
#14And unstacked ! It was surprising to see that it only took them about an hour to unstack (I didn't catch the stacking but I think I heard it was around the same amount of time ?). I'm still very perplex about the "catching" mechanism they are designing, Musk mentioned in the Everyday Astronaut interview [1] that it was a very hard problem and I'm very curious to see if/how they can solve it. [1] : https://www.youtube…
I'm sure you've seen this rendering and Elon's response, but I thought I would post it for other's who have not: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1422603106035118085
Re: Starship has been fully stacked
#15Re: Starship has been fully stacked
#16It's pretty amusing that they assembled it with a boring old construction crane. No fancy VAB or custom scaffolding. No different than the latest cookie cutter "luxury apartment building".
Re: Starship has been fully stacked
#17[deleted]
Re: Starship has been fully stacked
#18And unstacked ! It was surprising to see that it only took them about an hour to unstack (I didn't catch the stacking but I think I heard it was around the same amount of time ?). I'm still very perplex about the "catching" mechanism they are designing, Musk mentioned in the Everyday Astronaut interview [1] that it was a very hard problem and I'm very curious to see if/how they can solve it. [1] : https://www.youtube…
I'm sure you've seen this rendering and Elon's response, but I thought I would post it for other's who have not: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1422603106035118085
I've seen that rendering and it looks absolutely nuts. "catch the falling rocket with tongs". It would be amazing if it works, but for now it looks like something that sci-fi would avoid as not seeming plausible.
Re: Starship has been fully stacked
#19It's pretty amusing that they assembled it with a boring old construction crane. No fancy VAB or custom scaffolding. No different than the latest cookie cutter "luxury apartment building".
That’s core to their strategy. They also assembled a lot of the rocket in tents on a beach in Texas.
Originally they hired a company that normally builds water towers to construct it. The idea is that the rocket needs to be a commodity, not something built in a clean room by specialists.
Re: Starship has been fully stacked
#20It's pretty amusing that they assembled it with a boring old construction crane. No fancy VAB or custom scaffolding. No different than the latest cookie cutter "luxury apartment building".
> It's pretty amusing that they assembled it with a boring old construction crane.
This crane is neither boring, nor old. It's an engineering marvel itself. It's a Liebherr LR 11350 [1], one of the most powerful mobile cranes available worldwide, modified by SpaceX for their own use case [2].
[1]: https://www.liebherr.com/en/int/products/mobile-and-crawler-...