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My grandfather recalls (what he later found out to be) a rocket landing in London's east end during his youth. There were quite a lot of them at the time.
"Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down? That's not my department" says Wernher von Braun. - Tom Lehrer. https://genius.com/Tom-lehrer-wernher-von-braun-lyrics
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If you have followed SpaceX over the last 10-15 years, you’ll know that this is normal and is what makes the broadcasts fun to watch. The footage is high quality, with transparent telemetry, and multiple live views - unlike anything before or since. And the sheer joy of those employees is infectious.
What Musk, Shotwell, and the SpaceX team have achieved is truly astonishing and a massive win for humanity. I own no Tesla stock or cars, don’t use Starlink, and don’t use Twitter. But twisting this into something negative like this just does not make any sense to me. If anything, this comment shows the cult of (likely ideological) hatred towards Musk is more dangerous and unsettling than the alleged cult of personality around Musk.
I am one of the people skeptical about Elon’s specific claims of Starships abilities specifically about his Mars ambitions. Today’s test, if the Starship reentry is as successful as the booster soft landing will be absolutely a great achievement and a 100% mission success. This demonstration keeps SpaceX on schedule for their part of the Artemis 3 mission. Keeping the mission parameters simpler (no “refueuling” or do…
Anything Mars is pure BS. Just anything and everything. The one way trip to mars is orders of magnitude more complicated than moon. Keeping people from being riddled with cancer in 6months trip is not trivial. Landing and then what you plan a flag and die?
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You have to be careful how much wisdom you glean from fiction. The sheer hostility of space kind of precludes the "she's a good ol' ship" trope. When your door doesn't shut on your pickup, you can bang on it a bit. When your door doesn't shut on your spacecraft, you've got a ship full of corpses that look like a blob fish brought up from the Marianas Trench.
The oceans are very hostile to humans too, really not much less than space, and a lot of ocean-going vessels are rusty hulks.
How come the stream not cutting off during re-entry "blackout" period? Is it because the re-entry is low / slow enough so no thick plasma layer, or because it is streamed through StarLink which happens to be on the other side of the plasma layer?
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People happy and proud of their work. What's wrong?
> given the very real concerns that there is a dangerous cult of personality surrounding Musk, seeing this footage presented this way is unsettling.
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When I was young, there were no rocket landings.
> When I was young, there were no rocket landings. For all born after July 1969, you lived with rocket landings: Apollo lunar lander was a propulsive soft landing.
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To get a gentler reentry, you need a greater lift-to-drag ratio. To have a better hypersonic lift-to-drag ratio you need significantly more wing area, which is dead weight (and drag and a control problem) on the way up.
Exactly! Re-entry is the transition from orbital dynamics to aerodynamics. If you want the transition from orbit to flight to occur at a lower speed, then you need to be able to produce lift equal to your weight at that speed, at the altitude where you will hit that speed.
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> So four people would arrive at Lunar orbit in an Orion, board a huge prepositioned Starship, and fly that down to the surface? That's the idea, yes. [1] 1. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/1/13/20...
Because the SLS can't do anything close to what the Saturn V did, yup.
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They had a plane flying in the area shortly after landing, probably to drop some marker for a group to come around and recover the black box. I think they've stopped bothering with preserving the test articles though, in the process of test driven development, they're going to have so many "historic" test articles, that it's kind of pointless.
I'd be really surprised if they didn't have a GPS in the ship. Which should mean they know where it "landed".