471–480 of 588 posts
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why did you preface this with how many times you've made your point to deaf ears in the past? Am I supposed to follow your opinions across the site?
Did you know that we are a primitive species though? (up to anyone to guess what that means)
Does anyone else find it surprising that rockets are a century old[1] and yet still seem to fail spectacularly with amazing regularity, often due to some small flaw? Is it just that they're still relatively niche machines and thus haven't benefited from mass manufacturing improvements? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Goddard_and_Rocket.jpg
I think more you’re just at the absolute margins of engineering to get to escape velocity. Those constraints haven’t changed, so until some major material or fuel advance happens things will continue to go wrong. Probably the mistake is to keep relying on rockets and propellants. Need to think more revolutionary. But hard for a startup to do that, usually needs gov backing.
And if anyone is curious what is N1? > It is possibly the most dramatic and powerful rocket explosion since the Soviet Union’s N1 rocket was destroyed during a launch attempt in 1969.
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What would you say is Jeff Bezos' motivation behind it?
Jeff Bezos loves space exploration. He loves O'Neil's vision of orbital colonies, and he firmly believes that moving heavy industry to orbit will leave Earth better off. That's not a vanity project. The Washington Post, on the other hand, he purchased as a trophy. That's the vanity project.
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No one inside SpaceX, except for Elon Musk himself? https://arstechnica.com/space/2025/05/spacex-pushed-sniper-t...
Someone should invent a drinking game based on how long it takes for someone to drop Elon’s name in a thread about a totally different aerospace company.
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Neither Starship nor New Glenn has such a system, nor plans to add one.
Starship itself could potentially hot launch from the booster in the ground to get away. Hopefully the latching system is controlled by the Starship side.
*correction: Vac raptors can run at sea level in a test stand. Still doubtful that its safe/reliable and in either case it would still be far too slow.
[1] Note that the first G of acceleration is combating gravity, so Starship at e.g. 1.25Gs would accelerate away from the explosion at 1/20th the rate of Dragon v2.
[2]https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/9067/how-do-the-g-...
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It was very likely the largest explosion in Florida spaceflight history. Considerably larger than when SpaceX blew up AMOS-6 in 2016, and that required a full rebuild of the pad infrastructure over 18 months.
I'm wondering about how it compares to AMOS-6. New glen is bigger than Falcon 9 & uses fully cryogenic propellant, so there would be definitively more energy involved. On the other hand a lot of the damage on the Falcon pad was IIRC due to burning kerosene getting everywhere on the pad & melting everything. In this case I would expect all the liquid oxygen and methane to either be involved in the explosion or quickly…
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No one inside SpaceX, except for Elon Musk himself? https://arstechnica.com/space/2025/05/spacex-pushed-sniper-t...
Someone should invent a drinking game based on how long it takes for someone to drop Elon’s name in a thread about a totally different aerospace company.
> A source indicated that one of the lightning towers may not be salvageable, and that the transporter-erector may also be damaged beyond repair. My first thought is why wasn't the t-e moved away before launch?
Blue’s TEL is part of the launch pad. You can see it retract in some of the explosion videos. https://www.instagram.com/reel/C87e9x0tLix/