Mid-stream they said they were deploying 20 real V3 Starlink satellites.
At the end of the stream the said all 20 had checked out as well.
The goal was to get about 20 minutes of testing the new satellites in space, not for them to have any chance of becoming operational.
Starship hasn't been entering a full orbit so far because it would be really bad if the relight burn did fail - chunks of ship would rain down a few days/weeks later on some random area anywhere within 27° of the equator. On a much smaller scale this has been an internationally embarrassing problem for China's LM-5.
Around 20 minutes into the flight, they deploy 20x v3 sats. Google search tells me those cost more than 1M USD each. Yikes... they burned up 20M USD for a "few tests". Damn, space is expensive! The official video says that SpaceX only had twenty minutes to test the deployed sats before they fall back to the atmosphere.
Marine recovery can be much more difficult than it might seem though. Towing this nearly 200ft structure weighing a decent fraction of the weight of the boat that is not designed to be seaworthy, potentially full of explosive gasses and that could rapidly start breaking up and taking on water, nearly 300 nautical miles back to shore, would be quite difficult and dangerous. I would be impressed if they ever do it.
> Allegedly they had previously asked the Australian government about towing the ship back to a port.
https://www.reuters.com/technology/space/spacex-talks-land-r...
> What was their response?
Not sure. As far as I know the US is very supportive of SpaceX for space supremacy and Australia would almost certainly go along with what the US administration asks. If it hasn't happened yet it's more likely because SpaceX didn't/couldn't do it than Australia denying the request.
What about this one looks not reusable without refurbishment?
To my eye it’s by far the best we’ve seen, no burn through on flaps, etc
I wouldn't be surprised if we end up seeing a heat shield refurbishment attachment to the launch tower that allows technicians to access the side of the ship to patch up between flights without leaving the pad. They're going to need some kind of solution for the many back-to-back HLS refueling flights.
“We got all the heat shield data we needed and then some! ”
Launch successful. Booster separation and boost back burn looked good. Booster failed to relight some of its engines and hit the water hard. Successfully deployed the 20 starlink satellites. Successfully reignited an engine in flight to prove potential for de-orbit burn on future flight. Re-entry looked good and less spicy that some previous attempts (subjective). Such a soft landing that the ship flopped into the water without exploding and floated for a good long while (possibly still floating for all I know). Got some great drone footage flying over the heat-shield.
So the ship itself is looking increasingly good (so far) but they still seem to be having some issues with the booster.
The reason it’s very small is that almost all of the energy in hydrogen and oxygen is not stored in the chemical binding energy of these things going together.
The vast majority of it is stored in just the rest mass energy of the protons and the neutrons, which chemical burning doesn’t affect at all.
[Edit note: Starship and Booster are methalox, yes. The physicist is talking generically, not about this launch specifically)
It's why they have plans to elongate the stack further. If they have this much TWR to go around at liftoff, they can afford to cash in that extra thrust to pack more fuel.
Elongate the stack.
They had been explaining the post-ignition abort from last week, and showed how 4 out of 33 engines had failed to light on the first stage. This was due to some kind of pump malfunctions. They said that if 1 or 2 fail, it's OK to launch, but more than 2 is an automatic abort. So they were able to replace the finicky motors and fully test them out.
Who knows what caused the underthrust for the landing burn, but at least all 33 engines were operational at launch, and they got plenty of data from this test run, and all Starlink v3 satellites have been deployed successfully for their "suborbital speedrun", so this test flight is doing really awesome!
What I find really amazing and cool is that while its reentering the engineering team can drive it around and look at heating effects on tiles/spars/etc all while retrieving telemetry by Starlink. What many people don't realize is that early capsules were the shape they were because that was the limit of what they could simulate for re-entry forces. The ability to get real time confirmation of systems response in re-entry is a capability that we've never had. So there's that.
So at this point it looks like they are down to un-reliabile raptor relights on the booster.
Congrats to everyone who worked on this.
Is this just a fancy way of saying lightweight fragile aerospace tube with hot stuff all over the outside and flammable stuff on the inside will not respond well to falling on it's side or is there some other thing going on here I don't know about.
We had it demonstrated in the past with Starship surviving multiple burnthroughts and now in failing to explode. :-)
There was a couple of times when SpaceX accidentally soft landed a Falcon 9 first stage into the ocean, and had it just float around. They're yet to do that trick with Starship though.
EDIT: Of fucking course.
This was a great flight, though.
This way they got way more heat shield data, which is, I think, their most critical item they need to learn from and iterate.
interesting, i had no idea. I was going off the info i remembered about when those unexploded parts floated into Mexican waters. It's exciting to see Startship v3 have a perfect test flight. Hopefully the next launch will be fully orbital and they can start making productive use of the capability.
The SpaceX solution is to steer carefully and have the default trajectory end in the sea. Only if everything looks good, is the booster redirected to the tower.
Raptors are much more finely controllable and both stages of Starship can even hover when necessary, so the total control envelope, while not perfect, is much larger. That is why they can even try to land into a steely embrace, with no landing legs used.
Did the suicide burn actually play a role in the various barge-holing events? It’s been a while but I don’t remember that being the hard part.
What they cannot is achieve thrust-to-weight ratio of <= 1 when the first stage is empty, so controlled descent is basically impossible and suicide burn is the only option to land.
When it comes to failed returns, I think that at least once they ran out of fuel several meters early(?)
And the visuals from Starlink for the entire journey is freakin' awesome.
But like a lot of tech, the cool shit can have serious negative effects as well and it's important to be able to, again, acknowledge both appropriately.
The success of SpaceX has made him the richest man on the planet, and his money makes him dangerous.
(A donation to the presidential library, a new RV for the judge, a PAC that runs campaigns for the senator and rep - and Bob’s your uncle. Might cost 0.001% of your assets if you are a trillionaire. Cheap at ten times the price.)
What makes you think he hasn't? Does he demonstrate that he believes that nobody is above the law? I think you know the answer to that.
Isn’t the opposite?
SpaceX has an extremely profitable launch program and a profitable Starlink. It’s a straightforward would be better off financially without X and X.ai.
Equity: AI funds rockets
Of all the places that money parted from fools winds up, this is not the worst of them.
Too bad for Elon gullibles its at $113/share
but its a great company at $38
instead of having an enterprise AI strategy, they've become a landlord, renting capacity directly to competitors on a month to month basis, competitors who are building their own compute and can cancel this rental contract at any time.
so they'll use that to try to print rosy revenue numbers, except the size of the contract is until 2029 and the month to month payments can be cancelled at any time.
and they only have capacity to rent out because they don't have an enterprise AI strategy, they overspent on GPUs for an audience that never showed up for Grok, it has abysmal usage and its radioactive because it creates CSAM and is based af. It's just outdated Nvidia hardware that they are trying to recoup just a little bit of value from.
and if you believe in space datacenters, I've got a bridge in brooklyn to sell you! actually space datacenters are the 21st century bridge in brooklyn, whoever is selling you about it thinks you are stupid. Elon Musk just wanted the trillionaire print by all accepted metrics, and got that, so he said anything and disclosed it properly, and 4.9% of the shareholders bought that plan because they were greedy hoping for a pop. The pop came. now they're underwater.
Elon Musk doesn't believe the total addressable market of SpaceX's other business lines are that valuable in comparison. 25 trillion TAM for enterprise AI applications, 3 for everything else. ruh roh
"Do you know that your closest colleagues (including von Braun) have stated in company at Zinnowitz that it had never been their intention to make a weapon of war out of he rocket? That they had worked, under pressure from yourself (Dornberger) at the whole business of development and only in order to obtain money for their experiments and the confirmation of their theories? That their object all along has been space travel?"
The men had been arrested by the Gestapo and were going to be executed. Dornberger was also threatened with arrest, but he managed to get von Braun and the other released.
Don't say that he's hypocritical
Say rather that he's apolitical
"Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down?
That's not my department!" says Wernher von Braun
How can that be, you might ask?
The V2 program was an incredibly expensive program, and sucked up enormous resources. But the V2 proved to be an inconsequential weapon, and did very little damage, because its guidance system was primitive.
The V1, ironically, was effective. Not because it wreaked critical damage on Britain, but because it was cheap to build and deploy, and the British spent a great deal of resources trying to stop it.
It reminds me of the current drone warfare.
Hitler also demanded that it be used to attack London, blowing up civilian homes, when it would have been much more effective attacking the staging areas for D-Day.
Point is to not judge a book by its cover.
From what I can tell it looks like like an amazing source for technical details of the V2 rocket but there are many problems with it that make it unsuitable for the kind of argument that you're attempting to make here.
First of all, the book wasn't written by Dornberger -- it was ghostwritten by a Nazi propagandist and aerospace enthusiast named Franz Ludwig Neher[0]. Neher is an interesting fellow, having been imprisoned in the Dachau concentration camp for 18 months in the early 1930s and later enjoyed a career writing numerous Nazi propaganda biographies for 'Unsere Jagdflieger', a pulp booklet series issued on Hermann Göring's authority.
Looking at Neher's biography page on the German wikipedia we see that from 1951-1962 Neher was the press officer for the 'Gesellschaft für Weltraumforschung' or 'the German spaceflight society' in English, and even served for a time on its board. In 1952 Von Braun commissioned Neher to work on a Mars-project novel named 'Menschen zwischen den Planeten' which was published in 1953 apparently with poor reception by the public. Some reprints have a pretty cool looking cover though.[1]
I don't have time right now to dissect the actual claims made in V2 by Dornberger/Neher regarding von Braun but it's safe to say from everything I found that this is a very unreliable source for the argument that you're making as the man writing Dornberger's memoir was simultaneously the paid publicist of the German spaceflight lobby and von Braun's hired novelist.
Even in a first year history course essay assignment there's absolutely no way that this book would be considered an acceptable source to reference for non-technical details. Any instructor who was knowledgeable about the subject or who actually researched the sources would underline that passage in the essay with fat red lines and would scrawl the same kind of criticisms that I just made above in the margins in red pen. If your argument was the central thesis of the paper and this source was the evidentiary corner stone of that thesis you'd at best receive a C, but more likely a D grade.
In reciting this Werhner Von Braun apologia you have fallen for Nazi propaganda. Don't feel bad about it though -- we've all bought the big lie at one point or another. It's hard not to -- as the Nazis were pretty much the Wayne Gretzky of propaganda.
I'd like make this a teachable moment by introducing you to the concept of historiography[2] and one particularly important (and coincidentally German) author in the field: Leopold von Ranke.[3] It isn't always easy but proper analysis of sources is critical for making accurate claims and analysis of historical events.
[0] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franz_Ludwig_Neher
[1] https://www.amazon.ca/Menschen-zwischen-den-Planeten/dp/3453...
I don't know why arresting von Braun would be nazi propaganda - it paints the nazis as rather stupid.
BTW, I read the book because of the technical details, which were quite interesting to me.
Google "was von braun arrested by the nazis" and you'll see essentially the same thing I posted.
Confirmation of the same by "An Interview with Michael Neufeld, PhD, of the National Air and Space Museum": https://www.nationalww2museum.org/war/articles/wernher-von-b...
When I said "Nazi" earlier I should have been more precise, I was referring to von Braun, Dornberger, and his ghostwriter as "Nazis" even though AFAICT von Braun was the only actual card carrying Nazi of the bunch.
With that said, the problems with this source remains. The ghostwriter has a financial conflict of interest with the subject which would bias him to make as flattering of a portrayal of the subject, and the people involved are all intrinsically untrustworthy because well... look at the bunch... a Nazi propagandist, a Major General from the Wehrmacht, and an actual Nazi.
Look at the circumstances around this, you have the Nuremberg trials having only recently taken place which saw a bunch of dudes these guys personally knew publically shamed and hanged, These guys themselves were directly targeting civilians with these weapons, It's the middle of the McCarthy Era -- There's no way these guys could tell anything remotely close to an objective truth.
Everything they're going to say in this context is to save their skin. They're gonna write "Oh yeah, arrested by those evil Nazis for being too peaceful and science-minded" not something more realistic like "von Braun made a deal with the devil that was an absolutely psychotic and dysfunctional authoritarian regime and the deal almost blew up but that von Braun is so damn lucky he must have a horseshoe up his ass."
An adjacent topic that I've wondered about for years is his come to Jesus stuff after the war. It's plausible that he had a serious reckoning with his world view from his experiences during the war but it also seems just a little bit too convenient, you know?
He was also arrested by the Gestapo and threatened with execution if he was not more diligent in his efforts to develop the V2 missile.
I don't think it is implausible that he was less than enthusiastic about nazism. And once he was in the rocket program, there was no way out for him.
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/breakdown-in-pakistan
and this
https://lydialaurenson.substack.com/p/the-time-i-joined-peac...
I do wonder whether much of USAID and similar programs are an instance of a road to hell paved with good intentions. If professional NGOs hollow out existing local organizations and destroy local ability to organize on the cheap, they may be basically condemning entire countries to perpetual dependence on someone's else's politics and budgets.
Heh.
Of course some people say that once a Nazi, always a Nazi.
> Try separating politics from the advancement of humanity, you'll feel better.
can't. won't.
Only after the rescue worker, on live TV, said to millions that Musk could stick his submarine up his ass.
Musk has also done dumb PR things like provide free Starlink service to people cut off after the hurricane.
It went so, so far beyond a schoolyard taunt. All of my friends and I remember the debacle clearly, and it's the moment we all went from childhood idolizers of Musk to feeling pretty sick about the dude.
Musk hired a private investigator to confirm the pedophile allegations (which failed, of course).
Try again kiddo. Absolutely pathetic. Defending this shit is a moral failure for you too.
> Writing in an email to Buzzfeed reporter Ryan Mac, Mr Musk went further. He told the reporter to "call people you know in Thailand, find out what's actually going on and stop defending child rapists".
> He alleged that Mr Unsworth, 63, had spent decades visiting and living in Thailand and had recently moved to Chiang Rai in northern Thailand "for a child bride who was about 12 years old at the time".
Reminder:
> "pedo boy" sounds like an insult, not a charge... This is evident from you changing his word from "pedo boy" to "pedophile".
'motherfucker' is a common phrase even outside of strictly english - speaking countries , and very few people go on to explain how the person had sex with a mother.
'pedo boy' is impossibly uncommon, regardless of what the singular defending belligerent claims, and furthermore he went on to publicly accuse the person of actual pedophilia.
yeah : i'm sure it didn't fail in court due to unlimited deep pockets and lawyers on retainer.
is there anything beyond willful ignorance ? You and I have had differences of opinion before, but yeesh -- talk about a hill to die on, defending elons' shite behavior during that phase.
All it has to be is common in S Africa where he grew up. As I mentioned before, different cultures have widely varying common forms of insults.
> furthermore he went on to publicly accuse the person of actual pedophilia.
That was after being sued for $195 million. I've also remarked that I am not defending libel. A common insult is not libelous.
P.S. People successfully sue rich people all the time, because that's where the money is.
1. Musk calling him "pedo boy" isn't Musk actually calling him a pedophile, and there's nothing wrong with a grown man using insults (against an aid worker risking his own life to save children) that 14-year olds in the 80s in South Africa allegedly used on playgrounds
2. Musk telling Buzzfeed that the same exact guy is actually a pedophile (specifically a child rapist) who took a 12 year old bride was totally unrelated to the prior "pedo boy" comment, and you would never defend such an action
Fascinating pretzel you've folded yourself into. Not sure who you think you're fooling, hope it's not you though!
To be clear, I don't think anyone here is suggesting Musk should be held legally accountable for anything. Not sure why you keep falling back to this "libelous" standard. No one cares and defamation suits are virtually impossible in the US.
Your original snarky question was what is reprehensible about him. You are now defending his clearly reprehensible moral character, through some convoluted "didn't mean it but it was okay but also he totally did say the same thing in clearer terms weeks later and I would never defend that."
Interesting to note your own motte-and-bailey retreat on this point too though.
1. Musk offers money and engineering help
2. diver insults Musk on national TV
3. Musk insults diver on twitter
4. diver sues Musk for $195 million
5. Musk retaliates by investigating him
Neither of them are saints, and neither are "reprehensible" people. The jury in the lawsuit called it right by deliberating for one hour and then dismissing the lawsuit.
And insulting someone and engaging in libel is not the same thing, and is not a "retreat".
P.S. It's fine to write your own interpretation of my remarks, but it is not fine to put them in quotes suggesting I wrote them.
Anyway I just sent a note into a few publications to let them know that WalterBright is a pedophile child rapist.
That's apparently not even reprehensible under your moral framework.
Could you let me know the contact info of your local newspaper so I can give them this info as well?
Musk won the lawsuit.
Musk also publicly apologized.
Please continue your defense.
Consider that maybe "derogatory things wealthy white South Africans say about people in the apartheid era" is not a great standard to live up to.
There were 100 divers in total 10,000 various workers. There were no heroes there.
hurr durr heroism is when a singular person saves the day hurr durr
Disneyfication is perhaps the greatest cognitive crime committed against our species.
I'm genuinely confused so please explain step by step.
Do you think everyone around you is just brimming with unevidenced allegations of pedophilia to fling around at strangers, and finally we have the One True Authentic™ to just bravely say the big words out loud?
Currently on TV is a WW2 documentary narrated by Tom Hanks. It's pretty good, with significant coverage of nazis. I recommend watching it. I'm a bit of a history wonk, and have read extensively about WW2. I'm afraid I don't see any parallels between the nazis and Musk.
Congrats, you baited me into watching the video again. Definitely a nazi salute. Twice. Crisp enough to identify as a nazi salute even if the context hadn't been a far-right industrialist celebrating a far-right victory. But that was the context, giving us two layers of unambiguity.
The rhetorical parallels between Musk, his affiliates, and the nazis should be clear to anyone with remedial knowledge of history, let alone someone who calls themselves a wonk: scapegoating racial outgroups isn't a subtle strategy and Musk's pursuit of the strategy is not subtle.
WW2 is the end of nazi politics, not the beginning. In the unlikely case that you missed the parallels in good faith, I recommend the Richard Evans books to learn about the beginning and middle of the nazi movement.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plausible_deniability
https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Schrodingers...
Here's what Musk actually does when he intends that gesture: https://www.reddit.com/r/centrist/comments/1i8ajx0/video_of_...
And here's what this one looked like: https://www.reddit.com/r/gifs/comments/1i6par1/elon_musk_vs_...
Go on - would you give the latter link's "my heart goes out to you" gesture publicly at, say, work, or outside a synagogue?
I have to imagine it's motivated reasoning, because of the people who say it was a Nazi salute, approximately 100% of them already hated the guy. I've seen no one suddenly swayed. Fwiw I have no strong feelings about Musk either way, but to my eyes he is obviously not a Nazi.
Because we who read history all know that the "Nazi salute" or even the very American "Bellamy salute", and the Roman salutes before them, were directed to the leader, or a flag. And the Nazis in conjunction with saying "hail" to their leader. So far, so good?
But Musk was standing at a podium and looking out upon a crowd of people...voters...delegates... and he did not, in my view, try and face President Trump, or any leader standing at another podium, when he directed his salute outwards from the podium: outwards toward the crowd, opposite the camera angle.
So if Musk was not saluting President Trump: was he saluting a flag? Or the citizens? Because if he was saluting the citizens in this way, it gives a very, very different interpretation to the entire gesture, and if he was not saluting the president, or some leader, I do not see how this could be interpreted in the same way as the traditional salute of any type.
I asked whether he had seen any of them making the Bellamy Salute, but he said no. I suppose he was too young to see it. Hail Caesar.
Meanwhile, the Republicans elected and continue to rabidly support a court adjudicated actual rapist (https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/07/19/trump-car...) to the Presidency, who appointed someone with similarly questionable tattoos to be the SecDef (https://www.npr.org/2024/11/14/nx-s1-5191413/peter-hegseths-...). I think I'm comfortable with the contrast.
But at the end of the day you know what you saw. Reflects very poorly.
Snark aside, I’m curious: what about the comment you replied to is a “Reddit lie?” Pretty much everything act mentioned is well documented. Do you disagree with the assumptions made about motivations for the acts?
I fucking _loathe_ Trump. I still hope he makes America better. But god I fucking hate him. I think his policies are garbage, but I'd love to be proven wrong. All I see is bribery and nepotism... but yknow, he (finally) nominated Jared Isaacman. I'll fucking take it.
Musk is anathema. But yknow, I'm glad he's started the companies he has.
Starship is the SpaceX Cybertruck - lots of impressive engineering, but still doomed by terrible design choices from you-know-who. Stainless steel is just such a terrible choice for a rocket this large. Doomed the whole enterprise.
I know launches are exciting. Landings, doubly so. But eight launches to get to the moon is not a good rocket. Sorry.
Starship is fantastic value for money compared to Artemis!
Honest question, but what do they usually use?
I think choosing steel has helped Starship, as it allowed the ship to survive reentry and land in the ocean despite heat shield failures. Had the ship been made of aluminum, I'm certain earlier missions would have broken up when the aluminum heated up and lost its strength.
Also are you willing to stake money on that claim? How about this: If before July 25th, 2036, any version of Starship made primarily of steel (HLS, future Mars versions, etc) has an apogee above 2,000km, you pay me $1,000. If not, I pay you $1,000. If you like, we can bet some other amount up to $10k. And if you prefer, the loser could donate the amount to a non-profit/charity of the winner's choosing.
Basically. It's a rough work-life balance at SpaceX and as people get older, they want to live their lives and not live at work.
And the ship landing was so soft it didn't even explode! That's never happened before. And it's still connected to Starlink too. The ship's cameras are still working underwater! I wonder if they will be able to recover it intact?
We're getting some great views of the heat shield post-reentry. That's great data for the heat shield team. The heat shield is the biggest remaining question mark in the whole program. Reflight without heat shield refurbishment will be required for the whole architecture to work, and it's never been done before. None of the heat shields so far looked reusable without refurbishment, including this one.
Edit: Spashdown video https://x.com/SpaceX/status/2080804682918764619