That's a beatiful game. Mechanically it's simple enough, but the author seems to have put a lot of the work into failure effects. There are many different ways you can break the catcher, the booster, or both.

> Anyone know if they plan to relight Starship's engines in space this time?

No. I don't know why, but their plan for second stage is the same as before, go suborbital, reenter, soft splashdown into the Indian Ocean. Hopefully now without flaps burned through.

Nice game. @author Please just consider removing super-thrust effect when booster is punctured. Obviously engines have much more thrust than the gas escaping through the puncture, so crazy rotations after puncture are not realistic at all. Better behaviour would be a rapid loss of oxygen or CH4 and loss of engine thrust.

Wow, this game is great. Reminds me of a miniclip game

See also SpaceX's own official Starship game: https://starshipthegame.spacex.com

Doesn't seem to work on Firefox?

"Optimized for Chrome". Why?

Tomorrow? It was issued only one day in advance?

As I write this comment, it is Oct 12, 3:30 pm Central time. So the launch window starts in 15 and a half hours.

https://mytime.io/7am/CT

… and the dual landings from the first Falcon Heavy flight. Even today that footage looks like cgi

If they blow up the first tower, it will be 3+++ months to get FAA flight clearance again, so no great loss.

I don't follow these things often: How is this different than the four before?

>What I wonder about is why they never tested catching boosters with the ones they've been using all along. They know these boosters inside out, so it would be a good platform to gain experience with.

The Falcon 9 is incapable of hovering, because given the number of Merlins and their limited ability to throttle it cannot achieve a thrust/weight ratio (TWR) of 1 even on a single engine throttled to the lowest it can go. Rockets are almost entirely fuel by weight at launch, when empty they are very light. Since it has a TWR >1 when near-empty, lighting up an engine means F9 will want to go up again. So with F9 SpaceX must do a "hoverslam" to land, wherein the computer lights the engine at just the right point such that it hits relative velocity of zero right at the altitude of the landing pad (be it on ship or on land). That won't do for catching one however.

With Starship all of this was considered from the start. Raptor has better throttling capability (itself an amazing technical achievement), and of course on Super Heavy there are lots of them which is another advantage of the "many, smaller engines" approach. It means that they can effectively throttle it to just 1/33*min-throttle of max thrust. And SH is also just plain heavier construction, for good reason in an economics designed big rocket but also helpful here. Combined it is actually capable of hovering when near empty.

Apparently they landed the SH booster within half a centimeter of the target position at the last attempt.

So I'd say they definitely have carried over some important lessons from Falcon 9.

The actual catching part might perhaps not have been very transferable, given how Falcon 9 can't roll using it's single engine unlike Starship booster, and the large difference in mass.

They've been trying to launch and land the rocket at a precise point without explosion

as for why they haven't done it yet i imagine its because you can easily over optimize for something out of order, they had bigger priorities with making the launch work in 100 other ways so until those hurdles were cleared even attempting to worry about catching wasn't worth their time and manpower yet

The previous license also allowed multiple launches, so this license allowing multiple launches would be consistent.

As I understand it, only if the test article is identical. Any modification, new permit required.

I don't think the ship being launched has all of the planned improvements to the fins/hinge. This launch is S30, with the big improvements coming with S33.

Newer versions of the ship have smaller flaps, hinging from points offcenter, so that they are protected by the body of the ship.

Images probably demonstrate this better than words.

Current: https://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?action=dlattach;...

New: https://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?action=dlattach;...

1st stage reusability matters more so they can reach a cost model similar to F9, second stage is really just bonus.

If they never get the second stage working with reusability they could strip the design down to a simple S2

And looking ahead, Deep Blue Aerospace does aerobatic chase drones.[1] Perhaps if someone in that space offered their services to SpaceX?

For Starship on orbit... photo/inspection cubesats are hard, but perhaps an externally-mounted 360 wifi camera ejector pack?

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H-g26Zt15lo

> Will it finally make it to orbit?

No. "Starship will fly a similar trajectory as the previous flight test" [1]. IFT-4 was a suborbital flight test [2].

[1] https://www.spacex.com/launches/mission/?missionId=starship-...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starship_flight_test_4

The previous one could have made it to orbit as well. They are intentionally not going there to derisk failed re-entry ignition since the focus of these tests is entirely behavior in atmosphere.

To quote user rvnx:

> SpaceX provided information about the flight profile and its impact only in mid-August to FAA. [...]

> According to 50 CFR § 402.13, the other agencies have 60 days to give back their answers to the FAA.

> 15 August + 60 days = now.

You don't send a rocket without some sort of due diligence in terms of impact. Nobody likes bureaucracy, but I don't see how we're going to make the world a better place for everyone by letting billionaires basically do whatever they want with their toys without checks.

Falcon 9 (spacex's other rocket) wasn't human rated at first either.

The point of starship is to reduce the cost of kg to orbit, by being a fully, and rapidly reusable launch system.

The other long term and loftier) goal is to enable Mars colonization, a mission who's current main blocker is cost of kg to orbit.

By reducing the cost of putting things to orbit, you can do a whole lot more. Starlink is a good example, but if starship works it will be a paradigm shift that will result in a whole new space economy.

Starship is still under development, these launches are just testing. It’s not a finished product at all.

No, I don’t think one in every eight people on earth is going to see the catch attempt or even care about it. The launch and catch attempt is exciting but I don’t think it’s something that most of the planet is following. Even in the US, I doubt many people will watch it. It’s not the next moon landing.

If we’re talking about the near future? No, most people do not care.

If it’s successful it will likely be in the history books, so maybe billions of martians will one day watch.

Over how long of a time span are we giving this? I don't think so.

https://www.youtube.com/@SpaceX/streams = most popular live stream has 33M views

https://www.youtube.com/@SpaceX/videos = most popular video has 29M views

I'm pretty sure this also includes embedded views from news articles that embed the videos.

So to answer the question: In the short term, unlikely it seems. Over the span of hundreds of years? Likely so.

Honestly I don't even see a future Moon landing garnering that many people.

Maybe a Mars landing would, but non-techie people just don't seem very interested in space.

probably not live, i imagine that many people will hear news about it though

Doesn't seem like a very good article... a good journalist puts statements in the appropriate context and that seems to be lacking here.

For instance, it mentions "high levels of potentially toxic chemicals like Zinc and hexavalent Chromium", but doesn't say what that means. What is "high"?

E.g. the quoted Prof says he "wouldn't recommend drinking it", but would he recommend drinking regular rainwater discharge from this (industrial) area (or even regular city rainwater?) and would he say its worse than that? How many grams/tons of these materials are in the discharge? What is the likely concentration by the time it gets to any animals, how much would actually get inside them and how does that compare with the known levels that would be damaging to health? How does it compare with the concentrations from rain runoff?

A good journalist should find an appropriate expert and ask these sorts of questions so they can include them in the article and give the reader context, otherwise the reader will often come away feeling informed when in fact they know nothing of substance because there is nothing to anchor these unquantified facts to.

I read it. Wasn't worth a read.

This was a particularly funny quote:

> Musk “seems to care a lot more about 100,000 years from now than now here on Earth.”

I mean.. I think Musk is an arsehole and his plan to colonise Mars is insane, but this does not feel like a criticism! This environmentalist seems to care a lot more about short term issues than the long term viability of life on Earth.

> “At least one egg in every nest was either damaged or not there,” LeClaire says.

Ok let's assume that they are keeping count of the number of eggs in every nest... One egg? If these birds are going to die out because one egg in each nest breaks they aren't going to survive anyway.

I'm not saying the environment is unimportant, but I think you have to weight it against the importance of the thing you're stopping in the name of the environment.

It's like all the solar farm projects that get stopped in the UK because people think sticking some poles in a field is going to kill all the newts. Like, what do you think is going to happen to the newts when it's 40C in the summer?

The water deluge system has been in operation for all launches save the first and has been functioning well, protecting the pad from damage. It uses drinking-quality water and outflow has been sampled after each launch, with negligible traces of contaminants detected.

There was a disagreement between the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality and the US EPA about the specific type of permit that SpaceX needed from TCEQ for the deluge system but that was a paperwork/documentation issue only.

see:

https://www.spacex.com/updates/#starships-fly

The byproducts of this rocket’s combustion are CO2 and H2O

> harmful combustion products

Care to share what are they?

The previous launch was completely successful.

No damage was significant done to the wildlife near the launch pad in any previous launch, at least no more than is done to the wildlife during any launch that happens anywhere in the world.

They only destroyed the pad on the very first launch. The pad has taken no notable damage during any of the subsequent three launches between that one and this one (this is the 5th launch).

The combustion products of Methane and Oxygen are Water and Carbon Dioxide so there is nothing to damage the nearby areas.