> then they can forget about landing on the moon before 2030.

A crewed Moon landing before 30 is really implausible. Everyone is late, but the latest NASA OIG report put the Axiom suits very late (somewhere ~2031 if everything holds, but it notes it might not hold).

Were any of them actually failures? My understanding is they push limits and create intentional weak points to see where it fails, and something failing isn't a mission failure but rather part of the research process.

Small edit, 2 V2 (not V3) successes (flights 10 and 11).

I am pretty sure that at least some SpaceX engineers are reading HackerNews.

But I don't think I ever seen any insiders comments here, even anonymously.

>SpaceX cannot afford to take too many launches to get V3 solid.

Why do you say that? I'm sure they'd love to have everything go right, but I doubt they're going to go out of business if it doesn't.

It has a new engine design. If it can make it only a minute into launch, it'll provide a lot of useful data.

question: what will happen if orbit refuelling goes wrong? Won't it destroy everything in orbit?

There's not going to be a moon landing any time soon, regardless. Nobody knows how to do in-space refueling; it's a research project. And they're damn well not going to do it a dozen times in the next year.

Furthermore they don't have a lander. Landing on the moon is hard. So hard that almost everybody who tries it fails, especially if the lander is top-heavy. And the SpaceX lander idea is very top-heavy.

Finally, the NASA budget has been hollowed out. Even if the two big show stoppers above were easy, the lack of money would stop the project.

SN1 was a test engine, the flight engines are even cleaner https://fixupx.com/interstellargw/status/2057165036196409820

Oh wow that photo is from years ago but you’re correct, this is the first flight of that design

The stats are pretty out there. Iirc just the fuel pump, which you can probably pick up and put on your desk, generates 100k HP.

Booster dry mass savings of around one ton per engine iirc.

Raptor1 looks like the steampunk or mad max version

With super high res onboard camera footage too.

I think it's a few things:

They're already highly confident that if they have sufficient control over the booster trajectory they can execute the chopstick catch, so they don't particularly need to demonstrate that part more. Executing a pseudo-landing at sea lets them validate their booster flight controls perfectly fine without risking the launch tower and associated hardware. They can also do stuff like stretch the trajectory and control mechanisms to their limits to see how much they can handle, and not too big a deal if something goes wrong. Presumably any actual landings will be well within the known safe limits on all parameters.

I bet this first booster also has a lot of minor weird things associated with shaking out the manufacturing process, and they don't entirely mind testing to destruction the first one to get rid of it permanently and use the ones coming from a more proven manufacturing process for important work.

The booster catch is a useful trick but when the focus is just getting SS3 into orbit without incident, you can drop a few of the boosters in the ocean with the intent to fix at a later point.

Oh hey, you're right! Somehow I read "water landing" and interpreted it as landing on one of the barges (ocisly or jrti) any clue why that isn't the case? Is super heavy just too big for the barges maybe?

Possible, but that is still reasonable odds.

Reminds me of the line from The Naked Gun "Doctors give him a 50% chance of living, but there is only a 10% chance of that."

AccuWeather has it at the infamous 51% probability level for thunderstorms at 5 CST, so there’s still a decent chance for success tomorrow.

Time will tell!

I'm watching it now: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y_ecCDqTSJs As always, Tim is doing a fantastic job.

No legs. Gotta verify the vehicle can land with the precision necessary for a tower catch

they Typically put out a hype video before each flight at least the last several.

They can build new boosters pretty quickly. New launch/catch towers take a lot longer, and they don't have any redundancy yet. Also they weren't going to reuse their V2 boosters once V3 was ready, so they could learn more by testing things like intentionally disabling an engine during the landing burn or flying at a higher angle of attack.

V3 booster has a lot of changes, including a brand new downcomer, an integrated hot-staging ring, and 3 instead of 4 grid fins. Chances of a RUD are not 0.

If Flight 12 blows up in space, they've already got Flight 13 almost assembled. It might delay them a month, maybe. But if a returning booster destroys the launch pad, it would delay them much longer--maybe a year.

With those stakes, it makes sense to not try a booster catch until they're sure it's going to work.

>Either they can land them or they lose a billion dollars and 9 months when they crash the tower.

That's a fake youtube channel that is somehow allowed to squat the SpaceX channel name. It's been going on for years, including the crypto scam. Baffling. Maybe a big middle finger from Google to Elon.

It probably is AI generated.

My very first exposure to "AI spam" was trying to watch one of the Starship test launches, the second one if I remember correctly.

That was around the time that Elon bought Twitter, so he removed all publicity video streams from third-party platforms like YouTube and moved them to Twitter's streaming service.

I wanted to watch this on my big TV, so I was hunting through YouTube for the stream. I found the most likely looking one and watched as Elon got up on a stage, started waffling on about how this is the "future of humanity" and then with 40 seconds to go before the launch the (entirely realistic) AI voice was dubbed over and started offering "double your Bitcoin if you transfer to this account", with the obligatory QR code in the corner.

I was actually impressed by the audacity!

The really frustrating thing was that YouTube then promptly blocked all content even vaguely related to the launch! It was impossible to keyword search for anything that said "starship", "spacex", etc.

It was a scary preview of instant corporate censorship.

I'm sure the person (or bot!) at YouTube "meant well", but sheesh... they just erased the online presence of dozens of legitimate space-fan channels like NASA Space Flight. And NASA. And SpaceX's official channel too!

Ironically this meant that the only remaining matches were 100% scams.

The incredible thing to me is that I've reported one of these videos to YouTube and got an answer back via email saying "we checked the video and it's fine for us". This should be enough to sue Google on the basis that they made an active choice to keep it up.

Ignorant eyeballs are also eyeballs. One might argue - sometimes even more profitable eyeballs.

Silicon Valley built this machine. Many tens of thousands of software engineers worked on this.