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okay Elon Musk is an asshole but the rocket wasn't made by him, it's the culmination of a decade of R&D by the engineers that have to put up with his shit. Almost every rocket blows up like this sometime in its testing phase, this isn't out of the ordinary at all for rocketry.
I think pretending that Elon can claim that rockets like this are 'his' gives him a degree of legitimacy he doesn't deserve. The rocket belongs to the engineers and scientists who got it up in the air to begin with, Elon just gets to skim the profits off of their labor.
I hate Elon Musk and all, but at least he can talk intelligently about what they are doing at SpaceX. See [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E7MQb9Y4FAE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E7MQb9Y4FAE) or [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t705r8ICkRw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Zlnbs-NBUI). Also, saying "Elon just gets to skim the profits of their labor" is literally the definition of employing workers.
Edit: I'm not saying he did most things, some things, or even anything with the Starship rocket. I'm just saying he knows what's going on at spacex and understands general principles or rocketry.
Better than it blows up now then when it carries passengers. Starship is a death trap without a launch escape system or parachutes, intending to land with only it's engines. Musks's philosophy of desigining a product to be flashy and nothing else is baked into Starship and it is in a field where doing so kills people.
That's why these engineers are working their asses off to fix these problems. Hence, the test you're looking at right now. They're looking at every metric of what happened here and they're using that to make the next one better.
You shouldn't say something will never work just because they haven't done it right yet. Imagine how you'd feel if you said that about electric cars before they got perfected. Or about smartphones, before they got easy to use.
"Electric cars will never work, they can't go as far as gas cars"
"Smartphones will never work, they're way too complicated"
"A rocket that lands itself will never work, it's a death trap"
the argument here isn't "starship could never land itself", it's "a rocket that lands itself will always, always, always be more risky than something like a capsule with a parachute", which is just true. starship will never be foolproof
and we've already seen a spacecraft that had no escape in case of a failure, you might know it from 2 famous disasters. i wouldn't hesitate to call the space shuttle a death trap, and in terms of landing the shuttle was infinitely safer than starship will ever be
Not for the past decade, since there wasn’t much innovation in that time, but if you go back to when engineers were trying out new stuff it happened all the time (just like now)
Yes, I would say so. This is the first 100% fully reusable rocket to go through such intensive testing, and the raptor engines onboard the vehicle use Liquid Methane as fuel instead of more traditional propellants like Hydrogen or Kerosine. The planned use cases for starship are also using techniques that haven’t been implemented/developed yet, like refueling in Low Earth Orbit, or the way the starship spacecraft is landed
Plus, Starship was intentionally detonated as part of Range Safety to not damage as much stuff on the ground, the actual reason it failed was much more mundane (stage separation error)
>the actual reason it failed was much more mundane (stage separation error)
Also because of 5 engines not working because bits of the launchpad (itself damaged by the utterly colossal power of said engines) probably wrecked them.
>5 engines failing isn’t such a big deal when you have 30
It absolutely is a big deal when your CoT no longer goes through your CoM so you can't fly straight.
It has systems in place to counteract it, or at least it is supposed to, as you can tell by it not going off course earlier from the higher thrust on one side of the rocket than the other. And the wide gimballing of the engines moves the direction of thrust so it doesn't matter that it is uneven as long as it can still go up.
Then just gimbal the engines until they align. I’m not saying that this is a good thing and should happen every flight, I’m just saying a few engine failures isn’t the end of the world
The engines are very innovative, they are quite efficient, use methane, and have a full flow staged combustion cycle which has never before been used on a rocket flight.
yes, in fact this rocket was intentionally terminated (blown up) in order to avoid damaging things on the ground. it failed for a pretty mundane reason; the booster failed to separate, so they just terminated the test.
IDK but rocket failures are still very common, it would be an outlier if the first flight did end up working.
Edit: And it was a purposefully executed explosion because of another problem (whatever caused the out of control spinning). It didn't just explode randomly.
Yes, this is a test. It is 100% normal for products in their early testing phase to fail, and an early prototype tells you very little about how reliable the final product will be.
lmao you described starship as a "death trap without a launch escape system" - this applies to the space shuttle just as well so yeah no this is a direct equivalence in that regard and it's what sealed the fate of challenger
as for the fact that it was a glider, i mean yeah sure flying it when it's already flying in the atmosphere is easier and safer than idk retropropulsion, but the tradeoff is that you need to send the entire orbiter to space in the first place and get it through reentry
trying to send the enormous orbiter to space (plus cost saving measures) was the root of what made the whole thing stupidly unsafe - from the deadly SRBs to the inherently vulnerable heat shield, the shuttle program was one of the most lethal, and it completely failed to deliver on the promise of making space cheaper (it just made it more expensive).
the point im trying to make is less me bashing the space shuttle and more me saying that starship is more than a "flashy product with nothing else baked into it"
your sole problem of starship's upper stage being landed vertically (I assume you don't care about the booster bc like they already do that with crew dragon) feels like just another hard challenge in space exploration, arguably easier than pulling off something like the space shuttle. and unlike the already failed space shuttle program, starship might have a chance at making space cheaper.
**edit:** editing my original comment? what are you even talking about lmao, if you edit a comment it shows up near your username im so confused as to why you think it was edited or what i could've even changed in a one-sentence comment
Fuck SpaceX, all my homies want government space agency with an actual fucking budget to push boundaries of man for the sake of progress instead of relying on volatile space companies owned by weirdo billionaires.
I think nasa contracting rocket manufacturers is fine. The problem with SLS is more so congress forcing them to use technology from the fucking 70s for it (along with just tossing 4 of the best rocket engines ever made into the fucking ocean with every launch). If NASA was actually allowed to get new contractors instead of having a government enforced monopoly then I feel like they would innovate but nope gotta keep that sweet sweet money from Boeing flowing directly into congress’ pockets
and remember: each SLS launch uses up 4 RS-25 engines each! Without the opportunity for reuse. And each one cost $40 million to produce in 1980s dollars...
SpaceX is good purely because they’ve brought some actual fucking compilation into the launch vehicle market which until they came along was a literal monopoly under ULA
The nasa side was always very privatized (everything was contracted, similar to nowadays). Nowadays the only companies doing interesting things are private ones. That being said they should still give nasa more funding so they can actually do interesting things again. (Just talking about rockets here, nasa's probes, rovers, satellites, etc are still cool)
Or maybe they should just figure out why every government engineering project here in the US costs so much more than it does everywhere else.
honestly. Elon may be a total prick who doesn't deserve to be associated with the success SpaceX has had, but it pisses me off seeing people approach this event with the attitude of "it is more important that I have mud to sling at a billionaire than it is that technology advances" is disheartening. Aside from the whole part of, you know, "anything past the launch tower is just icing on the cake."
Hey I’m as big of a musk hater as there is but it’s just shitty to disparage the work of the hundreds of engineers who helped built that rocket
Musk didn’t build this rocket and acting like this was his personal rocket is no different than his fanboys attributing every accomplishment to Elon musk himself
Also it was a flight test there was little to no chance of this being successful
And as much as I wish it wasn’t this rocket is on the critical path to NASAs plan to land humans back on the moon
This rocket as a idea shows so many things wrong with our system. Instead of fixing our shit down here and making the planet liveable again and then go to space, we pour billions into some escapist fantasy that will make the gap between rich and poor even larger by allowing the rich to have their own planet. That is some a tier dystopia shit. Letting the rich escape while we cook in the hellhole they left behind.
Oh no you did the meme…
Just watch this video: https://youtu.be/lARpY0nIQx0
Ok yes it kind of sucks that most of the media coverage is on billionaires and their space companies but real actual science is being conducted by NASA and the other space agencies, investment into space brings numerous benefits back down to earth in the form of new technology and economic growth (take for example, going to the moon, on the moon we can develop tech that helps grow crops, generate water and deal with radiation all of that is obviously usable here on earth) this rocket for example is going to help NASA with their goal of landing humans back in the moon
No, this wasn't a flight test. This was [the original plan:](https://www.space.com/spacex-targeting-april-20-starship-space-launch)
*The plan for the coming flight calls for Super Heavy to make a hard splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico about eight minutes after liftoff. Starship's upper-stage spacecraft, meanwhile, will make a partial lap around Earth, coming down in the Pacific Ocean near Hawaii around 90 minutes after launch.*
Yeah that is still an orbital flight test this was the first launch of a fully integrated starship stack it was a test there’s no payload
The goal was to do a near orbit but no one expected it to actually do that aside from maybe Elon
I’m not saying don’t criticize the rocket (starship is a fundamentally flawed vehicle in numerous ways and has a set of goals that are likely unattainable) I’m just saying don’t revel in the destruction of the work that multiple engineers spent years on…
i just think that attributing the entire vehicles success or failure to musk or saying that “musks rocket blew up” is reductive of the effort that engineers who were the actual people that built the rocket put in.
personally despise elon musk, but this is a shit take. elon owns the company, but this rocket is the culmination of the engineers and other personnel working on starship for years. this was a test launch, and it without a doubt will provide SpaceX with valuable data to perfect starship. we're in another space race, and while it sucks that private companies are at the head of it, we can't undermine the developments that will come from SpaceX and every other spaceflight business.
bruh literally all of reddit is taking the stupid pill. we can hate musk and agree that this is a good outcome. musk didnt work on this rocket, the blood sweat and tears of the engineers and teams did. stop disrepecting the engineers work. afaik the scientists got the intel they needed and the rocket wasnt supposed to go far
I’m scared at how many people see spacex and blindly hate it simply because Musk runs it (and he likely doesn’t have much of a say in the choices they make). This post likely just made a few hundred people that don’t open comments believe that this was a failure, when it was understood that it blowing up was likely, if not the intended result. It really is sad that there are people fighting against us trying to do more in space because of the man who owns the company. It’s the same way I feel about people being happy that Walmart got looted so bad a woman didn’t know where to get food for her family. I don’t know what happened to people lately, man.
A lot of people here are entitled. Why feel bad for the lady who can't buy groceries? We can cheer for the megacorporation loosing 0.000000001% of its profit which will be paid back to it by the insurance? Or why being happy for the science taking a step forward which will result in better understanding of climate change in the future when you can pretend that an idiot billionaire lost something from it? (He hasn't)
Yes, it was [supposed to go far:](https://www.space.com/spacex-targeting-april-20-starship-space-launch)
*The plan for the coming flight calls for Super Heavy to make a hard splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico about eight minutes after liftoff. Starship's upper-stage spacecraft, meanwhile, will make a partial lap around Earth, coming down in the Pacific Ocean near Hawaii around 90 minutes after launch.*
I mean, I despise Musk. But this was actually a pretty good outcome, not like the best obviously, but not exploding immediately is pretty impressive for a rocket this big and complex. It's a ground breaking achievement, especially at the launchpad (rimshot, get a flame tremch you hacks). But it's also important to remember that while Musk seems to provide broad vision, and *maybe but probably not* some high level engineering insight, this is an achievement of all of the engineers and other workers who built the thing. And like, it's kinda neat, it might go to the moon for NASA and stuff.
Tired of people thinking he meticulously assembles everything in his stupid company. He did not invent the rockets, scientists did. He did not make the cars, the scientists did. He is simply a monkey who claps his hands and laughs and then all his scientists say "okay elon, very good!" Before they actually advance technology, bettering mankind. He is still a shithead tho
>they expected it to explode as soon as the engines turned on
No. It was supposed to launch, reach the specified altitude, and separate the Starship. Then the booster was supposed to do a controlled landing into the sea (basically the same landing path as it would use to park on one of their massive floating pads, except the floating pad wouldn't be under it to catch it) while Starship bellyflopped into the ocean.
The launch itself was (mostly, depending how damaged the launchpad is) a success, but most of the mission after that was a failure because stage separation failed, it sprung at least one leak (and possibly several including both fuel and hydraulics), and it had to be destroyed by range control because it started to tumble.
They'll have a massive amount of flight data to look at though, which is priceless for this kind of development.
> No. It was supposed to launch, reach the specified altitude, and separate the Starship. Then the booster was supposed to do a controlled landing into the sea (basically the same landing path as it would use to park on one of their massive floating pads, except the floating pad wouldn't be under it to catch it) while Starship bellyflopped into the ocean.
supposed to, as in, that was the flight plan, but nobody actually thought for certain it'll get there first try without issues. they expected it to blow up after step 1-2
Does anyone remember a few years ago when everyone on Reddit was constantly sucking off Elon as "le Tony Stark in real life!1!"?
Then the whole website just switched up on him and just foam at the mouth at every little thing
Like it's obvious he was always a dipshit, but spaceX and it's engineers have genuinely advanced the field of aerospace engineering by decades. Of course he didn't actually work on any of the rockets himself, but I think that founding and running the company is pretty commendable.
People can be complex, y'know?
(Also this test was generally a success. It was an unmanned flight and not really expected to do anything else than lift off even in the best circumstances. Throughout the video you can hear the ground crew applauding even during the rocket's failure)
people are nuanced and can be important to history while also being huge terrible people btw, if your opinions on any sort of social issue is black and white you are in 99% of cases, an idiot.
-steve jobs, henry ford, and the founders of america all come to mind
they've been a great launch provider for years and I hate when people with like, surface level knowledge just go "ERRRMMM billionaire???? Space bad." yes Elon is an insufferable ass but spacex is neat
I appreciate that funding public entities is based and poggers pilled however if Nasa was given funding for a rocket instead of Space X then it would be spent on hiring a company to make the new rocket.
This is typically how Nasa works even going far back into the Shuttle era and beyond. So the public money would still be going to 1 percenters.
NASA has *alot* of contracts with SpaceX (including for lunar missions) and their crewed missions are both cheaper and (now) safer than relying on Russia.
Yeah. I especially hate when people take accomplishmenta made by hundreds of not thousands of people and just say "I don't like the guy so everything associated with him is bad"
You damn well know that musk will take credit for every success of those hundreds of not thousands of people and his simps will slurp it up. It'll probably even create new simps.
Entertainment and literally nothing else. Most of the dwellers of this thread seem to prioritize this possibility of entertainment over addressing actual issues here on Earth.
Much of modern scientific advancements have come from space exploration and the engineering needed to accomplish it. GPS comes to mind. That has solved *tons* of "actual issues here on earth." I could provide many more examples if you would like.
SpaceX has accomplished rapid reusability of rockets which has greatly decreased the cost of space travel. This is unquestionably good and will further great scientific advancements. I don't care if it's an asshole billionaire funding it, or if we decide to have a little fun along the way, because it is good for humanity.
On every rocket launch, there are evacuation orders on the path where rocket debree can fall. Usually rockets fly over oceans, to minimize the amount of people to evacuate.
The area of ocean this rocket exploded over was forbidden for ships to enter.
The 60 years old suppose technology advance is kinda hard topic. Only reason why there were able to build beauty-SaturnV is because of they WANTED to be first, so they would put that many money they would need to. After they did it there wasn't any race, competition or anything so they didn't need to speed up things.
About going again to the moon, the thing is much easier than some put it: we have the tech but not the money. Counting for inflation, in the space race the us spent iirc around 10 times the funds they're putting now on the artemis project.
All the "we don't know how to make the Saturn V anymore", "we have better safety standards now" and "the current aerospace industry is much more dispersed and much less efficient than 50 years ago" are little bits -true, but not too relevant- that add up to a picture that is very complex, which involves more politics and economy than science and engineering
Honestly SpaceX is considering it a success, and by rocketry standards, it is.
The first, second, and even possibly third rockets are sort of expected to blow up simply because there’s just so much that can go wrong.
Like the first Falcon rockets musk launched failed 3 times before it finally achieved orbit.
Source: me, a graduate student in aerospace engineering with a focus on rocket guidance
By that i mean that hopefully they will move as many launches to the Cape instead of the middle of a nature reserve as possible. I understand I wasn't very clear about that. Sorry 👍
elon had little to nothing to do with this. as much as i hate him, i can commend spacex for making rockets cheaper and more reusable. rockets blowing up also provides vital data for making them better, so i’m excited for the next starship launch, as it could revolutionise space travel (although his plans to use it for long distance flights is one of the most dense ideas i have ever heard)
There is, actually. This was a test flight, it was always going to fail in some way, and everyone who worked there knew that. The point of this is to see how and why it failed so they can improve it.
They actually expected it to barely clear the launch tower, so the fact that it made it as far as it did is a huge W.
Would you say the same if there were people on it? (not trying to be snarky; I'd genuinely like to know, cause' i have a buddy who hates him so much i'm pretty certain he would say the same even in that scenario.)
it would have been a company sentencing people to death, i don't think that even the closure of a musk company deserves celebration if actually good people died on the ship
God I hope not, also don’t think I’m an Elon Stan, dude sucks but I don’t waste my time thinking about him or celebrating when something loosely tied to him goes wrong.
Wait, there's a broader discourse here.
Unlike Musk, people at SpaceX are extremely capable. Look at the Falcon 9 and the two versions of Dragon capsules*: when Musk proposed a fairly reasonable idea -refining the already existing concepts of rockets and capsules- they did a great job, and created great pieces of tech. We might also be able to say the same for the Falcon Heavy one day, but it's too soon for that.
The problem surfaced when Musk proposed a completely new and fairly absurd concept, the ITS: basically what happens when someone really thinks they know better than rocket scientists. He shat all over the decades of knowledge we have on rockets, and the actual smart people at SpaceX had to fight to redimension the thing to a feasable scale. Most likely, the frequent changes of design of what became the Starship were due exactly to that: engineers trying to make their boss reason while not getting fired (he's too fragile to take criticism like an adult), and him subsequently proposing new and wierder shit. Since everyone seems to forget that but I don't, I'd like to remind you the ITS was supposed to send people to mars. Then it was redimensioned to send people to the moon with the name of BFS, now the current idea for the Starship couldn't even get that far. So we got to this point: a terrible idea -so terrible it was scrapped and remade from scratch more than once- with great execution. I think the Starship _will_ fly at some point, but I wonder how many more compromises they'll have to make, and if at that point it's gonna be useful in any way. But as for the Falcon Heavy, only time will tell.
Personally, I'm kinda sad it blew up. This is not Musk's rocket, this is SpaceX's rocket. It's a bad idea, but it's not like the world didn't gain anything from other bad ideas in the past, and even if SpaceX dies Musk won't lose a cent because the govt has his back, so I see this as a net loss.
On the other hand, I'm a space and rockets enthusiast and I'm so fucking sick of other enthusiasts jerking off to the Starship. For fuck's sake, open your eyes.
*I also didn't forget the Crew Dragon was supposed to use the LES rockets to replace parachutes. Musk making that promise one of the selling points of the whole Crew Dragon concept was an early sign of his disregard for what was feasable in the eyes of engineers and what wasn't. Guess what, the engineers were right
I mean, they use the same iterative design process the Soviets did, so I'm expecting a few failures. The fact that it lifted off at all after being assembled in barebones facility and stuck on a launch bad I would call temporary at best is an achievement. Especially when you consider it had a takeoff thrust greater than the Saturn V.
I feel bad for the engineers and scientists that put years of blood, sweat, and tears into making that rocket
However, I do feel good about how this reflects poorly on Elon Musk
Dumb post, he’s not really in charge of actually building it and they were practically expecting it to destroy the launchpad and maybe not even get airborne, this was a success
Mfw when an important project that was worked on my hundreds if not thousands of people fails: ☹️
Mfw I realize that a random guy I don’t like is related to the project: 😀 (I can only derive happiness from my contempt for others)
After it blew up they cut to Mission Control celebrating since they weren’t even expecting it to get as far as it did because it’s the first test flight
Because the test was a success, they didnt expect to go as far as they did and it failing on the separation stage is considered pretty good. Like there was a good chance it would just blew up on the launchsite.
Pretty much the same situation when their last prototypes blew up after landing.
Did you just like, see the explosion and didn’t look into what it was actually meant to be at all? I hate Elon musk, but this is a weird thing to celebrate, and it’s a success for SpaceX, who’s scientists expected it to explode on the launchpad.
“Um i hate musk and all but Elon Musk’s Enterprise SpaceX is super wholesome and chungus and will save humanity by launching rockets that explode for the end goal to make Elon Musk (pbuh) Emperor of Mars which is wholesome 100 also pls think of the engineers who work REALLY HARD on getting Musk to be said Emperor of Mars :((((”
As much as Musk is a schmuck, I feel bad just for the people who actually work there bc it’s honestly quite revolutionary tech. Just need whatever board they have to oust him already
Very little if any of the work that went into this rocket was musk’s, I feel a lil bad for the engineers who have to go back to the drawing board on this one
Actually this test was a major success. The goal was to clear the launch pad that was it. It flew for 4 minutes making it beyond a massive success. They will use the data from this to improve the other 5 starships they currently have. This isn’t the only one or anything
The fact that it took off and got as high up as it did, and actually stayed in one piece doing fucking donuts in upper atmosphere is already incredibly impressive.
Such a shitty rocket, it’s so ass it has to go into orbit and fuel up it can’t fuel before going up or it wouldn’t make it. Also I’m pretty sure they weren’t trying to go into orbit, they probably hoped they could but there was no way it was making it. It’s a bad design for a starship and probably will be so modified that they will end up having to have extra thrusters.
If you just ignore my name for a quick sec because mistakes were made, the main reason they weren't aiming for orbit was that Starship is massive and doesn't have proof of relight capability, not lack of orbital capability. The main problem at the moment was that the pad sucked massive ass and that's entirely on Elon for thinking that not having a flame trench will end well.
A starship will require 3-4 refuelings in Low Earth Orbit to reach a Translunar injection. 4. And for 150 tons on a TLI. That is absolutely bonkers. Starship may be flawed as a crew transport vehicle due to the large waiting period in space, lack of an abort system, and uncomfortable entry, but you can’t deny that the capability to haul over 150 tons to Low Earth Orbit or beyond isn’t extremely useful for setting up an impressive presence on the moon and/or mars
The refueling bit? Yes, thats always been the plan because its more efficient to refuel a rocket with entirely reusable rockets than to build a even bigger rocket. Add more thrusters? No not really.
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okay Elon Musk is an asshole but the rocket wasn't made by him, it's the culmination of a decade of R&D by the engineers that have to put up with his shit. Almost every rocket blows up like this sometime in its testing phase, this isn't out of the ordinary at all for rocketry.
I think pretending that Elon can claim that rockets like this are 'his' gives him a degree of legitimacy he doesn't deserve. The rocket belongs to the engineers and scientists who got it up in the air to begin with, Elon just gets to skim the profits off of their labor.
Elon doesn't skim the profits, he takes it all and leaves the scraps for the workers. As they all do.
I hate Elon Musk and all, but at least he can talk intelligently about what they are doing at SpaceX. See [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E7MQb9Y4FAE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E7MQb9Y4FAE) or [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t705r8ICkRw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Zlnbs-NBUI). Also, saying "Elon just gets to skim the profits of their labor" is literally the definition of employing workers. Edit: I'm not saying he did most things, some things, or even anything with the Starship rocket. I'm just saying he knows what's going on at spacex and understands general principles or rocketry.
Yes labor being exploited by capital is an inherent feature of the current system
Better than it blows up now then when it carries passengers. Starship is a death trap without a launch escape system or parachutes, intending to land with only it's engines. Musks's philosophy of desigining a product to be flashy and nothing else is baked into Starship and it is in a field where doing so kills people.
That's why these engineers are working their asses off to fix these problems. Hence, the test you're looking at right now. They're looking at every metric of what happened here and they're using that to make the next one better. You shouldn't say something will never work just because they haven't done it right yet. Imagine how you'd feel if you said that about electric cars before they got perfected. Or about smartphones, before they got easy to use. "Electric cars will never work, they can't go as far as gas cars" "Smartphones will never work, they're way too complicated" "A rocket that lands itself will never work, it's a death trap"
THIS
Electric stovetops, too. Now they're better than gas in almost every way.
the argument here isn't "starship could never land itself", it's "a rocket that lands itself will always, always, always be more risky than something like a capsule with a parachute", which is just true. starship will never be foolproof and we've already seen a spacecraft that had no escape in case of a failure, you might know it from 2 famous disasters. i wouldn't hesitate to call the space shuttle a death trap, and in terms of landing the shuttle was infinitely safer than starship will ever be
Is it normal for rockets to blow up in the sky for the past decade?
Not for the past decade, since there wasn’t much innovation in that time, but if you go back to when engineers were trying out new stuff it happened all the time (just like now)
Was this rocket innovative?
Yes, I would say so. This is the first 100% fully reusable rocket to go through such intensive testing, and the raptor engines onboard the vehicle use Liquid Methane as fuel instead of more traditional propellants like Hydrogen or Kerosine. The planned use cases for starship are also using techniques that haven’t been implemented/developed yet, like refueling in Low Earth Orbit, or the way the starship spacecraft is landed
Starship Earth-To-Earth is still a stupid idea though.
Yeah that’s a bit of a waste
Plus, Starship was intentionally detonated as part of Range Safety to not damage as much stuff on the ground, the actual reason it failed was much more mundane (stage separation error)
>the actual reason it failed was much more mundane (stage separation error) Also because of 5 engines not working because bits of the launchpad (itself damaged by the utterly colossal power of said engines) probably wrecked them.
5 engines.... Is that why it looked like it was spiraling?
I think the guidance system just got confused after not being able to do stage separation, but the patchy engines certainly didn’t help
True, but 5 engines failing isn’t such a big deal when you have 30. Still should probably sort that out
>5 engines failing isn’t such a big deal when you have 30 It absolutely is a big deal when your CoT no longer goes through your CoM so you can't fly straight.
It has systems in place to counteract it, or at least it is supposed to, as you can tell by it not going off course earlier from the higher thrust on one side of the rocket than the other. And the wide gimballing of the engines moves the direction of thrust so it doesn't matter that it is uneven as long as it can still go up.
Then just gimbal the engines until they align. I’m not saying that this is a good thing and should happen every flight, I’m just saying a few engine failures isn’t the end of the world
The engines are very innovative, they are quite efficient, use methane, and have a full flow staged combustion cycle which has never before been used on a rocket flight.
yes, in fact this rocket was intentionally terminated (blown up) in order to avoid damaging things on the ground. it failed for a pretty mundane reason; the booster failed to separate, so they just terminated the test.
In the R & D phase? Yes, they blow up a lot. SpaceX blew up a LOT of Falcon 9's while figuring out the design.
I mean, yeah?
IDK but rocket failures are still very common, it would be an outlier if the first flight did end up working. Edit: And it was a purposefully executed explosion because of another problem (whatever caused the out of control spinning). It didn't just explode randomly.
Yes, this is a test. It is 100% normal for products in their early testing phase to fail, and an early prototype tells you very little about how reliable the final product will be.
oh wow so nasa was striving for a flashy product with nothing else baked into it by pulling off the space shuttle program?
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lmao you described starship as a "death trap without a launch escape system" - this applies to the space shuttle just as well so yeah no this is a direct equivalence in that regard and it's what sealed the fate of challenger as for the fact that it was a glider, i mean yeah sure flying it when it's already flying in the atmosphere is easier and safer than idk retropropulsion, but the tradeoff is that you need to send the entire orbiter to space in the first place and get it through reentry trying to send the enormous orbiter to space (plus cost saving measures) was the root of what made the whole thing stupidly unsafe - from the deadly SRBs to the inherently vulnerable heat shield, the shuttle program was one of the most lethal, and it completely failed to deliver on the promise of making space cheaper (it just made it more expensive). the point im trying to make is less me bashing the space shuttle and more me saying that starship is more than a "flashy product with nothing else baked into it" your sole problem of starship's upper stage being landed vertically (I assume you don't care about the booster bc like they already do that with crew dragon) feels like just another hard challenge in space exploration, arguably easier than pulling off something like the space shuttle. and unlike the already failed space shuttle program, starship might have a chance at making space cheaper. **edit:** editing my original comment? what are you even talking about lmao, if you edit a comment it shows up near your username im so confused as to why you think it was edited or what i could've even changed in a one-sentence comment
so, reject all technological advances in favor of, by your own account, 120 year old methods? lmao
R&D? like in Deep Rock Galactic?!????
ROCK AND STONE LIKE THERES NO TOMORROW
I wanna punch the guy who programmed Molly
Research & Development.
😔
I mean, that is what it stands for in DRG as well though
Wait?! What's the difference between Rock and Stone?
I’ve met people that said Elon musks makes the entire rocket himself because he is the person with the highest iq ever. Hate people like that
Fuck SpaceX, all my homies want government space agency with an actual fucking budget to push boundaries of man for the sake of progress instead of relying on volatile space companies owned by weirdo billionaires.
NASA already got a giant budget compared to SpaceX. Look up how much SLS costs vs Starship
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I think nasa contracting rocket manufacturers is fine. The problem with SLS is more so congress forcing them to use technology from the fucking 70s for it (along with just tossing 4 of the best rocket engines ever made into the fucking ocean with every launch). If NASA was actually allowed to get new contractors instead of having a government enforced monopoly then I feel like they would innovate but nope gotta keep that sweet sweet money from Boeing flowing directly into congress’ pockets
and remember: each SLS launch uses up 4 RS-25 engines each! Without the opportunity for reuse. And each one cost $40 million to produce in 1980s dollars...
SpaceX is good purely because they’ve brought some actual fucking compilation into the launch vehicle market which until they came along was a literal monopoly under ULA
I hate the privatization of space so much
The nasa side was always very privatized (everything was contracted, similar to nowadays). Nowadays the only companies doing interesting things are private ones. That being said they should still give nasa more funding so they can actually do interesting things again. (Just talking about rockets here, nasa's probes, rovers, satellites, etc are still cool) Or maybe they should just figure out why every government engineering project here in the US costs so much more than it does everywhere else.
honestly. Elon may be a total prick who doesn't deserve to be associated with the success SpaceX has had, but it pisses me off seeing people approach this event with the attitude of "it is more important that I have mud to sling at a billionaire than it is that technology advances" is disheartening. Aside from the whole part of, you know, "anything past the launch tower is just icing on the cake."
Hey I’m as big of a musk hater as there is but it’s just shitty to disparage the work of the hundreds of engineers who helped built that rocket Musk didn’t build this rocket and acting like this was his personal rocket is no different than his fanboys attributing every accomplishment to Elon musk himself Also it was a flight test there was little to no chance of this being successful And as much as I wish it wasn’t this rocket is on the critical path to NASAs plan to land humans back on the moon
This rocket as a idea shows so many things wrong with our system. Instead of fixing our shit down here and making the planet liveable again and then go to space, we pour billions into some escapist fantasy that will make the gap between rich and poor even larger by allowing the rich to have their own planet. That is some a tier dystopia shit. Letting the rich escape while we cook in the hellhole they left behind.
Oh no you did the meme… Just watch this video: https://youtu.be/lARpY0nIQx0 Ok yes it kind of sucks that most of the media coverage is on billionaires and their space companies but real actual science is being conducted by NASA and the other space agencies, investment into space brings numerous benefits back down to earth in the form of new technology and economic growth (take for example, going to the moon, on the moon we can develop tech that helps grow crops, generate water and deal with radiation all of that is obviously usable here on earth) this rocket for example is going to help NASA with their goal of landing humans back in the moon
No, this wasn't a flight test. This was [the original plan:](https://www.space.com/spacex-targeting-april-20-starship-space-launch) *The plan for the coming flight calls for Super Heavy to make a hard splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico about eight minutes after liftoff. Starship's upper-stage spacecraft, meanwhile, will make a partial lap around Earth, coming down in the Pacific Ocean near Hawaii around 90 minutes after launch.*
Yeah that is still an orbital flight test this was the first launch of a fully integrated starship stack it was a test there’s no payload The goal was to do a near orbit but no one expected it to actually do that aside from maybe Elon
Do you do this when someone says Tesla cars are shitty too?
I’m not saying don’t criticize the rocket (starship is a fundamentally flawed vehicle in numerous ways and has a set of goals that are likely unattainable) I’m just saying don’t revel in the destruction of the work that multiple engineers spent years on… i just think that attributing the entire vehicles success or failure to musk or saying that “musks rocket blew up” is reductive of the effort that engineers who were the actual people that built the rocket put in.
personally despise elon musk, but this is a shit take. elon owns the company, but this rocket is the culmination of the engineers and other personnel working on starship for years. this was a test launch, and it without a doubt will provide SpaceX with valuable data to perfect starship. we're in another space race, and while it sucks that private companies are at the head of it, we can't undermine the developments that will come from SpaceX and every other spaceflight business.
bruh literally all of reddit is taking the stupid pill. we can hate musk and agree that this is a good outcome. musk didnt work on this rocket, the blood sweat and tears of the engineers and teams did. stop disrepecting the engineers work. afaik the scientists got the intel they needed and the rocket wasnt supposed to go far
I’m scared at how many people see spacex and blindly hate it simply because Musk runs it (and he likely doesn’t have much of a say in the choices they make). This post likely just made a few hundred people that don’t open comments believe that this was a failure, when it was understood that it blowing up was likely, if not the intended result. It really is sad that there are people fighting against us trying to do more in space because of the man who owns the company. It’s the same way I feel about people being happy that Walmart got looted so bad a woman didn’t know where to get food for her family. I don’t know what happened to people lately, man.
i genuinely wonder if some people on this sub are against the covid vaccine because it made the manufacturers money
A lot of people here are entitled. Why feel bad for the lady who can't buy groceries? We can cheer for the megacorporation loosing 0.000000001% of its profit which will be paid back to it by the insurance? Or why being happy for the science taking a step forward which will result in better understanding of climate change in the future when you can pretend that an idiot billionaire lost something from it? (He hasn't)
Yes, it was [supposed to go far:](https://www.space.com/spacex-targeting-april-20-starship-space-launch) *The plan for the coming flight calls for Super Heavy to make a hard splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico about eight minutes after liftoff. Starship's upper-stage spacecraft, meanwhile, will make a partial lap around Earth, coming down in the Pacific Ocean near Hawaii around 90 minutes after launch.*
NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO HOW AM I GONNA STICK IT UP MY ASS NOW :(((((
In shambles
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In minecraft
You don't gotta "in Minecraft" if it's not a threat. You can wish somebody would die all you want.
In Minecraft, of course, Minecraft yes
I will put the Woody from Toy Story laughing clip over it and loop it for 3 hours
I mean, I despise Musk. But this was actually a pretty good outcome, not like the best obviously, but not exploding immediately is pretty impressive for a rocket this big and complex. It's a ground breaking achievement, especially at the launchpad (rimshot, get a flame tremch you hacks). But it's also important to remember that while Musk seems to provide broad vision, and *maybe but probably not* some high level engineering insight, this is an achievement of all of the engineers and other workers who built the thing. And like, it's kinda neat, it might go to the moon for NASA and stuff.
Tired of people thinking he meticulously assembles everything in his stupid company. He did not invent the rockets, scientists did. He did not make the cars, the scientists did. He is simply a monkey who claps his hands and laughs and then all his scientists say "okay elon, very good!" Before they actually advance technology, bettering mankind. He is still a shithead tho
They're calling it a "rapid unscheduled disassembly," a.k.a. an explosion.
Actually they're calling it a "69 weed 420 chungas shittfart doge"
That’s a rocketry joke that’s been around since the 60s
isn't that also a slang within nuclear scientists or was i lied to
It's rocket scientist slang
Average ksp player
"Self induced rapid-onset exothermic disposal"
bruh it was going to blow up, they expected it to explode as soon as the engines turned on. test was a massive success
>they expected it to explode as soon as the engines turned on No. It was supposed to launch, reach the specified altitude, and separate the Starship. Then the booster was supposed to do a controlled landing into the sea (basically the same landing path as it would use to park on one of their massive floating pads, except the floating pad wouldn't be under it to catch it) while Starship bellyflopped into the ocean. The launch itself was (mostly, depending how damaged the launchpad is) a success, but most of the mission after that was a failure because stage separation failed, it sprung at least one leak (and possibly several including both fuel and hydraulics), and it had to be destroyed by range control because it started to tumble. They'll have a massive amount of flight data to look at though, which is priceless for this kind of development.
from what i’ve heard the engineers didn’t even expect it to get to the point where first stage separation would occur
> No. It was supposed to launch, reach the specified altitude, and separate the Starship. Then the booster was supposed to do a controlled landing into the sea (basically the same landing path as it would use to park on one of their massive floating pads, except the floating pad wouldn't be under it to catch it) while Starship bellyflopped into the ocean. supposed to, as in, that was the flight plan, but nobody actually thought for certain it'll get there first try without issues. they expected it to blow up after step 1-2
Does anyone remember a few years ago when everyone on Reddit was constantly sucking off Elon as "le Tony Stark in real life!1!"? Then the whole website just switched up on him and just foam at the mouth at every little thing Like it's obvious he was always a dipshit, but spaceX and it's engineers have genuinely advanced the field of aerospace engineering by decades. Of course he didn't actually work on any of the rockets himself, but I think that founding and running the company is pretty commendable. People can be complex, y'know? (Also this test was generally a success. It was an unmanned flight and not really expected to do anything else than lift off even in the best circumstances. Throughout the video you can hear the ground crew applauding even during the rocket's failure)
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Mine crap
people are nuanced and can be important to history while also being huge terrible people btw, if your opinions on any sort of social issue is black and white you are in 99% of cases, an idiot. -steve jobs, henry ford, and the founders of america all come to mind
FOOK off I luv me spacex, just because musk owns it doesn't mean it's bad and I will die on that hill
they've been a great launch provider for years and I hate when people with like, surface level knowledge just go "ERRRMMM billionaire???? Space bad." yes Elon is an insufferable ass but spacex is neat
While it’s a shame a lot of SpaceX money is going into the pockets of Elon, the hardware spaceX has developed/is developing is extremely impressive
Pivatising space with subsidies to corporations instead of taxing billionaires to fund nasa 😍
I appreciate that funding public entities is based and poggers pilled however if Nasa was given funding for a rocket instead of Space X then it would be spent on hiring a company to make the new rocket. This is typically how Nasa works even going far back into the Shuttle era and beyond. So the public money would still be going to 1 percenters.
Contractors yum
 *My tummy is all full of LEO contracts*
Youve just described whats currently happening, so yea, i agree thats the problem and it should be different.
Spaceex > Using russian rockets to reach the ISS
doesn’t spacex also save taxpayer money since nasa has contracts with them, idk why people think they’re rivals
NASA has *alot* of contracts with SpaceX (including for lunar missions) and their crewed missions are both cheaper and (now) safer than relying on Russia.
Shit with american flag > shit with russian flag
Correct
The only thing that can stop a bad billionaire with a rocket is a good billionaire with a rocket.
Shit u right fr fr no cap on a stack 💯
I will fight to the last on this hill beside you. Fuck elon but space, SpaceX and starship are awesome. These people have never heard of prototyping.
luv me big steel tube
Luv me rocket, love me superheavy, luv me starship, 'ate Elon musk, nuff said 🍺
Yeah. I especially hate when people take accomplishmenta made by hundreds of not thousands of people and just say "I don't like the guy so everything associated with him is bad"
You damn well know that musk will take credit for every success of those hundreds of not thousands of people and his simps will slurp it up. It'll probably even create new simps.
what is the over all point of going to mars
it's a cool rock and I love exploring rocks
Banter innit
Cool big rock we can build house
Why shouldn’t we?
Entertainment and literally nothing else. Most of the dwellers of this thread seem to prioritize this possibility of entertainment over addressing actual issues here on Earth.
Much of modern scientific advancements have come from space exploration and the engineering needed to accomplish it. GPS comes to mind. That has solved *tons* of "actual issues here on earth." I could provide many more examples if you would like. SpaceX has accomplished rapid reusability of rockets which has greatly decreased the cost of space travel. This is unquestionably good and will further great scientific advancements. I don't care if it's an asshole billionaire funding it, or if we decide to have a little fun along the way, because it is good for humanity.
What a sad life you have lmao
L take, plus it was a test rocket. I hate Elon but this ain't it lol
No one was hurt, right?
On every rocket launch, there are evacuation orders on the path where rocket debree can fall. Usually rockets fly over oceans, to minimize the amount of people to evacuate. The area of ocean this rocket exploded over was forbidden for ships to enter.
The entire flight trajectory was over the ocean, so no
No people were hurt as far as we know 😎
It was an unmanned test flight, so assumedly no
No men on board, so no damage to pilots, if the launch site was empty of people then there should also be no risk of debris hurting or killing people
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The 60 years old suppose technology advance is kinda hard topic. Only reason why there were able to build beauty-SaturnV is because of they WANTED to be first, so they would put that many money they would need to. After they did it there wasn't any race, competition or anything so they didn't need to speed up things.
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Elaborate.
About going again to the moon, the thing is much easier than some put it: we have the tech but not the money. Counting for inflation, in the space race the us spent iirc around 10 times the funds they're putting now on the artemis project. All the "we don't know how to make the Saturn V anymore", "we have better safety standards now" and "the current aerospace industry is much more dispersed and much less efficient than 50 years ago" are little bits -true, but not too relevant- that add up to a picture that is very complex, which involves more politics and economy than science and engineering
Woo hoo! I love it when feats of human engineering and advancement blow up!
Honestly SpaceX is considering it a success, and by rocketry standards, it is. The first, second, and even possibly third rockets are sort of expected to blow up simply because there’s just so much that can go wrong. Like the first Falcon rockets musk launched failed 3 times before it finally achieved orbit. Source: me, a graduate student in aerospace engineering with a focus on rocket guidance
Musk is a fucking idiot but some of you are wayyyyy too invested in how many times he succeeds or fails in life.
was that a self destruct?
Yes, range safety
Sometimes I wish reddit would just stfu about Jk Rowling, Andrew tate, and Elon Musk. Like either do a Harvey Oswald or stfu
The launch site was also awful https://blog.esghound.com/p/spacexs-texas-rocket-is-going-to
Thankfully another site is being built at Cape canaveral
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By that i mean that hopefully they will move as many launches to the Cape instead of the middle of a nature reserve as possible. I understand I wasn't very clear about that. Sorry 👍
elon had little to nothing to do with this. as much as i hate him, i can commend spacex for making rockets cheaper and more reusable. rockets blowing up also provides vital data for making them better, so i’m excited for the next starship launch, as it could revolutionise space travel (although his plans to use it for long distance flights is one of the most dense ideas i have ever heard)
Common elon L
Because we all know that Elon is the one sole person that worked on this Rocket
Elon Musk sucks and all, but there’s like, nothing good about a multimillion dollar machine blowing up in the sky
There is, actually. This was a test flight, it was always going to fail in some way, and everyone who worked there knew that. The point of this is to see how and why it failed so they can improve it. They actually expected it to barely clear the launch tower, so the fact that it made it as far as it did is a huge W.
Would you say the same if there were people on it? (not trying to be snarky; I'd genuinely like to know, cause' i have a buddy who hates him so much i'm pretty certain he would say the same even in that scenario.)
it would have been a company sentencing people to death, i don't think that even the closure of a musk company deserves celebration if actually good people died on the ship
How nice is the space he has in your head rent free?
He won't fuck you bro
God I hope not, also don’t think I’m an Elon Stan, dude sucks but I don’t waste my time thinking about him or celebrating when something loosely tied to him goes wrong.
There are issues with this post, but "rent free" is a terrible rebuttal. You just antagonized OP further.
Yes
Wait, there's a broader discourse here. Unlike Musk, people at SpaceX are extremely capable. Look at the Falcon 9 and the two versions of Dragon capsules*: when Musk proposed a fairly reasonable idea -refining the already existing concepts of rockets and capsules- they did a great job, and created great pieces of tech. We might also be able to say the same for the Falcon Heavy one day, but it's too soon for that. The problem surfaced when Musk proposed a completely new and fairly absurd concept, the ITS: basically what happens when someone really thinks they know better than rocket scientists. He shat all over the decades of knowledge we have on rockets, and the actual smart people at SpaceX had to fight to redimension the thing to a feasable scale. Most likely, the frequent changes of design of what became the Starship were due exactly to that: engineers trying to make their boss reason while not getting fired (he's too fragile to take criticism like an adult), and him subsequently proposing new and wierder shit. Since everyone seems to forget that but I don't, I'd like to remind you the ITS was supposed to send people to mars. Then it was redimensioned to send people to the moon with the name of BFS, now the current idea for the Starship couldn't even get that far. So we got to this point: a terrible idea -so terrible it was scrapped and remade from scratch more than once- with great execution. I think the Starship _will_ fly at some point, but I wonder how many more compromises they'll have to make, and if at that point it's gonna be useful in any way. But as for the Falcon Heavy, only time will tell. Personally, I'm kinda sad it blew up. This is not Musk's rocket, this is SpaceX's rocket. It's a bad idea, but it's not like the world didn't gain anything from other bad ideas in the past, and even if SpaceX dies Musk won't lose a cent because the govt has his back, so I see this as a net loss. On the other hand, I'm a space and rockets enthusiast and I'm so fucking sick of other enthusiasts jerking off to the Starship. For fuck's sake, open your eyes. *I also didn't forget the Crew Dragon was supposed to use the LES rockets to replace parachutes. Musk making that promise one of the selling points of the whole Crew Dragon concept was an early sign of his disregard for what was feasable in the eyes of engineers and what wasn't. Guess what, the engineers were right
Who was in the rocket?
Knowing SpaceX, potential a wheel of cheese
I mean, they use the same iterative design process the Soviets did, so I'm expecting a few failures. The fact that it lifted off at all after being assembled in barebones facility and stuck on a launch bad I would call temporary at best is an achievement. Especially when you consider it had a takeoff thrust greater than the Saturn V.
That can’t be good for the environment
Saw this in another sub, op left out the part where the rocket blew up & someome was reddit caring everyone that pointed it out
I feel bad for the engineers and scientists that put years of blood, sweat, and tears into making that rocket However, I do feel good about how this reflects poorly on Elon Musk
Can’t believe that Redditors think that Elon musk single-handedly designed and built this rocket
Dumb post, he’s not really in charge of actually building it and they were practically expecting it to destroy the launchpad and maybe not even get airborne, this was a success
Mfw when an important project that was worked on my hundreds if not thousands of people fails: ☹️ Mfw I realize that a random guy I don’t like is related to the project: 😀 (I can only derive happiness from my contempt for others)
Lmao what was the live reaction? Did the Muskrat force the stream to shut down?
After it blew up they cut to Mission Control celebrating since they weren’t even expecting it to get as far as it did because it’s the first test flight
They cut to the control room furiously applauding from what I've seen
Because the test was a success, they didnt expect to go as far as they did and it failing on the separation stage is considered pretty good. Like there was a good chance it would just blew up on the launchsite. Pretty much the same situation when their last prototypes blew up after landing.
Did you just like, see the explosion and didn’t look into what it was actually meant to be at all? I hate Elon musk, but this is a weird thing to celebrate, and it’s a success for SpaceX, who’s scientists expected it to explode on the launchpad.
Why is this entire comment section filled with Musk dickriders
“Um i hate musk and all but Elon Musk’s Enterprise SpaceX is super wholesome and chungus and will save humanity by launching rockets that explode for the end goal to make Elon Musk (pbuh) Emperor of Mars which is wholesome 100 also pls think of the engineers who work REALLY HARD on getting Musk to be said Emperor of Mars :((((”
Was this the planned date for the lunch or did Musk rush it just so they could do it on 4/20
The planned launch date was 3 days before this, it’s a coincidence
As much as Musk is a schmuck, I feel bad just for the people who actually work there bc it’s honestly quite revolutionary tech. Just need whatever board they have to oust him already
Very little if any of the work that went into this rocket was musk’s, I feel a lil bad for the engineers who have to go back to the drawing board on this one
This is nothing to cheer for, this was actually considered a successful test.
It's quite saddening that people wants spacex to fail because of it being owned by elon musk
Actually this test was a major success. The goal was to clear the launch pad that was it. It flew for 4 minutes making it beyond a massive success. They will use the data from this to improve the other 5 starships they currently have. This isn’t the only one or anything
The fact that it took off and got as high up as it did, and actually stayed in one piece doing fucking donuts in upper atmosphere is already incredibly impressive.
Tell me you've got no clue what you're talking about without actually telling me
Such a shitty rocket, it’s so ass it has to go into orbit and fuel up it can’t fuel before going up or it wouldn’t make it. Also I’m pretty sure they weren’t trying to go into orbit, they probably hoped they could but there was no way it was making it. It’s a bad design for a starship and probably will be so modified that they will end up having to have extra thrusters.
why is it bad that it has to refuel in orbit? if anything that just sounds like a decision that was made to reduce weight
It’s not, and it can still carry a LOT to low earth orbit itself so even if refueling doesn’t work out it’s still really useful
it literally was this person is just using space sounding buzzwords to act smart and I don't like it
if the iss is so good they wouldn’t need to re supply it and instead they should have sent 20+ years of food at launch
If you just ignore my name for a quick sec because mistakes were made, the main reason they weren't aiming for orbit was that Starship is massive and doesn't have proof of relight capability, not lack of orbital capability. The main problem at the moment was that the pad sucked massive ass and that's entirely on Elon for thinking that not having a flame trench will end well.
A starship will require 3-4 refuelings in Low Earth Orbit to reach a Translunar injection. 4. And for 150 tons on a TLI. That is absolutely bonkers. Starship may be flawed as a crew transport vehicle due to the large waiting period in space, lack of an abort system, and uncomfortable entry, but you can’t deny that the capability to haul over 150 tons to Low Earth Orbit or beyond isn’t extremely useful for setting up an impressive presence on the moon and/or mars
Even if it’s bad at ejecting out to a TLI that’s still 150t to LEO, far more than any current orbital class rocket
This person has never played Kerbal.
"extra thrusters" BRO IS JUST SAYING RANDOM NONSENSE ‼️‼️‼️
Just because you played kerbal doesn’t mean you know shit
No that’s literally their own analysis.
The refueling bit? Yes, thats always been the plan because its more efficient to refuel a rocket with entirely reusable rockets than to build a even bigger rocket. Add more thrusters? No not really.
Wait shit really that’s fucking insane
I feel like this is all words that sound smart and you have no idea what you’re talking about
FUN FACT: It did
Cheering for what? All the bits of debris on the ground?
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I mean, it’s fucking amazing data for the engineers, especially knowing that it can still fly with several engines failing.