Starship & Superheavy Become The Biggest Rocket In Space.... Before Exploding
Starship & Superheavy Become The Biggest Rocket In Space.... Before Exploding
I don’t think that this has been posted yet, but if not here’s the summary.
https://youtu.be/O3F8aTBLLx0?si=GPVB2xtC5wwnSC6V
Just the highlights.
Next time it will do a full orbit! This flight was good progress
It was definitely impressive to see a single shock dimond the size of the entire booster. Didn’t blow up the launch pad either so they should be able to try again sooner to.
Seeing the pad improvements in action and all the 1st stage engines working through stage sep was such a relief. Hot staging working and the 2nd stage getting a mostly (?) successful burn was a great next step.
Hopefully we're only a couple months away from IFT-3!
I feel like these "fully reusable" starships would be more reusable if they exploded less often...
Their methodology is different from other space companies. Rather than making it perfect the first time, they make gradual improvements, testing in between to see if it works. The explosions are, well, not intended, but a byproduct of this method.
I am aware. But it still seems a little dishonest to claim at this stage that the rockets are "fully reusable", when explosions are not only highly likely, but an inherent part of the process. The end product is going to have to be reused a lot to balance out how wasteful the development process is.
I kind of suspect that Musk just thinks explosions are cool, and is using this "we'll slap something together and see how far it gets into the process before it explodes" approach as an excuse to have lots of explosions. Spaceships that work as intended and don't explode are too boring for someone with the emotional depth of a 13 year old edgelord.