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Starship's eleventh flight test
- peddling-brink 1y ago> The eleventh flight test of Starship is preparing to launch as soon as Monday, October 13. The launch window will open at 6:15 p.m. CT.
- rapsey 1y agoVery nice of them to have automatic time conversion to my local time when visiting the page. Something practically no one bothers to do. Alas it is in the middle of the night for us europeans.
- ta1243 1y agoI'm in Thailand, my Laptop is in Singapore time, my DNS is routed via a UK provider but my IP via Thailand. It tells me > October 14, 2025 00:15 - 01:30 United Kingdom Time
- 4pkjai 1y agoIs this something you think they can or should fix?
- floating-io 1y agoBeen a while since I've looked at available APIs, but can't the browser handle conversions into its own local system TZ? If it's going by IP geolocation, I would call that a bug.
- jaggederest 1y agoit's way easier too. Just parse an ISO UTC date string into a javascript date object and it'll correctly display the local time, no conversion needed.
- johncoltrane 1y agoBrowsers can handle conversions just fine but they need some context. If that context is somehow tampered with, then the results might be weird. In this case, SpaceX seems to be using UNIX timestamps(1) which is probably fed to a combination of Date and Intl to obtain a localized date string. Extrapolating the country where the user is located is not really rocket science either. But, if my context is somehow tampered with (VPN, internal clock, browser settings…), then I will get a potentially "wrong" date, for whatever definition of "wrong". The problem is fundamentally the same on the server side because you can only rely on the information you get… which might be wrong. So either you take the safest route, which is to display the local time of the organization or its UTC representation and let visitors figure out their local date on their own, or you take a somewhat riskier one, which is to try to display a localized date to your users and accept the potential flaws of the method. [1] https://sxcontent9668.azureedge.us/cms-assets/future_missions.json https://sxcontent9668.azureedge.us/cms-assets/future_mission...
- stonogo 1y agoYes, by setting the datetime attribute (in UTC) on a time element, then on the client side pulling that into a Date object and calling toLocaleString().
- swiftcoder 1y agoAbsolutely. If they sent UTC over the wire and handled it client-side, it would just work (your browser tends to know its own timezone)
- OtherShrezzing 1y ago>Very nice of them to have automatic time conversion to my local time when visiting the page. F1 finally has a really nice system for showing time[0]. They show both the local time at the circuit and the local time wherever the user is. For years they showed only the track time, without even a hint about the timezone the track was in. [0] https://www.formula1.com/en/racing/2025 https://www.formula1.com/en/racing/2025
- ipnon 1y agoIf there were a prediction market for which Mars transit window will see a crewed Mars mission, my money would be on 2033. In Musk chronology that's next week.
- Animats 1y agoA crewed flight by 2033 might be possible if it's one-way.
- nine_k 1y agoIt can't be anything else. The return ship should arrive separately with a minimal crew and with nearly full tanks. The first crew should spend some time on Mars on their own, inside the Starship, and maybe in buildings it erects, or tunnels it digs.
- alex_young 1y agoDefinitely the tunnels. Buildings would need to be made out of lead or something. No windows.
- mulmen 1y agoSurely the return ship would already be there before humans arrive?
- ben_w 1y agoAlthough the rockets are developing fast enough, I've seen zero work on ISRU needed for returns; and politically, with two presidential elections due by then, the US now has a dichotomy between leadership who hate Musk and who will also destroy the US economy and might start wars with allies, and potential leadership that just hates Musk, a fork which is a fantastic way for even the world's richest man to find himself banned from working on rockets.
- kiba 1y agoGet rid of Musk and keep the rest of the leadership intact.
- victorantos 1y agoBy the way I’ve vibe coded a countdown page for it on my blog https://victorantos.com/posts/spacex-countdown/ https://victorantos.com/posts/spacex-countdown/ 9 days left I might need to update the exact time for it
- the_real_cher 1y agoWhats the tine frame for starship to be working?
- Veedrac 1y agoNobody knows. Flight 11 is the last of the 'Block 2' Starships, so not 11, but potentially Flight 12 could be a successful derisking mission of Block 3, and then Flight 13 would be first full operational mission. Actual full reuse could follow soon after that. The optimistic case is that they've demonstrated everything they need to except for having a fully reliable heat shield, but they also seem to have a workable plan for the heat shield for literally the first time in the program's history. The pessimistic case is that Block 2 was rough, and making mistakes doesn't prevent an organization from making more mistakes. If things continue to go wrong, it could be arbitrarily far out. Wikipedia has a compilation of what's on the agenda: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Starship_launches#Future_launches https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Starship_launches#Futu...
- the_real_cher 1y agoThank you for the information!
- josefx 1y agoI think it should have landed on the moon one or two years ago? NASA keeps moving its target dates for the Artemis missions every time SpaceX fails to deliver.
- ben_w 1y agoDespite Musk's over-optimistic timelines (everywhere not just SpaceX), SpaceX is not the limiting factor for Artemis just because several other critical suppliers (SLS) are even further behind schedule and over budget. Given their sizes and capabilities, the entire Lunar Gateway space station could be deleted and leave only the lunar-variant Starship upper stage it's supposed to dock with in the same orbit for the crew launch vehicle from Earth to dock to directly instead.
- rocqua 1y agoI'm saddend by how little I care. I used to follow this quite intensely, and wished space-X the best. But with the owners antics, I just can't get myself to care that much. At the very least, that is sad for all the hardworking people at space-X.
- swazzy 1y agoseems like it is mostly sad for you
- otcalex 1y agoI think the sentiment is more widespread than you think. SpaceX has always succeeded despite Elon’s clown work. I for one would be absolutely humiliated to work for someone like him.
- TMWNN 1y ago[flagged]
- otcalex 1y agoI hope he sees this bro
- elaus 1y ago> (Hint: Musk was right and his engineers were wrong. Both times.) This is a really useless statistic. How many times was Musk wrong and his engineers were right? We don't know, we only have those two hand-picked examples from a less than neutral source.
- ben_w 1y agoNot even an overall error rate is helpful: it's fine to make a huge number of incorrect guesses when your goal is R&D and the payoff from the few correct guesses covers the expense of the incorrect ones. For example, engineers also warned the launch pad wasn't suitable for the first test flight, those enineers were correct, it didn't matter as much as it would have for e.g. a Saturn V or a Space Shuttle launch because Starship was (and still is) a test flight of a shockingly cheap unmanned vehicle. That said, if the people currently raising alarm over Kessler cascade risks are correct, that would be an example of something essentially unsurvivable for Starlink and similar constellations. Musk gambles when he thinks the expected return is positive; you can do that while winning hardly any bets, let alone loosing hardly any. What you have to avoid fooling yourself over are the odds, the costs, and the rewards, and I do think Musk is fooling himself about political costs if nothing else.
- contrarian1234 1y agoThe development timeline has been so strange. Falcon 9 was made so quickly compared to Starship. I would have expected a working rocket would have been quick - especially given they have a wealth of experience making the first one. And then I would have expected a protracted period of nailing down the landing and reuse And yet.. just getting this thing to orbit has been seemingly as hard as catching it coming down Does anyone in the know have a good assessment of what's up? Did they just take bigger risks making the Falcon 9? Is the workforce burnt out? From the descriptions and how they speak, they don't seem interested in getting to orbit unless it's reusable. But it seems like a giant non-reusable rocket would already be a huge win. It's at least shut down the ridiculous SLS program and freeup a bunch of funding
- dgrin91 1y agoWas the falcon 9 that much faster? They also had issues with the initial launches of falcon 1 and 9. Plus they did not start with reusable rockets like they are here - it took years and many landing failures to get there. And of course the scale is a totally separate ballpark - falcon was in a scale that was well known, starship is in a scale rarely worked with. Probably the closest comparable rocket to starship would be the N1, and that never successfully flew
- contrarian1234 1y agoAccording to Wiki Falcon 9 was announced in 2005 First launch in 2010 By the third flight they were delivering to the ISS Starship .. it's a bit unclear when they started designing it b/c they kept changing the design. But It's been in design for ~10 years. > As of August 26, 2025, Starship has launched 10 times, with 5 successful flights and 5 failures. 10 launches.. and not even in orbit. Not to speak of ISS. I'm sure they'll make it work eventually, but I would expect with experience the design time would decrease, not increase. Starting from zero, making the first rocket engine has got to be much much harder than making an improved iteration (even if more complex)
- kiba 1y agoI am not even a rocket scientist but I heard starship was described as a ridiculously hard and super ambitious program. So it's not unexpected that it would take a while for the program to mature. Falcon 9 was SpaceX's second rocket, but it also underwent several major changes before it becomes the workhorse that launches more than the rest of the world combined. Again, I have no idea what the difficulties actually entails.
- stratosgear 1y agoStopped reading at: "... Gulf of America..."
- socrateswasone 1y agoWho cares? We already know what's in space and there's nothing for us there.
- jaybrendansmith 1y agoI'm optimistic. But they have yet to show the ship can suffer a re-entry without losing part of the front flap. This is a deal-breaker, unless they expect to replace those flaps with every flight.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- ACCount37 1y agoThat's the furthest thing from a "deal-breaker". Flap damage is an inconvenience at best. Keep in mind: they're yet to reuse a ship, and landing Starship onto the launch tower is even more precarious than their first stage landing trick. There's still a lot of room for actual fuckups to happen there. They're going to lose ships, and they'll be lucky to avoid losing a tower.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]