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Starship's Twelfth Flight Test
- 7e 5mo agoWake me up for the launch of the v7 engines. SpaceX is like an incompetent AI agent, blundering their way to convergence, one painful launch at a time.
- pixl97 5mo agoThere is a 70% chance for storms in the area tomorrow so it's very likely going to be a scrub tomorrow.
- Recurecur 5mo agoAccuWeather 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!
- PyWoody 5mo agoThe percentage isn't the percent of it occurring but the area affected. So 51% of thunderstorms means 51% of that town/county/etc. will experience thunderstorms.
- robhlt 5mo agoThat's not how it works. Probability of precipitation means exactly what it sounds like: the probability that precipitation will fall in a specific forecast area. Here's the definition from the NWS: https://forecast.weather.gov/glossary.php?word=probability%20of%20precipitation https://forecast.weather.gov/glossary.php?word=probability%2...
- PyWoody 5mo agoInteresting. The way I explained it was how it was explained to me by a group of weather forecasters. For instance, here [0], is an explanation from a random weatherman that is in-line with how I was told. [0] https://www.ktvh.com/news/weather-wise/weather-wise-so-theres-a-chance https://www.ktvh.com/news/weather-wise/weather-wise-so-there...
- ericcumbee 5mo agothe real question is what is our probability of Launch Commit Criteria Violation at T-0. i've seen them be no go at t-10 with a 10% chance of go and watched it lift off on time.
- HerbManic 5mo agoPossible, 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."
- maccam94 5mo agoDang, they aren't catching the booster this time, but I guess V3 is practically a new vehicle and validating the next Starship launch is probably too critical to risk damage to the launch site for now.
- amarant 5mo agoOh 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?
- pixl97 5mo agoSuperheavy is 10x larger than the Falcon. Its thrust would sink the barge.
- robocat 5mo agoYeah. Rocket first stage Approx. unfueled mass: Super Heavy: 200000 to 280000 kg Falcon 9 first stage (without Falcon Heavy side boosters): 25600 kg
- jjk166 5mo agoSo 200-280 tons. A standard barge can support 1500-3000 tons of cargo. Even with the added weight of a catch tower and a healthy factor of safety thrust isn't gonna sink the barge. Far more likely the major hurdle would be stability issues with how tall it is.
- pixl97 5mo agoIt's not 280 tons... it's a falling object with kinetic energy so that rocket thrust is going to be very problematic for that boat especially if it' hitting unevenly. That and there's no way for it to stand without a catch tower.
- cooper_ganglia 5mo agoThese are always exciting, even if it's more of the same. I love that we live in a time where we can regularly watch huge rockets launch into space with intentional issues just to see what might go wrong and how best to monitor/solve them. Congratulations, everyone, at being alive at the best point in human history so far!
- olliepro 5mo agoWith super high res onboard camera footage too.
- valine 5mo ago> The two modified satellites will test hardware planned for Starlink V3 and will attempt to scan Starship’s heat shield and transmit imagery down to operators to test methods of analyzing Starship’s heat shield readiness for return to launch site on future missions Hope we get to see those images. Would be awesome to see a 3rd person view of starship in space.
- Nevermark 5mo agoI am watching Elon give a long speech about the launch, scarily delivered at high speed, without pause. Including a Bitcoin marathon promotional informercial complete with an on-screen scan code. "That QR code is your boarding pass." He just repeated several paragraphs verbatim from a few minutes ago. He occasionally mentions the aspirational 100x reduction in launch costs. AI slop. Yuck, Youtube. Surely Google could have AI moderators catching this crap.
- sfjailbird 5mo agoThat'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.
- ericcumbee 5mo agothe scammers steal channels, rename them and run those until google shuts them down. which they typically do but its swatting flies.
- Pedro_Ribeiro 5mo agoYou know Google owns a big part of SpaceX right?
- jiggawatts 5mo agoIt 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.
- sfjailbird 5mo agoThis is the first flight of the new engines. They look so much sleeker and simpler than the previous two generations: https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcQGMtnPjtG8DUA5B2Do-Tzpb0Kp06Uzo5G9xgXLkS6sjsgxBZiXNoCUg4kJ&s=10 https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcQGMtnP... * And supposedly with a 20% power increase to boot!
- chasd00 5mo agoThe stats are pretty out there. Iirc just the fuel pump, which you can probably pick up and put on your desk, generates 100k HP.
- jvanderbot 5mo agoWell, it's powered by bleeding exhaust from a very big rocket.
- TomatoCo 5mo agoOne of my favorite clips to give a sense of scale for rockets is this one. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=70u748VALt4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=70u748VALt4 I show someone and then I tell them, that's not the rocket exhaust. That's the exhaust for the engine that runs the fuel pump for the rocket.
- ethbr1 5mo agoTo me the coolest thing about rocket engines from an engineering perspective is the tyranny of efficiency that the physics mandate. Because weight is so critical, there's no luxury of "another component". If something can be repurposed, it is! And the power opportunities afforded by continually dumping that much fuel through are mind boggling. Even regenerative cooling with combustive fuel blows my mind.
- jasonwatkinspdx 5mo agoNope, Raptor is full flow staged combustion, so both the fuel and oxidizer have dedicated preburners and turbopumps each.
- chasd00 5mo agoReally looking forward to seeing raptor 3 fly. Those engines are insane.
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- dayyan 5mo agoEveryday Astronaut has posted a video on this launch https://x.com/Erdayastronaut/status/2057163096817332576?s=20 https://x.com/Erdayastronaut/status/2057163096817332576?s=20
- Diederich 5mo agoI'm watching it now: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y_ecCDqTSJs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y_ecCDqTSJs As always, Tim is doing a fantastic job.
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- purpleidea 5mo agoI don't know why they aren't doing more booster catches. Kind of a bit disappointed they keep skipping. Either they can land them or they can't. If it's not consistent then they're avoiding the possible failure so their stock price (launching soon) stays up, otherwise just prove it's solid and actually works.
- GMoromisato 5mo agoV3 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.
- ggreer 5mo agoThey 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.
- pixl97 5mo ago>Either they can land them or they lose a billion dollars and 9 months when they crash the tower.
- everyone 5mo ago[flagged]
- everyone 5mo ago[flagged]
- GMoromisato 5mo agoThere is a lot riding on V3. SpaceX cannot afford to take too many launches to get V3 solid. If 2026 is another 2025 (3 V2 failures in a row followed by 2 V3 successes), then they can forget about landing on the moon before 2030. My hope is that Flight 12 goes nearly flawlessly (at least gets to soft splashdown) and they can start testing in-space refueling in July/August. If they can demonstrate in-space refueling by the end of 2026, then they have a shot at a lunar-landing demo in 2027 and a crewed-landing in 2028. But a lot has to go right for that to happen. Here's hoping it does.
- everyone 5mo ago[flagged]
- rpmisms 5mo agoHave you met hardware guys? This is not how they operate, in my experience.
- everyone 5mo agoI mean I might be a hardware guy myself depending on your definition. I've never dealt with rocket engineers.. Are they "hardware guys" according to you? If so it seems you are using that term incredibly broadly.
- malfist 5mo agoAre you trying to say that "hardware guys" don't care if they're working to advance the agenda from a Nazi?
- saalweachter 5mo agoI mean, rocket guys have a long history of not minding advancing the agenda of a Nazi.
- rpmisms 5mo agoHistorically, that has been true about rockets.
- lysace 5mo agoThey have really invested focus in creating mass market content lately - like, actually having someone spend some time creating the text on this page. Didn't really see that earlier. And a number of long form videos (like "Test Like You Fly"). IPO time: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cg4pe2953q1o https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cg4pe2953q1o and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48213933 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48213933 (in the last few hours)
- ericcumbee 5mo agothey Typically put out a hype video before each flight at least the last several.
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- gcanyon 5mo agoSergei Korolev's ghost is looking at those 33 raptor engines and crying.
- philistine 5mo agoBecause his ideas for the N1 were not good. The engine was designed to fire once, so they couldn’t test every engine. They tested samples in batches, to the terrible results of the N1 rocket. Every engine at SpaceX is thoroughly vetted.
- gcanyon 5mo agoKorolev built the N1 in a cave, with a box of scraps. In the '60s.
- staplung 5mo agoI wonder what's holding them back from attempting to land...on land (as opposed to another splashdown in the ocean). They must have their reasons but there have got to be engineers dying to get their hands on a returned vehicle to see exactly how the tiles held up and if there's any other damage that doesn't show up so easily on the video feed.
- iknowstuff 5mo agoNo legs. Gotta verify the vehicle can land with the precision necessary for a tower catch
- mattas 5mo agoWill be interesting to see how the market reacts in real-time to flight tests going forward post-IPO. Usually big events (either good or bad) are announced pre- or post-market but launch windows don't care about market hours.
- isaisabella 5mo ago[dead]
- stinkbeetle 5mo agoThe new rocket engines mounted up to the first stage look like this: https://cdn.xcancel.com/pic/orig/B4150BF393BC9/media%2FHIyEIfsXYAAfaYM.jpg https://cdn.xcancel.com/pic/orig/B4150BF393BC9/media%2FHIyEI... What is incredible is that rocket engines traditionally looked like this: https://www.l3harris.com/sites/default/files/styles/896_x_506_2x/public/2024-07/l3harris-ar-rs-25-engine-testing-video-thumbnail.jpg https://www.l3harris.com/sites/default/files/styles/896_x_50... https://i.ytimg.com/vi/SXEOVufxOyY/sddefault.jpg https://i.ytimg.com/vi/SXEOVufxOyY/sddefault.jpg These new Space X engines look so minimalist that the CEO of another orbital rocket company mistook them for being incomplete. This is despite them being the most technologically advanced rocket engines ever made. It's probably not that other companies necessarily would be incapable of doing similar (previous iterations of this same Space X engine architecture looked similar to the "traditional" engine category). But I think the cost structure for other rocket engines never supported a significant push to optimize for manufacturing and unit costs, hard tooling, cost optimization, etc.
- cogogo 5mo agoJarring to see the Gulf of America in print.
- metalman 5mo agoThere is a rather large storm over south Texas, so not likely to launch today unless it blows through quickly https://weather.ndc.nasa.gov/goes/abi/goesEastfullDiskband13.html https://weather.ndc.nasa.gov/goes/abi/goesEastfullDiskband13...
- everyone 5mo agoI am a big space and tech fan, I have a crazy amount of hours in KSP and realism overhaul. I used to follow starship very closely, finally a rocket that's actually better than Saturn 5! But I cant separate space-x from elon. He is, for want of a better word, evil; supporting trump, supporting extreme right party in Germany, DOGE illegally and irresponsibly causing chaos, flouting the law at every turn. He is a tech-fascist. If we want democracy and egality its imperative that people like him are stopped. I want everything elon does to fail more than I want starship to succeed. It's fine, the rocket tech genie is out of the bottle now, someone else will make a good rocket.