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SpaceX launches Starship v3 rocket

• nxy 5mo ago
  Hexagon heat shield tiles show promise - I think.
• Aboutplants 5mo ago
  It lifts off so rapidly, it’s truly incredible
  • dylan604 5mo ago
    “Like a rocket” is a phrase for a reason
    • itishappy 5mo ago
      Eh, they've left some performance on the table: > Sprint accelerated at 100 g, reaching a speed of Mach 10 (12,000 km/h; 7,600 mph) in 5 seconds. Such a high velocity at relatively low altitudes created skin temperatures up to 6,200 °F (3,400 °C), requiring an ablative shield to dissipate the heat. The high temperature caused a plasma to form around the missile, requiring extremely powerful radio signals to reach it for guidance. The missile glowed bright white as it flew. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sprint_(missile) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sprint_(missile) Maybe v4.
      • dylan604 5mo ago
        I’m really struggling to find a point to this comment
        • LargoLasskhyfv 5mo ago
          Because you are speechless? Such accelleration! Much wow!
        • itishappy 5mo ago
          It's a joke. An excuse to share one of my favorite rockets. A rocket that happens to uniquely support your point.
          • mh- 5mo ago
            I chuckled and appreciated the anecdote, having not read about this rocket before. Thanks.
      • dredmorbius 5mo ago
        Then there's HIBEX, which hit 400g acceleration. (Via a Wikipedia rabbit-hole thanks to your comment.) <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hardpoint_(missile_defense) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hardpoint_(missile_defense)>
• tectonic 5mo ago
  Seeing both the Starlink mass simulators deploy and the camera view from the last simulators looking back at Starship was really cool.
• NitpickLawyer 5mo ago
  Oh man, so glad I stayed up to watch it. Kind of a rough start (but it's the 1st flight w/ new redesign, new engines, etc), had an engine out on both booster and ship, but the views were absolutely worth it. They managed to get the last satellite to connect to starlink and download the footage of the ship in orbit. Even with an engine out, the ship managed to reach orbit, deploy all the satellites, re-enter, flip and soft splash into the ocean, near a buoy! And on top of that we got the drone views of the landing. Fucking spectacular views.
  • Geee 5mo ago
    I'm guessing / hoping that the engine outs we're planned, or that they ran the engines with slightly different parameters to test them. If it's just unreliability then it might be a hard problem to solve.
    • Octoth0rpe 5mo ago
      > If it's just unreliability then it might be a hard problem to solve. It might, but it certainly helps having a ton of them around. Given that they used 42 of them today and 2 failed in some fashion, we'll call that a 1:21 failure rate. On a more typical rocket with say 10 engines (eg falcon 9), there's a good chance they wouldn't have seen the same failure till flight 3.
      • deleted 5mo ago
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      • brianwawok 5mo ago
        It’s something like up to 6 can fail and it keeps going, seems pretty good. I know they did some stuff like remove a heat tile to get failure feedback, wonder if engine was planned or accidental
        • NetMageSCW 5mo ago
          Accidental since they didn’t make the sub-orbit they were aiming for and thus couldn’t test engine re-light.
• generuso 5mo ago
  The views from Ship's engine bay looked rather ominous -- with the red glow visible in multiple places, and something venting furiously from the broken engine. It was a pleasant surprise that the ship did not explode and not only that, but it even landed exactly on target. Guidance system software engineers have done a very good job! The booster not completing the return part of the flight was disappointing. They had a similar incident in one of the previous flights, when they tried to maneuver the booster too aggressively immediately after stage separation which caused problems with the fuel supply. If it was something similar this time, it might be solvable by changing just a few details of the maneuver. So, maybe it is not that huge of a deal. There were many cool things in the webcast, from them showing the catamarans that are deployed at the landing site, to the views form the cameras on-board of the "satellites". The first few minutes after liftoff were just amazing visually.
  • dylan604 5mo ago
    Hopefully NASA ups their game for Artemis III
    • bakies 5mo ago
      Well it was supposed to be a moon landing, but SpaceX didn't get their stuff developed. Artemis II flew by the moon btw, I think that's more impressive than SpaceX crashing a bunch of suborbital flights into the ocean while behind schedule.
      • dylan604 5mo ago
        My comment was about the video coverage. Artemis II's coverage for the launch was especially lame. The solitary gopro on the side of the capsule had some cool footage but was just a single camera. The actual mission was not in doubt
  • stefan_lec 5mo ago
    Yeah, the new raptors and engine bay redesign for version 3 of ship seem a lot more robust than version 2, very impressed that the ship finished its mission so well. Scott Manley goes into quite a bit of detail on analyzing superheavy’s failed boostback, it’s a good watch: https://youtu.be/2kxanBYTAaY https://youtu.be/2kxanBYTAaY TL;DR - seems like the hot staging kicked the booster out in the wrong direction, and the ship’s plume impacted one of the grid fins, which would’ve given it quite a big kick. The sloshing just from that could easily have caused the observed issues.
• lysace 5mo ago
  Cool splashdown. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CiWX1nsvqBs&t=173s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CiWX1nsvqBs&t=173s
  • SV_BubbleTime 5mo ago
    So crazy that the NBC video didn’t include that! It’s still not as bad as NASA skipping the good view of the live separation.
    • maxlin 5mo ago
      Better to always watch from the official source, the only one that is in 4k too AFAIK https://x.com/SpaceX/status/2057843818859209147 https://x.com/SpaceX/status/2057843818859209147
      • sysworld 5mo ago
        Thank you!! I started watching on NBC and there video quality is potato.
• Laremere 5mo ago
  Summary from my watch: - Launch roughly on time, after a scrub yesterday. (Sounds like the scrub was due to ground equipment, most notably the water system.) - Initial ascent was good, but then one engine on the booster went out. - Relight of the booster's engines after stage separation for the boost back burn failed. Engines did light again for a landing burn, but seems to have hit the water harder than expected and was very off target. - Starship lost one engine shortly after stage sep. Turned into an unintentional test of engine out capability. It made it to space. - Some weird motion and lots of off-gassing after engine cut-off, with uncertainty about if it actually got a good orbital(ish) insertion. Seems to have been benign, with the motion being a weird slow flip to the orientation for payload deployment. - Test deployment of dummy payloads was successful, including a couple with cameras to look back at Starship. - An in space engine relight test was skipped, presumably due to the issues during launch. - Re-entry to over the Indian Ocean seemed to go really well. Nothing obviously burning or falling off. The amazing views of the plasma during re-entry, something never seen live before starship, are now routine. - Starship did a maneuver to simulate how they'll have to go out over the gulf and back to the landing site. - Nailed the target, evidenced by views from drones and buoys. Soft landing before falling over and giving us a big (expected) boom. As far as overall progress from previous test flights goes, they're at least treading water while making many large changes. I think they were hoping to try for a tower catch and actually going orbital for next flight, but I highly doubt that now. The boostback burn failing was the largest failure, with the engine failure on Starship being a close second. Good performance despite engine out seems to be an unintentional success.
  • TechPlasma 5mo ago
    I think the ship really punted the booster during stage separation. And caused the boost back failure from sloshing. Also I think Ship now has methane thrusters on it. They were operating with a clean blue flame in short purposeful bursts.
    • generuso 5mo ago
      If we look at the venting from the propellant tank (around T+16:15) it looks thick white closer to the vent, becoming more transparent and blue as it expands. That's just sunlight scattering on the particles and density fluctuations in the flow. A good cold gas thruster produces a lower density, more expanded flow, which looks blue for the same the reason the sky looks blue. One can compare this to the exhaust from various Falcon-9 engines and thrusters when it is illuminated by the sun on the backdrop of the night sky: https://youtu.be/JRzZl_nq6fk?t=193 https://youtu.be/JRzZl_nq6fk?t=193
• maxlin 5mo ago
  Having a faultless payload deploy and a pinpoint landing after losing a whole vacuum engine (one of 3) so early was an unexpectedly amazing performance. I suppose they gimballed the inner non-vac engines to the max and burned longer, next level adaptability. Most obvious improvement was having no re-entry heating problems, secondmost was deploying with zero issues and with a faster pace. It appears they decided to pause the "horizontal" movement of the pez dispenser before a final push away, probably to avoid vibration causing those "bonks" on the payload door, like we had once before.
  • chasd00 5mo ago
    Starship moved around so much there were a couple times I thought for sure it was out of control. Oh and takeoff looked very late but I’m sure I’m wrong. Heh I was watching the deluge turned on with no ignition thinking the whole things is about to hard start and explode.
• crummy 5mo ago
  Some footage: https://youtu.be/CiWX1nsvqBs?si=lE5autC2y2b8ez2X https://youtu.be/CiWX1nsvqBs?si=lE5autC2y2b8ez2X At a minute in you can see the satellites being ejected out one by one.
• xt00 5mo ago
  The amount of data they must have at this point running so many of those raptor engines has got to be insane... at least 300+ engine launches now -- wow.
  • sbuttgereit 5mo ago
    Sort of... this was version 3 of the engine, a fairly big redesign and for version 3 this was the first flight.
  • generuso 5mo ago
    Five years ago SpaceX reported that they had 30000 seconds of test firing time on the Raptor, over 567 engine starts. Since them the program accelerated dramatically. Well over one thousand engines had been produced, and on an average day at McGregor test facility the Raptors are fired for about 600 seconds. That would give about a million seconds over five years. That's a lot for any engine development program.
    • MPSimmons 5mo ago
      Consider for a moment the data requirements for the telemetry system that records those engine runs.
      • mh- 5mo ago
        If there's any public info about this I'd love to read it.
        • generuso 5mo ago
          Both SpaceX and NASA use LabView. NASA has a relatively detailed description of the engine test stands at Stannis: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=NASA+Data+Acquisition+System+Software+Development https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=NASA+Data+Acquisition+S... https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Design+of+Electrical+Systems+for+Rocket+Propulsion+Test https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Design+of+Electrical+Sy... A typical test stand would have maybe a thousand channels of relatively slow data (pressures, temperatures, flow rates, valve states, etc), and maybe up to a few hundred of channels for essentially audio data from vibration sensors. This amounts to sub-gigabit per second data rate overall. If very high speed video / multiple video cameras are used, this could generate massive data rates, but unless something interesting happens it is not clear how important this data is. In flight, the telemetry data rate from the entire Falcon-9 used to be measured in megabits per second per stage, plus the video stream. It was not a huge amount of data. Presumably now with Starlink they send a lot more telemetry from Starship, but in flight the engines typically have far, far fewer sensors compared to the ground testing.
• maxlin 5mo ago
  I wonder if the hot separation was supposed to be that hot. Going at mach 5 and doing a quick U turn while there was some weird orange color on the side of the Super Heavy, then (possibly?) losing most engines from it seemed extra chaotic
  • pixl97 5mo ago
    They had a similar issue with the v2 booster the first time, flipped it so hard it damaged the downcomer and they had to change it up a bit. Seems likely here, that thing thats as big as a building flipped ends pretty quick and is partially filled with liquid.
  • NetMageSCW 5mo ago
    The side of Super Heavy was reflecting light from Ship’s engines.
• MBCook 5mo ago
  I don’t keep up with them. What’s different compared to v2?
  • SJMG 5mo ago
    Quite a bit has changed. Here's the highlights: https://www.spacex.com/updates#starship-v3 https://www.spacex.com/updates#starship-v3
  • fsmv 5mo ago
    Now the flaps don't melt! The tiles don't fall off! It's a major overhaul of the design they've been working on for a long time. There was talk of v3 fixing the problems in early v2 test flights. The booster is v3 as well which presumably is why they had some problems. I believe this is also the first time they flew the v3 engines with the plumbing fully integrated in a single piece housing they 3D printed.
  • stefan_lec 5mo ago
    Biggest things changed are the plumbing inside the booster (much beefier, now supports starting all engines at once), and a new version of the engines, raptor v3 (more robust, and saves about 1 ton of mass per engine). Cool image comparing the three versions of the engine. In addition to making the engine itself a bit lighter, moving all that stuff to the inside of the engine let them eliminate a whole bunch of heavy shielding in the engine bay. https://ibb.co/pr0gx688 https://ibb.co/pr0gx688
• allenrb 5mo ago
  Big takeaway for me is that the reentry and “landing” of Ship looked great. For the first time, it felt like they’re really on the path to achieving upper stage reuse. That was always the biggest “reach” of the entire program in my view, and today they took a major step forward. Is it disappointing that they had a couple of engine outs, and also trouble with the booster relight? Sure. Do I have even a little doubt by now that they can fix these problems? None whatsoever. The success of Ship 39 today was a big, big deal.
• solenoid0937 5mo ago
  This is amazing.
• LorenDB 5mo ago
  My favorite part of this launch that others haven't already mentioned: during reentry, the dummy payload satellites were visible burning up behind the ship!
  • juancampa 5mo ago
    Glad you mentioned this. I was puzzled by the starry looking background during reentry
  • maxlin 5mo ago
    Curious! Got a timecode?
    • AviationAtom 5mo ago
      I do believe it appears at 35:00 into flight
    • LorenDB 5mo ago
      Check around T+50:00
• randallsquared 5mo ago
  The best part of this flight was seeing the full reentry with no visible hot spots or burn through like we've seen on every previous reentry of Starship. Seems like they have the heat shields really nailed.
  • modeless 5mo ago
    Yes, reuse of the heat shield has been the biggest question mark of the whole program and this is by far the best result of any launch so far. This is the first time it looks plausible that you could consider reusing the heat shield.
    • db48x 5mo ago
      Keep in mind that all the prior flights had deliberately missing tiles specifically to test how bad the damage would be. This one had no missing tiles so it should have essentially no damage to the hull.
      • modeless 5mo ago
        I think the worst damage on previous flights was often not related to the missing tiles.
        • syncsynchalt 5mo ago
          I think it was due to voids in the hinge area causing localized plasma impingement and heating. The v3 design has a more continuous shape around the hinges.
          • db48x 5mo ago
            Right. I’d have to go back and find explicit statements about the redesigns, but as I recall the v1 Starship had the flaps further forward and lots of tiles missing around the hinges. V2 moved the flaps back so that the hinge is shielded more by the curve of the body, but still had not enough tiles. V3 has almost continuous coverage using much more uniquely curved tiles. They look harder to make but not as bad as the shuttle’s.
• 7e 5mo ago
  Another flight with many explosions and a trivial payload. Trial and error, trial and error. At least these million monkeys have upgraded from typewriters to something more fun.
  • avmich 5mo ago
    You don't see the progress between flights, do you?
    • Rebelgecko 5mo ago
      Some of his employees have died in the meantime, but that's a price Elon is more than willing to pay
      • discordance 5mo ago
        Had to check this one and you're indeed right: one death in 2014[0], and one death earlier about a week ago (May 2026)[1] (as well as 600+ workplace injuries [0]). [0]: https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/spacex-musk-safety/ https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/spacex-m... [1]: https://techcrunch.com/2026/05/18/osha-probing-worker-death-at-spacexs-starbase-site/ https://techcrunch.com/2026/05/18/osha-probing-worker-death-...
        • labcomputer 5mo ago
          Scaled Composites has had a few deaths, too. Less recent that I thought: https://spacenews.com/explosion-mojave-air-and-space-port-kills-three-injures-three-others/ https://spacenews.com/explosion-mojave-air-and-space-port-ki...
      • s1artibartfast 5mo ago
        How many deaths has Facebook or Google had in that time? Over 100 died building the hoover dam. Over 5000 building the Panama canal, and over 30,000 if you count the failed attempt. 30,000 people trip and die in their homes per year. 70,000 Americans die per year from medication error or accidental overdose.
• jmyeet 5mo ago
  It's worth remembering that, according to SpaceX's own filings, they've spent >$15 billion on the Starship program thus far with more to come. And SpaceX is burning cash still, particularly because Elon Musk bailed out his own bad decisions with Twitter and xAI with SpaceX stock, basically. Flight 12 was a relative success. Some engines failed to light but that's an unintended good test. Rockets are typically designed such that they can have a certain number of engines fail and still achieve their mission. At this point, the entire SpaceX project is a bet on telecommunications services, specifically direct-to-satellite handheld Internet. That's the only market that will recoup the program costs. We don't have exact figures for the current true cost of a Falcon 9 launch factoring in reuse but many think it's somewhere betweenm $10 and $20 million. Well, SpaceX has spent 100 F9 launches on Starship so far and that's how you have to look at it. Say F9 is $20M and Starship once it starts launching Starlink is $10M that's 150-300+ launches just to break even. You might be tempted to say there are other missions for Starship but there really aren't. Satellites aren't that bug, as evidences by there being ~1 Falcon Heavy launch per year (usually for the military and/or to geostationary orbit AFAICT). You can't economically put multiple payloads in one Starship because they all have different orbital parameters. F9 is rated for human spaceflight. It's a long road for Starship to be certified for human spaceflight. SpaceX hasn't even begun to test in-orbit refuelling yet. Gases are weird in microgravity. F9 is the cash cow funding all this and that too might go away if Blue Origin or one of the other wannabes ever gets a reusable launch platform to commercial operation. There are big launches like interplanetary missions but those are few and far between. It would be fascinating if what ends up dooming SpaceX is actually Twitter.
  • aero-glide2 5mo ago
    Revenue from xai renting to anthropic this year alone will be more than starlink and launch revenue
    • jmyeet 5mo ago
      xAI is burning through $1 billion a month [1]. With Anthropic as a customer, it's basically an argument that we're losing money on every transaction but we'll make it up in volume. [1]: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-06-17/musk-s-xai-burning-through-1-billion-a-month-as-costs-pile-up https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-06-17/musk-s-xa...
• everyone 5mo ago
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• everyone 5mo ago
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  • gbgarbeb 5mo ago
    You might have it backwards. Trump 2 has been way more pro-SpaceX than Biden or Trump 1.
  • ggreer 5mo ago
    This is the third time in two days that you’ve made this exact same comment.[1][2] 1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48215414 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48215414 2. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48220491 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48220491
• albatross79 5mo ago
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  • ChocolateGod 5mo ago
    Columbus belonged in Italy.
  • dzhiurgis 5mo ago
    Sour grapes
• protortyp 5mo ago
  What a time to be alive
• WaitWaitWha 5mo ago
  I am just delighted that SpaceX continues with the "good enough" pace of development here, at least at these phases. Rapid iteration of build, test, learn, and improve rather than wait for perfection. They are willing to have "negative outcome learning experiences" to gather data quickly. and, of course, data, data, data. I like it because I know what insane amount of red tape has built up to do anything similar in a Gov (any Gov).
  • hgoel 5mo ago
    Shame they're risking that ability with the IPO. We've seen how irrational and ignorant stock traders are from other publicly traded space companies. Even scrubbed launches cause the price to dip.
    • zugi 5mo ago
      > We've seen how irrational and ignorant stock traders are from other publicly traded space companies. Absolutely true, but ignorant stock traders making irrational trades only matters if company management pays attention to them. Musk will maintain complete control of SpaceX even after the IPO, so he can focus on long-term value rather than short-term ups and downs. Of course, over time, if more shares are issued, this may change.
      • hgoel 5mo ago
        The argument for the IPO was to fund their space datacenters project, if Musk could afford to ignore the stock price, that wouldn't be needed.
        • labcomputer 5mo ago
          But by the time retail traders can affect the stock price, SpaceX will have already gotten their money.
        • s1artibartfast 5mo ago
          They get all the money on the ipo day. They dont get more if it goes after unless they sell more stock
• mempko 5mo ago
  This incremental progress, far smaller improvements than planned, has put them so far behind schedule I'm not confident this design is any good. Still haven't done orbit. This launch was not a smooth launch. SLS by contrast seems to work. Why did nasa contract SpaceX for the lander. The whole plan is bad.
  • XorNot 5mo ago
    There's plenty of finicky systems which go on to be good systems with a lot of work. Some things are just hard, a lot of the time you just don't see them being hard so publicly.
    • mempko 5mo ago
      Sometimes a design is poor and needs a lot of modification and patches to kind of work.
      • XorNot 5mo ago
        That's software engineer "I'll simplify it!" logic and the score of it's successes is far too low for how common it is. If a design with a bunch of modifications works, then it's a good design. Thinking you need to clean sheet redesign everything is how you get Second System Syndrome.
  • decimalenough 5mo ago
    Are you serious? They just launched a completely revamped version of Starship from an entirely new pad, and still hit almost all of their planned milestones while demonstrating that the design is reliable enough to handle a missing engine.
    • mempko 5mo ago
      Go back and look at the original plans and projections. Constantly redesigning is not something to be proud of. I call it vibe spaceship design.
• burnt-resistor 5mo ago
  So when's that self-growing Moon base happening?
  • tim333 5mo ago
    "potentially achieve that in less than 10 years" in Musk time which is 20 years to never in real time?
• GMoromisato 5mo ago
  This was good forward progress (V3 mostly worked, clear improvements on heat-shield, near-final Starlink deployment system). Is this enough progress to keep a 2028 crewed landing? Don't know. I'm curious whether they are going to try to recover a Starship before trying for in-space refueling (or the reverse). Either way, I think both have to work before they can try for an uncrewed lunar landing (presumably in 2027). The big question is re-usability. How close are they to relaunching a Starship? They may not know for sure until they can get one back intact. If they can launch at least once a month, maybe they'll make it. If they can re-fly a Starship this year AND demonstrate in-space refueling, then 2027 can be all about an uncrewed landing attempt. That would make me feel good about a 2028 crewed landing on the moon.
  • ordu 5mo ago
    > If they can re-fly a Starship this year AND demonstrate in-space refueling I'd bet that they'll not try in-space refueling before they demonstrated in-space relight of an engine. So they need to fly at least twice. Or even thrice because to demonstrate refueling you need two Starships in orbit.
  • Schiendelman 5mo ago
    IIRC, I think they're off the hook for a 2028 crewed landing because the spacesuits won't be ready until 2030, but if I'm wrong let me know!
• glzone1 5mo ago
  Does anyone know how important hot staging is? It seems to give the booster a real kick - what's that do to turbo's and fuel movement? You've got hot exhaust onto cold cryo fuel tank header? You've got to carry more mass in terms of protection for the tank? Is doing MECO and then push and then get 100 yards apart or something before second stage / ship engines kick on a big enough penalty to justify all the extra complexity?
  • rogerrogerr 5mo ago
    All the velocity you lose in any kind of throttle back is velocity you never get back. It hurts you the entire rest of the flight.
    • syncsynchalt 5mo ago
      aka "gravity losses". Every second you're not (yet) in orbit you're losing dv / cargo capability.
  • cwillu 5mo ago
    IIRC, it basically removes the need to do a handoff between the relatively tiny tanks that can reliably pump fuel and oxidizer in zero-g from the main tanks that struggle with that in starship, and completely removes the need for any of that on the booster.
  • jdranczewski 5mo ago
    They were originally planning to not do hot staging, aiming instead for a somewhat funny approach where they spin the ship and booster slightly so they are passively separated by centrifugal forces. A bunch of things went wrong in the first test flight, so this was never attempted, and they switched to the "simpler" hot staging in flight 2.
  • numpad0 5mo ago
    eliminates the need for ullage thrusters to force the blobby propellants in the tank onto pump intakes
• delichon 5mo ago
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  • cowpig 5mo ago
    I expect more from HN than seeing this kind of propaganda: Vague story without references featuring the takedown of an uninteresting political caricatures
• makemoney-2003 5mo ago
  many would think it was a failure lauch before going public
  • Rp8yXmdmr 5mo ago
    I am not sure results of single test launch matter much. The issues with SpaceX IPO aren't even related to rockets: it is the very low float, Musk making himself irremovable from CEO seat, and buying xAI at inflated valuation. If people are willing to buy such stock, even V3 blowing up at launch pad won't stop them.
• LandoCalrissian 5mo ago
  12 crashes in 5 years to get 1/5th the capacity of a Saturn V. Good job Elon!
  • vessenes 5mo ago
    ? Starship capacity is 150 (reusable) to 250-300 (non-reusable). Saturn V non-reusable capacity was like 140 metric tons or so. Saturn V cost in today’s dollars roughly $1.5bn per launch. Current Falcon heavy launch from SpaceX is in the $20mm cost (to SX) range, for 64 metric tons. So that’s 1,500:40 = slightly less than 40x cost improvement over Saturn V. Starship’s target costs would be $10mm per reusable launch or roughly another 4x cost improvement over Falcon Heavy. Also, the SX team is huge, including some critical operators like Gwynne Shotwell, it’s not just Elon driving this 160:1 improvement in lift and cost capacity.
    • stdatomic 5mo ago
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    • imtringued 5mo ago
      >? If Starship could meet the payload goals with their V2, they would have retired Falcon 9 already. >Starship capacity is 150 (reusable) to 250-300 (non-reusable). Those are aspirational numbers. V1 was supposed to have 50 tons and the actual payload was 0 tons. The confirmed V2 payload was 35 tons (optimistic). V3 has a payload closer to 50 tons than 150 tons.
• deleted 5mo ago
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• ece 5mo ago
  I am genuinely curious what causes the different colors of plasma that were visible throughout the descent. I saw at least purple, yellow, and shades of green.
• zhouquanxi 5mo ago
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