Saw this on Facebook originally, only I can’t find it now because Facebook has these very strange ideas about why people use Facebook. But this is cool. Mildly put together, but still extremely cool. And they did it just to say that they could*.
*And to sell Starlink subscriptions, obviously. To which I say: God Bless America, and All that the traffic will bear.
I’ve said this before, but I don’t know if I’ve said this here. I understand why people dislike Elon Musk, and he does display all the classic signs of a mountebank or charlatan… save one: he actually produces the product. It is genuinely a big deal to go from ‘rocket go boom’ to ‘hey, our EVA suits and tethers work in orbit‘ in less than twenty years. And, to be blunt about it: pretending otherwise merely makes people look like tedious dolts.
It has been 18 years since the first Falcon flight of Falcon 1 failed pic.twitter.com/Ha6ynd8cry
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) September 16, 2024
They’re gonna drop the capsule next month, hopefully get it to land remotely, then have the astronauts grab a ride down next year. Straightforward enough, really. Also, an indication that NASA made the right call in giving SpaceX point on the lunar stuff.
I know it’s more complicated than this, but the underlying thought is sound.
Dear Lord. This is absolutely correct: the article reads like a superhero team’s origin story. Or villain teams’.
Continue reading SpaceX testing for metahuman genes via historic space mission later this month.When billionaire Jared Isaacman self-funded a mission to orbit Earth in 2021, the project was billed as a childhood cancer fundraiser — and made for an eye-popping entrance into the private space tourism world. The four-person crew of people from various backgrounds with no prior spaceflight experience spent three days orbiting Earth together in a 13-foot-wide SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule.
[snip]
On Monday, Isaacman and three crewmates — including his close friend and former Air Force pilot, Scott “Kidd” Poteet, as well as two SpaceX engineers, Anna Menon and Sarah Gillis — will arrive at Kennedy Space Center in Florida to prepare for the launch of a far grander, more dangerous, and experimental trip to space.
In case you missed it: “Early on Saturday morning, at 1:45 am local time, a Falcon 9 rocket soared into orbit from its launch site at Kennedy Space Center in Florida… after a rare failure earlier this month, this particular Falcon 9 rocket was making a return-to-flight for the company and attempting to get the world’s most active booster back into service.” They had a fifteen day turnaround time in figuring out what was wrong, fixing it, and getting back to a launch schedule. That’s, yeah, pretty fast for non-wartime aerospace*.
Continue reading SpaceX back online.Which might have been a reverse jinx, because it looks like it went fine.
SpaceX lost footage (and presumably the ship) after this, but this… this is something new to see.
Farther along with every test. And once we can put all that mass in orbit… well. We can reassess what might be done, up there.
I watched the launch. I cheered when Starship cleared the pad, because that was the big hurdle. The farther along the big explody thing gets from the launch pad, the less you have to clean up before you test the next big explody thing. Starship got to the upper atmosphere before “rapid unplanned disassembly” occurred (I agree with a certain reader here that this phrase deserves wider use) in lieu of stage separation. Well, that’s why they test.
On to the next test! Certain parts of the Internet feel it should happen on June 9th, which admittedly would be nice. Seven weeks isn’t a bad turn-around time.
Assuming there is a launch today, the SpaceX feed starts at 8:15 AM Eastern time:
There are a bunch of reasons why there might not be a launch, of course. There are also a bunch of reasons why the test results might be, Yeah. Don’t do it that way, huh? Eventually you have to put the sucker on a launch pad and see if you forgot to carry the one. But it’s still exciting.
