For those who are interested

[Suff]

Spacex will do a 12km hop of their Starship today.

Well, if all goes well to the launch.

Spacex estimate a 33% chance of it landing successfully.

https://www.spacex.com/vehicles/starship/index.html

[Workingman]

Good piece of kit. I am looking forward to one landing on the Moon. Difficult.

[Suff]

Mars and the moon have proven very difficult for remote landings.

Spacex has another two of these in the pipeline. SN9 almost ready and SN10 in stacking.

What is most interesting are the conditions they are built in. They only started using screening when they couldn't get a weld consistent enough in the open air.

[Suff]

Sorry, wrong thread. Phones

[Suff]

It flew, it rolled over, it glided, it made it all the way back to exactly where it should land and.....

It looked like they got it pretty wrong. Either the engines didn't all ignite as they should (possible), or they were still testing to see how it would respond. One thing I did notice was that they did not deploy the landing legs. Either it came in too fast and they didn't get time, or they simply didn't bother, for whatever reason.

The landing legs are inside the skirt wall of the engine bay, you can see them, they look like the little short legs folded upside down. You see on the bottom right feed that they don't deploy.

That being said, this was an incredible display, nothing like it has ever been done before. It performed way better than the Falcon rockets which took years to go through similar testing to be able to land on drone ships. SN10 is sitting in the bay waiting for the next few days to be finished. Once SpaceX have cleaned up the landing area and crunched the data, they will likely go again within a few weeks.

[Suff]

Here is the video link.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ap-Bkkr ... .be&t=6462