Spacex

[Suff]

For those who are interested, it looks like they will be flying their SN9 tonight.

Might land, might crash and burn like SN8. SN10 is also sitting on the stand next to it waiting for its turn.

[Suff]

Crashed and burned even more spectacularly than SN8.

Rapid space development, right to your living room.

[Workingman]

Maybe it was being piloted by one of the pigs or monkeys Musk is implanting neural network chips in to, or maybe not.

Take-offs and landings of all aerial vehicles are the most dangerous times. They look to have cracked the take-off part, somewhat, the landing in the way it is hoped is proving far more difficult.

The crashes, while spectacular, are not failures in the literal sense. They are learning exercises, and as the commentary from mission control says, the telemetry feed all the way to the ground is there for analysis and improvement / learning. The big surprise would have been if all went well.... and there were later failures due to 'unknown causes' leading to expensive losses in payloads and lives.

[Suff]

Yes it was a learning exercise and they are learning loads. they don't just have the take-off sorted but also the flip over and glide too. It is the multiple re-ignition of the rockets and fuel supply switching which are causing a problem right now.

I give them a few more iterations to sort it out. Their engine design was originally Russian and nobody could get it to work until SpaceX took it over.

Unfortunately it is not quite as smooth as they would want. SN8 made it almost to the ground, vertical, with two rockets firing on low fuel pressure until it had a landing too hard to support. SN9 started to go vertical, one engine fired, the second one fired and flamed out, the third didn't even try to fire.

Progress, one step forward, two steps back. I guess it will be like that for a while. At least the next explosive candidate is already at the stand and waiting, pristine, to soar like an eagle and crash and burn on landing.

If the FAA will let them. They are getting pretty grumpy about serial crashes even though they know that these are not super over engineered, perfect machines, designed to carry people. Most spacecraft are made in clean rooms to incredibly exacting specifications and most of them are used once. Starship is welded together, for the most part, in the open air.

It took SpaceX about 2 years to get to booster landings and had quite a few failures on the way. Even then, they trashed one of their landing barges after recovery of boosters had been common. SpaceX is not expecting to be operational for humans for at least 2-3 years.

Interesting point though. SpaceX has a target of 36,000 starlink satellites to provide high performance, low latency, internet to the whole world. Today it will take them 600 launches, at 60 satellites a launch, to achieve that. The projected launch cadence, today, with Falcon9, is 2 per month. Or 25 years and they still haven't broken 12 per year yet. However Starship is a totally different ballpark. 300 satellites per launch and with 6 Starships and 3 super heavy boosters, designed for immediate re-use, it would take 20 days of launches. About 6 months in the very worst case and SpaceX is already starting to churn out satellites like Tesla churns out cars. Most Satellite Space vehicles take 2 years to build. SpaceX is churning them out in weeks.

Change is coming. Rapidly.

For those who are interested, Starlink Broadband is available for Beta test in the UK now and Tesla only has about 600 working satellites up there. I'm registered for interest from France although regulation may be a real pain here.