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Posted on 08/18/2026 11:19:06 AM PDT by SunkenCiv
After approx. 24 days at sea, the SpaceX Recovery team successfully guided Starship to a location just off the coast of Christmas Island. A team of SpaceX engineers is on their way to conduct additional analysis on the vehicle in calmer waters before attempting to return it to Starbase.
(Excerpt) Read more at x.com ...
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Click here: to donate by Credit Card Or here: to donate by PayPal Or by mail to: Free Republic, LLC - PO Box 9771 - Fresno, CA 93794 Thank you very much and God bless you. |
🚀🛰️
Never bet against Elon...
Long trip.
There's a brief video at this link, and at the main page, there's a shot of the booster with Christmas Island in the near distance, but I couldn't grab the URL without being an X member. X member? Paging Martin Fierro...
YA!!
Next year's their 50th anniversary. I'm Oooooold!
Ah, here we go, click the link or the pic to load the mp4:SpaceX video
Christmas Island?
Why not Easter Island?.................😁
Uh, yow. I like the X-Files movie soundtrack, "Music in the Key of X", they're on there with a Doors cover, seems like they did it slower for the actual movie soundtrack. My favorite off there is Meat Puppets "Unexplained".X - The Hungry Wolf | Final NYC Show
Live at The Town Hall 10/3/24 | 4:46 | Frumess | 10.2K subscribers | 420 views | October 4, 2024
As long as Musk’s team is in the neighborhood, maybe they can find Malaysia Airlines Flight 370.
And why isn’t there a Thanksgiving Island? “Land! Land at last! I’m so thankful! What should we name it?”
FTM, no Groundhog Day Island?
It’s probably worth the recovery expense, even tho there will hopefully be an orbited Ship caught in a couple of weeks.
If Ship is now in calm waters, could they not stabilize a huge sea barge next to it and recover using a fashioned full-body sling to lift it? Attempting to tow hundreds of additional miles in rough seas, it might rupture.
Yeah....I avoid airline travel. There’s been several Smithsonian channel Air Disaster programs where the cause of a crash is a fanatic Moslem or other pilot.
If it’s plucked from the sea (maybe twice), retiled here and there, fueled, and launched again, wowzo.
For over 3 weeks, 2 ships have been circling a floating Starship in the middle of the Indian Ocean. On Friday, many were convinced the story had just ended, 5,500 meters below the surface. Was Ship 40 gone? What actually happened out there is a true hero moment for SpaceX! Back on land, SpaceX quietly filed paperwork that tells you exactly what Florida is about to become. Let’s take a look at Starship Project Ignition!The FULL Story: How SpaceX Saves Starship 40 From The Ocean | 21:07
What about it!? | 664K subscribers | 62,206 views | August 18, 2026
0:00 The Indian Ocean Mystery
4:03 [sponsor ad, then] Musk's Vision for the Future
8:43 Project Ignition Revealed
12:12 Preparing for Flight 14
13:10 The Rise of Terran R
YouTube transcript reformatted at textformatter.ai *may* follow.
Is Halloween Island where the goth girls hang out?
Er... asking for a friend.
Chapter 5: The Rise of Terran R
All right, now let’s take a look at flight 14! Any news? Ship 41 is engine-complete inside Mega Bay 2 and prepared to roll to Massey’s for its static fire campaign. A road closure is still missing, though. Crickets. Nothing. It’s unclear why it is waiting in Mega Bay 2. Maybe it’s just very comfortable in there. We don’t know. As soon as there’s a closure set from Production to Massey’s, I’ll certainly jump out of my chair! And Booster 21 is receiving its engines in Mega Bay 1 ahead of its own static fire. The FCC paperwork still points at August 28th. That’s 10 days from now. But there’s one bit of information that reached us very unexpectedly. Yeah. On August 14th, NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman sat down for an announcement at Kennedy Space Center. While I can’t really report on the event because NASA didn’t approve my attendance, one detail was recorded.
“If they’re able to launch again, uh, you know, in early September after their last launch and continue to track inside of a month, potentially every couple of weeks before the end of the year, that that’s going to we’re going to feel very good,” Isaacman mentioned “early September.” Does he know more? Likely so. We might have to wait another week or two. Both static fires have to happen. Hopefully without any visible problem. SpaceX went from Booster 20’s static fire to a launch attempt in one week last time. So, we know that they can be very quick! Watch the road to Massey’s. When Ship 41 rolls out, we’ll know more. Until then, we’ll watch the heavy lift team closely!
While most eyes are watching New Glenn and Starship, there is another large rocket being prepared for its debut at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station LC16. Who already knows which rocket it is after mentioning the pad? It might not quite match the roughly 98 m of a New Glenn, let alone the over 124 m of a V3 Starship. But it does not have to shy away from those, standing at a very respectable 86.6 m. That’s taller than 90% of all flying rockets right now. And that rocket is Terran R by Relativity, a partially reusable mid- to heavy-lift rocket. It will start with a reusable first stage, but full reusability is planned for the future. It’s a two-stage launch vehicle designed to deliver payloads that exceed Falcon 9’s capability. In a reuse scenario, it’ll be able to lift 23.5 tons to low Earth orbit. This number can rise to 33.5 tons in an expendable configuration. All right, then let’s have a look at how close we are to actually seeing it fly.
Relativity’s own target is no earlier than 2026. There’s not that much time left, considering we’re already well in the second half of the year. But recent updates on completed milestones paint a positive picture. In April, acceptance testing on the Aeon R engines had become a regular event. The vacuum-optimized Aeon V completed full-duration mission duty cycles, meaning it burned as long or longer than it would on a real flight. And what comes after acceptance testing on a rocket engine? Right. They’re installed on an actual stage. A very large actual stage...
Relativity needed a bigger test stand. And whenever you hear “big rocket test stand” in the US, chances are it’s related to Stennis Space Center. That’s the same facility where Blue Origin is now testing as well. It’s simply the place pretty much everyone goes to test big rocket stages, and it has been for a long time. Well, except for SpaceX. They do their own thing. I’ll give you the reason in a minute.
Relativity stripped down the A2 test stand and started installing systems and piping to support the new rocket stages. The refurbishment includes a massive, water-cooled flame diverter and a new acoustic water ring. At ignition, a rocket tries to destroy its own launch pad in two different ways, and water is the cheapest defense against both. The first threat, that’s the exhaust itself. A supersonic jet of gas coming out at extreme temperatures. If you let that blast straight down onto flat concrete, it bounces right back up into the engines and the base of the rocket. Not good. It also chews the pad to rubble over repeated firings. So you build a flame diverter. Right, SpaceX? Sorry, I had to.
The second threat is sound. Rocket engines lighting up put out an acoustic shockwave north of 150 dB right under the engines. Those pressure waves reflect off the pad and hammer back into the rocket. This time as violent vibration. If you saw the very first Starship launch, you know what I mean. Launching a large rocket without a water deluge system in place produced the now-famous concrete tornado.
The same month, the structural test stand in Long Beach was modified for a new round of testing starting in June. In late July, Relativity finished structural qualification on a dedicated first-stage test article. This stage was literally tortured and had to endure more than on an actual flight. A lot more! The test article endured over 400 pressurization cycles. While pressurized, the engineers squeezed it with 1950 tons of force. But it held. I bet that was a huge confidence boost for the team.
Terran R’s second stage kicked off its own campaign around the same time. The pressure test passed flight pressure was the first step. They also took a close look at the plumbing during this process. So now you’re probably asking yourself when we’re getting to the fiery part of this. All right? The next milestone will fix that. Engine integration has begun.
The first Aeon R engines are now mounted onto the first stage’s thrust structure. That’s the part of the rocket that takes the full force of all the engines while trying not to turn into a pancake. Terran R has plenty of thrust. The first stage alone is powered by 13 Aeon R engines. At liftoff, they deliver a combined thrust of around 1586 tons. For comparison, Falcon 9 sits at roughly half of that. If all this goes as planned, Relativity will be much closer to an actual launch attempt. Once the engines are installed back at Relativity’s Long Beach factory, the first stage can return to Stennis for the fiery part, and it’ll be a big event with such a large stage!
If all tests come out as expected, the whole show moves on to the launch site at the Cape, where it will eventually meet the top half of the rocket. And that second stage is in a similar situation right now. It started cryoproof testing at Stennis in early August, validating its structural integrity. And just like the lower stage that it will ride on, it was tested beyond expected flight loads. Once cryo testing wraps up, it will also return to the factory to be mated with its single Aeon V vacuum engine before returning to Stennis yet again for the hotfire. And only after that milestone is ticked off the list will it advance to LC-16 to meet the first stage.
Remember project ignition from earlier? That’s why SpaceX wants its static fire stand close to the factory. You save a lot of miles. You save a lot of miles. And that’s it for today! ...
AMEN AMEN
Another great update! And another big rocket coming online pretty soon. Bigger than Falcon 9, I had no idea. Combined w/ SpaceX, hopefully BO, too and all the smaller rocket endeavors in the works, what a great time to be alive, rocket wise!
Good job!!
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