VIDEO AT LINK.........................
Incredible how much space exploration work is going on this week!
You can feel the excitement at SpaceX. Oh, to be young again and on that team! What incredible talent.
I hope they are respecting proper DEI decision making protocol, too! (just kidding)
..and the Starship traveled all the way to the Indian Ocean and splashed down, albeit somewhat torched by plasma.
splashed down, LOL... did it miss the barge???
If not for Musk and SpaceX, we’d be in big trouble in space capabilities.
Somestatistics,& the future as E. Musk ses it for StarShip:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pscFJSofcGs
Musk lays out the future of the Starship program:
Overarching goal of the company is to extend [ human ] consciousness to another planet - Mars - and achieve sustainability while Earth civilization is still strong.
The key thing is to have enough people and tonnage on Mars, so that if something would happen to Earth beyond our control, [ human ] consciousness would go on.
Musk thinks this can be done in ~20 years.
327 successful launches, ~300 landings, 261 re-flights, Dragon has has 45 launches, 50 crew members to orbit, 46 to ISS.
This year, SpaceX will do 90% of all Earth mass to orbit launches, China 6%, all others 4%.
Once Starship is flying, SpaceX will do 99% of all Earth mass to orbit launches. Final version of Starship will do over 200 tons to LEO with full reusability.
If all goes well:
Flight 4 will get through the high heat regime with both Starship and Booster landing on a virtual Tower. √
Flight 5 will see the booster land on a Tower; the possibility of catching the Booster with the arm this year is around 80-90%.
Starship will land on a Tower after about 2 consecutive successes of a given design landing on a virtual Tower - and will likely happen next year. Starship will then become reusable.
There will be 2 Towers at Boca and 2 at the Cape, all by sometime next year.
Next year will see orbital fuel transfer - a very important step in going to Mars. The Moon Ship will be specialized without heat shield and landing flaps.
Aiming to get the Booster engines to 330 tons of thrust with Raptor 3 engines. Which look like most of the engine is missing - but it is not.
Starship 3 will cost less per flight than Falcon 1 [ non-reusable]. Ultimately, the cost per flight will be down around $2-3 million per flight.
Musk sees thousands of ships departing for Mars every 26 months, most will be used as raw materials; later on, some ships will return to Earth, but most people going to Mars will never return.
Musk wants to get the cost of going to Mars low enough that most anyone can afford it.
Musk goes on to describe what he sees for the development of Mars.
Too bad it doesn’t have enough gas to go 238,000 miles there, and back, to the moon. Perhaps someday we will solve the fuel issue?
My thanks go out to you, or to whomever posted the live feed, and luckily I’ve waking up early of late. :^) I had the stream on the Roku and when the announcement got down to t minus a minute or so, I left this room and went to watch.
Those youngish kids at SpaceX have one of the best jobs in the world, and the enthusiasm to show for it.
Unless Biden puts up more roadblocks, I suspect the BFR will be man-rated before the end of this calendar year. I expect the next two launches will be somewhat close together, haven’t seen even an Elon-time estimate of when though.
China space watchers hail SpaceX Starship’s ‘breathtaking’ test flight
State-owned media and industry employees praise the massive US rocket’s successful and record-breaking landing
Ling Xin in Ohio
https://www.scmp.com/news/china/science/article/3265714/china-space-watchers-hail-spacex-starships-breathtaking-test-flight