SpaceX starship lifts off.
Hot-stage separation.
First stage explodes.
2nd stage self-destructs.
Praises galore.
Artemis astronauts will have to a wait a bit longer.
Don't pack your bags for Mars yet. #starship#spacex
1/n
I don't know. Maybe staking the latest attempt to reboot manned lunar exploration on what is less a a rocket designed for a particular mission and is more yet another stainless steel ideation of the raging ego of a narcissistic man-child was possibly a mistake?
SpaceX:
Our Starship rocket successfully passed the "Clear the tower" test. Congratulations to all!
The fact that 5 of the 33 engines failed is a minor aesthetics issue. We did indeed reach a low earth orbit for a number of seconds, albeit a very low one; technically an orbit with a very short apogee and a perigee inside the Earth's body.
Next goal, achieve separation and celebrate it with amazing extra loud fireworks 🎇 🧨! Stay tuned!
It is clear that many people only saw a chance to pile on Elon Musk from the Starship explosion last week, and that's a shame.
Because, whatever I might feel about Elon Musk, Starship is the most innovative and potentially disruptive technology in the #Space industry for decades. And this is an industry that desperately needed the shake-up.
So I'm going to talk about why. It may take awhile, because there's a lot to cover.
This was my thought too after watching closeup slowmo video today:
“The destruction of the launch pad could potentially have contributed to a further issue with the launch: bw 5 & 8 of the 33 Raptor engines appeared not to be firing at various points during the rocket’s ascent. It’s not currently known what caused these engines to fail, but 1 possibility is that material from the destruction of the launch pad, called ejecta, could have damaged them.”
I will not be surprised if the decisions that led to the crater under the #starship resulted in debris rebounding up to strike the craft. If that's the case, the systems likely were working and the craft should be in orbit.
I could do without the overexcitable staffers whooping on these webcasts.
The Starship launched. But the stages failed to separate and it looks like they triggered the destruction mechanism as it was falling towards the ocean.
It was an engineering test flight. So that outcome is fine.
I dislike #Musk so much that I made sure to include it in my profile. But the people mocking #SpaceX for the #Starship launch "failure" don't know what they're talking about. It was a test launch. It was not expected to make it even as far/high as it did, it was definitely not expected to make it into "space."
LAUNCH DAY 🧵! 🚀 This morning I'll be right there with so many other #space fans watching what happens in Texas with the launch of SpaceX's #Starship - the largest rocket ever built.
Current news from SpaceX is launch target of 8:20 CDT (UTC-5), which is about an hour from now.
They say a livestream will start "45 minutes before" launch.
Will it launch successfully? Will it reach orbit? Will it blow up?