Starship's 10th Flight Test imminent [complete]

Let's do this! WOOOOO!

Elon Musk GIF by MOODMAN
 
It did the flip!!

It's surreal seeing a belly-flopping metal tube just turn around and hover, crazy shit!
 
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Nailed the landing. Pretty good for a rocket where they purposely removed some of the thermal tiles to see if what kind of damage it would take

This mission was completely successful with all objective fulfilled! Next launch should be soon!
 
Fantastic. 🥳

It's just incredible that such engineering is possible.

The absolute glee the media had here in the UK at the previous failures was very grating, especially when we've just axed what little space programme we had.

Also, Arse Technica comments section are going to be having a meltdown.
 
This stuff is awesome. So sad, that the majority doesn't care about these advancements or even look down on it.

We could be so much further already. We could turn our worldwide military budget into space exploration and populating our solar system. We could atleast put backups of the most important data and plant seeds on another planet or the moon, in case of a huge catastrophy. But no, humanity will probably go extinct, after some huge asteroid will hit us.
 
Impressive! It's only a few years since it was a thing that looked like a grain silo with an engine on the bottom and it flew for 500 ft. Now it seems almost inevitable that it's going to work and they'll have a gigantic reusable rocket ship capable of reaching Mars. That's a crazy rate of progress.

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This was so good to watch! Ended up making the missus watch it too and going through whats happening, she was throughly excited :messenger_unamused:

Unlike me, watching it a second time :messenger_tears_of_joy:
 
Fantastic shots but I don't know if they have enough control over the ship yet to catch it in the arms of the tower, it doesn't seem to hover quite as steady and as vertical as the booster does when they catch it.
 
I'm so happy that they finally nailed it. I'm looking forward for the next launch.
It's just crazy how can someone even imagine that would be possible to launch such a gigantic rocket into space...
 
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So how far away are we from landing a person on Mars? Stuff seem to be advancing fast for SpaceX's ships. I'm really out of the loop when it comes to modern spacefaring.
 
So how far away are we from landing a person on Mars? Stuff seem to be advancing fast for SpaceX's ships. I'm really out of the loop when it comes to modern spacefaring.
Landing an unmanned Starship on Mars can plausibly be done in < 5 years. After that milestone sending an astronaut there will mostly come down to risk tolerance. Will probably take a while.
 
Landing an unmanned Starship on Mars can plausibly be done in < 5 years. After that milestone sending an astronaut there will mostly come down to risk tolerance. Will probably take a while.

I would also like to think the unmanned missions to Mars would also allow for testing of how Starship works under the lesser gravity and thinner atmosphere there and what changes need to be made to safely use them in that new environment.
 
I would also like to think the unmanned missions to Mars would also allow for testing of how Starship works under the lesser gravity and thinner atmosphere there and what changes need to be made to safely use them in that new environment.
Yeah, and dropping offloads of supplies and robots to build stuff.
 
I think the first mission to mars will be within the next 10 years.

I'd like to think that one of the first things they do when they send the first Starships there is to lay in orbit Starlink systems so there's finally a continuous feed for anything that NASA has on the planet and having to wait for the planet to be in proper alignment with Earth to get a proper signal.
 
I'd like to think that one of the first things they do when they send the first Starships there is to lay in orbit Starlink systems so there's finally a continuous feed for anything that NASA has on the planet and having to wait for the planet to be in proper alignment with Earth to get a proper signal.
The actual purpose of Starlink is actually this. All of the work to establish the current Earth constellation is simply prototyping the network for interplanetary communications which will be constructed to link Earth to Mars

Most likely satellites will need to be placed into intermediate orbits between Earth and Mars which continuously follow the orbits of the two planets independently between the two planets which can interface as they pass each other to maintain a continuous link no matter where the planets are relative to each other in space, even when they are on opposite sides of the Sun from each other
 
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The actual purpose of Starlink is actually this. All of the work to establish the current Earth constellation is simply prototyping the network for interplanetary communications which will be constructed to link Earth to Mars

Most likely satellites will need to be placed into intermediate orbits between Earth and Mars which continuously follow the orbits of the two planets independently between the two planets which can interface as they pass each other to maintain a continuous link no matter where the planets are relative to each other in space, even when they are on opposite sides of the Sun from each other

The immediate orbit thing was one of things I've wondered about but where and how far apart and was one of those things I got stumped at thinking about.
 
I'll never understand why he didn't want to practice on the moon first. It's much closer than mars for the inevitable first few failures.
 
Actually landing on Mars is going to pose its own challenges. Let alone taking back off and getting home. You'd have to be a psycho to sign up for that very first multi-year Mars mission. I think Tesla AI bots are more likely, despite Elon's hard-on for manned exploration.
 
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