Yep... Absolutely incredible achievement but I have a question (wearing flame suit now).

Why?

Why complicate things and ad the extra risk?
- Is there a real benefit to catching a rocket like this as opposed to landing it as before?

To be clear I certainly appreciate the precision and difficulty!

That booster is quite a bit bigger than the ones they've been landing the other way. I'd imagine the landing gear to hold this one up would be too heavy to make it worth while to use it. It'd take too much payload capability away from the booster.

"Starship is designed to achieve reflight of its rocket booster ultimately within an hour after liftoff. The booster returns within ~5 minutes, so the remaining time is reloading propellant and placing a ship on top of the booster."

Wow?

For all you squirrels that think government does it better.

In your face!

This makes sense. Thanks.

Engineered and designed in Hawthorne CA in the former Northrop plant I once worked in.
Elon hates keeping the facility open but he has to have smart people.
Twice the power of the Saturn V.
The airframe grid controllers that fly the 1st stage to the ground is some amazing engineering.

Like many of you I grew up with the space race from Mercury all the way to the Shuttle. Every time I see a rocket take off I'm amazed but this is next level.

It does have landing pads up there.

A short beam out with a puck under.

Probably none of which would've thought this feat possible - and who might well have scoffed at the audacity of very idea- just ten years ago.

Combine an amazing entrepreneurial spirit with the mind of the world's foremost visionary who understands and accepts his own limitations ... and you get what we just witnessed.

_

One thing I don't get is why they are betting the farm- literally, the tower and the fuel farm, for the sake of learning the catching game.

Seems like I'd want a second landing tower, a little further away from the fuel facilities to ensure even if a landing doesn't stick, it doesn't compromise the entire launch facility.

I'm betting that landing was a little closer to failure than it appeared. Not knocking things at all- but at some point one of those is going to have a mishap. That's a lot of things that have to happen right all at once. This is still a learning process.

Again, kudos to space x. Awesome.

its not a super amazing achievement, JPL has been landing rockets like this since the early 1990s. so elon is 30 years late, and billions underwater.

I know an engineer who applied at space x, and I’m told they vet heavily and only hire the top of the top…


It’s amazing what one can do when they prioritize goals over societal optics.

big yikes. all elon cares about is social optics. his companies fake and lie more commonly than they actually deliver.

^^^ Sounds like somebody couldn't even get a phone, much less a Zoom or in-person interview.

_

Elon is an innovator in a world that breeds mediocre people and safe career moves…

This is definitely something new to me. I live 2 miles from JPL, and frequently get tours from a high school friend who is an engineer there. What is the name of the program, I would love to read about it.

Regardless, Space X, under Musk’s leadership, has ensured the US remain a leader in space exploration. Without SpaceX we had no way to get to the ISS. We paid Russia 75 million per astronaut for a round trip.

Billions underwater? He created the Falcons and Raptors with far less resources than legacy spacecraft manufacturer Boeing.

Is it possible some political bias is seeping into your opinion of these remarkable SpaceX achievements?

no, im just tired of "success" metrics for elon being something that someone else already did decades before, cheaper, and faster.

i believe the first VTVL was in 1993. 31 years ago.

spaceX isnt insuring anyone is anywhere, its a multi-billion dollar skinkhole that can't hit its targets on budget or on time, which NASA, and JPL regularly do. starship is a comedy of errors of engineering that will never work as intended, even it can do some of the things promised, some of the time, years late, and billions overbudget. its the cybertruck, but for space.

like this isnt amazing, we are watching expensive, technical failure, and cheering it on as success. if this was a government program, you'd all be trying to kill it as fast as possible, and would be a *showcase* textbook example of awful program and budget management. the NASA budget would be slashed in a heartbeat if they had failed this hard on anything.

artemis I has already orbited the moon. its paid for. and it works. like we already did this, cheaper, faster, and already paid for it.

elon hasnt innovated anything. he's a systemic failure, who has failed up his whole life. he's bought his way into everything, and only hindered its success with his antics. any success his operations have had are in-spite of him, not because of him.

my personal favorite version of this, is elon in interviews parroting common first year engineering school phrases like they are some profound new knowledge. he does this all time. another favorite was when he told tesla engineers to align the body panels of the cybertruck to 10 microns. thankfully the real engineers ignored him. or when he told the twitter stack engineer that twitter needed a full stack re-write. the guy is a loon. you can tell the VP of all his companies goes around after elon spouts off some bat**** dumb ****, and says "yeah ignore that, keep doing what you are doing, we'll just tell him we did it that way, he can't tell" no wonder they are all quitting.

the guy is a moron. the definition of a mediocre white man who has failed up.

actually one time a friend of mine offered to give me an interview at one of his automation companies. they got bought in what ... 2017ish?

i believe my direct quote was "**** no, i like my life"

friend quit less than a year later, said it was a ****hole almost immediately after tesla bought them.

he has huge turnover issues and none of his former employees have anything good to say about his companies.

starship only works outside earths orbit if they can launch enough of them, and refuel them in space, very rapidly, like hours. this is because in space, the fuel tanks essentially leak like crazy, so you have to launch 3 support refueling missions for every single starship you try to send outside of earth orbit.

so you need to land them, and refuel them, and then launch them again, in a few hours.

for the whole thing to work. otherwise star ship is a redundant, expensive, and pointless satellite launcher.

one of the critical issues with starship from the planning phase is that everything has to work perfectly, or it fails. the minimum viable product if you will, is total success, reliably. no matter what happens. with 60+ engines per starship, over and over again, with basically no inspection or repairs. a few engines on a support launch dont work ... all for nothing. one of the starships takes some damage on entry or retrieval? total failure. like the mission profile is bonkers, even under the best of circumstances is unlikely. this was already stockton rush levels of mis-engineered.

so no wonder the thing doesn't work, and its years behind, and 10s of billions over budget.

could it work? i mean you throw enough money at anything and it eventually *could* work. maybe elon's ego is big enough he will spend the billions, if he still has them.

meanwhile we have artemis over here. thats already orbited the moon. works. and its paid for. scheduled to take astronauts for a moon flyby in September 2025. NASA just over here, doing the work, for cheaper, faster, and far more reliably.