How has no one posted this in the last five hours? Here is a highlights reel that boils the livestream down into a nice 12 minutes, courtesy of CNET with timestamps.
How has no one posted this in the last five hours?
I did see that it happened, but the early news articles were just stubs, so I figured they weren't worth posting. Reporters need time to write it up. :-)
I did see that it happened, but the early news articles were just stubs, so I figured they weren't worth posting. Reporters need time to write it up. :-)
This test flight was amazing. My expectations were a successful booster touchdown with Starship getting further through the atmosphere but still burning up due to the heat shield's tile adhesion...
This test flight was amazing. My expectations were a successful booster touchdown with Starship getting further through the atmosphere but still burning up due to the heat shield's tile adhesion problem. Never would I have imagined it to already get to the belly-flop maneuver stage, and perform the soft landing. It did all of that with missing tiles, and at least one semi-destroyed flap. Turns out Starship is way more resilient than I thought. Though hopefully the flap sealing improvements for flight 5 will prevent it from being tested to such an extent again, even if it was spectacular.
Watching that flap come apart slowly I was convinced it was going to rip off during reentry or at least when they first tried to use it. And then it didn’t! The moment in the video when it lit up...
Watching that flap come apart slowly I was convinced it was going to rip off during reentry or at least when they first tried to use it. And then it didn’t! The moment in the video when it lit up as the engines lit and we could see it again was crazy.
I did see that it happened, but the early news articles were just stubs, so I figured they weren't worth posting. Reporters need time to write it up. :-)
This test flight was amazing. My expectations were a successful booster touchdown with Starship getting further through the atmosphere but still burning up due to the heat shield's tile adhesion problem. Never would I have imagined it to already get to the belly-flop maneuver stage, and perform the soft landing. It did all of that with missing tiles, and at least one semi-destroyed flap. Turns out Starship is way more resilient than I thought. Though hopefully the flap sealing improvements for flight 5 will prevent it from being tested to such an extent again, even if it was spectacular.
The control systems on this rocket are genuinely out of this world. The ending felt like it could've been a bit in the martian.
Watching that flap come apart slowly I was convinced it was going to rip off during reentry or at least when they first tried to use it. And then it didn’t! The moment in the video when it lit up as the engines lit and we could see it again was crazy.