Thursday, November 23, 2023

Between Starship Flights

I got up on Saturday just in time to watch Starship's second test on the SuperHeavy. Ideally we'd have seen the SuperHeavy return to launch, as Starship went into orbit. That much, didn't happen - as Reuters gloats (normally big fans of rockets and antisemitic content, much more so than Musk). To remind Reuters: those goals were "stretch" goals.

The primary mission was to prove to various USG agencies that South Texas remained a fit place for testing rockets of this scale. This much succeeded: the launchpad is almost intact and the flight-termination systems both worked.

The test was also meant to prove to USG's military, and to other space companies like Astrolab, that SpaceX was making progress not just on the ground and on abort-state, but in the separation-staging: hot staging being new. Clearly this has been shown as well.

I held off on poasting last weekend (or Monday) because I wanted to see a little more of what the space economy and ambient culture would make of all this. Thus: the followup. Astrolab seems more confident as well. Elon thinks he can get another bird through the air by Christmas.

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