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They demonstrated the engines re-lighting in space, which is significant. There had been some questions about this because the engine is of a design that is said to be very tricky to start, and the tank pressurization system of the rocket has the risk of water and CO2 ice forming in the methane tanks, which had caused several failures in past tests flights. So this is a pretty good milestone.

So we might start seeing test flights actually entering orbit soon. Possibly even carrying some real payloads soon.

I remember there was a phase of Falcon design where it looked like they had perfected barge landing, and then they had a rash of failures. Later on they admitted to intentionally crashing older boosters so they could find the limits of the hardware. They were iterating at such a pace that the data was worth more than a recovered booster. I wonder if that was the case today?

What's the advantage of the chopsticks landing over splashing the thing down in the ocean?

Does an ocean landing cause significant damage that's not present with an on-land chopsticks landing?

Presumably there are pretty big advantages considering how much it must have cost to develop the chopsticks approach.

Fascinating, the more distractions Musk has, the more impressive SpaceX does. Just imagine what he could do if he were the CEO of a hundred companies!

See also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42188247

Is this due to the higher incidence angle ? Seemed like the main 'difficulty' factor that was upped in the mission description

Is there a publicly documented (or guesstimated) timeline for Starship? What comes next?

Seems like fts failed and the booster is still floating in the sea right now.

why is elon musk never in these comments answering questions? to my knowledge hes never left a comment publicly on HN but has on reddit

Honestly do not understand why rockets are a big deal. What are we going to do with them? If anything we have too many satellites in the sky as is.

Why can't the tower/chopsticks be as portable as the booster?

Many people have lost money on Polymarket. The chance of the sticks catching the Starship was around 75% and of course immediately dropped to 0% after the announcement.

Any technical specifics available yet on the reason the catch was aborted? Eg. Which parameters were out of range.

Hypothetically speaking (asking for a friend), can you intercept the Starship with standard AA missiles as it re-enters?

Could they have crashed it because of security/safety concerns for President-elect Trump, who was there as a surprise guest, watching the launch with Elon?

Per NYTimes: “It was pretty epic on Attempt 1,” Kate Tice, a senior quality engineering manager at SpaceX, said of the last test flight’s tower catch on the company’s livestream. “But the safety of the teams and the public and the pad itself are paramount.”

Not sure what would have changed compared to the first launch, other than Trump’s presence - and they haven’t described any anomalies.

A launch is one thing: lots of explosive potential, but the kinetic energy is quickly dispersed.

The KE of a botched landing of what’s essentially a ballistic missile would be a whole lot more concentrated…

Or maybe they just didn’t have time to file a modified flight plan for it to enter even-more-specially-restricted controlled airspace.