should be a fun video. Looking at his approach, fail fix fly, and being able to do it without government oversight except for launch safety, gives him a good chance of pulling it off. That and he's batshit crazy. Good thing he's doing this and not running Chaos, Thrush, or Spectre.
It looks like the design was validated. It belly flopped gracefully and then turned nose up for landing. We know SpaceX can land rockets. Fly, fail, fix, and fly again.
And they already know what went wrong here. Based on todays performance I wouldn't be surprised if SN9 succeeds.
After the flight, Musk tweeted that it was a “successful ascent” and that the vehicle performed well. There was low pressure during the landing, “causing touchdown velocity to be high & RUD,” he wrote, using an acronym for “rapid unscheduled disassembly.” “Even reaching apogee would’ve been great, so controlling all way to putting the crater in the right spot was epic!!”
Did you notice the little black dog in the picture? I mean what super-villain has a little dog? I'm so disappointed.
SpaceX’s Starship was on the launchpad Thursday, apparently ready to fly in the latest iteration of the spacecraft SpaceX hopes will take people to Mars. The spacecraft, known as SN9, or serial number 9, was filled with propellant, letting off plumes of steam on the launchpad, as fans waited. But it didn’t fly. Instead, SpaceX founder Elon Musk took to Twitter to bash the Federal Aviation Administration, which licenses space launches and is charged with protecting people and property on the ground. “Unlike its aircraft division, which is fine, the FAA space division has a fundamentally broken regulatory structure,” he wrote. “Their rules are meant for a handful of expendable launches per year from a few government facilities. Under those rules, humanity will never get to Mars.” The tweet revealed the tension between SpaceX’s Starship program and the government’s primary regulator of what gets into the air. source
HBO is developing a limited series about SpaceX, the space exploration company founded by Elon Musk. The six-episode series “SpaceX” will be based on the book “Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future” by Ashlee Vance. It will document how Musk, in pursuit of his lifelong dream to make humankind a multi-planetary species, handpicks a team of engineers to work on a remote Pacific Island where they build, and launch, the first SpaceX rocket into orbit. It spurred a new era of privately funded space exploration, culminating in the first manned Space X launch of the Falcon 9 on May 30, 2020. source
(Reuters) - SpaceX's first high-altitude test flight of its Starship rocket, which exploded last month while attempting to land after an otherwise successful test launch, violated the terms of its Federal Aviation Administration test license, the Verge reported on Friday, citing sources. Source.
