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question: what will happen if orbit refuelling goes wrong? Won't it destroy everything in orbit?

My theory for why they have been failing so much recently..

2018.. Young brilliant engineer starts working for spaceX, absolutely the most exciting space company, on an awesome new rocket that will finally be a better launch vehicle than Saturn 5 and be able to enable all sorts of cool space stuff. Just a naive young nerd, dont really know anything about Elon, not into social media.

2024.. The Elon stuff in the media is unavoidable and obvious, they guy is a freaking nazi, suporting trump, supporting right wing parties in EU.. The talented engineer either leaves or stops giving a shit and quiet quits.

This process times several 100, in an experimental rocket design project, where any tiny flaw can make the whole thing fail.

Oh wow that photo is from years ago but you’re correct, this is the first flight of that design

The stats are pretty out there. Iirc just the fuel pump, which you can probably pick up and put on your desk, generates 100k HP.

With super high res onboard camera footage too.

I'm watching it now: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y_ecCDqTSJs As always, Tim is doing a fantastic job.

Oh hey, you're right! Somehow I read "water landing" and interpreted it as landing on one of the barges (ocisly or jrti) any clue why that isn't the case? Is super heavy just too big for the barges maybe?

They can build new boosters pretty quickly. New launch/catch towers take a lot longer, and they don't have any redundancy yet. Also they weren't going to reuse their V2 boosters once V3 was ready, so they could learn more by testing things like intentionally disabling an engine during the landing burn or flying at a higher angle of attack.

V3 booster has a lot of changes, including a brand new downcomer, an integrated hot-staging ring, and 3 instead of 4 grid fins. Chances of a RUD are not 0.

If Flight 12 blows up in space, they've already got Flight 13 almost assembled. It might delay them a month, maybe. But if a returning booster destroys the launch pad, it would delay them much longer--maybe a year.

With those stakes, it makes sense to not try a booster catch until they're sure it's going to work.

That's a fake youtube channel that is somehow allowed to squat the SpaceX channel name. It's been going on for years, including the crypto scam. Baffling. Maybe a big middle finger from Google to Elon.

It probably is AI generated.

My very first exposure to "AI spam" was trying to watch one of the Starship test launches, the second one if I remember correctly.

That was around the time that Elon bought Twitter, so he removed all publicity video streams from third-party platforms like YouTube and moved them to Twitter's streaming service.

I wanted to watch this on my big TV, so I was hunting through YouTube for the stream. I found the most likely looking one and watched as Elon got up on a stage, started waffling on about how this is the "future of humanity" and then with 40 seconds to go before the launch the (entirely realistic) AI voice was dubbed over and started offering "double your Bitcoin if you transfer to this account", with the obligatory QR code in the corner.

I was actually impressed by the audacity!

The really frustrating thing was that YouTube then promptly blocked all content even vaguely related to the launch! It was impossible to keyword search for anything that said "starship", "spacex", etc.

It was a scary preview of instant corporate censorship.

I'm sure the person (or bot!) at YouTube "meant well", but sheesh... they just erased the online presence of dozens of legitimate space-fan channels like NASA Space Flight. And NASA. And SpaceX's official channel too!

Ironically this meant that the only remaining matches were 100% scams.