Flight 4 ended with Starship igniting its three center Raptor engines and executing the first flip maneuver and landing burn since our suborbital campaign, followed by a soft splashdown of the ship in the Indian Ocean one hour and six minutes after launch.
I still can't believe that happened! Gives me so much confidence on their in-space propellant storage too, for some reason.
Dare I say magical? So cool this is happening. Crazy that it's barely in the mainstream news (at least in my experience).
I understand the sentiment, but I'm sorry to say I have seen absolutely no data that supports this. Perhaps you'd like to share a source?
I think I may have an idea of why this has been down-voted?
How much you buy into this vision will undoubtedly depend on your predilection toward Musk and your sense of the difficulty of forging habitable communities on an uninhabitable world like Mars.
I wonder who didn't click the article /s
A lot wrong here, I'm sorry to say, and I'm really not a fan of Musk. He is absolutely not selling Starlink to be used by Russia. That would be shut down real quick. (They may be using black-market terminals, but that's a different question.) And this new constellation will, as I understand it, be owned and operated by the US govt. Think like every single spy satellite ever: govt finds a contractor and asks them to do a thing.
That's right! Matches almost exactly what we saw in IFT-2. It was also cool to see that when stage 2 acceleration flattens out isn't an anomaly (as I thought after IFT-2) but rather a purposeful throttling to keep loads at ~3.5g's. And then you can see the step down as they cut off vacuum raptors first and then SECO!
Dang that was brutal to watch
I'm switching to back to Linux for the first time in 8 years. Grew up on Mandrivia for no reason other than that's what my dad liked, got a MacBook for school, and now that my OS isn't getting updates I want something fresh and free! Thinking of getting my toes wet with Linux Mint :)
You're right, that's my bad. I just meant to say the debris hasn't gone into orbit.
This time is so frustrating. There really isn't any malice or sabotage happening that I am know of, and the system seems to be working well in that the rules enacted to protect human life, property, AND the environment are being followed. But the bureaucracy is so stifling. It's almost comical (in a tragic way) how even a national priority as high as a return to the moon cannot move ahead despite the obvious benefits of doing so.
I love that they showed more of the booster landing footage, but I still wish we could see it hit the water and tip over!