Busy times at Twitter!
And Elon banned a reporter for “hacked materials” (unlike the Hunter Biden story, it is unclear what materials here are alleged to be “hacked”) for posting a story he reported about the guy who hacked Matt Walsh’s Twitter account:
ruh roh
It didn’t damage any ground equipment and the rocket was just going to end up in the ocean anyway so it’s still a successful launch.
Yes but does it get a blue checkmark?
Oh yes, the hackernews elon slappies are working themselves into a frenzy reminding everyone of this.
So is this one reusable or what
wait, do they realize that the 2nd stage didn’t separate? like, yeah the bottom part that blew up won’t be carrying humans but it was still attached to the part where the humans would be when it exploded
“the goal of this test was not to blow up the launchpad so it’s a SUCCESS elon hater!”
like, I get the point - this is the most massive launch ever attempted. it is an achievement, and the “model” of spacex is to have easily repeatable and reproducible flights like this (although they dont make public the cost so we have to take them at their word there).
but, I’ll still giggle at the rocket spinning wildly and blowing up before it reaches 2nd stage separation.
SpaceX blew it up on purpose, it seemed like the vehicle was fine just tumbling back to ocean level which is actually pretty neat that it can handle weird stresses like that.
Stage separation has always given them trouble, their first 3 rockets didn’t separate correctly and if the 4th one also failed they would have been done as a company back in 2008.
They didn’t put out clear expectations about it blowing up. Completely not on purpose, at least the way it happened. I see all the news sites have updated their headlines after several started with “successful launch”.
I heard they were within tens of m/s from reaching an orbital velocity too - gotta be painful lol
I did also think it was impressive how it was able to handle such forces spinning like that.
These kinds of accidents happen all the time in space exploration. Still gonna laugh at Elon, tho.
Sounds like the goal was to just clear the tower and everything after that was a stretch goal.
They were pretty far off, Starship does most of the work and they were at about 2,100 km/h when they tried to separate the stages and need to get to ~27,000 km/h for orbital speeds. Seems like if they had managed separation though Starship would’ve been able to get itself into the planned (almost) orbit.
lol @ me believing anything I read from HN comments
yeah, from playing KSP I can tell you it takes quite a while for it to get to orbital velocity, most of that happens in the upper atmosphere where accelerating is easier.
