SpaceX's Starship will attempt its first orbital flight today
SpaceX's Starship launching to orbit for first time ever today
Starship is set to launch from Starbase in South Texas on Monday during a 75-minute window opening at 8:15 a.m. EDT. The 407-foot megarocket, the most powerful ever built, will carry 26 next-gen Starlink V3 satellites to low Earth orbit on its 14th test flight, then splash down in the Pacific near Chile after nearly 10 hours. SpaceX says full reusability is the "holy grail of rocketry."
Starship is the biggest and most powerful rocket ever built, standing a towering 407 feet (124 meters) tall when fully stacked.
- paulus_magnus2
Starship is not yet reusable but they have the MVP and a fantastic position to iterate forward.
-- they have an orbital launcher with the largest diameter cargo bay
-- larger sats have bigger antennas and bigger PV area and more bus power. this scales as diam^2
-- 26 x Starlink v3 ~40-65 tons to LEO
-- every launch generates revenue, locks out the orbit for competitors.
-- they can launch more volume, more mass and cheaper than anyone else by a large margin
-- the design is validated - things will work
-- there is technical debt, issues but the rocket did the job
Caveats
-- timelines for full reusability are optimistic etc
-- there will be other issues in scaling to launching gigawats into orbit
-- cooling will have to be
-- Musk might go Full Villan mode before the thing works
[meta] I really didn't like that other negative comment getting voted to the top.
Looks like it's made by someone who never worked in a bigco.
For every bigco I worked, at any time there were hundreds if not thousands of open issues.
You could list them and try arguing the company is about to fail and you'd scare people who don't know better.
It's the judgement of the severity of the issue that matters not #no_of_issues.
And if there were 0 issues would our job exist?
[edit] getting the formatting right is very hard, maybe we could get a preview / TinyMCE ?
- prodigycorp
Distillation: Stream starts in about 1hr. Payload is 26 starlink v3 satellites.
Launch window is 8:15 AM to 9:30 AM eastern time.
Superheavy will land 7min after launch. Starship lands 9hrs post launch.
Edit: Both will be splashdowns (originally said they'll be caught)
- motionlessveloc
Ship will also have to be outfitted with a life-support system ahead of crewed missions, which could be coming relatively soon. For example, NASA picked Ship to the be the first crewed lunar lander for its Artemis program, which aims to land people on the moon for the first time in 2028 on the Artemis IV mission.
Don't worry, there is absolutely no chance this will happen in 2028. There are many detailed takedowns of why the "Human Landing System" schedule is preposterous, but here's HN's idlewords:
https://mceglowski.substack.com/p/how-should-we-think-about-...
- holt62
What an incredible feat of engineering, even if it doesn't make orbit. Just getting that much mass off the pad is mind-boggling.
- Symmetry
They seem to have reached near-orbit with one vacuum engine failing. Lets see if they decide to go all the way to orbit or if the failure causes an abort.
- fakwandi_priv
I’m a bit saddened this thread has so little activity, 55 comments as of posting, here even though there are half a million people watching the spacex stream. Just watching the launch, the amount of technology and people involved is incredible.
Prompting claude 5.5 has more appeal it seems.
- 317070
Does someone know where to watch the official livestream? The internet is so swarmed with all the recasters I cannot find the official stream anymore...
- A_D_E_P_T
Status update: It launched. Looks very good so far. At nearly 100km altitude four minutes in, most engines nominal. Superheavy separated successfully.
Inspiring to watch, really.
- asgr
7km/s, 26 sattelites currently deploying - super impressive!
- Zigurd
Having an impossible critical path will be the demise of the starship project. Too many things have to work that cannot be tested out of order. Too many of those things that needed to work years ago still don't. And those are the easy ones.
The items I'm listing here are just a subset of the critical path, and each milestone along the way will take months, optimistically, and years more realistically. To the point that starship won't be relevant to moon missions or any commercial use by the time it does what it needs to do to even partially fulfill the plans for it:
It needs to meet payload specifications. Currently it is off by a factor of two, which sounds doable until you realize the spec is 100 tons, and they need to find 50 tons more capacity by shedding weight elsewhere in the system.
It needs a launch cadence fast enough so that refueling doesn't take 15 separate starship tankers. Currently it would take years to refuel one single starship to make a one-way trip to the moon.
There's just a minor milestone on the way to that launch cadence: catching both stages.
Once both stages are reliably caught after a mission, refurbishment needs to be minimal. Proving that out will take several missions.
This is a simplified list of items on the critical path, but reaching each of these items has risks, and if those risks prove to be problems to solve, then each of those problems has a list of tasks and tests associated with it.
Some people think very highly of Elon for proposing […]