ok now they have an actual reference and can animate it better haha.

All the renders in the world couldn&#x27;t have prepared me for how crazy the actual catch looked!

Agreed, but I&#x27;m concerned that humans being humans, we&#x27;ll have the entire solar system to blow ourselves over.In The Expanse (which I highly recommend), they give a new lease on life to that quote attributed to Einstein &quot;I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought with, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones&quot; - hurling asteroids towards a planet. I really hope humanity&#x27;s real future will play out in accordance with some of the more optimistic elements in The Expanse.

&gt; pathetic patches of landIt&#x27;s always funny seeing people pretend they live in a world where small issues like land or food don&#x27;t affect them, even though they only have that privilege because a larger military says they should.

Amazing days ahead of us - if we can avoid blowing ourselves up over pathetic patches of land, we could have the entire solar system under our feet...

Yes, the chopsticks are attached to one giant lift.

Yes, the chopsticks lower and raise. They will lower the tower onto a transport vehicle and send it back to the bay for examination, and then possible reflight.

Yep, they handle all the mounting&#x2F;demounting ops on the launch mount, so they have to be able to move along the tower.

From the replay, it seems that the fire comes from methane from the RCS thrusters burning, so it seems normal

There was a lot of smoke coming out of the bottom after the catch. I was worried about an internal fire but it’s since stopped. The glow from the engine mount on re-entry was amazing. The fire on landing had me worried too I was expecting it to grow but put itself out eventually.What an amazing morning!

They&#x27;ll lower it to the launch mount... the catch arms are effectively a crane. But I wonder if it&#x27;s more &quot;toasty&quot; than they were expecting? There were some fires going at catch (those look out, at least on external camera views) and the engines are still a bit.... smokey. Don&#x27;t know if that&#x27;s normal... or if they were expecting it.My hunch is that they don&#x27;t put it down for awhile. If there&#x27;s still an issue were there are fires lingering inside, my hunch is they want that as far from the ground infrastructure as possible.Either way incredible progress.

Stage 1 sucessfully caught. That was pretty incredible. I remember watching the Falcony Heavy launch when both boosters landed in sync.It&#x27;s hanging pretty high in the air, I assume so the engines do less damage to the pad. One wonders how they&#x27;re going to get it down. Do the chopsticks lower on the tower?

Although this is by far not the first landing of SpaceX boosters I&#x27;ve seen, this looked like scifi to me even in 2024.

An additional advantage is that it’s theoretically possible to make fuel for Starship on Mars.  The Luna lander will need to bring enough fuel for the return trip.

The Delta-V is comparable since you can aerobrake on mars. It&#x27;s only the difference between the time.Earth to moon without Aerobraking is a delta v of around 13k&#x2F;s, mars is 13.3

Moon by 2030 and Mars by 2040 seems like a winning bet lately

And here I thought nothing would top the double landing view from Falcon Heavy...

It was just a quick google. 150t reusable.No idea about the other costs.

They previously threw around a number of around $1M per flight, as mostly fuel costs.Also, while 150t is the target payload capacity, the current test vehicles are closer to 50t in payload capacity, there are revisions in the pipeline based on data from these test flights which will bring it up to 150t.

Methane is about 900-1500$ &#x2F; ton. About 1000 tons is used for the launch in addition to 3600 tons of lox. That should be a bit cheaper than methane per ton. Ballpark, the propellant might cost around 2M$.A modern airliner on a long flight might burn around 80 tons of kerosene. It&#x27;s slightly cheaper than methane. Call it 75-80K$.

Is that 150t of payload or total? What’s the cost in fuel alone (let’s ignore maintenance and operations costs for now)? I’m trying to get a feel for the relative scale compared to today’s commercial flight.

SRB and tank were not re-usable. That’s the equivalent of the first stage you just saw getting caught

Economy of scale: starship can be &quot;mass&quot;-producedMaterial: stainless steel is much cheaperPercentage of reusability: boosters of shuttle cannot be reused, maintenance of shuttle itself is also very expensive (heat shields were pricey). whereas the starship stack has higher reuse percentage and allegedly cheaper to maintain.

the space shuttle was &quot;reusable&quot;. It had to be taken apart and meticulously cleaned and tested and basically had to be rebuilt after each flight, in a process called turnaround. SpaceX&#x27;s rockets are much closer to what you&#x27;d consider reusable.

Think of the word ‘reusable’ in this case as less a binary descriptor but more of a scale of reusability.Yes, both systems are reusable, but there are key differences in the refurbishment of the systems that partly explains the cost difference. It took more labor, resources and time to refurbish the shuttle. Also consider rapid reusability was a stretch goal when it was being designed, but we have come a loooong way since, spacex in particular has had it as a driving competitive differentiator for years now.Another big difference is that NASA post Cold War was a skilled jobs program, with an incentive to do distributed, high overhead work to appease their bosses (congress), while SpaceX has the opposite.

The main difference is that this is built by a private corporation who can&#x27;t afford to throw money away, while the Space Shuttle was build by the government, and moreover it had to fulfill a number of conflicting requirements, and commercial profit was not one of them.But on a more technical level. I think the vertical landing is the main difference. Vertical landing was obviously known and done by NASA, this is how the lunar modules landed on the Moon. But doing it on Earth, with vehicles weighing hundreds of times more, I don&#x27;t think the world had that technical readiness a few decades ago, when the space shuttle was designed.And another major difference is the mass manufacturing idea. From the start SpaceX planned for getting to mass manufacture its rockets. The Falcon rockets are much cheaper than any other alternatives even if you remove the reusability.Then it&#x27;s the methane burning engines. This was pure old fashioned engineering progress. SpaceX&#x27;s engines are miracles of rocket engineering. Aside from that, the fuel choice is extremely smart. Methane is better than all other fuels, except for hydrogen. Hydrogen was the fuel of the space shuttle, but it&#x27;s very tricky to work with. It has very low volumetric density, so the tank of the space shuttle was absolutely humongous. Hydrogen needs to be stored at an absurdly low cryogenic temperature, so this adds to the complexity. And that tank was not reusable, so it adds to the cost.

Massive. The designers of Starship studiously avoided all the problems that made Space Shuttle expensive to refurbish:a. Cheaper, more durable material (stainless steel).b. Cheaper, easier to manufacture engines.c. Easier to use fuel (methane is much &quot;tamer&quot; than hydrogen).d. Standardized heat shield with much smaller requirements for manual work.

Manufacture and maintenance contracts for the Shuttle were deliberately spread out across many companies and states, especially in key congressional districts. It was a jobs programme; waste was a feature not a bug.Same thing for SLS.

&gt; space shuttle was reusableSpaceX builds vehicles. The Shuttle was “reusable” because they needed a term between the default for transportation capital expenditures (e.g. trains, planes, cars and ships) and the modified missiles that defined post-War spaceflight. “Reusable” in the Shuttle’s context meant months of specialist overhaul time and the cost of a Falcon 9 launch in SRB booster replacements alone [0].At the end of the day, in 2010, “the incremental cost per flight of the Space Shuttle was $409 million, or $14,186 per kilogram” [1]. ($591mm and $20,512 in 2024 dollars, respectively [2].) SpaceX’s prices per kg are around $3,170 on Falcon 9 [3] and $1,520 for Falcon Heavy [4]. Starship should bring those costs below $1000.[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;forum.nasaspaceflight.com&#x2F;index.php?topic=51959.0" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;forum.nasaspaceflight.com&#x2F;index.php?topic=51959.0</a>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Space_Shuttle_program" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Space_Shuttle_program</a>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.usinflationcalculator.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.usinflationcalculator.com&#x2F;</a>[3] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.spacex.com&#x2F;media&#x2F;Capabilities&amp;Services.pdf" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.spacex.com&#x2F;media&#x2F;Capabilities&amp;Services.pdf</a> LEO[4] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Falcon_Heavy" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Falcon_Heavy</a> LEO, theoretical

The Shuttle consisted of the shuttle (orbiter) itself, the external tank (not reusable), and the two boosters which could be reused after ocean recovery. The orbiter itself was slow and expensive to reuse since (among other things) all the heat shield tiles were inspected and 30-100 replaced between each launch. I don&#x27;t know how much work was done to the engines between launches, but SpaceX&#x27;s parts and cost reduction on the Raptor engine have to give it an advantage there.StarShip consists of the Super Heavy booster that we saw &quot;caught&quot; today, and the StarShip (orbiter) itself. Having the booster return to launch site vs requiring ocean recovery should potentially increase cadence and reduce cost of reuse. StarShip is also meant to be reusable, although it remains to be seen how that will pan out. On the previous flight there was burn through from inadequate heat shielding - maybe we&#x27;ll see an improvement with today&#x27;s vehicle. I&#x27;d expect SpaceX to iteratively arrive at a quicker and more cost effective orbiter reuse procedure than NASA had with the shuttle, but how quick remains to be seen. Of course they are planning many of these to go on one-way trips to Mars rather than being reused.

Starship is supposed to be fully &amp; rapidly reusable.   Neither adjective applies to the space shuttle.

Read the article &quot;SpaceX flight Ops&quot;

Falcon 9 has already proven that partial reusability is economical. SpaceX has dominated the entire worldwide launch industry and their competitors are nation states with no need to make a profit.The difference is that they have already proven to be the lowest cost and most reliable launcher due to reuse. This is them lapping the industry with second stage reusability.

Shuttle itself was refurbishable, but not rapidly re-usable. It was also incredibly expensive to build and refurbish. A shuttle launch also utilized boosters that were not re-usable.Starship is supposed to be (and clearly well on the way to being) fully rapidly re-usable. That means all stages (in this case two) are re-usable, and that the capital and time required to get either stage flight ready again after a flight should be minimal.Said another way – it is cheaper for SpaceX to build an entirely new Starship + Booster than it was to refurbish a Shuttle between flights, by a factor of about 4x ($90M for a Starship+Booster &#x2F; $400m for Shuttle refurb).

The difference is only a small part- the shuttle itself- was reusable. The booster that put it into space was scrapped every time.

The boosters were not (or at least not with the quick turnover and lower costs like the ones from SpaceX)

You&#x27;ve got a lot of responses on the difference of reusability, but the shuttle was also more expensive because it had to carry a lot of capabilities with it every time.  If you were launching a satellite, you were carrying along the crew compartment and a couple astronauts.  If you were bringing a few astronauts to the space station, you brought a cargo bay.  And in either circumstance, you brought big wings.  Starship can be filled with all cargo.  And if you&#x27;re just changing crew on the ISS, you could... not use Starship and launch a Falcon 9 instead.  One of the mission profiles required by the Air Force for the shuttle was that it be able to rendezvous with a satellite, put it in the cargo bay, and return to Earth, all under 2 orbits and along a path that avoided flying over the Soviet Union, which required a rather large turn in-atmosphere to make it back to landing on the west coast.

To answer this oversimplified question with a simple answer, the Space Shuttle couldn&#x27;t be a more different vehicle than this one. It truly is a comparison between apples and oranges.Let&#x27;s start with the fact that it was designed in the 1970&#x27;s. If you had a Cadillac DeVille from 1970 it would get 8-12 miles per gallon. Just the mere fact that the design is about 70 years old makes that vehicle too expensive to operate, and that&#x27;s before we even start talking about other issues with the design (performance, safety, reliability, etc).

The Space Shuttle was not fully reusable as the biggest single part, the orange tank, was destroyed every time. But more importantly, the orbiter and boosters needed 2+ months of refurbishment&#x2F;rebuilding after every flight.One of the design goals of Starship is for the booster and ship to relaunch with zero refurbishment. To literally land over the launchpad, refuel, and go back to orbit within hours without people even approaching them. The heat shield is the biggest risk to that goal IMO, and we saw today that it definitely sustained serious damage despite improvements. But if they ever get there then per-launch costs will be a tiny fraction of the Shuttle with 6x the payload.

The majority of damage to shuttle&#x27;s TPS apparently came from foam strikes from the external fuel tank. Superheavy&#x27;s optimized profile certainly helps here, since there are no large cryogenic tanks hanging ominously over the TPS while being shaken violently by solid rocket boosters.

No one has answered with one of the biggest issues with the shuttle: each one was extremely custom. Every single heat shield tile was unique to a specific position and a specific shuttle. There were probably over a hundred million individual components in the Shuttle, and with many critical ones being custom, the time to refurbish it for a new launch was much longer.This is in contrast to something like the falcon, which has a very standardized mfg process and components, which allows for really rapid iteration

The shuttle wasn&#x27;t fully reusable, just for starters.  The boosters were reusable with a lot of refurbishment work.  The center tank was expended every time.  It was very expensive.  Only five shuttles were ever made, which means that no effort was put into automation of production of engines etc., everything was custom, and everything required great care to save the sunk costs.

Early designs of the shuttle were fully reusable. That was quickly dropped due to costs and requirements. The final shuttle design was also unsafe.

Because people are reflexively averse to government spending unless there&#x27;s a billionaire making profits on the way through thanks to 100 years of academic capture by Austro-libertarian economists.

Reusability increases costs if you don&#x27;t reuse often enough.The shuttle would have been much, much, cheaper per launch if it had flown more often. The expected costs for the shuttle included a range based on how often it flew which turned out to be reasonably accurate. They were much worse at predicting which end of the range they would be flying in. At the rate they ended up flying they had the extra costs of reusability without any of the benefits.Starship is ludicrously expensive, but still much cheaper than even the best case for the Shuttle, and it has a guaranteed source of launches to help it benefit from resuability.

Estimated costs of the fully loaded cost of the shuttle program ended up at $600 million to $1 billion per flight. The refurbishment costs per flight and man hours&#x2F;staffing were astronomical.It actually would have been a lot cheaper if they had gone for serialized, mass assembly line production of Saturn V class disposable rockets to launch piece of space stations, satellites and manned missions into low earth orbit.

The main thing is... Space shuttle wasn&#x27;t all that reusable. It had to be launched with a massive rocket and two massive boosters that just fall into the ocean.

&gt; What is the differences between the two?More than 40 years and many lessons learned.SpaceX took advantage of tech from both the US and Russia, including the experience with the Space Shuttle. They have better computers, better metallurgy, advanced 3D printing and their own experience with the Falcon 9.There is no guarantee that it will reduce the costs that much, but will all that experience, the chances are success are higher than with the Space Shuttle.One big issue that isn&#x27;t talked about much and that SpaceX takes very seriously is simply a lack of demand. There is only so much stuff you want to put in space. Satellites are expensive, and even with disposable rockets, the launch is only a smaller fraction of the cost. It is already a problem with the Falcon 9 as they have a bunch of rockets and not much to do with them. Starlink, orbital refueling, and crazy ideas like earth to earth transport are all ways to address this problem.It was a problem for the Space Shuttle too, they couldn&#x27;t achieve the economies of scale they planned it for. It was supposed to fly for routine maintenance missions but it didn&#x27;t work out.

So, reusable is supposed to reduce the cost. But the space shuttle was reusable and it has been shutdown because it was too expensive. What is the differences between the two?

I’d love to see a probe catch and examine ʻOumuamua.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;ʻOumuamua" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;ʻOumuamua</a>

This opens up immense possibilities for exploration

Falcon 9 is still the most advanced rocket flying real missions to date. The only thing close to it is Blue Origin, which didn&#x27;t even have their maiden flight yet.Is their timeline too optimistic? Yeah, but if the industry still catches up with F9 and they are close to having something a lot more advanced it really doesn&#x27;t matter.Even without reusability nothing comes close to Starship&#x27;s cargo capacity. If you don&#x27;t have to put a lot of engineering into getting things as small and light as possible you can put things in space a lot faster.

Where is the progress if they&#x27;re 2 years behind their schedule? In Q1 2025 they should already be launching the HLS according to the timeline.

I&#x27;m just so happy to see this level of progress. This another big step for opening up space. To think that one day this will be considered normal. 150 Metric tons sent on a fully reusable rocket.Thats like a 747 to space.

Saving up those refurbishment costs, cleaning the tower ahead of time!

Yeah but they did pass some flame down much of the tower. Pretty quick though, probably just cleaned it with fire.

Yeah, it also always catches me off guard how late they reignite, while at the same time I&#x27;m always surprised by how slow the liftoff is even though all the boosters are on full throttle. Of course both things make sense given the respective mass at both points in the process, but given that it looks like the same rocket from the outside, a bit unintuitive.

I have the same feeling watching Starship when the telemetry on the bottom right of the screen showing “0km” but landing burn hasn’t started. Later did I know that it was meant to start the burn only a few hundreds _meters_ from the ground

Prior to today the only landings you&#x27;ve seen are Falcon 9, which has to do a &quot;hoverslam&quot; because it can&#x27;t throttle low enough to actually hover.Even just one engine in minimum thrust would make the rocket go up when empty.. so the computer lights the engine at the precise right moment so it will have 0 velocity at 0 altitude, then it cuts off the engine. &quot;Hoverslam&quot;.The Starship booster is different, it can actually hover.

Every moment your engines are burning at anything less than maximum thrust, you are wasting fuel. You want to relight as late as possible with as high thrust as possible for maximum efficiency. But that it actually works is nuts.

Even without the catch step, I always feel like their boosters are coming down way too fast way too late, with engines reigniting startlingly close to surface.  Never ceases to surprise me.

Yeah it definitely looked sketchy for a sec but was probably fully as intended

That was crazy, 50% of me thought as it was coming in, especially as it pitched towards the tower, &quot;they&#x27;ve overcompensated and are going to bring the whole tower down&quot; but they absolutely nailed it.

My guess is that it&#x27;s venting out the system pressure, and it&#x27;s safer to burn it.

who cares... they did it and it didn&#x27;t burn up or destroy the platform. rest is just nitpicking

You usually see some down near the engines after a Falcon 9 landing.The vent out the side before touchdown didn’t look right, though. Something blew, but non-critically.

Probably not expected, but the nice thing is that they don&#x27;t have to pull the vehicle off the bottom of the ocean to study what happened there.

Desirable? Probably not. Expected? Yeah. Especially given that is the was pretty unexpected to work on the first try.

It does look like venting, but on the Everyday Astronaut video feed it also looked like a COPV inside one of the strakes looked like it exploded as well.

If not an intended vent, probably some methane leak. Given that they have the first stage intact, they will know exactly what happened very soon. Yet another advantage of having the rocket returned instead of sinking it in the ocean.

It is common for Starship prototypes to have uncontrolled fires, but it is obviously not a good thing.For example, prototype number 10 exploded 8 minutes after landing [1] because of a seemingly insignificant fire at the bottom.After today&#x27;s flight there was a long lasting fire in the engine section, with occasional flaming pieces of plumbing raining down from the rocket. Examining the aftermath should help SpaceX to understand what improvements need to be made to prevent this from happening.[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;XOQkk3ojNfM?t=38346" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;XOQkk3ojNfM?t=38346</a>

They have mission goals which were achieved (booster was caught). Goals that they didn&#x27;t think they could do (Starship being within the buoys). While there was flames and those could be dangerous you judge the mission based on the planned outcomes but they will try to eliminate the anomalies to improve the next mission while still achieving the goals.

It looked to me like the fire was on the fuel intake valves and if you watch carefully that area was scoured by the nozzle output when it was first slowing down so it probably blew through the shutoff valves or something

I&#x27;d love to see followup analysis of what that fire was all about.

In some of the views of the landing it&#x27;s clear that the flames are from a methane vent.  I.e., it&#x27;s really not a problem.

Naive question: I obviously expect there to be flames from the engines, but there were flames on the lower sides for quite a while after the catch – is that expected?

I suspect there&#x27;s already a whole &quot;refurbishment&quot; process for the crane even for non-reusable launches, and once it&#x27;s working darn reliably, they can just have a bunch of them ready to go, and cycle once in a while.

The plan is to have many, many Mechazillas.

I also expect if something fails a test in the way down you crash in the water rather than splat your catcher

The booster aims towards the shore until the landing burn starts, only then does it swing towards the tower. So, for the most part, failures should mean that the booster safely crashes into the water.

That, and redundancy. The amount of cash you save allows you to do that.

They&#x27;ve landed over 300 Falcon boosters and haven&#x27;t wrecked their barges yet I expect that this won&#x27;t be a major issue.

I wonder what will happen when they get to 99% reliability? They clean up and rebuild the Mechazilla every once a hundred catches, on that occasion that one fails?

This angle is even more impressive IMO <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;x.com&#x2F;kimbal&#x2F;status&#x2F;1845451222750306344" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;x.com&#x2F;kimbal&#x2F;status&#x2F;1845451222750306344</a>

10 minutes from 3h25m of this video shows launch and catch.Historic viewing :)<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=YC87WmFN_As&amp;t=3h25m14s" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=YC87WmFN_As&amp;t=3h25m14s</a>

Erratum: Not Mexico. I echoed a repost without sanity checking the perspective - sorry about that.

A phone video[1] from Mexico, with nice plume refraction of the Sun.[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;x.com&#x2F;Cosmo_556&#x2F;status&#x2F;1845554958604657051" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;x.com&#x2F;Cosmo_556&#x2F;status&#x2F;1845554958604657051</a>

Video of the catch&gt; Mechazilla has caught the Super Heavy booster!<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;x.com&#x2F;spacex&#x2F;status&#x2F;1845442658397049011" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;x.com&#x2F;spacex&#x2F;status&#x2F;1845442658397049011</a>

I think saving weight is definitely one of the main issues, see those proportionally large legs on Falcon-9, I guess it simply doesn&#x27;t scale on bigger vehicles like Starship &#x2F; Heavy booster. Also, by catching the booster on site, they can even save the transportation and do the refurbishing on site, so even shorter turnaround time I guess.

&gt; I&#x27;m not sure how critical &quot;catching&quot; the booster is to reusabilityNot necessarily for reusability, but it helps significantly for rapid reusability: it eliminates the need to transport the booster from the landing site to the launch site. Given that it&#x27;s 9m x 70m and weighs 270 tonnes, that&#x27;s not an easy process.

Efficiency and cost are the goals, reusability is just one way to do that.  Moving big heavy things less is another.

&gt; but it does save weight by not needing legs for landingThat was the exact reason they went this way.

I&#x27;m not sure how critical &quot;catching&quot; the booster is to reusability, but it does save weight by not needing legs for landing, and perhaps the booster suffers less stress this way?Note that the booster is not really being &quot;caught&quot; although this is the word it seems we&#x27;re stuck with. It&#x27;s really more like landing on the arms, since it throttles to a hover at that point.

Didn’t they look at all kinds of ideas earlier like squirting some propellant or water out over the skin on the way down, and wasn’t steel chosen for its thermal robustness? Did they get into the problem and realize it’s a lot harder and abandon those things for tiles?Maybe they will have to sacrifice more payload mass for active or passive shielding or more fuel for powered deceleration. That would yield a less impressive lifter but with full reusability.

&gt; Other companies should have reusable boosters soonYou&#x27;re way too optimistic. Starship will deliver commercial payloads, with SpaceX phasing out Falcon 9 outside of ISS launches, before anyone has a reusable Falcon 9 equivalent.It pains me to say this, but SpaceX is in a class all its own.

I found Jeff’s Bezos interview with everyday astronaut really illuminating on this topic.Supposedly they’re working on both a reusable and cost optimised non-reusable second stage at the same time. And they don’t really know yet which one will end up being cheaper.You also see this kind of thinking with Rocket Labs neutron rocket. Where they focus on making the reusable booster do more, while making the second stage smaller, cheaper and simpler.I think if it wasn’t for the rocket engine this wouldn’t be a question at all. The tank doesn’t have much value. It’s just a thin shell and probably a fraction of the cost of the fuel.So I’m thinking, perhaps the optimal solution is something like this: the bottom part of the second stage with the engines separates, and a small engine and fuel tanks places the engines in a stable orbit. The tank itself is deorbited and burns up.At some point later something like the Starship collects several second stage engines and deorbits them safely to be reused.Or perhaps just the engines can be immediately deorbited with an inflatable heat shield and parachutes.

&gt; Second stage reuse seems the far more challenging problem.Sure, SpaceX has been doing first stage reuse for a long time now. But they have demonstrated landing the second stage successfully at sea twice now with the same sort of smoothness that they demonstrated once for the booster before they then caught the booster on the first real try.A partial list of unbelievably hard things that SpaceX has so far made seem easy:<pre><code> - building a rocket from scratch
 - landing Falcon 9 boosters
 - landing Falcon 9 boosters *reliably*
 - 3x weekly launch cadence (Falcon)
 - the bellyflop manoeuver
 - mass manufacturing(!) a rocket engine
 - catching the booster
 - simulated landings of the ship
</code></pre>
Catching the booster is really just like landing a Falcon 9 booster w&#x2F;o legs, but clearly much harder.Anyways, if they can do all those things then it&#x27;s pretty clear that they can catch-land the ship.There&#x27;s still a huge list of crazy-difficult things that SpaceX say they want to do that are hard to believe are possible, except for the fact that SpaceX has already done so many unbelievably difficult things already.

Second stage reuse seems the far more challenging problem. Other companies should have reusable boosters soon but if significant amounts of Starship continue to ablate on the way down they could be faced with a disposable Starship competing with smaller and cheaper second stages that are well sized for typical payloads. We already knew boosters can be flown back to launch sites reliably with high accuracy. We don&#x27;t know if it is possible to make rapidly reusable thermal protection systems that can operate on an orbital vehicle of Starship&#x27;s size until it is demonstrated.

true but don&#x27;t forget this is test flight #5

They&#x27;re a long way from having a reusable super heavy booster. It&#x27;s still copping a lot of damage on the landing.

Even with a disposable upper stage, I believe Starship would be cheaper per kg than F9 or FH.

They&#x27;re still having some significant burn through problems on the upper stage fins during reentry it looks like. Way better than last time but the top part of the fin was glowing far a while after the main reentry finished.

It&#x27;s difficult to overstate how important the milestone of catching the booster is.  Now we have a reusable rocket an order of magnitude larger than anything we&#x27;ve had before, and the cost of kg to orbit just nosedived.

The SpaceX engineers are incredible for being able to pull this off.

They should just rename themselves to NSF Space Flight, or NSF for short.

&gt; NSF is not affiliated with NASA, but the initials in the URL are used with permission from NASA.

NSF video: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;x.com&#x2F;nasaspaceflight&#x2F;status&#x2F;1845442658203734384" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;x.com&#x2F;nasaspaceflight&#x2F;status&#x2F;1845442658203734384</a>Truly incredible. A day for the history books.

Literally brought me to tears, watching that happen.

Can you explain why? I don&#x27;t understand why this is so important

That was one of the greatest things I&#x27;ve ever seen.

&gt; Edit: SpaceX should create a simple &#x27;catch&#x27; the rocket game. Play in browser style. Just for kicks and marketing.there is, it was discussed in the FAA thread.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=41821220">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=41821220</a>

Shameless plug for my own project with a similar bent - write your own lunar lander autopilot in browserlunar.unnecessarymodification.com

&gt; SpaceX should create a simple &#x27;catch&#x27; the rocket game. Play in browser style. Just for kicks and marketing.They did: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;starshipthegame.spacex.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;starshipthegame.spacex.com&#x2F;</a>

This one is not from SpaceX, but gives way more fun: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;mechazilla.io&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;mechazilla.io&#x2F;</a>

Watched several times, amazing stuff.Had flashbacks to playing Jupiter Landing on the C64!<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Jupiter_Lander" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Jupiter_Lander</a>Edit: SpaceX should create a simple &#x27;catch&#x27; the rocket game. Play in browser style. Just for kicks and marketing.

Felt special witnessing history, was delighted my kids and their friends all were glued to the TV for it also.

I always thought the liquid sloshing would be one of the hardest to simulate (considering how chaotic fluid mechanics is). Interestingly, I think this caused the 2nd Falcon launch to fail (the LOX sloshing).

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Model_predictive_control" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Model_predictive_control</a><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;cse.lab.imtlucca.it&#x2F;~bemporad&#x2F;publications&#x2F;papers&#x2F;ecc15-descent.pdf" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;cse.lab.imtlucca.it&#x2F;~bemporad&#x2F;publications&#x2F;papers&#x2F;ecc...</a>

how much liquid fuel is present when it lands? I assumed all the clouds it was giving off was it dumping fuel to make sure it was empty on landing

I never thought of using fluid dynamics in the rocket stabilization algorithm—maybe it&#x27;s something that could be useful to prevent many of the accidents involving liquid-transport trucks

Reminds me of the early days of Google File System.They used trios of regular consumer grade disks&#x2F;servers etc as a cluster and it looked like a single node.They had to replace a LOT of hardware but this was still cheaper than big iron industrial grades servers.

&gt; Another interesting thing SpaceX is doing is to use consumer-grade chips in triple redundancy configurations instead of using $100,000+ radiation-hardened aerospace&#x2F;defense grade chips.This has been known in the high availability and safety systems industry for a while and a good book to learn these reliability engineering techniques is &quot;Reliability Evaluation of Engineering Systems&quot;.The book is available on amazon: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;a.co&#x2F;d&#x2F;1nH824K" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;a.co&#x2F;d&#x2F;1nH824K</a>

Just as a note, Space Engineers has a mod that accounts for fuel in the tanks and also various orbital mods. If one feels inclined to try it for themselves ;)

I spent 2 semesters covering controls and I barely felt like I learned anything.

Reliability is not based on a system that cannot fail. It is based on a system that can survive failure.

I know MPC takes a LOT of compute power. It&#x27;s not like a finely tuned PID loop or even a cascade of PID loops, computationally.Does anyone know (or have educated speculation on) what kind of hardware is running these algorithms? Like, do they have a linux machine that&#x27;s running the control loops? Are we talking megabytes, gigabytes of SRAM?I would think no -- you would definitely need hard real time for something like this. But my only experience with real time systems is in tiny MCUs with kb of SRAM. That&#x27;s definitely too small for a controller like this.Really curious about the nuts and bolts of this.

I have been told by people who worked on them that you get radiation hardened aerospace&#x2F;defence grade chips by backing off the clock speed about 20% to give signal stabilization slightly longer time.  I can understand the population being confused about this but industry being confused seems to have more to do with regulatory capture and beaurocratic moats which SpaceX does seem to be bypassing.

People don&#x27;t realize how powerful applied math (especially in the areas you&#x27;ve mentioned) has become. Same tools can be applied to people in the ad tech&#x2F;social media.

<pre><code> &gt;probably involve some kind of fast numerical fluid simulation
</code></pre>
Sometimes even a simple approach can work. On Apollo they developed (at the time cutting-edge) passive RC filter networks, to avoid the control system &quot;exciting&quot; the rocket at frequencies of the slosh&#x2F;bend&#x2F;torsion modes.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ntrs.nasa.gov&#x2F;api&#x2F;citations&#x2F;19700023342&#x2F;downloads&#x2F;19700023342.pdf" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ntrs.nasa.gov&#x2F;api&#x2F;citations&#x2F;19700023342&#x2F;downloads&#x2F;19...</a> (search for &quot;slosh&quot; or &quot;shaping network&quot;)

&gt; control system also has to compensate for the fuel moving inside their rocketsMy stepfather worked as a programmer on the Apollo program, and the thing he always talked about as his biggest accomplishment was working on the &quot;slosh problem&quot; -- so yeah, props to the SpaceX team for managing that landing. And props to my stepdad for managing it on hardware that was... a billion times less capable? :-)

&gt; MIMO and nonlinear control theories are probably some of the hardest topics in all of engineering.I am curious but clueless about these problems, can you expand more?

&quot;instead of using $100,000+ radiation-hardened aerospace&#x2F;defense grade chips&quot;Well, that makes perfect sense considering that both the spaceport infrastructure, and the booster need to do their calculation on the ground level instead of the highly radiated environment that is space. However, for the rockets themselves, which happen to reach that harsh environment, they may use more resilient and expensive hardware in the future, after passing over the current &quot;let it splash in the Indian Ocean&quot; development and testing phases.

&gt; SpaceX control system also has to compensate for the fuel moving inside their rockets so the control algorithms probably involve some kind of fast numerical fluid simulation.Surely this isn&#x27;t necessary with a small enough sensor granularity or whatever the terminology is. You can have very dumb software if it reacts quickly enough to changes in perception.

I&#x27;m not an engineer, but is there a reason why they can&#x27;t french press (sans filter) the fuel toward the bottom of the tank as it empties?

MIMO and nonlinear control theories are probably some of the hardest topics in all of engineering. SpaceX control system also has to compensate for the fuel moving inside their rockets so the control algorithms probably involve some kind of fast numerical fluid simulation.Another interesting thing SpaceX is doing is to use consumer-grade chips in triple redundancy configurations instead of using $100,000+ radiation-hardened aerospace&#x2F;defense grade chips.

timestamp for &quot;catch&quot; is around 40:00 for those curious

I thought it was plausible given the accuracy of F9 landings, though I still wonder how it will work at scale if one failure destroys the landing site. That could ruin the cost benefits.Where his vision hit a lot of speed bumps is second stage reusability. Starship is a beautiful second stage to throw in the ocean. They’ll probably get it landing but the heat tiles will require a lot of refurbishment between flights. They’re going to have to figure something else out.

This happened with LLMs in a big way. Basically humanity surpassed some kind of AI milestone and we zoomed past the turing test in a big way. But thanks to social media everyone is sort of rolling their eyes at it.

&quot;When Musk first proposed this, I thought he was crazy.&quot;&quot;Is there a word for that - something out of fiction becoming mundane?&quot;Musking?

2 related expressions:
1. Creeping Determinism - the idea that even magical leaps forward were somehow inevitable and were anticipated.
2. Nihil Admirari - the idea that wisdom is anticipating every possible thing that could happen, therefore a wise person would never be surprised.But I lump both these together as the *&quot;Wiseass Movable Feast&quot;*

When Musk first proposed this, I thought he was crazy. It seemed like something a school boy would draw up. Now I think this will become routine and forgettable after a few more successes. Is there a word for that - something out of fiction becoming mundane?

Because the rocket weighs a small fraction of what it did at launch, specifically because it only has 2-3% fuel left.Fuel is the vast majority of the vehicle weight at launch, kind of like an empty vs full can of soda.

It weighs about 10% of what it did at liftoff, but half of the engines fire to slow it down.Also I don&#x27;t think the telemetry on the feed is that accurate, so with all of the atmospheric braking, it was probably going a bit slower than the 1200km&#x2F;h at engine reignition.

First off, the booster was going about 1250 km&#x2F;h when it started its landing burn, it relied purely on drag to get it slowed down to that speed.Going by the telemetry of the seconds before the landing burn and noting the speed vs time, it seems drag was around 40 m&#x2F;s^2 when it was going at around 3000 km&#x2F;h. Since drag depends on velocity squared though, it had reduced to just above 10 m&#x2F;s^2 just before the engines lit at 1250 km&#x2F;h, and so would quickly become negligible once the engines lit.Going by Wikipedia, the Super Heavy[1] has 3400000 kg of fuel at launch, so 3% of that is about 102000 kg. For the landing burn, it used 13 Raptor v3 engines[2] to scrub speed. Each Raptor flows about 650 kg&#x2F;s max, so 3% fuel is enough for about 12 seconds for the 13 engines.The empty mass of the Super Heavy is about 275000 kg, so about 377000 kg before the landing burn with 3% fuel.Using the sea-level vs vacuum performance of the Raptor v2 engines, one can estimate that each Raptor v3 produces about 2.45 NM of force at sea-level. So 13 of them would produce about 31.85 MN of force.Using Newton&#x27;s second law, F=ma, this gives an initial deceleration of about 84 m&#x2F;s^2 and about 104 m&#x2F;s^2 when empty. If we do a rough spreadsheet integration, we get that a burn of roughly 4 seconds is needed to scrub the speed assuming no other forces.Now, comparing this with reality, the full 13 engines were lit for a little over 5 seconds.In my simplified calculations I was assuming full throttle the whole way, which obviously isn&#x27;t realistic, and I also assumed 3% fuel. So over all I think that&#x27;s a pretty decent estimation.[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;SpaceX_Super_Heavy#Engines" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;SpaceX_Super_Heavy#Engines</a>[2]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;SpaceX_Raptor" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;SpaceX_Raptor</a>

Note that the energy of 3% of the propellant (~100 GJ) could theoretically get the empty booster (100,000 kg) to a little over 5000 km&#x2F;h if properly applied.

The booster was falling at 4500 Km&#x2F;h 30 seconds before the catch with 2-3% fuel left. How is that amount of fuel remotely enough to stop the downward momentum?

I thought the same, screamed out &quot;ouch that doesn&#x27;t look good!&quot; right before the catch.The last part of the live stream they showed footage from a different angle and there it didn&#x27;t look too bad though! For sure controlled.Scott Manley put out a tweet that they went down towards a non-tower position until they were at three engine controlled burn, and only then did the side shift.

Actually this is a good question - there&#x27;s a lot of control engineering research on Data-Driven Control Systems.Check Steve Brunton youtube channel, he is one of the leaders in this area: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;gb_C9LcjDSI?si=xUjqUZ9-0MIFohX6" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;gb_C9LcjDSI?si=xUjqUZ9-0MIFohX6</a>

If I had to bet, I would bet against it. Boston Dynamics for example, for the longest time, didn&#x27;t use anything other than Model-Predictive Control. Only recently have they started using RL

The simulation they show at 21 min into the video is almost exactly like it happend in the end, to it seems it went perfectly as planned.

super good question, especially with all the tilting involved, which would make visual servoing difficult. Maybe some form of beacons on the ground?

Could just be differential&#x2F;rtk GPS. You can get incredible precision with that.

From the control point of view, isn&#x27;t this exactly the same as F9 landing on a pad, except the pad is virtual, floating in between the chopsticks and the ground? Or course one difference is that the approach needs to be from the correct direction.

Great question! Could just be Real-Time Kinematic (RTK) GPS like someone mentioned. Essentially the landing arms know their position very precisely and they measure the tiny errors in GPS data, and send that correction data live to the rocket in real-time as it&#x27;s landing. Once the rocket gets very very close it could also just be using vision systems to zero-in on exactly where the chopsticks are.To speculate more, they could also be using something like ultra-wide band positioning. This relies on the same time-of-flight principle as GPS but instead of using satellites in orbit to provide the precise time information you rely on various nearby ground stations. Would only be useful right at the final approach, the last couple hundred meters, but it&#x27;s another way they could get very very precise position information. (fun fact: Ultra Wide band positioning is also how iPhones can locate AirTags with centimeter accuracy)

I know the control algorithms are the mind-blowing part here but,does anyone have any literature about how the Rocket localized itself with respect to the chopstick arms? It must&#x27;ve been some combination of GPS and Radar pings to the arms?And then the onboard IMU to make sure it hits it straight.

That&#x27;s amazing footage, and you&#x27;re right about the perspective: from the official feed the distances seem compressed compared to what we see in this footage.

The little boy who was lifted on his dad’s shoulders got me emotional.

Wow, those pressure waves! Didn&#x27;t see them yet, on all the close up footage. Thx for posting

Here’s a video from a farther vantage point that gives a better perspective on the landing process:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;x.com&#x2F;shaunmmaguire&#x2F;status&#x2F;1845444890764644694" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;x.com&#x2F;shaunmmaguire&#x2F;status&#x2F;1845444890764644694</a>

There&#x27;s also a very impressive sensor and actuator story.

Yes, indeed. But I will add that the sheer size of the rocket helps in this regard. I think it is rather hard to appreciate the massive scale of the feat by watching videos.

A clip from some news program popped up on YouTube, just a two minutes clip of the catch, I was convinced that it was reversed. The fact that this is possible, that they made it work is nothing short of amazing.

Prior launch landed 0.5cm away from the target location. This is equivalent to landing a 25 story building right on the foundation.Absolutely impressive accuracy and precision.

Nothing could have prepared me for how that catch looked. I was sure the rocket was careening into the tower at the last second before it straightened out. The control algorithms must be incredible for the landing system to work within those small tolerances.

Well it shows like SpaceX on mobile with 150k viewers, maybe YouTube could use some brain power to fix that.

Would be great if I could stream to my Chromecast or AppleTV from X without using airplay streaming my whole browser...

They don&#x27;t do lives on youtube, those are scammers. it is always on x.com

And yet all MSM channels are the first thing u see when u query certain topics and people.It’s intentional

Youtube has a terrible problem with scammers.  I don&#x27;t know why they don&#x27;t do anything about this.

There was an AI crypto scam channel. Musk is so scammy that it looked feasible and was shared widely by the looks.

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;i&#x2F;broadcasts&#x2F;1RDGlyognOgJL" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;i&#x2F;broadcasts&#x2F;1RDGlyognOgJL</a>Here. Or try Space Affairs on YouTube

Those are deep fake crypto scams that YouTube does not pull down. My father was scammed by one for over $2000.The older we get, the likelihood that we get scammed approaches one. Be weary.

Uuuh the first stream on YouTube was Musk giving a speech, so I was waiting for the launch but turns out it was on another stream? So I just missed the whole thing, great.

Everyday Astronaut Stream: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;pIKI7y3DTXk" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;pIKI7y3DTXk</a>

I hope this is not going to be used for &#x27;Earth point A -&gt; Earth point B&#x27; travel.

Improvements that make space flight more sustainable are welcome ... unless that means an order of magnitude more pollution in a less controllable form, like emissions. [Due to more frequent flights]Daily trips to space likely also mean more debris in space and falling to earth.I hope there is a balance that includes the lives of people near these sites and all of us sharing the same atmosphere.

Magnificent, it&#x27;s hard to image what we&#x27;ll be able to do once these do roundtrips daily. For those are not aware, that booster is 71 m (233 ft) tall!

Congratulations to those working at SpaceX!

I would like to shake the hands of the steeley eyed rocket men and women who just landed a skyscraper with centimeter precision. Respect.This one&#x27;s for you. Hit it Perry. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=_VJlHWESyLI" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=_VJlHWESyLI</a>

Seems impossible honestly. Like the Jetsons

Usually it is a small telescope on a nice motorized mount weighing a ton. NASA had several of those around Cape Canaveral [1].[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=xig3sL_rRH8" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=xig3sL_rRH8</a>

The thing that impresses me even more is the kinds of cameras they mount on the rocket. How do they shield it from all the heat and debris with a material that&#x27;s optically clear?

I&#x27;m completely mind-blown that not only can they do this, but we get 1080p video for almost the whole time.What cameras do they have that can look at something 30 KM up in the air that well?

As in life, when a person is on a road to nowhere, it’s the homecoming that’s sweet. The only thing more exciting than an Earth landing will be a moon or Martian landing. Or the in-orbit fuel consolidation docking, if only because it will be a huge milestone.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;open.spotify.com&#x2F;track&#x2F;7wFmJxJfGCN6DM5913y7pr?si=-Uomu7jrSf-odR_YmCK3IA" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;open.spotify.com&#x2F;track&#x2F;7wFmJxJfGCN6DM5913y7pr?si=-Uo...</a>

It still blows my mind how the landings are more exciting than the launches.

&quot;Incredible!&quot; in the voice of my 3 year old who just saw it :)

We&#x27;re going to need a dedicated FSA (federal space agency) at this rate, which should do most of the heavy lifting (ha) for the FAA and just use them for NOTAMs and TFRs.

What makes you think the issue is funding?

Need to remove regulations instead and fast track SpaceX.Every fucking time we don&#x27;t need to increase the size of the Government. It only gets bigger. Never smaller.

More money would make the situation worse. They need competent leadership. Everyone like to just say “add more money” because it means no actual operational change to the status quo.

It seemed to not be FAA here, but the several other agencies that all had 60 days to respond. FAA fast-tracked it but couldn&#x27;t fast track it past the other guys&#x27; 60 day allowed time.

The FAA needs more funding at this point. They&#x27;re not staffed for the rate of launch requests which commercial space has grown too.

It is a state commission composed of political appointees. It&#x27;s unlikely it has the jurisdiction over Vandenberg to ban any activities, except when such activities violate state environmental laws. Even then, the federal government might be able to override them. It will be interesting to see what comes of this.Ideally, the commission will withdraw its objections and allow the launches; SpaceX obviously chose this site both for its proximity to the Pacific Ocean and for redundancy in case of poor weather in Florida (like this past week for example).

I don’t understand how this is a constitutional violation like you claim. Let’s pretend he posted something absurd on Twitter for arguments sake, like “I’m going to use my rockets to kill every endangered bird on every California beach”, do you think that should not be considered when evaluating the request for more launches?

But Starship launches from (checks map) Texas.

Well that may still continue to happen. The wonderful and competent state of California is literally trying to block SpaceX launches over Musk’s constitutionally protected political speech:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.politico.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;2024&#x2F;10&#x2F;10&#x2F;california-reject-musk-spacex-00183371" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.politico.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;2024&#x2F;10&#x2F;10&#x2F;california-reject-m...</a>I cannot remember a more explicit case of authoritarian government abuse in a developed nation in recent memory, and it’s especially infuriating given SpaceX and Musk are one of the most important and innovative companies and leaders of all time. No other country would think to look at such accomplishments and try to undermine themselves through petty politics and lawfare.

That&#x27;s madness.  And unconstitutional.

The California Coastal Commission has no authority over a Federal (Military) launch range so there&#x27;s no need for real concern. Yes using people&#x27;s personal opinions for denial is illegal, but it&#x27;s moot regardless. So I&#x27;m not sure SpaceX could sue for any damages.

They don&#x27;t actually have any jurisdiction in this case. Launches from Vandendberg are from a military base and while they do try to work with the California commission they ultimately are the ones that decide what does and does not get launched.

California officials reject more SpaceX launches, with some citing Musk&#x27;s X posts<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;shellenberger&#x2F;status&#x2F;1845131546501734440&#x2F;photo&#x2F;1" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;shellenberger&#x2F;status&#x2F;1845131546501734440...</a>

Very inspiring, glad I woke up to watch it. Congratulations to the SpaceX team. This is what competition looks like. It’s funny how last decade SpaceX had to sue the government to get more launches.

Starship Flight 5: Launch and booster catch [video]