Zer0_F0x

Bait for wenchmarks

NASA paid for the promise of a super cheap, high-availability, super heavy lift vehicle that could land on the moon and on Mars.

Rapidly reusable boosters and ships for refueling in orbit is the most important part of that promise, the landing on the moon and Mars part is relatively easy in comparison and has all been demonstrated by NASA themselves in the past.

Of course that's all just why they pretend to develop such systems, the true reason being American military presence anywhere on the planet within minutes.

Yeah, that strategy worked wonders for Germany 85 years ago

It's at the bottom of Google's first page too

Don't you have to touch the bow above the thing raising the strings to play the violin...?

Someone tracked it until splashdown, so by using the camera angle and landmarks they can pinpoint the exact position it fell in and fish it out, it was pretty close to shore!

Open wide, America, Bibi's balls are getting dry and your taxpayer dollars are the saliva that will moisturize them

I'm Greek and I always thought it's derived from the words olo (whole, entire) and kafsi (to burn) so as to mean something that burns completely. A quick Google search seems to confirm this but I'm admittedly not an expert on the matter

The Saturn V could lift 141t to LEO...once. Also it'll be at least another 5 years before we reach a stable max power version of Starship.

For example the Falcon 9 v1.0 first flew in 2010 and the current Block 5 version first flew in 2018 with more than double the LEO capacity when fully expendable.

If they configure Starship as fully expendable it can lift 250t to LEO (per SpaceX, so grain of salt there to be fair).

As for the shuttle, I love it to bits and I'm sad it had to be grounded. It was refurbishable but not really reusable and the massive liquid fuel tank was discarded in each flight.

That can't be right! 2016 was just.... Fuck I'm getting old so fast

Disclaimer: Fuck Elon Musk and all the shady shit he's been pulling off.

That said, this is one of the most impressive things I've ever seen in terms of the potential it holds to shape the future.

Up until 5 short years ago we had:

• No main booster recovery
• No rocket nearly as powerful as this one
• No successful flight of a full-flow stage engine
• Nobody even considering the catch with chopsticks thing
• No private company testing super heavy lift vehicles (BO is about to enter the chat as well)
• No push for reusability at all

This was all built on top of the incredible engineering of NASA, but this one launch today has all of the above ticked.

This is like making the first aeroplane that's able to land and be flown again. SpaceX uses this example as well, like, imagine how expensive any plane ticket would have to be if you had to build a brand new A380 every single time people wanted to fly and then crashing it into the sea.

Going to space is EXPENSIVE. If this program succeeds it will both massively reduce the cost to space and spin off hundreds of companies looking to do the same in various ways.

Look at any new rocket currently in development, they all include some level of reusability in the design and that's all thanks to the incredible engineers of SpaceX paving the way, first with Falcon 9 and now with Starship.

We're talking industrial revolution levels of progress and new frontiers in our lifetimes, which is very, very exciting.