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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   268 thread views

Transnational Thursday for January 16, 2025

Transnational Thursday is a thread for people to discuss international news, foreign policy or international relations history. Feel free as well to drop in with coverage of countries you’re interested in, talk about ongoing dynamics like the wars in Israel or Ukraine, or even just whatever you’re reading.

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Starship exploded. I'd link to some Twitter video but the X posts run from "This is actually a win!" to "Embarrassing disaster, must be investigated now!" Musk seems to be on X silence, at least as of this writing.

Musk posted about it last night:

https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1880060983734858130

But he's clearly identified a downstream problem there, not yet a root cause.

The booster landing again, in visibly better shape than test 5, was a win. The Starship explosion was grossly embarrassing (worst performance since test 2, and yeah it was a major version update but they obviously weren't expecting this level of new teething problems).

It was also a near-disaster: no reports of injuries, but (unconfirmed) reports of property damage from shrapnel, and aircraft having to do emergency diversions away from the hazard area, are not things that should ever be consequences of a launch failure.

And of course it must be investigated now. Starship is currently launching solely through a narrow keyhole between Cuba and Florida where any disasters can avoid the heaviest population densities, but there are still islands in the danger zone if, as just happened, a launch fails in an unrecoverable way at just the wrong time. More importantly in the medium term, SpaceX wants to start catching ships in addition to boosters, and for that to happen they first need to reenter, from the west, over land. If they can't credibly and correctly assure the safety of that plan, they'll be stuck at the same "partially reusable" design level as Falcon 9 (and hopefully New Glenn sooner or later), and the cost of that would that they're not recouping their multi-billion-dollar investment any time soon, and the harm it would do to flight cadence would make their Artemis plans much harder.

Yes, I think legally it has to be investigated anyway. Thank you for the link, apparently I am much further delayed in my news stream than I suspected.

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