SpaceX's Starship should be ready to fly again before Christmas, Elon Musk says
www.space.com
But it's unclear if the company will have a launch license by then.

“Starship Flight 3 hardware should be ready to fly in 3 to 4 weeks.” Musk on X, Nov 19 2023

It’s nice to at least see the ship back on pad B :)

  • threelonmusketeers@sh.itjust.worksMEnglish
    0·
    9 months ago

    I very much doubt that either the booster stage or the orbiter stage detonated as a result of a failsafe mechanism.

    The article may be a bit out of date. Last week, Kathy Lueders confirmed that the AFTS were activated.

    SpaceX will be going bankrupt soon. Musk already said this would happen last year

    He’s made similar hyperbolic statements before. I think SpaceX is in a reasonably safe financial position for now. They’ve scooped up the majority of the (western) launch market, F9 reuse is working well, and they announced that Starlink turned a profit earlier this year.

    SpaceX have been reporting lots of quality control issues producing the new version of the Raptor engines

    Have they? Reliability seemed much better on IFT-2 than IFT-1, and I don’t see any reason this trend wouldn’t hold for IFT-3.

    • vexikron@lemmy.zipEnglish
      0·
      9 months ago

      I dont believe Kathy Lueders. SpaceX staff in general and Musk in particular have a long track record of making ludicrous promises and failing to deliver on them, as well as many statements about proposed systems or features that are more or less obviously physically or economically impossible if you do some basic research on what they would entail.

      A great example of this is the idea of using point to point rockets to replace aircraft flights. Two obvious reasons this is a ludicrous idea is that 1) rockets take a lot longer to refuel than aircraft and 2) they take a lot longer to safely prepare (ie check over and refurb) to be flown again.

      And besides, none of that alleviates what I already outlined: the booster cannot have exploded like that if the story is as simple as the abort system engaged. At best, that would mean the abort system was poorly designed or malfunctioned, because it /should/ have prevented, not caused, the massive explosion that was seen.

      Re Starlink, you stopped my quote before the part that mentions this was an internal company email sent by Musk to other SpaceX employees.

      It seems you agree with me though that when talking to the public Musk often says grandiose hyperbolic nonsense.

      Re the Raptor reliability, yes. You are misinformed.

      Look, I dont know how to break this to you but Elon is a egomaniac lying scam artist who has basically failed to deliver on the vast majority of promises he has made over the course of a decade.