alt Hacker NewsSpaceX's Starship launching to orbit for first time ever today
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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)
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-...
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.
What an incredible feat of engineering, even if it doesn't make orbit. Just getting that much mass off the pad is mind-boggling.
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...
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.
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 technologically elegant solutions. But he's got a really big blind spot for the project management implications.
7km/s, 26 sattelites currently deploying - super impressive!
Huge congratulations to the SpaceX team!
I tuned in at T+11 just in time to hear the announcer talking about splashdown in the Indian ocean and that they weren't going to orbit today, followed immediately by saying the team is still considering options and trying to find a way to get to orbit. We'll see what happens.
T+22: Go for orbit!
I find curious the Starship business ROI discussed here mentions almost exclusively Starlink and the moon.
Putting weapons in orbit seems a very likely goal, given the attitude of the current US leadership.
They felt confident enough to recently acknowledge publicly their existence:
Watching that take off is breathtaking. I've been a space nerd since a little kid and I cannot believe how cool this is. Fuck yeah!
This was such a long time coming!
I remember all the Twitter account that keep saying Starship isn't physically / scientifically possible.
I am so looking forward to a successfully launch today.
go for orbit!!!
planned 6 orbits, 10hr's in space the load of satelites will deploy 10x the banwidth of a single falcon launch making the economics of this venture rather startling for any 'competition'. if they nail the deploy, relights, and soft landings, it will time for everybody to rethink everything * * keep in mind they are already tinkering with on orbit fuel tranfer technology, which will lead to routine bunkering * other things, like doing visual condition inspections of every ship in orbit means there experience base grows at a rate that other companys litteraly cant imagine.
SpaceX is a master lesson in over promising and under delivering
Not a fan of Elon Musk at all, but SpaceX is damn impressive. Watching these key launches always makes me emotional for our species and what we can accomplish together.
mpv https://x.com/i/broadcasts/1qxvvenMPMQxB
works beautifully
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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.