Did not enjoy the wait for AOS!

May Clipper have a boring journey.

Stunning. They have no right to make it look so easy.

I was ready to wait until Christmas for this and now I’m not emotionally prepared!

If there’s a catch attempt I’m expecting a mild success where something goes wrong (those arms sway sooo much), but I’m optimistic about Ship reentry. Going to be great.

Curious to see what happens in the Gulf given Zack Golden’s speculation from a few days ago. Are they really going to retrieve a booster that’s hundreds of meters below sea level? Feels hard.

Unfortunate for this to happen on a high profile flight, amid all the regulatory bickering.

I’m glad my concerns about these suits were overblown! They look like a big improvement over status quo.

Pretty confused about why SpaceX released this - it’s a vague, whiney, entitled message, even if they’re right!

Parts of the regulatory process are clunky, and the goals of an environmental assessment don’t always align with the goals of SpaceX - that’s the point. I’d be concerned if the company was happy with the process.

I don’t want to write an essay right now. I know it’s messy, and the process needs to improve. I just wish SpaceX had brought receipts before starting…whatever they just started.

Great points. I think my concern is that a failed catch has the potential to look very dramatic, even if nothing significant goes wrong. I worry that a lengthy investigation will be triggered. But admittedly I don’t know how that process works!

I wonder if a successful catch will be what accelerates the launch schedule.

I hope a failed catch doesn’t mean a six month pause…

They have, and that seems to be the industry standard. I don’t expect issues. But you can’t test everything in a full gravity vacuum chamber and SpaceX has never made an EVA suit before.

I’m sure the depressurization process includes tons of safety measures and tests, but I’m still creeped out by a tourist flight being this experimental!

As far as I know these EVA suits aren’t going to be tested sans people, and that gives me the creeps!

I think I’ve come to a similar conclusion after IFT-4. Reusability is the top priority, not a stretch goal like with Falcon-9. As such, the expected value of testing reentry is a lot higher than that of orbital maneuvering.

What an insanely aggressive development approach!

It stands for “maximum dynamic pressure”, and is a fluid dynamics concept. It’s the moment when the spacecraft is under the most stress, and therfore where certain things are most likely to fall apart.

It’s caused by a combination of atmospheric density and velocity. To avoid issues, there’s a rough rule of “don’t accelerate too much until you’re high enough that the atmosphere thins out” during launch, and “don’t hit the atmosphere too fast” during reentry.

Here’s a chart for the IFT-3 launch. At one minute you can see that acceleration decreased for a few seconds, to minimize the strength of max-Q.

Interesting that there’s nothing special about acceleration at max-Q, unlike during launch.

If it’s only the on-screen flap that had issues, hopefully that points to a minor fix instead of a major one. I wonder what sort of data they have on this. How many thermal tiles were lost on each flap? Where did the issues start? Are the other flaps alright? Hard things to track.

I can’t believe they (maybe) completed the landing burn with a shredded flap.

Between that and the booster engine issues, this seems like one of the best possible learning scenarios.

The Super Heavy hover looked way more stable than I was expecting. Amazing progress.

The lack of vacuum relight is really interesting - I thought that was the biggest barrier to a “real” orbital flight with a payload that can start offsetting development costs.

But yes, everything else about this flight plan is exciting!

I remember feeling stunned about how limited the HLS test was going to be. So much effort and money to NOT test critical systems? I hope they keep adding elements.

Under one of the options, astronauts would launch into low-Earth orbit inside an Orion spacecraft and rendezvous there with a Starship vehicle, separately launched by SpaceX…The crew would then return to Earth.

Prudent to test these capabilities, but ouch.