re: Starship Flight Test #2 | Starship got to Space for 1st Time!!

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Thought they said they had no intention of trying to land/retrieve today.

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They do want to test the hover procedure needed for the eventual chopstick catch sequence before dumping it into the Gulf

NSF showing 1 of their slow-mo shots... several obvious areas where heat shield tiles have shaken off of Starship

That will be another thing for SpaceX to look at

Chopsticks are lowering

It took 3 days for chopsticks to move after the 1st flight

Just 2 hours after 2nd flight

FAA announces a 'mishap'... investigation to start

All expected... I'm sure the FAA is part of the crew walking around

SpaceX & FAA will work together to get the mishap investigation done as quickly as possible... and I imagine this will take much less time than the 7 months between 1st & 2nd flights

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Very sad about the RUD of the first stage. I was going to scuba dive it next week.

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You might have 1 to dive on by summer time

so after finally watching the SpaceX feed of the launch instead of the NSF feed... I now definitely have a different opinion as to what happened to B9

it seems like not all of the engines that were supposed to relight to help with the boost back burn actually lit and then the 1s that did light up for the boost back started to shut down in a weird manner... including 1 of the 3 center engines which never shut down in the first place also going down

then it seemed like there might have been an explosion from the engine bay moments before the FTS activated

so it seems the issue was with boost back and may or may not have had anything to do with hot staging

the leading theory so far seems to be the sloshing of the fuel inside the booster on its flip may have caused a liquid hammer affect.

the chopsticks have been lowered all the way to the bottom of the OLM and there's clearly some severed cables on at least 1 of the arms

so the OLM did suffer some damage... though it seems at this point like it's all minor compared to what happened with the 1st test flight

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that beast is only 53 feet shorter than the state capital - 397 vs 450.

and it’s a fricking rocket.

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They rocket they used 55 years ago to get men on the moon was 363ft tall. The did multiple orbits and recovered the control module 8 miles from midway in their first test flight.

3rd flight of Saturn put men in space. The 5th one put men orbiting the moon. 6th one put men on the moon, just a year and half after the first test flight. Absolutely wild even by 2023 standards.