SpaceX's fourth Starship launch approved for Thursday (opens in new tab)

Why? Without speed of light or faster than speed of light travel we are stuck with uninhabitable planets (and we can't even fix our own)

Same. Really looking forward to this and also the subsequent launches

Certainly better than the same old new adtech, fintech, programming language, AI, crypto, techbro drudgery that is common, uh, in a lot of sites.

The tumbling sure made the footage a lot more spectacular than straight-and-level flight would have :) It's still pretty stunning that we could watch it live, in that quality, nearly uninterrupted.

Would love to know if the reentry ship vibrations might make patterns in the plasma akin to the cymatic patterns on a chladni plate or faraday waves in a dish of water. Maybe it would be useful… but maybe it would just look cool!

Seeing starship in person, both it being stacked and also taking off, was the most "I live in the future" experience of my life. It genuinely felt like science fiction and I was grinning so hard as I was driving towards Starbase and seeing the stacked Starship off in the distance for the first time. I car camped on the beach directly outside the base (thankfully AC all night in a Tesla) and it was also a really fun experience waking up in the middle of the night, and again later at sunrise, and seeing Starship immediately outside my window

That footage is the coolest thing to come out of this so far.

> Unexpected failures

That's literally why SpaceX tests the way it does. Unexpected failures are this program's M.O... It's a test program and Starship, unlike Falcon, is not operational (let alone human rated). They can -and do- retrofit fixes to the new vehicles they already had at the time of an anomaly and are now capable of going SN to SN pretty fast (months).

An unexpected failure in a program like Vulcan or SLS would -maybe- derail it for years. I say maybe because Vulcan's upper stage's tank exploded during testing and it barely moved its schedule. SLS is a different beast, precisely because they simulate and ground-test every single little detail and possibility and building another SLS with fixes would probably be a multi-year project.

> Unexpected failures have the potential to derail such a program for years

Catastrophic ones, sure. But not just the unexpected. If you aren’t unexpectedly failing in such an endeavour, you’re not pushing hard enough.

Not really. Anything other then outright shooting a rocket at an inhabited area, years of derail is incredibly unlikely.

I dunno, if you followed the falcon 9 test launches, each launch made progress and often surprised everyone. I expect that this system is bigger, more complicated and so that iterative success will be a little slower, but generally I think it will continue as it has been: each launch is an improvement over the previous one.

it's 50/50

They are attempting the same just below orbital trajectory as last flight. They will not be attempting an in orbit-ish deorbit burn, as they have stated that their primary goals are getting the ship through peak reentry, and the booster to a simulated soft landing burn.

Seems reasonable. FAA is like: Do no damage to people or property. Don't deviate from the specified corridors and times. Don't have anomalies/fts before you get to that nominal (slightly-sub)orbital insertion. Tell us beforehand if you're going for controlled or uncontrolled reentry. GLHF with the rest.