Comment by Cu3PO42
Comment by Cu3PO42 a day ago
What a strangely beautiful sight. While I was excited to see ship land, I'm also happy I get to see videos of this!
Comment by Cu3PO42 a day ago
What a strangely beautiful sight. While I was excited to see ship land, I'm also happy I get to see videos of this!
I felt.. bad watching that breakup, it reminded me of Columbia.
Which coincidentally launched 22 years ago today: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/STS-107
I remember being woken up by the thunder from Columbia.
Lost it over the years but I used to have a photo of about 20 vans of people parked on our property doing the search for debris. Don't think they found any on our land but there was a 3 ft chunk about 5 miles down the road.
OTOH I remembered Columbia too and I felt good knowing that Starship is being tested thoroughly without jeopardizing the crew.
The space-shuttle could not fly to the orbit automatically. It had to have people on board, and the first flight, IIRC, came close to a disaster.
Meta-commentary is annoying (yes, I realize the irony.)
As long as the debris has no effect wherever it lands, I agree with you
A lot of flights seem to be diverting to avoid it...
https://bsky.app/profile/flightradar24.com/post/3lfvhpgmqqc2...
Does SpaceX bother with NOTAM for its launches?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NOTAM
It seems like the flights should have been planned around it so no diversion would be needed.
My understanding is that there are areas which are noted as being possible debris zones across the flight path, but that aircraft are not specifically told to avoid those areas unless there an actual event to which to respond.
If my understanding is correct, it seems sensible at least in a hand-wavy way: you have a few places where things are more likely to come down either unplanned or planned (immediately around the launch site and at the planned deorbit area), but then you have a wide swath of the world where, in a relatively localized area, you -might- have something come down with some warning that it will (just because the time it takes to get from altitude to where aircraft are). You close the priority areas, but you don't close the less likely areas pro-actively, but only do so reactively, it seems you'd achieve a balance between aircraft safety and air service disruptions.
They do but its not clear to me whether the area where it broke up was actually included in the original NOTAM. The NOTMAR definitely does not according to the graphic shown on the NASASpaceflight stream. They are still live so I can't link a time code but something like -4:56 in this stream as of posting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3nM3vGdanpw
Actually, this video is a good indication for exactly what transpired:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w6hIXB62bUE
It's ATC audio captured during the event.
Understandable, but an over reaction. Any debris not burning up is falling down after minutes.
Would you bet hundreds of lives and millions of dollars on that?
The number of SpaceX video clips that I know are "actual things really happening" which still activate the involuntary "Sci-Fi / CGI effect" neurons in my brain is remarkable.
Yeah. I know that feeling.
That tower catch. That _had_ to be a new version of Kerbal, right? The physics looked good, but there's no way that was real...
Indeed. The one that still flips a bit in my brain is the two Falcon rockets landing in unison side by side. I'd say it was high-end CGI except no director would approve an effects shot of orbital rockets landing in such a perfect, cinematically choreographed way.
It would just be sent back to ILM marked "Good effort, but too obviously fake. Rework to be more realistic and resubmit."
Yes, both spectacular and beautiful. I guess Starship can now say what the legendary comedy actress (and sex symbol) of early cinema Mae West said:
"When I'm good... I'm very good. But when I'm bad... I'm even better." :-)
Combined with another tower catch, that's two spectacular shows for the price of one. Hopefully the onboard diagnostic telemetry immediately prior to the RUD is enough to identify the root cause so it can be corrected.