This kind of thing is why I got into engineering in the first place.

There's so much more to it than money.

Nice, how did you find a music clip with such a good match across the whole video? Or are you saying you know that SpaceX media people were using that as test music when cutting theirs?

OK, that's downright creepy. Especially that the singing starts with the lyrics "holding on" at the exact moment the booster is caught by the chopsticks.

Another rough take with some orchestra music from Stellaris, of all things. Start the SpaceX video and 'Towards Utopia' at around the 2:21 mark https://youtu.be/887f76RXvdE?t=141

this was great. i hope someone just recuts video with exactly this soundtrack

I think it's a cool achievement, but for some perspective NASA first did a vertical rocket ship landing without chopsticks decades ago.

And the whole point of this thing was to do that on the moon, which is never going to happen at this rate.

Totally reasonable question. This is the first rocket ever that will (assuming further success) land in its entirety back on the launch pad, refuel, and go back to orbit the same day.

Imagine that every time an airliner landed its cockpit was destroyed and you had to build a new one. A fully reusable airplane would be a transformational improvement. That's the level of achievement we're talking about here.

The big thing is that it dramatically reduces the cost of shipping things into space. Previously it was difficult to ship anything much larger than a compact car in to orbit. Now you can ship half of a basketball court into orbit, including all the vertical space.

Until very very recently the roughly bus sized ISS modules were the largest habitable spaces we could ship to orbit (although Skylab in the 70s were basically repurposed Saturn V fuel tanks and also big) so now it's possible/probable we can ship 20 people to space, and have moderately comfortable accommodations for them.

We can also ship mining equipment and substancially more supplies to the moon. Or mars. We went from using pack goats to 18 wheelers to ship stuff in space. The pack goat can ship a handful of hand made silk scarves and Faberge eggs over the Himalayas, but the 18 wheeler can deliver everything from socks and tshirts to cell phones and big screen tvs and trucks and lawn mowers. This really opens up space to more than the highest, most bleeding edge science and we might actually see more than 100 humans in space at the same time, in our lifetimes.

If you go to space, 90% of the cost is the rocket (depending on your accounting). If rockets can be made reusable, then you can drop costs by 90%, to first order. Cheaper rockets means cheaper satellites for internet and sensors and stuff.

It's a rocket in the same ballpark as the Saturn V but where the two stages can both be recovered and re-used.

SpaceX has demonstrated being able to fly the same rocket stage dozens of times with minimal refurbishment with their Falcon 9 family of rockets, but they still have to build and discard the second stage of the Falcon 9 for each launch.

Starship scales that up in magnitude and adds second-stage reusability.

This article [0] is a pretty good explainer for why Starship is such a big deal

[0] https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2021/10/28/starship-is-st...

Consider ocean-going freight transportation: the container ships and the containers, the port facilities and the cranes. Now imagine that you were able to witness the very first round-trip sailing of such a container ship between two newly constructed still-experimental-and-heretofore-unproven ports.

That'd be pretty cool right? The dawn of a new era in global trade.

This is that, for space. (Booster as container ship, Orbital vehicle as container, launch tower as literal crane, launch complex as port)

This is a great resource for why Starship is groundbreaking. So much so, it’s not even really comprehensive to the existing space-industrial complex.

https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2021/10/28/starship-is-st...

Price decreases significantly when you can reuse. This rocket is the same size as the ones that brought the Apollo missions to the moon, but will cost significantly less because they don't have to build one every time they launch it.

Cost. Ballparking from memory (because I'm on mobile) sending something to space on the Space Shuttle cost something like $40k/kg. The Falcon brought that down to 2500, and the Falcon Heavy down to just over $1k/kg.

So nearly two orders of magnitude cheaper, but you still can't really do anything too fun in space at $1k/kg. The goal with Starship (and its rapid reuse) is to bring costs down another couple of orders of magnitude to where we could eventually even see costs drop into the single digit per kg.

And at that point suddenly space becomes open to things that sound difficult to even fantasize about today, like colonizing Mars, taking suborbital flights to get from Texas to Hong Kong, or setting up industrial systems on the Moon, to say nothing of space tourism that doesn't start with the prerequisite of being a billionaire.

Rockets that are easily reusable make spaceflight a lot more logistically feasible, which should translate to a massive drop in costs.

We are going to see massively increased space activity of all sorts. It is almost impossible to predict all consequences thereof.

Imagine if a round-trip flight from the US to Europe didn’t cost $500, but only $5, unbelievable, right? This is exactly what Starship will do to space travel. Many things we see in sci-fi, like lunar and Martian cities or orbital cruise ships, could soon become reality.

Personally, I can’t wait to see a massive, kilometer-wide telescope in space or nestled in a crater on the Moon. We might finally figure out dark matter, dark energy, anti-gravity.

Honestly of very little significance to the typical individual. It isn't going to pay my bills or provide for my kids. It does nothing for people suffering war and genocide. Nothing for poverty, access to health care and education. Nothing for the biggest threats facing our civilization.

It is still a remarkable technical achievement and I think the people who have designed and built these systems deserve some celebration for their accomplishments. It has the potential to lower costs and increase the capacity for greater commercialization, militarization and exploration of space.

I think the extent you see that as something positive is subject to your faith in humanity. I tend to think technologies connection to social progress is a three steps forward, two steps back sort of thing. We have certainly made gains in my lifetime but we could have gone a lot further.

Yeah we should call this whole thing off and spend the money on solving poverty! /s

I’m with you. As landing the thing means nothing if you can’t get payloads to the destination. To get this thing to the moon would need like 20 refuelling flights to meet it on the way.

I think they’re trying to maintain focus on the engineering rather than the politics surrounding Musk at the moment.

He choose not to mention the top 20 Diablo IV player.

It is traditional to summon an Elon Musk Flamewar by implying even vaguely that he is successful. Elon Musk’s support for a candidate may have been pivotal in that candidate’s win today. This sort of thing is like bathing in gasoline next to a forest fire.

The launch startup space has completely fallen apart over the last 5 years. SpaceX and rocket lab will make it, I’m not so sure about everyone else.

Have you got a link?

I think there is an honest debate here for the tech side of the house and its implications/risks/etc, but my point is, I think, more broad than 'will we move too fast elsewhere'. I worry he will bring twitter like problems, 'free speech is important, if it is approved by me', to space and Mars. I can easily imagine a future where the Moon, Mars and space are accessible, so long as you are approved by Musk to be in space. That gets to my core point, do we want Musk to be that gatekeeper? Do we want him deciding who and what can go to space and where they can go.

I think that's the last thing they need to do before they can actually launch satellites. I'm surprised there was no attempt on the last launch. Glad to see it this time. The improved Starlink constellation that Starship will enable is going to be awesome.

That's cool PR move. If they managed to light one then it's great success. If they don't people will think they just got unlucky. But if they tried to light all and only one would work or none, or one would work but some other blew up whole rocket it would look terrible. That last eventuality is something they want to prevent by trying to light just one.

And they need to demo that the flaps hold up through re-entry with nominal, minimal damage, otherwise a permit for a plan involving re-entry over land (which is needed to catch the ship) would obviously not issue.

> because losing control of a Starship in low earth orbit would be catastrophic

Why? Remote detonation wouldn't work in that case?

> Nearly four years ago, Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak actually sued YouTube over Bitcoin scam livestreams that were using his likeness. So, this has clearly been going on for quite a while now. And, unfortunately, it looks like these fake YouTube livestream schemes are going to continue on, at least for the foreseeable future.

I recently reported a bunch of the SpaceX ones that were running for long time. Nothing happened. I think Google/Alphabet is just happy with the extra ad views.

This aspect needs regulation.

Each streamer adds a delay to their stream. This means that any stream forwarded to you by another streamer is going to be delayed.

The delay was between SpaceX recording and uploading an event and Everyday astronaut decoding it at their mixing desk. Their own feeds from their cameras and microphones had less delay than the SpaceX stream did. Everyday astronaut then had another delay between when they encoded this result and you saw it.

If you had opened up the SpaceX stream directly you would have found it was ahead of the stream shown inside Everyday Astronaut.

BTW I was also watching EA's stream.

I assumed a large portion of YouTube/ Google management had been in a plane crash as that seemed the only plausible explanation for it to stay up as long and have as many viewers as it did. It really was stunning.