Starship Flight 7

Anyone care to give the non spacey folks like me the highlights of this launch?

You mean like later after it happens?

It's similar to last time if you saw that, the first stage will come back towards the launch site and they will try to catch it with the landing tower chopsticks, while the second stage does a soft landing in the ocean after going halfway around the earth.

As far as new stuff, they are trying to deploy some simulated satellites from the second stage and will try to relight one of the engines.

Preparing to launch 4:37pm CT (~45mins after this comment)

First 10mins watching gets you to space with engine shutdown.

38mins after launch engine turns back on. 10mins after that reentry starts. 1:06 after launch is the landing.

I think that covers it.

I also saw mention somewhere that this is V2 of Starship upper stage? Somewhat longer, and I’m sure a bunch of other changes to enable mass simulator deployment.

Yes, about 2m longer. Also some modifications to the heat shield, including testing new types of heat shield tiles. Also non-structural versions of new catch pins to see how they perform on reentry

Edit: also, they are reflying one of the raptor engines that was on the previous flight (Engine 314, because pi).

Thanks, they also mentioned that they moved the upper flaps to reduce heating on them during reentry.

Space X has failed after 3 billion US tax payer dollars to take a banana into low earth orbit. Needless to say we aren't going to Mars last year watching a woman in a long dress floating in the cargo bay behind a curtain of glass windows playing a violin for entertaining the dozens of astronaut's which don't have space for food, water, belongings or life support.

> Space X has failed after 3 billion US tax payer dollars to take a banana into low earth orbit

Literally just lofted some satellites.

*tried to, but lost them all

No, they successfully sent two to the Moon on Weds. https://www.cnn.com/2025/01/14/science/nasa-launch-firefly-i...

The point was about Starship - it has never successfully flown with any amount of cargo. The 3 billion number from the poster before makes it clear they were only referring to Starship, not all of SpaceX.

SpaceX is an extremely successful space launch company, and Falcon 9 is the best we've ever had. It's just Starship that seems to be going much worse.

Falcon 9 was once in the same spot; simulator payloads (a wheel of cheese), years of delays, a bunch of smashed-up first stages and drone ships, etc. Even more so if you count the Falcon 1 failures.

Starship has already demonstrated several key things work - the new engines, catching the booster, and on-target intact reentry of the second stage, all for about as much money as a single SLS launch is projected to cost. (Thus far, they've only had one for $26B.)