starship 10
Just wonderful stuff. So excited for the future.
My parents have formative memories of watching the moon landings as kids, and I of watching the space shuttle. As someone who ended up where I am in large part due to my curiosity about the world growing up, reading of OP's kid watching a rocket launch, thinking critically about what they're seeing, and learning more about the world from it is a joyous thing.
I expect many kids to know that from cartoons, but perhaps my kids whatch weird cartoons. Anyway, the cartoons sometimes have the details wrong, so it's nice to talk about that.
Figure it's going to burn up on entry?
EDIT: made it. I suppose it was meant to blow up on landing in the ocean? It would have been nice to examine the burned components — but perhaps they had not intended to retrieve it that far away anyway.
They don't claim to have any plans of recovering the wreckage, but they have previously fished up wreckage for study, so it's still possible they decide to do that.
The reason this matters is that if they get into an orbit in a short test, they need to exit that orbit with some sort of active system. So the statement "we got to orbit" implies a lot more technology development than the current flights actually show. I agree with Scott that Starship can easily enter LEO, but I am not so sure it can exit gracefully.
> Listen, lad. I built this kingdom up from nothing. When I started here, all there was was swamp. Other kings said I was daft to build a castle on a swamp, but I built it all the same, just to show 'em. It sank into the swamp. So, I built a second one. That sank into the swamp. So, I built a third one. That burned down, fell over, then sank into the swamp, but the fourth one... stayed up! And that's what you're gonna get, lad: the strongest castle in these islands.
(although I suppose this ship fell over, then burned down, and then sank into the ocean)
That would be fine for the fligt so far - until it started to heat up from re-entry heating. The stainless steel would be still fine if heated to hundreads of degrees, but the expanding gass could maybe make the enclosed volume to rupture ?
Or a mix of methane and oxygen accumulating somwhere and exploding - but that seems less likely to me in a near vacuum environment during re-entry.
The economics of Starlink basically require high cadence Starship launches with 50+ Starlink v3 satellites on each flight.
The tiles themselves work fine, but how to best mount them? where do you need them? Can you make them thinner? do you need anything underneath? what kind of gap do you need between tiles? Those are the things they're hoping to understand in these tests.
The Shuttle tiles were technically reusable AFAIK. The issue was that they were very fragile and the Shuttle for the most part could not tolerate any heat getting through the tiles (being aluminum), so every flight needed to have a perfect heat shield. Starship is a bit better on that end, as stainless steel is a lot more capable of tolerating heat and I think the tiles are a bit less fragile. Still, would be ideal to figure out how to not drop any tiles.
They're currently experimenting with things such as actively cooled tiles (which I presume were installed on this ship, since they were on the last two).
I personally think the likely best case is that they'll have to go over the ship and replace some here and there before launching again.
But yes, “rapid reusability” is a ways off. I expect they’ll be spending weeks inspecting and repairing ship and booster before reflight for a few years, but they’ll drive it down over time.
TBD how “rapid” the reusability ends up being in the end.
My impression is they just need to leave the engines on a little longer to get to orbit, then turn them on again with the ship pointed in another direction to get back to the suborbital trajectory they’ve already demonstrated deorbiting from.
The hard part is reentering through the atmosphere without burning up, flipping, and landing, which they’ve already demonstrated multiple times. There’s no additional atmosphere between where they’ve flown and “orbit”.
It seems like if they can get boosters to rapid reuse (a much easier goal), and churn out ships at sufficient scale, they can afford to take time inspecting/refurbing each ship as part of a pipelined approach.
For example, this is from their Flight 4 press release (https://www.spacex.com/launches/starship-flight-4):
"Flight 4 ended with Starship igniting its three center Raptor engines and executing the first flip maneuver and landing burn since our suborbital campaign, followed by a soft splashdown of the ship in the Indian Ocean one hour and six minutes after launch."
Note that they clearly say since the start of their suborbital campaign. And this from their Flight 6 press release (https://www.spacex.com/launches/starship-flight-6):
"Starship completed another successful ascent, placing it on the expected trajectory. The ship successfully reignited a single Raptor engine while in space, demonstrating the capabilities required to conduct a ship deorbit burn before starting fully orbital missions. With live views and telemetry being relayed by Starlink, the ship successfully made it through reentry and executed a flip, landing burn, and soft splashdown in the Indian Ocean."
And from today's pre-launch press release (https://www.spacex.com/launches/starship-flight-10):
"The Starship upper stage will again target multiple in-space objectives, including the deployment of eight Starlink simulators, similar in size to next-generation Starlink satellites. The Starlink simulators will be on the same suborbital trajectory as Starship and are expected to demise upon entry. A relight of a single Raptor engine while in space is also planned."
To be fair, there were two press releases where they didn't correctly use "sub-orbital" and used orbital instead. Releases 3 and 9. Neither said they achieved orbit, but more causally talked about the "orbital coast" and the worst: "Starship's six second stage Raptor engines all started successfully and powered the vehicle to its expected orbit" from flight 3. It's true these statements are incorrect, but they aren't asserting a direct claim to having reached orbit (though they imply it), when they make an assertion about the nature of the program they seem fairly consistent in talking about their "suborbital campaign" as well as talking about their orbital missions being in the future.
The way I'm reading it, it looks like they get sloppy with language sometimes, but it doesn't look like they are directly asserting anything other than being in a suborbital program.
Starship is a fuel-hungry beast - it can get to LEO by itself, but it needs a lot of tanker launches to go beyond. And if your goal is a Mars colony, you don't want to be limited to one launch per launch window.
I appreciate none of that is as pithy as saying it simply didn't reach orbit, but it's a real concern versus something that is really irrelevant.
I think there are still a few unique tiles on Starship around joints and such IIRC, but either way, the number of tile types is much smaller for Starship.
To my thinking, the sane sequence will be launch; catch; survey and maintain (heat shield and other items); and then launch again 24 hours later if everything checks out.
And that will be an absolutely massive improvement over what we have today, let alone what we had with the Shuttle.
I'm keeping my fingers crossed...
Now, they are getting it to pretty damn close to orbital velocity... which is why saying they still haven't reached orbit is a bit silly. They're clearly technically able to reach orbit if they really want to... that they haven't proved they can safely leave orbit is the problem.
Once the tanker version is needed, a ship ship could go up 5+ times a day. The logistics of backfilling a pad with a new ship is much more involved
We could just construct 200 Space Shuttles and spend months refurbishing them after every flight, and still send one up every week.
The goal is to drive down launch costs, time is money, and a system that requires time consuming refurbishments is more expensive.
The Apollo program was built in no small part by Nazis.
Which is a little easier to do when your craft is shaped like a plane and not a simple cylinder. The loading and positioning were easier to model and then achieve in flight.
The shuttle also flew with repair kits and glue that could be used in a vacuum. The astronauts could perform an EVA and work to replace damaged tiles and there were published plans on how to do so. NASA unfortunately figured out very late that using the Canadarm to image the bottom of the shuttle immediately on achieving orbit was extremely necessary given the icing problems of the external tank.
I wish he hadn't gone along with them, but there likely had to be concessions before attempting to make progress. When it became clear cost savings and efficiency wasn't the actual goal in the White House, Elon left.
For someone with such a vaunted intelligence, he was either dumb or complicit. "Working things out from first principles" would have had him leave after the very first step.
The moments truly never stop. Every single day they amaze and surprise you, fill you with so much love and joy and appreciation.
One time Bill Gates was asked what gave him joy and without missing a beat he said his children. Nothing is greater, nothing gives you more meaning, nothing is more ultimate than the sacrifice and patience and wonder and fulfillment of having children.
It just amazes me that technologies have come so far that at one end we can really show that the earth is truthfully a sphere but also at the same time technology has come so far one can claim this is just another video created by AI and is not actually true.
I don't quite understand how the airplane shape made it easier to model the loading and positioning? (Not saying you're wrong, just doesn't fit my intuition and I'm curious).
My understanding is that Shuttle didn't have to answer the questions about tile gaps etc because it used glue rather than mechanical attachments, if that's what you mean by positioning.
Not everyone agrees with you politically and it's unpleasant to have to wade through these kind of rants to read about interesting things.
You have strong feelings, I get it, but please stop the pollution. I am trying my best to say this in a kind and sincere way. There are plenty of other places to make political rants.
I think that work can be done quite well based on all the footage and other collected metrics.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
(There's one in the In Comments section that you're in clear breach of)
No one (at least not me or anyone I take seriously) is arguing whether or not these suborbital profiles are designed to be safe even under adverse or full failure conditions; though the Caribbean air corridors might have been managed a bit more gracefully on some previous flights... still...
Nonetheless there is a valid criticism that in ten flights they still haven't mastered keeping the control surfaces of the space craft whole during the reentry phase of flight. 1500 miles isn't going to cut it as a safe return zone when they try bring this in for a catch. While I'm as impressed as anyone that they've hit the mark with compromised Ships as many times as they have, neither Port Isabel nor Titusville are 1500 miles from their nearest Ship catch towers and I wouldn't support any attempts for a catch until they can get the whole Ship back in good working order... reliably. While I'm a advocate for this program and SpaceX... I'm not such a fanboy that I can't see there are issues with this aspect of the program. This is ignoring the impact on rapid reusability and simply focusing on the basic safety of the program.
Starship's Tenth Flight Test - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45007907 - Aug 2025 (233 comments)
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
My current method is to screen share from an iPad after starting the video on Safari. Trying to Airplay gave me audio but not video on the TV. But, the screen share has a pretty large letterbox around it, was hoping to get full screen video.
You can approximate space shuttle reentry to roughly a 2d surface entering atmosphere. Because of airplane shape, the tile side faces atmosphere and the plasma goes around plane edges. Where as starship being cylinder doesn't have any separation boundary and plasma roughly goes more than 180% of the cylinder.
Not that my choice is suitable for everybody, but the most common choice is not suitable for everybody either.
I don't have Apple TV but for videos on X, I download it temporarily to a intermediate server then stream using VLC [1] it's a hassle but I get great watching experience on all platforms. For now, you can stream this on VLC: https://bin.hrzn.pics/0AdLye8
Though I generally watch Everyday Astronaut's [2] coverage on YouTube.
[1] https://apps.apple.com/us/app/vlc-media-player/id650377962
As you say, they reïnforce each other by speeding up the learning curve and deployment of learning to the real world, serving as both a bolstering of the product and experimental validation.
Would note that Shuttle tiles were never mass manufactured. The Shuttle’s shape meant lots of unique tiles. And its lack of mass production meant each tile was basically an artisanal object.
SpaceX aims to reüse tiles over many flights. But even if some tiles need replacing after each launch, that doesn’t tank Starship per se.
Definitely true
> Just like the real news, people divide themselves into bubbles of whatever reinforces their beliefs
Hopefully HN can be better than that and be a place for informed criticism or informed praise from whatever provenance
And I mean proper life, backpacking for months around south east asia, himalaya, diving in remote tropical islands, doing extreme mountain sports to the fullest capacity. You know, stuff that adds easily many decades of life actually experienced.
It doesnt compare, it cant.
But there is a catch - to have a chance for actually being a good long term stable parent (and also having and raising kids in a similar way), 2 balanced individuals need to meet and be close to each other on many levels, and then keep working on it. Something I dont see often around me unfortunately in these me-me-me times, with corresponding consequences. Better having no kids than be a miserable parent, raising another miserable generation of permanent cripples.
Just wait till you hit 60s and the pool of nice things you can do keeps shrinking dramatically, I've heard such phrases before and then heard regrets some time later.
“Let’s go to the moon” comes back at least once a week.
Sincerely hope to be able to take her, one day.
It took me a moment to remember what the Gulf of America is. What stupidity.
For better or worse people with kids know both lives, people without kids only know one. It's like saying "you'll never know how it is to eat an entire cake". Maybe you ate much of it, that counts for something. Now you're on to the next cake. You might bite more than you can chew but this goes for everything.
The value of this freedom is the highest when you're young, experimenting, putting your life on some track. Being "free" at 65 doesn't have anywhere near the same value as it does at 20. Once you do it (almost) all, everything else becomes more of the same doesn't it? That cake I was mentioning? The first bite tasted a whole lot better than the last.
There's no right or wrong, everyone knows their preference and personal circumstances. But your explanation felt like a knee-jerk reaction.
It's nice they make you happy, but will their lives be happy?
The evidence says it's very unlikely.
My choice is not to inflict that experience on another sentient being. I'm really not seeing anything at the moment that encourages me to question that.
My top reason for wanting to visit US has flipped semi-recently to wanting to witness one of these launches. I'd hate for the Boca Chica site to become more secretive as it marches on towards production quality.
Heck, the person spearheading star Trek vision has gone on public records essentially saying he never liked star Trek and that's why he's gonna make it more like star wars....
My direct ancestors lived through some harrowing times without losing their will to live and if they were alive today they would likely feel this is a great time to be alive. My 2c.
Compared to what? We're living in some of the best times humanity as a whole ever had. Deciding en-masse to not have kids is the irresponsible thing because it literally condemns humanity to extinction and creates a self-fulfilling prophecy. You're cursing the world because you stubbed your toe. Social media inflicted this kind of feeling a lot over the last couple of decades.
> but will their lives be happy?
You'd have to ask them. Humans overwhelmingly choose to live so you could conclude that they prefer existing over the alternative. Happiness is very relative and you'd have a hard time defining it even for yourself, let alone for your hypothetical unborn child.
> The evidence says it's very unlikely.
There's absolutely no evidence to support anything you said. It's your personal preference and you're entitled to it. Why don't you own your choice instead of putting it on fictitious evidence that your unborn child will be unhappy?
> My choice is not to inflict that experience on another sentient being
Whatever you pick you're making that choice for you, not for them.
I bet you one thing for sure, if this didn't have Elon Musk smell on it, and it was a government funded project, it would have 2500 upvotes. I can tell you that for sure. Just most people are afraid to speak their mind because...well you know, the flagging and down votes. Which I couldn't care less about, I think this whole down voting ideas you don't like game is rather stupid. This community has not evolved in years.
300 something upvotes for something "this big" as opposed to the 2500+ yesterday about Google's anti-side loading efforts should tell you that.
Every day these companies operate with "don't be ashamed of your past AfD" as the CEO ... Is a mockery.
So keep lapping up the propaganda! Tastes sooooo good.
So what's worse, all the unbridled enthusiasm for a Nazis corporation, or me bringing up the dark side in a joke?
It's a body of water south of Florida, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas.
It used to be called the Gulf of Mexico.
Sometimes to more abject despair, but often to more hope.
People shouldn't be forced at gunpoint to have children, but they also shouldn't be dragged down into insecurity and despair that it's financially impossible.
Children don't know the world exists beyond their town until they're instructed on it!
Is there any active cooling of any of the skin that we know of?
Elon always talks about a city on Mars but seeing for the first time the gargantuan size of Starfactory it dawned on me that SpaceX are true believers. It is still a big IF, because the dimension of the mission is absolutely bonkers, but IF the goal is to send every two years hundreds of Starships to Mars (everyone needing around 3-4 tanker missions) you need large scale production of ships.
But they haven't tried to catch Starship yet and likely won't for a while, so you're arguing a silly hypothetical.
I did that with my grandma as a kid and to this day I don't think I've done anything more relaxing and interesting, it's like watching a fire or waves, it never gets old
Blue Origin didn't show with the first New Glenn launch their payload mechanism or reentry mishaps.
But the Paramount+ stuff is doing pretty well. Strange New Worlds is very popular. So was Lower Decks. The last season of Picard, at least, gave fans a lot of what they had been looking for. They've got a new series coming out, and what little we know is that it has a bang-up cast. (Not that that's sufficient; Discovery did very badly by some very talented actors. But it's a good start.)
So Trek: The IP is still going pretty strong. At least as well as Star Wars, which has also been hit-and-miss.
> To be fair, there were two press releases where they didn't correctly use "sub-orbital" and used orbital instead. Releases 3 and 9.
Another example of an official communication is a March 14, 2024 Musk tweet after a rocket did not reach orbital velocity:
> Starship reached orbital velocity! Congratulations @SpaceX team!!
Orbital velocity at the altitudes they target is 28-30 km/h. They consistently stop their tests at about 26 km/h. This is not to say the rocket can't make it to orbital velocity, just that it didn't.
"They get sloppy with their language sometimes" is a good way to excuse repeated lies. If this were a company you were less of a fan of, "they get sloppy with their language sometimes" probably wouldn't fly for you, either. Getting called on their bluffs about this is probably the reason they have gotten more precise about their language.
By the way, it is my opinion that it is time to cancel the entire Artemis program and both of its failures of rocket technology. If SpaceX wants to continue to develop Starship, it should do so without federal funding. I would have no problems with the Starship program if not for the use of public money.
Still they are making good progress if a bit slower than that.
It really is a change that's not quite possible to convey with words.
Anyone who thinks they can’t do stuff is not seeing the whole picture.
-Elon
People and cultures that don't want children will give way to those who do.
> the pattern was different between the different orbiters.