Space X Big Launch Tonight.

The unscheduled disassembly line made me laugh and reminded me of something similar.
Had to attend a family event on the GC recently and took some "in law" relatives to the Tweed art gallery in Murwillumbah during a spare day.
One exhibit was a photo of an empty chair in front of a window.
The blurb at the bottom said something like - The empty chair symbolises that someone is not there... (Love it😆)
Of course I burst out out laughing, but had to check myself because there was a certain gravitas about the place with many serious visitors keen to see Monet's "Haystacks, midday" on loan from the National Gallery. One young lady asked me to photograph her with her phone ensuring the image showed here viewing the Monet and another older chap from Sydney breathlessly told me he had been meaning to visit the gallery for years but just had to come up to see the Monet.
I think I need to head bush again..........................
(No offence meant to art lovers - I used to do a pretty good drawing of Donald Duck myself back in the day.....)
 
Honda achieved a " rapid unscheduled disassembly " on a regular basis when bench testing their 22,000 rpm NR 500 GP engine , some 40 years before Elon Musk decided to spend $ 10 billion in his efforts to replicate exactly the same result .........
 
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Apparently it can ( or could ) carry up to 100 passengers in the upper part ............... Start naming some of the people you would like to see go up in it ............. I can think of a few ...........


There was an episode of Red Dwarf where they came across a space ship drifting aimlessly in space ........ On board they found it was full of a collection of people from Earth who were part of a " pioneer force " .... the cream of society , those at the forefront of intelligent thinking ......... The Earth was doomed , so they had been sent out as the best possible people to explore and find possible new planets to colonise , and others would be following on behind them ......

........ On further investigation these " intelligentsia " were in fact found to be the Simon Cowells ; food critics ; political commentators ; reality TV stars ; internet opinion formers , and so on , of the world ........

It didn`t take long to fathom out that there was no problem at all back on planet Earth , and that no one would be following on behind them ......

...... In fact back on Earth , everyone was patting each other on the back , congratulating each other that at last they had managed to get rid of all these useless idiots , by spinning them some yarn about the Earth being doomed .......

Practical experience and real life situations were completely alien concepts to those on board , which is why the ship ended up drifting powerless in space .........

Sorry to go on a bit , but the passenger carrying element reminded me of this ..........
 
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Well, it MOSTLY went great. The Launch was incredible, with so much power. They had a couple of high-speed cameras mounted and linked to HUSKY MUSKYS Satalights that produced some fantastic vision including the booster reentry phase. Seeing it glowing in bright green plasma as it heated up from friction in the upper atmosphere at 24,000kph was pretty impressive. The Starship mission didn't include reaching orbit as they were not sure their new engine with a completely new fuel could reignite in the vacuum of space. If you cannot achieve an engine refire then reentry cannot be controlled, uncontrolled reentry has the potential of a very big ship crashing to the ground ANYWHERE. So that refire was one of the goals, but it didnt happen so that and the loss of the booster, not all booster engines refired losing control of its soft splashdown were failures. This shit is far from easy, BTW there have 5 ships all really to go plus two upgraded Raptor engines built and also ready to fly. The next test might be just a month off. I really love to see SOMETHING happening, to think it's more than 50 years of thumb-twiddling pisses me off to the max.
 
My guess is they need to be able to slow its orbit speed down in a controlled way, which requires an engine burn that starts reliably on the correct number of engines out of the 6 the ship has, the big booster has 33 engines plus it has to run those engines for the right time plus the ship needs to be orientated in the right direction. So it comes in belly first and that's the side with the heat-protective tiles, eventually, when they get it working right it's supposed to turn its arse down and slow enough, to be caught by those moveable arms on its launch tower without damaging any of it or the tower. Sounds like complete Bullshit, and that's exactly what I thought till you see their smaller rocket land on its tail getting close to triple figures. The first time I saw that happen got my attention, I thought that was impossible. Musk is such a dichotomy, complete Dickhead in some things and absolute amazing in others. BTW their Business model is pretty impressive as well, they use huge NASA contracts plus their Satellite business to finance this, Massive on-site manufacturing of all they need at Boca Checa plus another facility being built on Cape Canaveral. So much money is being spent and lots more to come. There are 5 test flights scheduled this year, compared to NASAs possibly one for Artemis.
 
This is significant because sooner or later our digital overlords will need a way off of this planet. After making this one uninhabitable they will want a viable escape system. This is step one, getting stuff into orbit cheaply.
 
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