from Hacker News

Starship has been fully stacked

by loourr on 8/6/21, 3:30 PM with 46 comments

  • by go_elmo on 8/6/21, 3:57 PM

    Its so interesting to watch this technology evolve, life and uncut. Its almost as if every other day another milestone is revealed. Especially as its a tech that one doesn't work with (mechanical engineering / rocket motor engineering etc).

    Looking forward for all the great space missions that will be made possible by this (europa, enceladus, more comet missions & many more space-telescopes), not so much for humanity becoming multi-planetary, as the scientific value is lower imo. E.g. a great project: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NQFqDKRAROI

  • by cwizou on 8/6/21, 3:50 PM

    And unstacked !

    It was surprising to see that it only took them about an hour to unstack (I didn't catch the stacking but I think I heard it was around the same amount of time ?).

    I'm still very perplex about the "catching" mechanism they are designing, Musk mentioned in the Everyday Astronaut interview [1] that it was a very hard problem and I'm very curious to see if/how they can solve it.

    [1] : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t705r8ICkRw

  • by 908B64B197 on 8/6/21, 6:07 PM

    Only in America things like this can happen.

    A whole industry bootstrapping itself into transforming exotic, mission critical hardware into a commodity; SpaceX is making flight hardware a commodity, just like Silicon Valley did with semiconductors!

    Meanwhile Europeans are playing catch-up with the Falcon 9 (already 11 years old) and it looks like Ariane 6 won't be competitive with SpaceX anyways [0]. And China is still raining toxic fuel and spent rocket stages on villages. [1]

    [0] https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/11/europes-challenger-t...

    [1] https://arstechnica.com/science/2019/11/china-keeps-dropping...

  • by Steltek on 8/6/21, 4:09 PM

    It's pretty amusing that they assembled it with a boring old construction crane. No fancy VAB or custom scaffolding. No different than the latest cookie cutter "luxury apartment building".
  • by sbuttgereit on 8/6/21, 4:39 PM

    A tangential, silly observation. I hear Musk being called "a Steve Jobs" a lot... wouldn't "a Howard Hughes" be closer to the mark? Maybe a generational thing....
  • by toomuchtodo on 8/6/21, 4:08 PM

    Anyone know an estimated static fire/launch date? I'm open to a meetup (and cold beverages under a canopy) within visual distance of the pad.
  • by amirhirsch on 8/6/21, 3:57 PM

    Looks small.