Live feed from Texas this morning. Looks like they will be putting fuel onto the rocket soon. If all goes well we may see a big thing hop up in the air and come back down intact. YMMV.
Live feed from Texas this morning. Looks like they will be putting fuel onto the rocket soon. If all goes well we may see a big thing hop up in the air and come back down intact. YMMV.
Warning siren just went off. About 10 minutes if everything goes OK.
Aborted
Detanking now, test hop is a scrub for today.
Scrubbed
Well, scrub for now. They may still make another run today.
I watched the attempt yesterday- scrub then, too.
I'll wait for the replay.
According to Musk, it's likely they will have another attempt today.
It did it! Just left it on while watching hockey.
Pretty cool.
It doesn't look like the future, it's one goofy looking spaceship right now. But that was awesome. Can't wait for the 20 km flight.
Those mach diamonds in the exhaust looked fantastic.
There's a lot of video of this, but here's the high quality SpaceX feed.
"Earl, the grain silo just flew to the other side of the field!"
In reply to Keith Tanner :
So I wonder how much concern that was to have a fire outside of the engine for a while? At least it was not a blow torch kind of flame, but something combustable was where it should not have been....
Let's all be totally honest, if we saw that thing in a movie doing exactly what it just did, we'd say it was unrealistic and that the special effects guys should have tried harder instead of dangling a soup can from a string. We truly live in the strangest timeline.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯ said:Let's all be totally honest, if we saw that thing in a movie doing exactly what it just did, we'd say it was unrealistic and that the special effects guys should have tried harder instead of dangling a soup can from a string. We truly live in the strangest timeline.
This. Hell, tell 18 year old me that the phone I carried with me had worldwide access to information and live video calls I'd have laughed in your face. This stuff? next level.
Man, that landing was some David Copperfield E36 M3. Goes from 100% obscured to "hey look, here it is standing perfectly in its new spot." yeah, right next to the relocated Statue of Liberty.
alfadriver (Forum Supporter) said:In reply to Keith Tanner :
So I wonder how much concern that was to have a fire outside of the engine for a while? At least it was not a blow torch kind of flame, but something combustable was where it should not have been....
I'm pretty sure that wasn't part of the plan, but it apparently was not mission critical for this hop and they got the rocket back to take a look :)
¯\_(ツ)_/¯ said:Let's all be totally honest, if we saw that thing in a movie doing exactly what it just did, we'd say it was unrealistic and that the special effects guys should have tried harder instead of dangling a soup can from a string. We truly live in the strangest timeline.
When the inside cam showed the landing legs unfold, my immediate thought was "Wow, Elon must have watched a lot of Thunderbirds when he was growing up."
Now I need to make a GIF with the hand of god picking up and lifting the unit around like a chess piece.
Keith Tanner said:alfadriver (Forum Supporter) said:In reply to Keith Tanner :
So I wonder how much concern that was to have a fire outside of the engine for a while? At least it was not a blow torch kind of flame, but something combustable was where it should not have been....
I'm pretty sure that wasn't part of the plan, but it apparently was not mission critical for this hop and they got the rocket back to take a look :)
Better for it to break like this!
I've been watching Monty Python's Flying Circus on Netflix and the flight of this thing fits right in with the animations.
Some trivia I picked up looking into this:
The reason why it's sort of flying at an angle is because the engine is offset. It's offset because the final version will have three engines and if you put 3 in this version it would have too much thrust to hover (final version will be much heavier obviously).
The box on the top of it is a weight. It's primary purpose is to move the center of mass up so that the thrust line is higher up the rocket and it won't have to lean over as much with the offset motor.
Rocket Science... it's a thing.
That weight happens to be a couple of rolls of stainless steel, which are basically leftover rocket building parts. You need mass in all the right places for a rocket to work. Which is why SpaceX shot a car to Mars. They had to put something up in the nose, so why not something fun? I believe the Falcon hoisted a wheel of cheese.
The final version will actually have six engines, but only three of them for use in atmosphere IIRC.
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