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Friday Sky Candy

Charlie Martin | 6:33 PM on November 22, 2024
SpaceX via AP

This week, we’re celebrating a special event — the launch of the sixth Starship test flight. We didn’t get the dramatic booster catch this time, dammit — the launch tower was damaged and lost communication. But it was a successful launch, successful in-orbit burn, and successful splashdown of both Starship and Super Heavy Booster.

This illustrates just what we’re talking about here: the biggest rocket ever launched. This is why the nickname for a long time was “BFR” — B for “big”, R for “rocket” and you can guess why F.

One of Musk’s many enterprises, and probably the one that impacts the lives of the most people, is the StarLink constellation of satellites, providing high-speed, low-latency internet all over the world. In 2021, Ben Popper and I wrote a series at Stack Overflow Blog about the software that makes StarLink fly. Something that struck me at the time was that the corporate purpose of StarLink is to fund making humanity a multi planet species. I wrote about that earlier today, in Elon Musk Wants To Save The World — And More.

StarLink at this point accounts for nearly two-thirds of âll the active satellites in the world.

One of the thing I really like, just for the looks of it, is the clean gas flame appearance of the methane-oxygen Raptor engines in use.

This is a nice time-lapse of what the launch looks like.

One of the things that is unusual, if not unprecedented, is the hot-staging when the Super-Heavy finishes its job. 


Maybe you’re not a complete space nut, like me. I remember watching Scott Carpenter and then John Glenn being launched in the Mercury program, and all the NASA launches since then. I even went to Edward’s Air Force Base to see the first Space Shuttle orbital flight come in to land, But I think it’s a mistake yo imagine that Musk’s dreams have no impact here on Earth.

Elon is risking a lot.

Robert Heinlein wrote a novella, “The Man Who Sold The Moon”, in which a billionaire named Delos D Harriman pushes to send the first man to the moon. Almost none of the details are really correct — the rocket is launched from near Colorado Springs, there is only one pilot, a host of other things, but the emotional core of the story is that Harriman achieves his goal — and doesn’t, because he’s too valuable to be allowed to go.

I hope that’s not Musk’s fate. I’m sure he wants to see the Earth from space.

He wants to see Mars close up.

There’s so much more to see.

Charlie Martin

Charlie Martin writes on science, health, culture, and technology for PJ Media. For media inquiries, please contact [email protected]

Category: COLUMNS
Tags: FUTURE SPACE SPACEX

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