Starship's Eighth Flight Test
76 comments
·February 24, 2025Molitor5901
jp42
if you can, visit Starbase. I can't believe its so easy and you can see those huge rockets from so close. No permission of anything needed you just drive to there.
Dig1t
Absolutely agree. Also the public location where you watch launches from is also the location where SpaceX employees watch from (South Padre Island). So you get as good of a view as the actual SpaceX employees do and it’s free to walk or bike in. It’s an amazing experience.
vessenes
Super exciting. I hadn’t read the debrief from 7s explosion, sounds like the early speculation had it right - leaks into a not well ventilated area and a (proper) autonomous self destruct.
I’m excited to see if they can keep data all the way through reentry - that is such a game changer long term, and seeing live plasma effects is just insanely cool.
Ajedi32
Looks like it was posted just today, so you didn't miss anything: https://www.spacex.com/updates/#flight-7-report
Molitor5901
and the little fin that did!
dvh
When all the early prototype bugs are ironed out, will the second generation be called V2?
tim333
Perhaps the moon orientated version could be called Moonraker after the Bond novel featuring a wealthy industrialist building rockets who turns out to secretly be a nazi. It is of course an implausible plot but the name is good.
vessenes
Werner von golf clap for you sir
russdill
This generation of starship is literally called V2
alabastervlog
Sadly, I did not have "the US rocket program comes full circle... in a couple ways" on my 2025 bingo card.
decimalenough
In case you missed the joke:
_joel
Just waiting for "operation too many alleged paperclips" to finish
AtlasBarfed
[flagged]
WalterBright
> I want SpaceX de-Musked ASAP
Consider what happened to Apple when Jobs was forced out (and then when he came back), and what happened to Microsoft when Gates left.
Musk made what SpaceX is today. He's been doing an incredible service to the world with SpaceX.
ceejayoz
> Consider what happened to Apple when Jobs was forced out...
He learned a lot, and came back with that knowledge?
We don't really know what Apple would look like if Jobs hadn't had his years in the wilderness; I suspect, for example, that Pixar wouldn't have happened.
At times, immature children benefit from a time out.
NoMoreNicksLeft
>I want SpaceX de-Musked
Why? I don't much care for Kardashians, but I just ignored that they had a tv show.
>which is going to be REALLY hard given the private ownership majority he presumably owns,
Maybe you'll rise high in the ranks once the proletariat starts the revolution.
Veserv
The Kardashians did not have money disbursement and firing authority over vast swathes of the US federal government. Maybe it is just me, but I feel that demands a little more scrutiny than reality TV stars. We certainly should not lower the expected standards of behavior and give a free pass on things we expect normal people without the power to do extreme harm to abide by.
The highest should be held to the highest standards, not the lowest.
unsnap_biceps
I would love spaceX de-musked because I want to support them! I want to be a share holder! I want them to be successful, but I don't want to support Musk, so I have conflicting wants.
I don't have a conflicting set of wants with the Kardashians, so I do just ignore them and it's all good.
IAmGraydon
>Why? I don't much care for Kardashians, but I just ignored that they had a tv show.
Were the Kardashians uprooting the US Government or am I missing something?
EA-3167
The Kardashians didn't own and run an economically and strategically critical company.
There's a big difference between wanting Musk far away from SpaceX, and wanting a communist revolution, just like there's a difference between owning a make-up brand and the world's leading launch company.
ceejayoz
> Musk wants to deorbit the space station
More than Musk; SpaceX was awarded the deorbit contract last year, under Biden.
https://www.nasa.gov/news-release/nasa-selects-international...
> I hope the astronauts get back safely
They'll be fine. SpaceX has a perfect record for manned flight so far.
Both scenarios are a bit like Harry Truman claiming to have done most of the work winning WWII.
wlesieutre
> More than Musk; SpaceX was awarded the deorbit contract last year, under Biden.
The contract to deorbit after the end of its operational life in 2030.
Musk wants to deorbit the ISS as soon as possible instead, after getting in a twitter argument with astronaut Andreas Mogensen.
daveguy
Deorbit of the ISS was scheduled for 2030 with experiments and research continuing until deorbit. Mant research programs are depending on this continuation of service to complete recent proposals.
If you didn't think musk had a conflict of interest, this is exactly what it is. Surely you can see this for what it is.
Who wouldn't want their hundreds of millions of dollars contract paid out 3 years earlier than planned?
https://www.nasa.gov/news-release/nasa-selects-international...
https://www.the-independent.com/space/elon-musk-space-iss-de...
russdill
As interesting change to their updates page:
"SpaceX reached out immediately to the government of Turks and Caicos and the United Kingdom to coordinate recovery and cleanup efforts."
to
"SpaceX reached out immediately to the government of Turks and Caicos and worked with them and the United Kingdom to coordinate recovery and cleanup efforts"
IAmGraydon
Why is that interesting?
ckcheng
A comma would've sufficed?
cf: "SpaceX reached out immediately to the government[s] of Turks and Caicos[,] and the United Kingdom to..."
russdill
Just that it appears that they did not reach out to the UK government when this happened as they may have been unaware that Turks and Caicos are a British Overseas Territory.
whitehexagon
I think that will be ~midnight here (central Europe). Is this going to do a complete orbit before landing attempt? It's not clear from the launch page. Hoping to see the deployments.
I remember seeing gen1 deploy here before I knew what they were, and panicking that the long string of dots were ICBMs!
Strangely 2 weeks ago I think it was one of the gen1's that gave a nice reentry burn up early one morning here, also a bit scary when unexpected.
Anyway exciting that they were able to turn this test around so fast after the last one, hopefully a longer show this time. Best of luck to the team.
Ajedi32
Looks like the OP's link got truncated. It should be https://www.spacex.com/launches/mission/?missionId=starship-...
Frederation
Go get'em, Shotwell!
jhp123
If our government is so strapped for cash that it has to cancel food shipments for starving children[0], then surely we are in a deep enough fiscal crisis to stop spending money on space exploration?
[0] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/usaid-trump-funding-pause-500-m...
kemotep
Do we know when they plan to test orbital refueling? Launching a 2nd Starship to exchange fuel between them in orbit?
It looks like this is a repeat of flight 7’s mission of testing payload launch capabilities, specifically the type of starlinks starship is partly designed to handle.
zeristor
Pending regulatory FDA approval…
Surely they mean pending regulatory capture
Ajedi32
I'm assuming you meant FAA. Last I checked, Starship isn't edible. ;)
mkaic
Not with that attitude it's not :P
fabian2k
With this kind of massive conflicts of interests and the way the current administration behaves you have to assume that any kind of regulation on Musk's companies is effectively removed. Even if he does not intervene directly, every employee that acts against him must assume they'll lose their job over those actions. That's a fundamentally untenable situation, there can be no actual oversight and regulation under these circumstances.
Dig1t
Under the previous admin it took longer to get regulatory approval than it took to build it (the most advanced rocket in the world) and it involved insane things like strapping a pair of headphones onto a seal and playing rocket sounds to it.
We can only hope that the new administration will streamline the process and reduce the time needed to get regulatory approval.
unsnap_biceps
> Under the previous admin it took longer to get regulatory approval than it took to build it (the most advanced rocket in the world)
Generally it does take awhile for a third party to understand the design decisions and their impacts then the designing person. This shouldn't be a surprise to anyone working on software.
> it involved insane things like strapping a pair of headphones onto a seal and playing rocket sounds to it.
Do you have a citation for this?
cooper_ganglia
>it involved insane things like strapping a pair of headphones onto a seal and playing rocket sounds to it
There are actual images of a seal with headphones strapped to its head online!
Dig1t
https://youtu.be/3SvJP5wfN4k?si=ICrN3UqdeEH8yLxe
>nonetheless we were required to kidnap a seal, strap it to a board, and play sonic boom sounds to it to see if it would be distressed. This is an actual thing that happened. I have pictures.
Then shows a picture. It sounds like another commenter is saying that the pic displayed by the Lex podcast is not the exact pic from Elon, but instead a similar pic meant to illustrate.
>The amazing part is how calm the seal was.
He said they had to do this twice.
m4rtink
Checking if seal is broken was for the Falcon Heavy booster landing pad on Vandenberg, it was not really related to the Starship program.
bryanlarsen
They take a lot longer than 6 weeks to build a Starship. They can build a Starship a month, but that's because there is significant parallelism. My guess is that there are parts on a Starship that started assembly over 1 year before the Starship is complete.
saalweachter
I don't know if Elon Musk or SpaceX has ever kidnapped a seal and played headphones to it, but the photos that were going around the internet for the last few years (they made the rounds in 2017 in connection to SpaceX, before Musk began referencing it in 2023/2024) were from an unrelated study in 2006: https://x.com/mcrs987/status/1848070131781455911
I'm still looking or the original study to find out what the "larger study" was about [was it an impact study related to Vandenberg? Was it part of seal monitoring, and while they had the seals they did a bunch of other stuff?], so if someone else digs it up I'd be interested in a link.
saalweachter
I eventually stumbled upon the Federal Register, which has some documents that talk about this, both re: SpaceX and Boeing at Vandenberg.
Boeing, probably related to the pictures on the internet: https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2006/06/26/E6-1004...
SpaceX, related to the landings: https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2018/11/15/2018-24...
I don't know exactly how often who puts headphones on seals yet, but it sounds like as part of operating at Vandenberg, it's routine to "haul out" (by which I assume they mean, capture and remove, releasing some time/distance away) harbor seals, so they aren't in the way; it sounds like they also (sometimes? always?) perform some amount of monitoring activities on the seals, since you've already got them captured.
Also, all of this activity is apparently termed "Level B harassment".
sonofhans
Yeah, I agree, fuck seals. The more we damage marine mammal life with loud sounds the better. If they didn’t want to get killed off in awful ways by our tech toys they should have evolved ear muffs.
throwawaymaths
> strapping a pair of headphones onto a seal and playing rocket sounds to it.
That sounds more traumatizing to the seals than the actual launch.
Anyways:
https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-1-4939-3456-0_...
LorenDB
IIRC this study was not about the lethality of Starship, it was about whether the seals were agitated or disturbed by the launch.
null
TheRealNGenius
[dead]
I can't help but shed a tear every time I see Starship take off. I'm not space nut or even aviation, but it's just remarkable to see what we have been able to accomplish. Here's to a very successful launch.