Hour and a half until launch. Things are going smoothly so far. Prop load just started.
NSF stream:
Everyday Astronaut:
SpaceX stream should start here in about an hour:
30 minutes to go. The SpaceX stream is up.
10 minutes! No problems so far, though they said they had to chase off some boats.
ETA: Liftoff!
ETA2: Can’t seem to make a fourth post, so editing this one. Great liftoff, though, and no apparent engine failures.
Oh damn, the booster went kablooey! But the Starship is still going.
ETA: Guess their hot staging shield needs work. But the booster lasted long enough to get out of the way of the ship. Ship’s still burning clean.
Yes ! nice Rapid Unscheduled Disassembly there !
That was a really solid RUD! Can’t wait to look at the replays (though I still need to sleep tonight).
They’ve easily met their basic test goals: made it through hot staging, and through most of second stage flight.
Can’t tell what’s going on right now–seems like they’ve lost signal, but I think the ship might still be going. Even if not, that was a pretty good test flight.
Well that was officially awesome. Looks like they lost both stages. But a remarkable success overall.
Yep, huge improvement over the last one. Pad looks good, Raptor reliability is way up (no engines lost at all), and made it well in to second stage flight. Still lots of work to do, but very good progress. Hopefully the next flight will happen much sooner.
And with that, I’m off to bed. 5:20 am is after even my bedtime…
Fantastic flight. Now I hope I can sleep.
I almost forgot it was today and I tuned in about 60 seconds before it launched. That was a close call! The engines looked great, Starship made it to space, and the destruction of the booster was spectacular.
I think the test cadence will really start to motor now.
I understand how the booster failed (more or less) but can someone tell me what happened with the starship? Did it RUD?
Shit. I’ve been feverishly ill and completely missed a launch was going to happen. So I wake up this morning to the find I missed the show. Argh.
Second the question on the fate of the upper stage.
Searching the news I find:
And
But perhaps that was about the booster.
Which may also be about the booster.
It sounds like SpaceX itself doesn’t know what happened to the upper stage. ?
Washington Post is reporting the Starship was lost:
Thanks. From the link above:
So both of them went kablooy is the story then. I wish the press could make that clearer.
Maybe starship rendezvoused with the long lost zuma satellite 
So does that count as reaching orbit for the purpose of this thread?
Because NASA is getting uneasy, The Atlantic writes (gift link in Beta, let`s see how long it remains valid). They are counting on this thing working fine to go to the moon.
Didn’t work for me. No adwall, tried a private window. In Chrome and Firefox. No dice. Appreciate the effort!!
I can imagine Nasa is shitting pants right now. SLS is supposed to be the high maintenance, low cadence horse. Yes, a lot of Starship’s low cadence is regulatory, but you can’t blame two bad launches (and three RUDs) on that.
I doubt it. Taking “reach orbit” in its least tortured interpretation, I don’t think Starship would have attained orbit this year at all. This flight was a sub-orbital hop. If everything worked, it might have gotten into space, but not into orbit.
For all we know, it did get into space. We haven’t been told at which point in its trajectory it was destructed.
Well, at least the showerhead worked? It looked like it was a great solution.
Well, how much info did they get from telemetry? Nowadays I assume that there are many data channels, and quite a number of independent receivers monitoring them.
It did seem a bit odd that they apparently lost the upper stage quite late, after it had separated and seemed to be running quite well?
We probably won’t know until they analyse the data.