Sure hope you’re right. But I cannot see why he is wasting his time on stuff like twitter.
He employs the best engineers in the business to do the work and he gives them the freedom to innovate. His role is to provide the vision, and be figurehead to draw the attention of the media with his various public relations pronouncements.
Useful to have such a lightning conductor to keep the public entertained while the engineers get on with the serious business. Jobs played a similar role at Apple. Branson at Virgin. Other organisations have huge public relations departments spending vast amounts on brand building.
“Starship”?! That’s a rather grandiose title, is it not? It also fills me with dread because the very thought of Elon Musk becoming our “Ambassador to the Stars” is the stuff of nightmares.
For the largest rocket in history, the first one designed to be completely refueled in space so it can take 100 tons of payload to almost any planet or out of the solar system, and be fully reusable to boot? With the capacity to take 100 people into space at one time?
Seems like a reasonable name to me.
I’ll consider it “reasonable” when it actually arrives at another star. You can say, “I told you so”, in about ten thousand years. LOL
You know, the Saturn V never went anywhere near Saturn.
The space shuttle “Enterprise” was a pretty arrogant name, since it didn’t even have warp drive.
Virgin Galactic doesn’t have any capacity to explore the galaxy.
Boeing’s ‘Starliner’ does not go to the stars. Nor does the Orion spacecraft go anywhere near the Orion nebula.
The Mercury spacecraft could not go to Mercury.
Isn’t this fun?
Yes! 
“Starship” is a designation, not a name.
Example: “The starship Enterprise”
It’s the designation assigned to a spaceship that has the capability of reaching different star systems in less time than it takes for a civilization to go extinct.
Your turn! 
This is getting silly.
Starship, when referring to the SpaceX craft, is always capitalized in print. Hence it’s a proper name.
I’m especially disappointed with the F-104 Starfighter.
Yep! 
Yes, it is misused as such. From what I’ve observed of Musk’s personality, it is undoubtedly a name designed to stroke his own ego.
You mean like when he called one of his recovery barges “Just read the instructions”, and another one “A Shortfall of Gravitas”?How arrogant! Two of SpaceX’s recovery ships are named “Bob” and “Doug” Two of the tender ships are called “Maverick” and “Goose”.
Elon Musk is a space geek and has a big sense of humor. He chooses names from science fiction (Ian M. Banks, for example) and gives things whimsical, fanciful names. Oh, the horror.
There are ;lots of things to criticize about Musk. The names of the vehicles of SpaceX is not one of them.
So… Anyone want to predict when the first launch of the full stack Starship/Super Heavy will happen? That’s the subject of the thread, after all.
Far as you know, the only reason we haven’t been attacked by another star is the recognized defensive threat posed by the Starfighter.
At this point, I’d bet against this year. I don’t think they’ve hit any showstoppers, just that the cost and complexity of Stage 0 has lowered their risk tolerance just a bit. I’ll go with Feb '23.
The last rumors I’ve heard is that additional modeling has uncovered an effect where hot exhaust can push its way upward around the vehicle at high altitudes. The Saturn V had this problem as well. The COPVs on the outside may need to be moved or protected.
Also some rumblings that they may have taken just a bit too much structural margin out of the upper stage, to where the tiles might crush each other. Not sure about this one.
Anyway, all seemingly fixable stuff, but probably not in a couple of weeks.
Didn’t they already put shrouds over the COPVs? Or do they need something more extensive?
That strikes me as something they might just fly with, under the 'build fast, fly lots, learn" philosophy.
I think the big risk item they are trying to avoid is a RUD on the pad. That would be ruinous, and probably set them back a year and a billion dollars or more. Second would be a failure on ascent. But if Starship can just attain orbit, that pretty much proves out the system, and the rest is details. Since they aren’t recovering the Starship on the first launch anyway, if a fix for the tiles means rebuilding the rocket, my guess is that they’ll fly anyway to prove out the booster and all the other hardware, and let the thing burn up on re-entry if the tiles fail on launch. If it’s a simpler fix that can be done in weeks and not months, then yeah, they’ll fix it first.
Do you know if they had tiles fall off on the last two static fires?
Yeah, could be. Feb 23 is as good a guess than any, and it’s almost never wrong to bet on delays in a rocket program. I agreee that December is looking iffier by the day, but I still have hopes for January.
Unclear. It’s pure rumor-mill stuff anyway. I mean, the effect does happen–you can see it on photos of the Saturn V launches–but whether it is actually delaying the launch is unclear.
The static fires didn’t have a full stack, so no tiles present. A full-stack static fire is probably something else we need to see before a launch.
I’m not sure we ever got a Starship-only static fire without losing a couple of tiles, but I’m also not sure how relevant that is. Being so much higher up on a real launch, we can guess that the acoustic and vibration environment is at least a little milder.
Agreed. That means a big focus on ensuring the engines work reliably and don’t have any risk of resonant failures, etc. I.e., don’t be an N1.
I read that the 14-engine static fire damaged the pad enough that they had to strip out and repour the concrete.
Yeah, there were chunks of concrete flying during the first one. But apparently they replaced it with a higher grade of concrete for the second test and there was negligible damage. They may also be playing games with some kind of nitrogen system. 33 engines are going to be fun, at any rate.
For nail-biting definitions of “fun”.