They’ve long ago established exactly that regime for every aircraft manufacturer, every aircraft engine manufacturer, every aircraft part manufacturer, and every single aviation business that uses aircraft to do whatever they do. Airline, firefighting, pipeline patrol, etc.
100% of the entire field of endeavor called “US aviation” exists solely at the behest of the FAA. Commercial space is no different. And should be no different.
Your politics (and naivete) is showing.
I knew it!
(this is satire, in case it isn’t obvious)
Not too much in this article that hasn’t been gone over already, but there was one interesting tidbit:
“We landed with half a centimeter accuracy in the ocean” on the previous flight, he said, “so we think we have a reasonable chance to go back to the tower.”
That’s pretty damn accurate!
Yeah, I think what hung up reusable stages for decades was that no one knew how to get sufficient accuracy for landings without having the stages be rocket planes that would glide in to a piloted landing. Now that computation is dirt cheap it can be done automatically.
They’re still pretty confident about Sunday:
Be there. 7 am CT. Get your ass out of bed.
I have never cheered on a machine so hard as I did with Flight 4. Just incredible to watch in realtime. And I expect Flight 5 to be no different. Gonna be badass whether or not they catch it.
Gerst must mean that they know the position of part of the booster within a cm, not that they hit the target within a cm, which is what I thought at first. That would be almost impossible.
It seems to me that you’d have to structure that very carefully, so as to not fall afoul of (very good and important) anti-bribery laws.
Confidence is probably good for the stock price, regardless of whether or not it’s justified. So of course they’ll be confident. Worst-case, the stack stands there for longer while they wait for approval.
Agreed. But this kind of arrangement already exists for other agencies, most notably the FDA:
https://www.fda.gov/industry/fda-user-fee-programs/fda-user-fees-explained
SpaceX is a private company. They still have an internal “stock price” but they aren’t concerned by day-to-day market reactions. They sell shares to large institutions that care whether Starship flies because it means earning NASA milestone payments and because it affects the economics of Starlink, but they don’t care whether it flies on Sunday or any other particular date.
In related news, the FAA has authorized Starship Flight 5:
https://drs.faa.gov/browse/excelExternalWindow/DRSDOCID173891218620231102140506.0001%3FmodalOpened%3Dtrue%3FmodalOpened%3Dtrue?modalOpened=true
It’s happening!
Yeah, I wondered about that. Though my thought is that it’s the opposite of what you say: the booster came down to 5 mm of their targeted GPS position, but their GPS position isn’t actually within 5 mm of the real position.
GPS can be made more accurate with additional differential ground stations–that’s viable for the actual tower, but not the middle of the ocean.
So I dunno. Regardless, it doesn’t have to be that accurate as the tower arms have a lot of play in them. Gonna be exciting!
Well, OK, then, good for public opinion. They certainly care about that to some degree, even if they don’t literally have a stock price.
Huh? There are all kinds of user fees charged by the government. And note anti-bribery laws refer to the payment of money to individuals…, not for government fees.
Oh sure, the whole reason for them to make a big deal of the launch is to get the public interested. It’s one of the things they do much better than their competitors.
However, in this specific case they clearly knew in advance that FAA approval was coming. We’ve seen this before, where the approval came just days before the scheduled launch. Clearly the two parties work together closely–but it’s more than just that. The FAA must have an accurate idea several days in advance of when they’ll be complete, and tell SpaceX so that they can make preparations.
However, it’s still a surprise that the FAA was saying “late November” until fairly recently, and then that got pulled in sharply. Something must have changed. Maybe the Fish & Wildlife consultation came back much earlier than expected.
Public Service Announcement:
SpaceX does not livestream on YouTube. If you see a livestream that appears to be from SpaceX, it is a scam. They will try to sell you crypto or some other bullshit. One current example, but there will be several more as the launch approaches:
YouTube has proven entirely incapable of dealing with these. In fact they promote them to the top of the search results.
There are some legitimate channels that will livestream the launch: Everyday Astronaut, NASASpaceflight, etc. These are fine if you don’t mind the extra commentary and don’t want to use X. But none of them claim to be associated with SpaceX.
SpaceX does have a YouTube channel that they occasionally post stuff to (though not livestreams). The channel name is just “SpaceX”. But this is not the same as the name that appears on the video. The scam channel above has a name of “@starship5.spacex-us”, but it superficially appears to be SpaceX.
I’ll give a shout-out to Spaceflight Now (https://www.youtube.com/@SpaceflightNowVideo). Good knowledgeable coverage and they appear to be fairly hooked in with SpaceX.
Looks like this thing is on target to lift off (fingers crossed). I think we’ll get daylight in time for launch, so it should be spectacular. Me, I’m watching NASA Spaceflight’s YouTube stream as they have really complete coverage and show lots of passion and joy for spaceflight.
Livestream has started. Currently set for T-0:25:00. The SpaceX stream:
And the NASASpaceFlight stream:
Lots of great views!
Amazing launch. And go for tower catch!
They caught it! Holy shit.
It was a little burny (still is) and I was a bit worried, but it’s there. Damn.
And ship’s in orbit (almost forgot about it… so did the announcers).
I watched on Spaceflight Now – the angle just before catch looked uncomfortably extreme to me, but obviously it was catchable.
Brian
It looked like it was swinging pretty hard, but maybe that was intentional? I.e., a last-second slide maneuver to move into place, so if something fails it doesn’t take out the launch mount? But it’s sitting right on the pins, exactly as intended. No post-landing swinging or anything.