The Great Ongoing Space Exploration Thread

That article contains a cite to a vid outtake of the event. I’m not sure, but IMO that may be the largest wet fart in recorded history. By a considerable margin. :wink:

Photo of V3
The SpaceX booster B18, the first V3 version of Starship, suffered an explosion that damaged the LOX tank during ambient pressure testing last week

Not much to say beyond the cite. A group claims to have detected high energy gamma rays that match the energy and location in galactic space predicted by current theories for dark matter. Might be huge; might be the result of torturing data beyond its error bars.

I’m not competent to say which, but I bet this will get some serious attention in the field.

What sort of WIMP would have the properties needed to match the observations? Any of the zoo of previously proposed add-ons to the Standard Model?

What’s Russian for “oops”?

At least that waited until after the USA regained the ability to get crews to/from the ISS using our own hardware. Had this failure occurred a few years ago everybody would have been screwed.

Some combo of NASA and SpaceX just gained a new customer.

On a less serious note …
Looking at the damage pix, I guess we could say “Basically, the bottom fell off.” Off the pad that is.