Won't know when until we get closer to the launch: Giving Huston a wide berth as they are likely to still be recovering. Huston traffic is not fun and likely to have lots of dump truck debris on the roads. There is also a shop I look forward to visiting. Bob Wilson
We might be closer. It would appear that the FAA might be getting their thumbs out of their exhaust port.......
Pissed, I was hoping for at least 48 hours warning so I could drive down and witness it. Videos are nice but #4 was a "whole body" experience. Having been a lab rat in Oklahoma City during the 1960s sonic boom tests, I remain curious as to what a 20 ton, returning Starship first stage feels like. Sonic booms and Starship launches are 'whole body' experiences. Bob Wilson
I effectively lived in a sonic boom lab rat zone in the 1960s and early 70s too, in the deep rural Northwest. Not multiple times daily, but once every few months. When living in town, we'd hear the sudden double-boom thunderclap, then the roar of the departing jet. After moving out of town, while outdoors, I'd occasionally hear and sometimes even see a jet winding up for what seemed liked a practice bombing run over town, on some runs where the farm was outside the boom zone. It appears the booms were outlawed in 1973, but the apparent bombing practice runs continued, subsonically, with jets approaching much lower and following terrain. Several times, we looked up to see fighters screaming very low overhead, as they popped over the ridge and descended on approach towards the town target. Searching the web, I now wonder if it all this was related to the Radar Bomb Scoring system. I see multiple references to Wilder, Idaho, though aircraft would have come from multiple Air Force bases in the region, such as Mountain Home, Fairchild, and Malmstrom. The Spokesman-Review - Google News Archive Search
That sucks. I watched it live on my phone and was amazed when the ramp "caught" it. Would have been awesome to witness it in person.
Words fail. Congrats to SpaceX for just about a perfect test! They actually 'stuck' two landings - on two sides of the globe - and it appears that they did everything right in between. It doesn't look very impressive from afar - but that's a 'fairly large' booster, and it just came back from a fairly quick jaunt half way to outer space. In car terms - Zero to 3,000 mph (and 45 miles up!) and back to zero again at the same place and in more or less 1 piece in under 7 minutes.
On this angle, you think they had some leeway to drop the booster on the arms but turn it 90 degrees, and the leeway between both arms is far less. Amazing feat.
Sounds like the FAA got new directions and there won't be a silly "FAA Hold" for flight 6. Once Tesla announces their launch schedule, I'll make the motel reservation and head to Port Isabel. I'm not expecting to see the Starship tower snatch but certainly the booster. SpaceX is building a second launch and catch tower with lessons learned from the first. It too will need testing and might be ready for #6. If it were me, I'd have the initial catches use a different tower from the one snatching the booster. After Florida comes online, rebuild the first tower so SpaceX will always have two, operational towers. There has been no discussion of lateral reentry where the Starship could divert left or right of the orbital path. It has a lower aspect ratio than the shuttle but at high mach numbers, it might not matter. Bob Wilson
I knew Gene Austin at Marshall Space Flight Center who was the program manager for: Unique, Gene insisted on using a MacIntosh while the lemmings use Windows 3.x. The Delta Clipper was an unmanned demonstrator launch vehicle flown from 1993 to 1996 for testing vertical takeoff and landing (VTOL) single-stage to orbit (SSTO) technology. Bob Wilson
P-Can and Boca are probably close enough in latitude to be each other's divert field, and there's lots of water near each - and once Musk and the PRC kiss and make up Vandy is a good third option. If I were SpeceX I would option some dirt in the Indian subcontinent of perhaps Oz.
