Its so interesting to watch this technology evolve, life and uncut. Its almost as if every other day another milestone is revealed. Especially as its a tech that one doesn't work with (mechanical engineering / rocket motor engineering etc).<p>Looking forward for all the great space missions that will be made possible by this (europa, enceladus, more comet missions & many more space-telescopes), not so much for humanity becoming multi-planetary, as the scientific value is lower imo. E.g. a great project: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NQFqDKRAROI" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NQFqDKRAROI</a>
And unstacked !<p>It was surprising to see that it only took them about an hour to unstack (I didn't catch the stacking but I think I heard it was around the same amount of time ?).<p>I'm still very perplex about the "catching" mechanism they are designing, Musk mentioned in the Everyday Astronaut interview [1] that it was a very hard problem and I'm very curious to see if/how they can solve it.<p>[1] : <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t705r8ICkRw" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t705r8ICkRw</a>
Only in America things like this can happen.<p>A whole industry bootstrapping itself into transforming exotic, mission critical hardware into a commodity; SpaceX is making flight hardware a commodity, just like Silicon Valley did with semiconductors!<p>Meanwhile Europeans are playing catch-up with the Falcon 9 (already 11 years old) and it looks like Ariane 6 won't be competitive with SpaceX anyways [0]. And China is still raining toxic fuel and spent rocket stages on villages. [1]<p>[0] <a href="https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/11/europes-challenger-to-the-falcon-9-rocket-runs-into-more-delays/" rel="nofollow">https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/11/europes-challenger-t...</a><p>[1] <a href="https://arstechnica.com/science/2019/11/china-keeps-dropping-toxic-rocket-parts-on-its-villages/" rel="nofollow">https://arstechnica.com/science/2019/11/china-keeps-dropping...</a>
It's pretty amusing that they assembled it with a boring old construction crane. No fancy VAB or custom scaffolding. No different than the latest cookie cutter "luxury apartment building".
A tangential, silly observation. I hear Musk being called "a Steve Jobs" a lot... wouldn't "a Howard Hughes" be closer to the mark? Maybe a generational thing....
Anyone know an estimated static fire/launch date? I'm open to a meetup (and cold beverages under a canopy) within visual distance of the pad.