Big Rocket Launch this morning: a test of the SpaceX Starship. It will launch from Texas, test the firing of two boosters and the payload door, and then (fingers crossed) a splashdown planned in the Indian Ocean. The flight time will be one hour and 4 minutes, and this time the rockets, though designed to be recovered, apparently won’t be recovered.
Set your alarm for 8 a.m. if you’re on the East Coast, 7 a.m. Central or corresponding times in other places. But the livestream begins half an hour before those times. You can watch the prep and launch either site given below.
This site gives information about the vehicle and launch, and also links to the SpaceX video.
From Jon and Bat, we hear of a SpaceX launch this morning.
This from Bat:
According SpaceX and news outlets, the big launch is on for a 110 minute window commencing at 0700 central time Thursday morning. Launch is from SpaceX launch complex in Texas. The rocket is over 400 ft tall. She’s a big ‘un! Live Coverage begins at SpaceX website 30 minutes before scheduled launch so that would be 0630 Central Time.
This is the big rocket that Elon Musk is developing for big Moon mission payloads and on to Mars. He claims that they are using an “engineering approach”: test often and learn from failure: you really don’t want failure but when you get it, you use it to improve the vehicle and its control.
A video of the launch should be at the site below (click to go there, and then click on “watch”; there’s another launch video site below):
Here’s the official announcement:
The third flight test of Starship is targeted to launch Thursday, March 14. The 110-minute test window opens at 7:00 a.m. CT.
You can watch the live launch webcast at SpaceX.com/launches or on X.com/SpaceX starting approximately 30 minutes ahead of liftoff.
The third flight test aims to build on what we’ve learned from previous flights while attempting a number of ambitious objectives, including the successful ascent burn of both stages, opening and closing Starship’s payload door, a propellant transfer demonstration during the upper stage’s coast phase, the first ever re-light of a Raptor engine while in space, and a controlled reentry of Starship. It will also fly a new trajectory, with Starship targeted to splashdown in the Indian Ocean. This new flight path enables us to attempt new techniques like in-space engine burns while maximizing public safety.
This rapid iterative development approach has been the basis for all of SpaceX’s major innovative advancements, including Falcon, Dragon, and Starlink. Recursive improvement is essential as we work to build a fully reusable transportation system capable of carrying both crew and cargo to Earth orbit, help humanity return to the Moon, and ultimately travel to Mars and beyond.
Here’s a YouTube site:
Looks like launch delay with it now scheduled for 9:10 ET. Claim that they are still clearing boats out of area. Of course my view is that these are all candidates for Darwin Award and we should launch and let evolution play out. You kids get off my lawn.
The tank farm is spooling up, looks like propellant load may start soon. They don’t do that until they are otherwise ready to launch. With recent upgrades they load 10 million pounds of propellant in about 45 minutes.
Propellant load has started.
Something strange happened with Space X’s YT feed: a spam video asking viewers to scan a QR code and send Bitcoin, with Elon Musk promising to send back twice as much!
There are lots of spam sites pretending to stream this, some pretending to be SpaceX itself. SpaceX is not streaming this on YouTube, only on X. If you see a QR code it is an illegitimate spam site. Use one of the following sites.
Everyday Astronaut – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ixZpBOxMopc
What About It? – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OHq2jhP1efI
NASA Space Flight (not NASA) – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RrxCYzixV3s
Watching now. Looks good so far…
Since they are not doing a rendezvous or trying for a particular orbit, I assume that the backend of the launch window has to do with daylight downrange in the Indian Ocean for splashdown….errr…water landing.
Almost there…
This is amazing – thanks for posting it, I would’ve missed it.
OMG that is the BOOSTER view – RETURNING…
Freaking amazing. Those engines! I want to live long enough to see a human on Mars. That’s been a goal of mine since I was a child!
… So funny – they have elevator music playing from after the PEZ door test ’til splashdown! In about 40 min they say. I’m watching the eXtwitter SpaceX feed.
… PEZ .. also funny.
I love rockets and space exploration and I think the SpaceX concept is incredible but I cannot support any company that is owned by Elon Musk due to his overt antisemitism and borderline white supremacy.
Amen, brother.
Both of those are pretty much fabrications by those who want to do him down, often because they want a reversion to woke censorship on Twitter.
‘You have’ not ‘said the actual truth’.
https://www.timesofisrael.com/musk-endorses-tweet-claiming-jews-stoke-hatred-of-white-people-as-the-actual-truth/
It is a fact that some Jewish-led organisations such as the ADL have long pushed Critical Race Theory with its demonisation of white people as “oppressors”.
All of a sudden, post Oct 7, Jews have found themselves demonised as “white” and “colonialist” and “oppressors” in exactly the same way that some Jewish-led organisations (again, the ADL is one; Soros’s Open Society foundation is another) had been doing with regard to white people.
Pointing out these things is not “antisemitic”. Quite a few Jewish people have (post Oct 7) also been re-evaluating along these lines. Bill Ackman is one (he has said so).
That is the wider context of the Twitter exchange. Also relevant context is that the ADL has been one of the main culprits in trying to scare advertisers away from Twitter in order to force them to re-impose woke censorship.
I don’t agree that Musk’s attitudes on this amount to “antisemitism”, let alone “overt” antisemitism. And, if one takes a fuller account of everything he’s said it is clear that he is pro-Israel.
And, out of interest, what is your support for the “borderline white supremacy” charge? I don’t recall him calling for a whites-only ethnostate.
Although I agree with most of what you said, Jews certainly have a right to feel they’ve been oppressed by white Europeans (and Americans, etc.), because they have been. It’s one of the main reasons the state of Israel exists.
You don’t have to call for a “whites-only ethnostate.” to be a white supremist. Since he took over Twitter or X Nazi and ant-semitic messages have run rampant. He claims he doesn’t censor on his platform as a matter of principle but journalists who run a fowl of his views routinely get censored (see Don Lemon recently).
My view is he doesn’t mind the anti-semitic or Nazi posts on his platform but to me that is totally inappropriate. Your views obviously differ and to me calling it woke censorship is just a diversion.
Okay but can we end this discussion, since it’s not relevant to the post? Maybe someday we’ll have a “Discuss Elon Musk” post.
Clever to use Starlink for communication throughout normal blackout period to Earth. Nice test flight. It appears that they got quite a bit done.
Today’s launch was great. Some tips for watching SpaceX launches:
1. They’re now streamed officially on X and not YouTube.com. You can reach them via https://www.spacex.com/launches
2. The YouTube versions are either independent cameras or refeeds of the X stream, which means that they may cut away from the official stream to add commentary, for better or worse. The refeeds are delayed by say 20 seconds and may not be as sharp due to re-encoding the stream.
3. The official X stream often has on-ship cameras that the independent watchers can’t access directly, but the independents can have some pretty good tracking shots from the ground.
4. The independent sources add a lot of technical information of varying quality.
5. When watching, keep on eye on the telemetry numbers. You can see the speeds and altitudes, and for the Starship launches, how many engines are lit. Watch how they change and you’ll be able to spot anomalies before commenters mention them, if they do. Does the velocity stop increasing when the engines are supposed to be lit? Could be the engine failed. Do both the velocity and altitude stop updating? Could be that the vehicle or telemetry failed. It’s especially interesting to watch the now-routine Falcon 9 launches. Watch how after the boost-back burn, the velocity increases as it free falls to Earth, but then starts slowing with _no_ engine as the atmosphere increases and the booster turns slightly sideways to increase drag like a paper towel tube falling sideways.
6. Spins often indicate failures. If you see the on-ship video suddenly lurch, then cut out, that may be a fail. OTOH, controlled axial spins are expected. During today’s launch, the Starship was rotating while in orbit. It was constant. I’m guessing it was to control heating/coolng by rotating so heat doesn’t build up on one side.
I’m sure other launch watchers have other tips and things they watch for…
Good comments DrGary…sounds like you might be a physics teacher! I would say about #4, that sometimes the independent sources have better background and regarding #5, yes, viewers can get a reinforced situation awareness from scanning the telemetry while watching and listening… much like you scan your dashboard instruments while driving. Available Telemetry variables sometimes change from flight to flight so take a minute before launch to know what they are providing.
I switched to the official feed, because it became apparent that the “Everyday Astronaut” presenters were watching it an relaying information with a bit of a delay. However, the Spacex feed sounded like it was being broadcast from a sports bar, with distractedly loud cheering breaking out every few minutes.
The slow tumbling into the plasma during reentry brought Columbia to mind.
A friend of the family has a summer home very close to the launch site. I would love to be able to attend one of his launch parties.
My wife and I were thinking of taking a side trip to Boca Chica before or after witnessing the upcoming total solar eclipse in Texas. My hope was that the eclipse might happen around the time of a Starship launch. Sadly, logistics & costs made the eclipse trip unworkable for us. But I still hope to see a Starship launch. As I understand it, there may be a half-dozen launches of Starship this year alone.
Curiously, I found that the YouTube feeds on my tv were slightly ahead of the feed on my phone that SpaceX was posting on X-Twitter. In any case, I’d prefer that SpaceX post on YouTube as well as on X-Twitter, as the company had done until recently.
I was pleasantly surprised to be able to see the plasma created by reentry friction envelope Starship. I might be mistaken, but I don’t think that has ever been seen or recorded from outside a spacecraft.
I wonder if Elon Musk made a conscious choice to launch on Pi Day (π). After watching the launch I happened to make my first-ever edit of a Wikipedia page — about the symbol for Omega (Ω) — realizing only afterward that today was associated with another Greek symbol. Fun coincidence.
My edit on Wikipedia was an addition to the many listed uses for the Omega symbol, including reference to a relevant article. See “Other” at this link:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omega
“A symbol used by U.S. citizens in the 1960s & 1970s to denote resistance to the U.S. war in Viet Nam. Adapted from the SI unit for electrical resistance.[9]”
(After a modest search I was even able to find the pin-button for Ω that I had sometimes worn back in the day.)