Starship V3

dmix

One more week > Liftoff will occur at 6:30 p.m. ET on Monday (May 19) https://www.space.com/space-exploration/launches-spacecraft/...

kyriakos

Page banned in my country apparently

moralestapia

Yay, go Elon! What SpaceX has accomplished is just phenomenal.

hparadiz

Close ups of the tail fins and the hull exterior have little hex tiles covering the entire tail fin assembly. There's also different sizes of tile. Exciting to see if that will be enough structural reinforcement.

vzaliva

Reading reports of people objecting datacenters build in their states I wonder how Florida residents feel about the Spaceport ? It will certainly be more distruptive than datacenters.

a34729t

The new more powerful engines with built in heat shield are a phenomenal achievement. Hopefully they perform as good as they look!

danpalmer

I used to follow Starship so intently, similarly NASA things, but Musk's antics, politicising of everything he touches, the increasing use of NASA as US propaganda, has all really put me off it. It's hard to get excited about these things anymore, which is sad because they're otherwise legitimately exciting.

slac

Gotta pump that Grok IPO /s Seriously though, the whole SpaceXAI makes zero sense to me. SpaceX was a wonderful company and there was zero need to pollute it with Twitter and a service that creates sexual images of people without their consent.

phren0logy

I was disappointed when this was not the command line prompt library

gok

It's a fascinating design but it's been 14 years since the concept was first announced and it's never really completely worked. If it ever was possible, it's not clear the talent for it still works for SpaceX.

beambot

Those Raptor 3 engines are a thing of beautiful simplicity compared to their forebears...

spankalee

Oops, I read too far and come across these bangers in the next post: > In the long term, space-based AI is obviously the only way to scale. > My estimate is that within 2 to 3 years, the lowest cost way to generate AI compute will be in space Yes, Elon is very sane.

sergiotapia

Spacex may be the most important company on the planet. What greater goal is there than expanding humanity to the stars!

BoxedEmpathy

I really hope I get to see a permanent settlement on Mars or the moon. I don't care who settles it I just want to see humanity reach for the stars.

seemaze

Aerospace vessel, not terminal prompt.

christkv

I wonder how you solve the cooling issue as you can only shed heat via radiation.

Fordec

The thing which is seemingly missing from this is their current largest hurdle emerging from the V2 testing. The heat shields keep failing. I guess the focus is going to be on getting stuff up, rather than back down. Thus the Starlink and data center plays, not human space exploration.

Melatonic

Definitely some cool photos of Starship V3 - how much of this is new info vs just a press release style announcement? I havent been following the latest rocket news much

arjie

Incredible to get insight into the new things they're trying. Back in the day of the old Space Race this kind of thing was impossible and now an enthusiast can just follow along as incredible feats of engineering are performed. Great stuff! I imagine at least some of the reason to chase the AI datacenters in space thing is because Starship is "too capable" if it succeeds. It makes available a technology that does not have a short-term utility that people will pay for. Starlink was something that's been useful as telecoms but perhaps that market is saturating. It makes sense to pursue what is currently high-utility but is not being met because of terrestrial constraints. Well, good luck to him. A lot of smart people are chasing this idea and I can't seem how it could work, but I was honestly surprised that Tesla hit its production goals, and I was honest surprised that SpaceX hit success so fast, and I was honestly surprised by the rise of LLMs, so the truth is there are lots of paradigm shifts I just miss: BEVs, cheap space, AI. Someone once tweeted something like: > Less intelligent people perceive more intelligent people as incredibly lucky. They always make inscrutably stupid decisions, unjustified by visible information, and somehow fate rewards them for this. But also, I'm just hoping that a new era of space exploration will open up in my lifetime. That sounds incredibly cool! And I dare say there are many people like me in the US at least judging by the popular baby names of this era, which have seen spikes in Aurora, Nova, and Luna - and in the one my daughter has: Astra.

ivolimmen

Saw some photo's and the first thing that stands out: the American flag. What's up with that? If you see a product launch in Europe there will be no flag in the photo's (non that I ever saw).