Starship's Tenth Flight Test
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As Starship's tenth flight test dazzled onlookers, parents on the thread couldn't help but reminisce about sharing awe-inspiring moments with their kids, from watching rocket launches to teaching them to ride a bike. Commenters nostalgically recalled sparking their children's curiosity, with some even recommending educational tools like Kerbal Space Program to fuel their kids' fascination with space. The thread became a heartwarming celebration of the joy of discovery and the special bond between parents and children. Amidst the enthusiasm, one commenter even shared Steve Jobs' quote about the profound connection parents feel with their kids, resonating with many.
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Just wonderful stuff. So excited for the future.
The moments truly never stop. Every single day they amaze and surprise you, fill you with so much love and joy and appreciation.
One time Bill Gates was asked what gave him joy and without missing a beat he said his children. Nothing is greater, nothing gives you more meaning, nothing is more ultimate than the sacrifice and patience and wonder and fulfillment of having children.
Not that my choice is suitable for everybody, but the most common choice is not suitable for everybody either.
It really is a change that's not quite possible to convey with words.
It's nice they make you happy, but will their lives be happy?
The evidence says it's very unlikely.
My choice is not to inflict that experience on another sentient being. I'm really not seeing anything at the moment that encourages me to question that.
My direct ancestors lived through some harrowing times without losing their will to live and if they were alive today they would likely feel this is a great time to be alive. My 2c.
Sometimes to more abject despair, but often to more hope.
People shouldn't be forced at gunpoint to have children, but they also shouldn't be dragged down into insecurity and despair that it's financially impossible.
Compared to what? We're living in some of the best times humanity as a whole ever had. Deciding en-masse to not have kids is the irresponsible thing because it literally condemns humanity to extinction and creates a self-fulfilling prophecy. You're cursing the world because you stubbed your toe. Social media inflicted this kind of feeling a lot over the last couple of decades.
> but will their lives be happy?
You'd have to ask them. Humans overwhelmingly choose to live so you could conclude that they prefer existing over the alternative. Happiness is very relative and you'd have a hard time defining it even for yourself, let alone for your hypothetical unborn child.
> The evidence says it's very unlikely.
There's absolutely no evidence to support anything you said. It's your personal preference and you're entitled to it. Why don't you own your choice instead of putting it on fictitious evidence that your unborn child will be unhappy?
> My choice is not to inflict that experience on another sentient being
Whatever you pick you're making that choice for you, not for them.
Children don't know the world exists beyond their town until they're instructed on it!
People and cultures that don't want children will give way to those who do.
For better or worse people with kids know both lives, people without kids only know one. It's like saying "you'll never know how it is to eat an entire cake". Maybe you ate much of it, that counts for something. Now you're on to the next cake. You might bite more than you can chew but this goes for everything.
The value of this freedom is the highest when you're young, experimenting, putting your life on some track. Being "free" at 65 doesn't have anywhere near the same value as it does at 20. Once you do it (almost) all, everything else becomes more of the same doesn't it? That cake I was mentioning? The first bite tasted a whole lot better than the last.
There's no right or wrong, everyone knows their preference and personal circumstances. But your explanation felt like a knee-jerk reaction.
And I mean proper life, backpacking for months around south east asia, himalaya, diving in remote tropical islands, doing extreme mountain sports to the fullest capacity. You know, stuff that adds easily many decades of life actually experienced.
It doesnt compare, it cant.
But there is a catch - to have a chance for actually being a good long term stable parent (and also having and raising kids in a similar way), 2 balanced individuals need to meet and be close to each other on many levels, and then keep working on it. Something I dont see often around me unfortunately in these me-me-me times, with corresponding consequences. Better having no kids than be a miserable parent, raising another miserable generation of permanent cripples.
Just wait till you hit 60s and the pool of nice things you can do keeps shrinking dramatically, I've heard such phrases before and then heard regrets some time later.
Thank me later.
Heck, the person spearheading star Trek vision has gone on public records essentially saying he never liked star Trek and that's why he's gonna make it more like star wars....
But the Paramount+ stuff is doing pretty well. Strange New Worlds is very popular. So was Lower Decks. The last season of Picard, at least, gave fans a lot of what they had been looking for. They've got a new series coming out, and what little we know is that it has a bang-up cast. (Not that that's sufficient; Discovery did very badly by some very talented actors. But it's a good start.)
So Trek: The IP is still going pretty strong. At least as well as Star Wars, which has also been hit-and-miss.
I did that with my grandma as a kid and to this day I don't think I've done anything more relaxing and interesting, it's like watching a fire or waves, it never gets old
“Let’s go to the moon” comes back at least once a week.
Sincerely hope to be able to take her, one day.
The economics of Starlink basically require high cadence Starship launches with 50+ Starlink v3 satellites on each flight.
The booster ditch was super cool, hover then just cut the engines and let it drop.
Figure it's going to burn up on entry?
EDIT: made it. I suppose it was meant to blow up on landing in the ocean? It would have been nice to examine the burned components — but perhaps they had not intended to retrieve it that far away anyway.
They don't claim to have any plans of recovering the wreckage, but they have previously fished up wreckage for study, so it's still possible they decide to do that.
That would be fine for the fligt so far - until it started to heat up from re-entry heating. The stainless steel would be still fine if heated to hundreads of degrees, but the expanding gass could maybe make the enclosed volume to rupture ?
Or a mix of methane and oxygen accumulating somwhere and exploding - but that seems less likely to me in a near vacuum environment during re-entry.
The girl in NASASpaceflight video linked at top said maybe one of the three oxygen vents blew up due to some kind of buildup. Location makes sense.
> Listen, lad. I built this kingdom up from nothing. When I started here, all there was was swamp. Other kings said I was daft to build a castle on a swamp, but I built it all the same, just to show 'em. It sank into the swamp. So, I built a second one. That sank into the swamp. So, I built a third one. That burned down, fell over, then sank into the swamp, but the fourth one... stayed up! And that's what you're gonna get, lad: the strongest castle in these islands.
(although I suppose this ship fell over, then burned down, and then sank into the ocean)
It landed on the sea, there was no barge afaik.
But yes, “rapid reusability” is a ways off. I expect they’ll be spending weeks inspecting and repairing ship and booster before reflight for a few years, but they’ll drive it down over time.
TBD how “rapid” the reusability ends up being in the end.
It seems like if they can get boosters to rapid reuse (a much easier goal), and churn out ships at sufficient scale, they can afford to take time inspecting/refurbing each ship as part of a pipelined approach.
Starship is a fuel-hungry beast - it can get to LEO by itself, but it needs a lot of tanker launches to go beyond. And if your goal is a Mars colony, you don't want to be limited to one launch per launch window.
We could just construct 200 Space Shuttles and spend months refurbishing them after every flight, and still send one up every week.
The goal is to drive down launch costs, time is money, and a system that requires time consuming refurbishments is more expensive.
Elon always talks about a city on Mars but seeing for the first time the gargantuan size of Starfactory it dawned on me that SpaceX are true believers. It is still a big IF, because the dimension of the mission is absolutely bonkers, but IF the goal is to send every two years hundreds of Starships to Mars (everyone needing around 3-4 tanker missions) you need large scale production of ships.
Anyone who thinks they can’t do stuff is not seeing the whole picture.
Once the tanker version is needed, a ship ship could go up 5+ times a day. The logistics of backfilling a pad with a new ship is much more involved
As you say, they reïnforce each other by speeding up the learning curve and deployment of learning to the real world, serving as both a bolstering of the product and experimental validation.
I think that work can be done quite well based on all the footage and other collected metrics.
Definitely true
> Just like the real news, people divide themselves into bubbles of whatever reinforces their beliefs
Hopefully HN can be better than that and be a place for informed criticism or informed praise from whatever provenance
However, I was talking about HN the site. I don't think news websites should (generally) discriminate against sources but the individual readers can (collectively, as with the case of HN and voting) make a judgement call and take provenance into account, including the example you give where an unlikely source makes concessions or gives validity to an argument that they would be usually opposed to.
But the main reason I raised provenance is that the internet has given small individual voices the chance to bring informed insight to the public that previously would have been without a platform. So in this particular case I don't necessarily discount some rando on Youtube making criticisms of SpaceX; they might hold at least some validity. (In this case they obviously didn't.)
It looked like it happened during separation somehow.
Still they are making good progress if a bit slower than that.
-Elon
The tiles themselves work fine, but how to best mount them? where do you need them? Can you make them thinner? do you need anything underneath? what kind of gap do you need between tiles? Those are the things they're hoping to understand in these tests.
The Shuttle tiles were technically reusable AFAIK. The issue was that they were very fragile and the Shuttle for the most part could not tolerate any heat getting through the tiles (being aluminum), so every flight needed to have a perfect heat shield. Starship is a bit better on that end, as stainless steel is a lot more capable of tolerating heat and I think the tiles are a bit less fragile. Still, would be ideal to figure out how to not drop any tiles.
Which is a little easier to do when your craft is shaped like a plane and not a simple cylinder. The loading and positioning were easier to model and then achieve in flight.
The shuttle also flew with repair kits and glue that could be used in a vacuum. The astronauts could perform an EVA and work to replace damaged tiles and there were published plans on how to do so. NASA unfortunately figured out very late that using the Canadarm to image the bottom of the shuttle immediately on achieving orbit was extremely necessary given the icing problems of the external tank.
I don't quite understand how the airplane shape made it easier to model the loading and positioning? (Not saying you're wrong, just doesn't fit my intuition and I'm curious).
My understanding is that Shuttle didn't have to answer the questions about tile gaps etc because it used glue rather than mechanical attachments, if that's what you mean by positioning.
You can approximate space shuttle reentry to roughly a 2d surface entering atmosphere. Because of airplane shape, the tile side faces atmosphere and the plasma goes around plane edges. Where as starship being cylinder doesn't have any separation boundary and plasma roughly goes more than 180% of the cylinder.
Is there any active cooling of any of the skin that we know of?
Would note that Shuttle tiles were never mass manufactured. The Shuttle’s shape meant lots of unique tiles. And its lack of mass production meant each tile was basically an artisanal object.
SpaceX aims to reüse tiles over many flights. But even if some tiles need replacing after each launch, that doesn’t tank Starship per se.
They're currently experimenting with things such as actively cooled tiles (which I presume were installed on this ship, since they were on the last two).
I personally think the likely best case is that they'll have to go over the ship and replace some here and there before launching again.
I think there are still a few unique tiles on Starship around joints and such IIRC, but either way, the number of tile types is much smaller for Starship.
To my thinking, the sane sequence will be launch; catch; survey and maintain (heat shield and other items); and then launch again 24 hours later if everything checks out.
And that will be an absolutely massive improvement over what we have today, let alone what we had with the Shuttle.
I'm keeping my fingers crossed...
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
It just amazes me that technologies have come so far that at one end we can really show that the earth is truthfully a sphere but also at the same time technology has come so far one can claim this is just another video created by AI and is not actually true.
Blue Origin didn't show with the first New Glenn launch their payload mechanism or reentry mishaps.
My current method is to screen share from an iPad after starting the video on Safari. Trying to Airplay gave me audio but not video on the TV. But, the screen share has a pretty large letterbox around it, was hoping to get full screen video.
That's what I did on the iPad and couldn't get the video. I can try the Mac next time. It's not my fault driver and assumed iPad would be the same.
I don't have Apple TV but for videos on X, I download it temporarily to a intermediate server then stream using VLC [1] it's a hassle but I get great watching experience on all platforms. For now, you can stream this on VLC: https://bin.hrzn.pics/0AdLye8
Though I generally watch Everyday Astronaut's [2] coverage on YouTube.
[1] https://apps.apple.com/us/app/vlc-media-player/id650377962
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BtUMt0gsqrs
Starship's Tenth Flight Test - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45007907 - Aug 2025 (233 comments)
Splashdown right next to the buoy!
Awesome to see it all go right.
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