Booster 13 on the launch mount today being prepared for upcoming static fire testing ahead of Starship test flight 6.

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That is just astonishing!

Thanks MH, an infinitely more useful response than Turin's unnecessary unpleasantness.

Re the Ship exploding upon landing it seems hardly surprising as they've dumped running rocket engines into water, the back pressure spike that they're not designed to withstand must be huge, not to mention the disruption to the structure likely to be caused by the impact of its toppling over.

Irony Alert!!
If you hadn't been so unpleasant and mysoginistic about the SpaceX engineers presenting the launch we could all stick to useful information, but you keep repeating the same nasty jibes.
If you can't take it don't dish it out.

Video. STATIC FIRE! Booster 13 fires up ahead of Flight 6 of Starship. Its partner, Ship 31, has already been Static Fired.

This has happened less than two weeks after Flight 5.

QED...

Pad must have been in pretty good nick after IFT5 - that's encouraging

Space X crew returned to Earth.
There have been many technological advances to space travel but re-entry is still brutal.
Back on Earth: NASA’s SpaceX Crew-8 Mission Splashes Down Off Florida - NASA
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Starship 33 has been revealed!

This is the first next generation design Starship and is expected to fly on flight 7.

https://cimg2.ibsrv.net/gimg/pprune....9016be46eb.png
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Flight 6 is focussed on Booster risk reduction, not Ship envelope expansion - Flight 5 booster came within 1 second of an abort and crash-landing beside the tower because of a problem and another 100 items could have led to an abort. This and more in the link belowNEWS: Small excerpt from @SpaceX Starship Flight 5 debrief and upcoming Flight 6 readiness conference call with Elon Musk.

Funny how these ships look very much like Fireball XL5. That show was way ahead of it's time.

You want something that someone with a crystal ball did back in 1966?

See Pegasus and Selena,,,,

Pegasus VTOVL

Pegasus VTOVL stage

Project Selena

Crystal Ball? Fireball XL5?

Ideas and concepts often come early way before the technology is developed to make them a practicality.

vide the development of the gas turbine, first proposed in almost complete but completely recognisable form by one John Barber in 1791.
Wiki goes on to say,

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• 1899: Charles Gordon Curtis patented the first gas turbine engine in the US.[7]
• 1900: Sanford Alexander Moss submitted a thesis on gas turbines. In 1903, Moss became an engineer for General Electric's Steam Turbine Department in Lynn, Massachusetts.[8] While there, he applied some of his concepts in the development of the turbocharger.[8]
• 1903: A Norwegian, Ægidius Elling, built the first gas turbine that was able to produce more power than needed to run its own components, which was considered an achievement in a time when knowledge about aerodynamics was limited. Using rotary compressors and turbines it produced 8 kW (11 hp).[9]

Aviation, computers and robots share a similar lengthy flash-to-bang development history.

Aircraft took 50 years before they became a really practical form of transport rather than a rather exotic niche curiosity and rocketry, despite being orders of magnitude more complex is developing on a not too disimilar timescale in which the vision of Musk and SpaceX is proving a historic scene-shifter.
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Scott Manley's review of the week with some pertinent information about IFT5 and IFT6.

Booster 12 has been moved to the Starbase rocket garden.

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Easy to miss how big those damn things really are....

Announced today, SpaceX has developed HLS Starship crew cabins, sleeping quarters and science lab mock-ups in prep for the Artemis III Moon landing mission in 2026.

These may be located inside the HLS nosecone mockup at Starbase.

The interior design of the HLS Starship airlock has already been released, as seen in Image 2, so it’ll be exciting to see what futuristic design SpaceX has in store for the rest of Starship’s crew cabin.

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The "rocket garden" looks a bit like seals on a beach.

More details regarding the Starship HLS mockup revealed.

- Consisting of two floors, there are 5 space station-style crew quarters plus a storage area, with up to 20 crew quarters per Starship rings.
- Four flight seats with command screens like Crew Dragon.
- Hallway in the center with ladder, and a ~40 foot ceiling for maximum lunar gravity fun.

Lower floor consists of a functional life support system.

For the real Starship HLS, there will be at least two floors, with one being the airlock where the astronauts will ride an elevator to the lunar surface.

It’s exciting to think that we are going from a tiny lunar lander to an apartment sized spaceship landing on the Moon.

Summary of interview by Spaceflight Now: @SpaceflightNow has released an interview with the deputy manager for NASA's Human Landing System program which included some new information about Starship:

- Ship to Ship prop transfer campaign planned to start in March 2025
- Ship to Ship prop transfer test planned to be completed over the summer
- NASA is looking for a bi-weekly cadence with only the Boca pads at first and then later getting 39a online
- NASA helped SpaceX test their MMOD (Micro Meteoroids & Orbital Debris) tiles which will be used in space
- NASA helped SpaceX improve cryogenic valves and other internal cryogenic cooling components - SpaceX uses testing capabilities at Glenn and Marshall and expanded that relationship
- Design update in November, critical design review next year
- Astronauts have a meeting with SpaceX once a month to improve the HLS design
- There are HLS crew cabin, sleeping quarters, and laboratory mock ups at Boca Chica

Thanks ORAC.
A huge difference in design philosophy compared to previous and other current ideas. (Looking at you Blue Origin).