SpaceX had a successful 20 meter first untethered flight for the Starhopper. They will go higher and higher with test hops similar to the Falcon 9 grasshopper flight tests.
Starhopper flight successful. Water towers *can* fly haha!!
— e^👁🥧 (@elonmusk) July 26, 2019
Here are videos of the old grasshopper flights.
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Full flow as in two turbo-pumps, one optimized for each fuel component–not two turbo-pumps driven on a common shaft as with the MK-15? Avoids the common-seal leakage issue between two high pressure fuel components.
video’s show the flight and landing better.
loaded with a much edited stream.
When there was no earth shattering ‘kaboom’ at the end, I knew it was successful, and I was sad.
Brush clearing was a bonus. It won’t be in the way for later tests.
Yeah, but at one point you could see the top poke out of the cloud higher than it had been sitting on the ground, and when the smoke went away it was in a different location.
Granted, you could posit a scenario where the top of it was on hydraulic struts, and was lifted 60 feet into the air under cover of smoke, then they rolled it sideways a ways and hid the dollies. But I think assuming it flew is simpler.
lol – that’s no evidence of flight…
Just a mess of smoke and fire.
Yes, also that U235 is something you want to keep tap on.
Hint CIA hit an Egyptian weapon dealer and found themselves arm deep in Russian operators. CIA has posed as islamist and the Russian as mafia trying to sell plutonium. The Egyptian was in the crossfire.
You could probably make an pretty funny movie out of it but its something you don’t want to touch. Likely that India lost contact with an satellite during an burn and Norad warning service was down because an software update.
A minimum capacity factory would be huge. It would only be cost effective if we were doing a lots of flights to/from Mars.
A laser powered tug could be cheaper.
Over 5 hours? They could have edited that down to a minute, and not lost anything interesting.
Tim was playing with the camera settings mid-test …again. Sigh.
So this would be because it would be, in theory, possible to get political buyoff on launching Th232 into orbit, but nobody in the USA or EU will ever let you send up a reactor’s worth of U235 or something, right?
It might be easier to get the fuel launched by Russia who have happily launched operating reactors before.
Yeah. It is the first time ever in history that a full-flow staged-combustion rocket engine actually flew. Let that sink in for a minute.
We just witnessed history folks!
It moved up then to the left, plus started a couple brush fires…
they’ve moved it… horizontally?
You want to stick an ADSR in orbit for breeding fuel?
Sort of off topic but related to comments from live stream…
How inefficient would it be to set up a solar powered accelerator in orbit to generate fuel for atomic rockets, eg. transmuting non-fissile Thorium232 to fissile U233. Maybe using a fusor to generate neutrons, so part of the energy doesn’t have to come from solar.