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  • Hacker News
  • Does anyone care? I'm DOGEdly tired of these videos.
    by spwa4
  • Just watching the live-stream, does SpaceX only hire young guys in their 20's?
    by pupppet
  • >Just watching the live-stream, does SpaceX only hire young guys in their 20's?

    Basically. It's a rough work-life balance at SpaceX and as people get older, they want to live their lives and not live at work.

    by m348e912
  • I got a job offer in May and I'm about to be 40 in a week, so you can definitely get hired if you are older.
    by Anzix
  • It’s interesting the cognitive dissonance this brings out in me. As much as I think Musk carries a fairly reprehensible aura, I would still like to see SpaceX succeed. Space has a funny, transcendent way of inspiring us.
    by appplication
  • I apply this mindset to Trump/politics too.

    I fucking _loathe_ Trump. I still hope he makes America better. But god I fucking hate him. I think his policies are garbage, but I'd love to be proven wrong. All I see is bribery and nepotism... but yknow, he (finally) nominated Jared Isaacman. I'll fucking take it.

    Musk is anathema. But yknow, I'm glad he's started the companies he has.

    by AlexErrant
  • Actual, literal Nazis got us to the Moon and frankly no one cared. Not then, not now. Try separating politics from the advancement of humanity, you'll feel better.
    by pudgywalsh
  • You don't need to virtue signal your dislike of Musk-the-person to be allowed to show your admiration for the exploits of SpaceX. I don't care what you think about Musk and I'm pretty sure I'm far from the only one. Yes, SpaceX is doing great, hopefully other companies will follow their clear lead and make space access more reliable and 'affordable' so that those great wheels-in-the-sky may one day become reality.
    by hagbard_c
  • The tiny part of SpaceX that is actually about space, yes. Unfortunate that it has been bolted onto the hulk of Musk's AI fever dreams.
    by amanaplanacanal
  • I’m glad that of all places, HN is still able to grudgingly put aside red/blue team sports to appreciate really cool science and engineering.
    by qwerpy
  • Incredible. I missed the launch but exciting to see the remarkable success. Boy am I hoping we go to the Moon and to Mars and to all the other places!
    by arjie
  • Real time reentry plasma field will never get old. Amazing
    by s08148692
  • Goosebumps.

    And the visuals from Starlink for the entire journey is freakin' awesome.

    by andsoitis
  • You can also track the progress in text: https://www.cnn.com/2026/07/24/science/live-news/spacex-star...
    by andsoitis
  • Seems like the booster landing burn did not light all the engines and so it crashed into the water.
    by georgeburdell
  • The “chopstick” catcher arrangement seems awfully fragile. Would the ground equipment have survived this if it had been a real catch?
    by wat10000
  • It was going in the water anyway, but yeah, it touched visibly faster than it should have.
    by stephc_int13
  • Re-light seems to be one of their biggest remaining obstacles in a lot of these flight tests.
    by fastball
  • Yup. Some of the Youtubers (like NASA Spaceflight) had video of it hitting the water pretty fast and hard. That said, this is the only test failure so far. I'm cautiously hopeful they get Ship to touch down. (it will explode after it does because of physics but stepping lightly onto the ocean will be a win)
    by ChuckMcM
  • The actual objective was to crash very slowly into the water, and to that end, I believe they planned for about 13 out of 33 to light for the "landing burn". But only about 5 lit up at that time, giving them a higher-speed crash-landing. However, the landing site was exactly where they needed to be, and done in complete safety, so that is good.

    They had been explaining the post-ignition abort from last week, and showed how 4 out of 33 engines had failed to light on the first stage. This was due to some kind of pump malfunctions. They said that if 1 or 2 fail, it's OK to launch, but more than 2 is an automatic abort. So they were able to replace the finicky motors and fully test them out.

    Who knows what caused the underthrust for the landing burn, but at least all 33 engines were operational at launch, and they got plenty of data from this test run, and all Starlink v3 satellites have been deployed successfully for their "suborbital speedrun", so this test flight is doing really awesome!

    by ButlerianJihad
  • Whoa the acceleration from the start surprised me. It’s huge and it just … zipped off the pad like a bullet (ok not real bullet but still).
    by fsloth
  • Felix on the "what about it" YouTube channel says flight 14 will be even faster. That's going to be something to see.
    by laughing_man
  • The more you accelerate early instead of later, the less fuel you have to subsequently carry to get to the same speed so it's more efficient.
    by ivewonyoung
  • Given how little payload is onboard at the moment, what an empty can starship is, i sure hope for their sake there is a lot a lot a lot of zip to spare right now.
    by jauntywundrkind
  • They juiced the engines up big time with the Raptor 3 upgrade. The rest of the stack is leaner and meaner too, but engines are the single biggest upgrade.

    It's why they have plans to elongate the stack further. If they have this much TWR to go around at liftoff, they can afford to cash in that extra thrust to pack more fuel.

    by ACCount37
  • Starship landed in the ocean intact and only slightly on fire!
    by ACCount37
  • That just seemed to be standard venting, methane if I'm not mistaken.
    by NolF
  • Its amazing to see this beast and think that all the firey stuff isn't the primary energy source (although totally necessary to pushing the mass out the back fast enough).

      The reason it’s very small is that almost all of the energy in hydrogen and oxygen is not stored in the chemical binding energy of these things going together.

  The vast majority of it is stored in just the rest mass energy of the protons and the neutrons, which chemical burning doesn’t affect at all.
    https://www.dwarkesh.com/p/adam-brown-gr

    [Edit note: Starship and Booster are methalox, yes. The physicist is talking generically, not about this launch specifically)

    by adolph
  • Summary: almost, but not quite entirely successful.

    Launch successful. Booster separation and boost back burn looked good. Booster failed to relight some of its engines and hit the water hard. Successfully deployed the 20 starlink satellites. Successfully reignited an engine in flight to prove potential for de-orbit burn on future flight. Re-entry looked good and less spicy that some previous attempts (subjective). Such a soft landing that the ship flopped into the water without exploding and floated for a good long while (possibly still floating for all I know). Got some great drone footage flying over the heat-shield.

    So the ship itself is looking increasingly good (so far) but they still seem to be having some issues with the booster.

    by staplung
  • Speaking of which, are there any fan theories on why the boosters seem to have persistent issues? Or is the plumbing still churning fast enough that we keep seeing N=1 issues for successive designs?
    by smallmancontrov