Starship's Eighth Flight Test | Hacker News Reader

Starship's Eighth Flight Test

spacex.com

65 pointsLorenDB85 comments

I can't help but shed a tear every time I see Starship take off. I'm not space nut or even aviation, but it's just remarkable to see what we have been able to accomplish. Here's to a very successful launch.

if you can, visit Starbase. I can't believe its so easy and you can see those huge rockets from so close. No permission of anything needed you just drive to there.

Absolutely agree. Also the public location where you watch launches from is also the location where SpaceX employees watch from (South Padre Island). So you get as good of a view as the actual SpaceX employees do and it’s free to walk or bike in. It’s an amazing experience.

That.. is amazing and surprising!! WOW! It took me years to get an invitation to go see a NASA launch up close but that was a long time ago when the shuttle was still flying. Maybe I can convince my wife to take a spontaneous trip with me to see them up close. We could stop at a Buc-ee's!

Do it! I am waiting for my 7 month old to become big enough to be ready for 6 hour drive. I plan to make it annual ritual to visit Starbase with kids.

Super exciting. I hadn’t read the debrief from 7s explosion, sounds like the early speculation had it right - leaks into a not well ventilated area and a (proper) autonomous self destruct.

I’m excited to see if they can keep data all the way through reentry - that is such a game changer long term, and seeing live plasma effects is just insanely cool.

Looks like it was posted just today, so you didn't miss anything: https://www.spacex.com/updates/#flight-7-report

and the little fin that did!

When all the early prototype bugs are ironed out, will the second generation be called V2?

Werner von golf clap for you sir

This generation of starship is literally called V2

Sadly, I did not have "the US rocket program comes full circle... in a couple ways" on my 2025 bingo card.

In case you missed the joke:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V-2_rocket

Perhaps the moon orientated version could be called Moonraker after the Bond novel featuring a wealthy industrialist building rockets who turns out to secretly be a nazi. It is of course an implausible plot but the name is good.

Just waiting for "operation too many alleged paperclips" to finish

I think that will be ~midnight here (central Europe). Is this going to do a complete orbit before landing attempt? It's not clear from the launch page. Hoping to see the deployments.

I remember seeing gen1 deploy here before I knew what they were, and panicking that the long string of dots were ICBMs!

Strangely 2 weeks ago I think it was one of the gen1's that gave a nice reentry burn up early one morning here, also a bit scary when unexpected.

Anyway exciting that they were able to turn this test around so fast after the last one, hopefully a longer show this time. Best of luck to the team.

As interesting change to their updates page:

"SpaceX reached out immediately to the government of Turks and Caicos and the United Kingdom to coordinate recovery and cleanup efforts."

"SpaceX reached out immediately to the government of Turks and Caicos and worked with them and the United Kingdom to coordinate recovery and cleanup efforts"

Why is that interesting?

A comma would've sufficed?

cf: "SpaceX reached out immediately to the government[s] of Turks and Caicos[,] and the United Kingdom to..."

Just that it appears that they did not reach out to the UK government when this happened as they may have been unaware that Turks and Caicos are a British Overseas Territory.

Go get'em, Shotwell!

Looks like the OP's link got truncated. It should be https://www.spacex.com/launches/mission/?missionId=starship-...

Do we know when they plan to test orbital refueling? Launching a 2nd Starship to exchange fuel between them in orbit?

It looks like this is a repeat of flight 7’s mission of testing payload launch capabilities, specifically the type of starlinks starship is partly designed to handle.

If our government is so strapped for cash that it has to cancel food shipments for starving children[0], then surely we are in a deep enough fiscal crisis to stop spending money on space exploration?

[0] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/usaid-trump-funding-pause-500-m...

Pending regulatory FDA approval…

Surely they mean pending regulatory capture

I'm assuming you meant FAA. Last I checked, Starship isn't edible. ;)

Not with that attitude it's not :P

With this kind of massive conflicts of interests and the way the current administration behaves you have to assume that any kind of regulation on Musk's companies is effectively removed. Even if he does not intervene directly, every employee that acts against him must assume they'll lose their job over those actions. That's a fundamentally untenable situation, there can be no actual oversight and regulation under these circumstances.

Under the previous admin it took longer to get regulatory approval than it took to build it (the most advanced rocket in the world) and it involved insane things like strapping a pair of headphones onto a seal and playing rocket sounds to it.

We can only hope that the new administration will streamline the process and reduce the time needed to get regulatory approval.

> Under the previous admin it took longer to get regulatory approval than it took to build it (the most advanced rocket in the world)

Generally it does take awhile for a third party to understand the design decisions and their impacts then the designing person. This shouldn't be a surprise to anyone working on software.

> it involved insane things like strapping a pair of headphones onto a seal and playing rocket sounds to it.

Do you have a citation for this?

https://youtu.be/3SvJP5wfN4k?si=ICrN3UqdeEH8yLxe

>nonetheless we were required to kidnap a seal, strap it to a board, and play sonic boom sounds to it to see if it would be distressed. This is an actual thing that happened. I have pictures.

Then shows a picture. It sounds like another commenter is saying that the pic displayed by the Lex podcast is not the exact pic from Elon, but instead a similar pic meant to illustrate.

>The amazing part is how calm the seal was.

He said they had to do this twice.

>it involved insane things like strapping a pair of headphones onto a seal and playing rocket sounds to it

There are actual images of a seal with headphones strapped to its head online!

That doesn't mean said image matches the story told.

https://x.com/mcrs987/status/1848070131781455911 asserts it was actually a study for the Delta IV booster, not something SpaceX had to do.

Yes, I'm aware of that. My point was that SpaceX has said they've had to do this, and if it sounds so wacky that that's unbelievable, there are actually photos of the same thing happening with seals, so I feel very little need to doubt that SpaceX was held to the same standard if that's what they claim.

Not a "citation" as much as anecdotal evidence that dispels doubt.

> My point was that SpaceX has said they've had to do this...

Musk also famously tweeted "funding secured" for Tesla. "He's lying" is 100% within the realm of possibility.

Checking if seal is broken was for the Falcon Heavy booster landing pad on Vandenberg, it was not really related to the Starship program.

They take a lot longer than 6 weeks to build a Starship. They can build a Starship a month, but that's because there is significant parallelism. My guess is that there are parts on a Starship that started assembly over 1 year before the Starship is complete.

I don't know if Elon Musk or SpaceX has ever kidnapped a seal and played headphones to it, but the photos that were going around the internet for the last few years (they made the rounds in 2017 in connection to SpaceX, before Musk began referencing it in 2023/2024) were from an unrelated study in 2006: https://x.com/mcrs987/status/1848070131781455911

I'm still looking or the original study to find out what the "larger study" was about [was it an impact study related to Vandenberg? Was it part of seal monitoring, and while they had the seals they did a bunch of other stuff?], so if someone else digs it up I'd be interested in a link.

I eventually stumbled upon the Federal Register, which has some documents that talk about this, both re: SpaceX and Boeing at Vandenberg.

Boeing, probably related to the pictures on the internet: https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2006/06/26/E6-1004...

SpaceX, related to the landings: https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2018/11/15/2018-24...

I don't know exactly how often who puts headphones on seals yet, but it sounds like as part of operating at Vandenberg, it's routine to "haul out" (by which I assume they mean, capture and remove, releasing some time/distance away) harbor seals, so they aren't in the way; it sounds like they also (sometimes? always?) perform some amount of monitoring activities on the seals, since you've already got them captured.

Also, all of this activity is apparently termed "Level B harassment".

Yeah, I agree, fuck seals. The more we damage marine mammal life with loud sounds the better. If they didn’t want to get killed off in awful ways by our tech toys they should have evolved ear muffs.

> strapping a pair of headphones onto a seal and playing rocket sounds to it.

That sounds more traumatizing to the seals than the actual launch.

Anyways:

https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-1-4939-3456-0_...

> That sounds more traumatizing to the seals than the actual launch.

To a substantially smaller number of seals.

that don't even exist. (see link)

Your link is about the Gulf of Mexico.

Vandenberg (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vandenberg_Space_Force_Base) is on the Pacific Ocean, where there are most certainly seals and sea lions. https://www.vandenberg.spaceforce.mil/News/Features/Display/...

You have the wrong body of water.

Delta IV heavies also launched from Vandenburg since long before f9 existed, and is considerably louder than falcon 9. was there a need for that study?

The study was apparently for the Delta IV. https://x.com/mcrs987/status/1848070131781455911

same thread, tory bruno says it was not for delta IV

https://x.com/torybruno/status/1848797537215410627

I'm pretty sure he's talking about Starship, not Falcon 9. Starship doesn't launch from Vandenberg; neither Starship launch site has seals present.

Propellant mass 441,800 lbs (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delta_IV_Heavy) to 906,000 lbs (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falcon_Heavy) in the respective first stages.

falcon 9 heavy has never launched from vandenburg.

But it will.

https://www.vandenberg.spaceforce.mil/News/Article-Display/A...

(Starship hasn’t, either.)

IIRC this study was not about the lethality of Starship, it was about whether the seals were agitated or disturbed by the launch.

I used to follow SpaceX so closely but now, given the behavior of Elon Musk, I cannot take any interest in any company connected to him.

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