Premium said:

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Is this the last launch of this version?

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Yes. And the 2nd launch of this specific booster

Are they gonna catch it? Or blow that off again?

They will dump it in the ocean. They don't need it for anything/plan to change pad 1 to the V3 configuration after this, so won't use it or risk a tower catch.

AgBQ-00 said:

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never in my life have I thought about the moon looking different in Australia.

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Something about the Tycho Crater being on top makes it look so much more like the Death Star.

AgBQ-00 said:

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never in my life have I thought about the moon looking different in Australia.

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Right? Tripped me out when I moved here.

AgBQ-00 said:

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never in my life have I thought about the moon looking different in Australia.

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Whoa. Me neither. What does it look like from the equator? Sideways?

Doesn't it "flip" from moonrise to moon set the same for everyone? It's just the way you'd be oriented when it's higher in the sky that would change

We all knew starlink phones were just a matter of time.

There would/will be a significant/noticeable lag even if this works, and they haven't even started deploying V3 Starlinks yet, would take 10's of thousands, probably 5+ years even with Starship going all out/re-usable. I'm also skeptical it could ever work in buildings, so I doubt this is a true 'replace the cell towers' moment.

It's exciting, but I don't want a solar flare to knock out all cellular communications in a minute, either. I'd expect SpaceX to grow their partnership with T-mobile, not cut back on it.

$17 Billion: Elon Musk's SpaceX struck a deal with EchoStar Corporation for 50 MHz of exclusive U.S. spectrum and global MSS licenses, a move that supercharges its Starlink Direct to Cell service worldwide.

"This agreement will enable us to develop and deploy our… pic.twitter.com/7M06aaUOs9

— Melissa Hallman (@dotconnectinga) September 8, 2025

The other irony is that this is really a denouement of sorts for DishTV, whom Echostar ran/operated, and which also bought Hughes in 2011 and…always sucked at satellite internet. But we're not talking about satellites/infrastructure here, but bandwidth/spectrum.

Was that due to capability/infrastructure or due to corporate greed/throttling on purpose?

I don't think this was ever meant to be a "replace cell towers" thing or a live stream in 4K from the back country thing.

But there absolutely a market for very distant data. Want to text from the middle of no where? Need low bandwidth data sent from remote locations?

Hughes? I think that was always a bit of a disastrously run outfit. Part infrastructure, part business, also a reflection of launch costs/capabilities at the time. I think they tried to patch together line of site (VHF) ground antenna's to residential users and it really just…never worked well.

Some of these outfits like Echostar wound up, over the past 20 years, just with more spectrum than product, so it makes sense for them to cash in. The DishTV/DirectTV merger I still think the gov't screwed up on, but it's water under the bridge. The investment ATT has poured into fiber though I am skeptical will hold up, ultimately (as someone whose bill for this product has gone from 30 bucks a month to over $120 over the years.)

I really don't ever want to give up my AT&T fiber. It's been cheap, fast, and reliable for around a decade now.

OnlyForNow said:

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Was that due to capability/infrastructure or due to corporate greed/throttling on purpose?

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Technology, Hughesnet orbits at 22,000 miles up. Round trip is 88,000 miles or nearly half a second at the speed of light, basically circling the globe 3.5 times to get one request and response. Starlink orbits at 350 miles up, or a 1400 mile round trip. Basically Houston to El Paso and back again. Latency on HughesNet is at minimum nearly half a second, for Starlink it's minimally around 7ms. Latency is higher than the minimum, so you can imagine trying to have a video call where the infrastructure has latency laid on top, and additional latency for encoding/decoding. Also heavily bandwidth restricted, because one satellite couldn't provide that much and had to service a large area of rural people.

Went from one rocket launching one satellite, one time to one rocket booster launching 30 times with 28 satellites per launch.

Not to mention the additional power requirement for GEO birds to provide decent speeds.

Shawn Ryan has a good podcast out with Jared Isaacman, on his show.

Still listening but I laughed early on when he analogized SLS shuttle hardware to taking a P-51 Mustang into Desert Storm because we needed to keep the plants running.
Frankenrocket starship discussion between Tim and Eric Berger:

Call me pessimistic, I honestly think the only way to get humans back on the moon in this decade is likely a single launch approach, but not with SLS. SLS's TLI capacity is insufficient. Honestly, make an expendable Starship upper-stage with a Saturn V style clamshell stage… https://t.co/JPrGBgRy6X

— Everyday Astronaut (@Erdayastronaut) September 8, 2025

double aught said:

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I really don't ever want to give up my AT&T fiber. It's been cheap, fast, and reliable for around a decade now.

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I would love to cut my ATT bill entirely, despite the product working well/fast. I think it's a horrible company, period, for many reasons that are off-topic to this thread, but will just leave this here:

People don't understand the scale of the H-1B scam

There are some companies where literally every hire is an Indian visa holder

They actually want you to believe an entire company's worth of jobs can't be staffed by Americans pic.twitter.com/wDs2M7rTTU

— Brotherhood (@DiggingInTheDi1) September 8, 2025

Static fire complete for the Super Heavy booster preparing for Starship's eleventh flight test pic.twitter.com/1qkypMOd7I

— SpaceX (@SpaceX) September 7, 2025

That wouldn't be any sexier if it were in denim

will25u said:

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This seems... HUGE!

‘You’ll thank me later’

Translation: ‘AT&T, T-Mobile, Verizon, Cricket Wireless (honorable mention), are all dead now. Connect to the internet & your loved ones from anywhere on earth including the top of the Himalayas starting soon’

Extremely well done & super exciting. https://t.co/M8e2No5QUe pic.twitter.com/0uSEufO0CO

— dar (@radbackwards) September 8, 2025

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Elon is taking over the tech data industry!

I bought roaming / traveling Starlink service a few weeks ago for the motorhome, unbelievable how easy it was and is to set up... just fold it up and put it in the carrying case.. get to new spot setup in 5 minutes and you got great internet and tv service at the next place. when you set the satellite on the ground you open the app and it tells you how to adjust the satelitte on the ground.. so easy

Kenneth_2003 said:

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That wouldn't be any sexier if it were in denim

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Their drone video is nuts. The power.

Moar!

Test Flight 10 filmed at 1200m from 4 miles away. pic.twitter.com/yrDGEfTLP0

— Dustin Farrell (@Dustin_Farrell) September 8, 2025

The sheer volume of water that is being converted into nearly dry steam in those videos is nothing short of mind blowing!

Musk states in this interview that current handsets don't support the Echostar spectrum and will probably take two years to come to phones. That the service will eventually allow a person to stream video anywhere in the world, and that it will function inside buildings, provided the building doesn't have a thick metal roof.

I imagine some of the justification for the purchase is licensing with handset manufacturers for emergency services, some for closing gaps for terrestrial cell service providers, and then also to provide home internet for locations that don't currently have a clear view of the sky.

hph6203 said:

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Musk states in this interview that current handsets don't support the Echostar spectrum and will probably take two years to come to phones. That the service will eventually allow a person to stream video anywhere in the world, and that it will function inside buildings, provided the building doesn't have a thick metal roof.

I imagine some of the justification for the purchase is licensing with handset manufacturers for emergency services, some for closing gaps for terrestrial cell service providers, and then also to provide home internet for locations that don't currently have a clear view of the sky.

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Reminds me of his "I really don't want to have to make a phone, but if we have to make a phone, we will" quote from a while back. Sounds like maybe he is going to make a phone. But if Apple and Samsung are smart, they will move at lightspeed to be the first to market with a compatible device.

Nice Stephen Clark piece at arstechnica on the heat shield/flight 10 and beyond.

Quote:

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Not great, but SpaceX officials think they have a solution. Near the top of the ship, amid the patch of white, engineers noticed a few darker areas. These are places where SpaceX's ground team installed a new experimental material around and under the tiles.

"We call it crunch wrap," Gerstenmaier said. "It's like a wrapping paper that goes around each tile, and then... these tiles are mechanically held in place. They're snapped in by a robot. When we push the tile in, this little wrapping paper essentially sits around the sides of each one of the tiles, and then we cut it off on the surface."

Using this "crunch wrap" material could seal the spaces between the tiles without using gap fillers. The gap fillers on the space shuttle added complexity to the heat shield, and they sometimes dislodged in flight.

"This is kind of what we're going to fly on this next flight, on Flight 11," Gerstenmaier said. "When we fly here, we're going to put, essentially, crunch wrap everywhere, and see if we can get better sealing and better tile performance moving forward. These are areas where we're inventing things. We're doing test experiments. We're doing test envelope expansion. We're doing aerodynamic things. All these things are critical."

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No more iron oxide (orange, a hideous color) from metallic tiles, it sounds like. Personally, I am glad to hear that, even if it might have made things simpler for the SpaceX engineers.

Quote:

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"Next year, we step up to another version of both ship and booster, called V3 (Version 3)," Gerstenmaier said in response to a question from Ars. "It also has a new Raptor engine underneath, with more performance than the previous ones. So we'll fly V3 (suborbital) first, and then if that's successful, then we'll probably go orbital after that with the next V3."

That would mean an orbital flight no sooner than Flight 13. This matches a recent comment by Musk, who said SpaceX will likely attempt to catch and recover Starship back at Starbase somewhere around Flight 13 to 15, depending on the outcomes of the next couple of test flights. It also agrees with predictions from my colleague Eric Berger in a recent story on Starship.

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Life?

NASA's Mars rover uncovers strongest hints yet of potential signs of ancient life - CBS News

Quote:

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NASA's Mars rover Perseverance has uncovered rocks in a dry river channel that may hold potential signs of ancient microscopic life, scientists reported Wednesday.

They stressed that in-depth analysis is needed of the sample gathered there by Perseverance ideally in labs on Earth before reaching any conclusions.
"Today we are really showing you how we are kind of one step closer to answering ... are we truly alone in the universe," Associate NASA Administrator Nicky Fox said during a briefing on the findings Wednesday morning.

Roaming Mars since 2021, the rover cannot directly detect life. Instead, it carries a drill to penetrate rocks and tubes to hold the samples gathered from places judged most suitable for hosting life billions of years ago. The samples are awaiting retrieval to Earth an ambitious plan that's on hold as NASA seeks cheaper, quicker options.

Calling it an "exciting discovery," a pair of scientists who were not involved in the study SETI Institute's Janice Bishop and the University of Massachusetts Amherst's Mario Parente were quick to point out that non-biological processes could be responsible.

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A Raptor 3 was just tested for 354 seconds, a new record for the Raptor South test stand. The almost 6 minute test is also close to a full ship ascent burn 🔥 Acceptance testing underway for Starships next engine!

Live views: https://t.co/vA0IB0tnAR@NASASpaceflight pic.twitter.com/BaoTxiT9UQ

— Justin Swartz (@jswartzphoto) September 10, 2025

As someone above noted regarding the 2 year training timeline:

Note that the Artemis II crew was named in April 2023, about two years before the projected launch date. If NASA were really serious about a human landing in September 2027, they would name the astronauts on the mission as they would be starting formal training.

— Eric Berger (@SciGuySpace) September 10, 2025

Tim came out with some thoughts on HLS:

(Ultimate arm chair engineer warning, long but hear me out)

Artemis is a mess. I've been working on a very deep dive going over all possible options to get humans on the moon with existing (and near future existing) hardware and I've discovered something quite interesting about… pic.twitter.com/DTUbcccGV5

— Everyday Astronaut (@Erdayastronaut) September 11, 2025

Quote:

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Artemis is a mess. I've been working on a very deep dive going over all possible options to get humans on the moon with existing (and near future existing) hardware and I've discovered something quite interesting about the current plans for Starship HLS.

Starship HLS should ABSOLUTELY not do it's own Trans Lunar Injection. SpaceX should do a "stubby" HLS which only has enough propellant to get from NRHO down to the surface and back. This only requires about 400 tonnes of propellant because you could remove something like 20 or 25 TONNES of tankage that is currently baked into the design that's ONLY used ONCE to do the TLI.

A stubby Starship HLS now has MUCH greater margins too, almost 700 m/s of dV for a round trip between NRHO and the lunar surface. This also means its refueling requires substantially less propellant for the subsequent missions. It makes the refueling trans lunar tanker require much less propellant, which means it requires fewer launches to fuel that up as well. It all works towards much fewer launches all together, a much more efficient lunar lander that isn't carrying around an additional 25 tonnes of dry mass, a shorter vehicle which requires less hardware for the elevator, a lower center of gravity, much lower landed mass since it requires less propellant to get back to NRHO etc etc. It's a win : win.

The only drawbacks I've found so far is the trans lunar tanker and HLS would need to be able to dock nose to nose and have heavy bracing to be able to perform the TLI docked with the Trans Lunar Depot, however this would certainly be less mass than the 25 tonnes of parasitic tankage we've removed.

The other drawback is a trans lunar refuel depot that has minimal dry mass (and therefore only 2 Rap Vacs) would likely need to expend a booster to be able to get into orbit initially since it would take about 19 minutes for two Raptors to burn through 1,600 tonnes of prop, so you'd have to launch it with less than 600 tonnes of prop which still gives it enough dV to get into orbit if the booster is expended, but also can get the job done with just two Raptor Vacuums, would be be most efficient for all trans lunar refueling operations. BUT, THIS IS TRUE OF THE FULL HLS AS WELL!

The numbers BARELY close with little margin for error and boil-off with a full height HLS doing its own TLI. A stubby HLS is almost the only real viable option that has much greater margins and requires far less to refuel once its at the moon.

Best of all, cargo and crew volume remain the same for a stubby HLS Starship. There's almost no compromise other than the complication of having to do the TLI with two docked vehicles. Something that's never been done before, but certainly the juice is worth the squeeze over having an inherently inefficient lunar lander.

I'm working on a very in depth deep dive on all things Artemis and this is just something that stood out. I can't wait to show you my full rundown. There's some interesting options out there that can help ensure the US beats China back to the moon while also aligning with long term sustainability goals.

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I dunno, the thread is interesting.