I thought both stages had engines?

Currently “only” the bottom half of Starship is where its main propellant tanks are — the upper half (minus the relatively small header tanks in the nose) is where payloads will live =)

Remember, Ship 25 is almost a year old, iirc, and they’ve already revamped/updated the tile integration process on the more recent Ships (to the point where after everything cures — or whatever has to happen — they go back and see if they can be pulled off with appropriate force). So hopefully we shouldn’t see ass…

Here’s all (I think) of the environmental info from the 2022 Programmatic Assessment and the one just done by the FWS before this last flight:

I believe Crew Dragon had just one test flight of the capsule before the Demo 2 mission with Bob and Doug going to the ISS. And of course the boosters that they were atop were already flight-proven, so the tests were mainly focused on the capsules’ performance. But to answer your question: (surprisingly?) not too many…

Deleted for redundancy =)

What a beautiful, gorgeous test flight! Everything seemed to work almost perfectly up to staging — at least much, much better than generally expected. I suspect hot-staging may have some impact on whatever went wrong with the booster burnback, and maybe whatever caused the FTS to terminate the ship after MECO ... but…

Looks like they need to replace a grid fin actuator, so launch postponed to Saturday =P

The second Starship mission may or may not succeed ...

Louisville, Colorado, and will soon make the roughly 60 mile (96 kilometer) journey to the Neil Armstrong Test Facility in Sandusky, Ohio

Kinda jumping the gun on that proclamation, no?

“famous line from Harry to the waitress: “I’ll have what she’s having.””

Yeah, I’m 6' 4" and when in the glory days I was at 210 I was an effing rail. There’s absolutely no way Trump is below ... what? ... 270? 300+ wouldn’t surprise me at all.

Yeah, and it’s not really a diverter, either, in that it’s not really redirecting the exhaust in any particular direction. It’s more like a reinforcement of the flat surface that was already there (the ground) as well as providing for deluge dispersion.

SpaceX hasn’t released anything, but I believe one of LabPadre’s cameras picked it up ...

And fortunately they’ve already tested an FTS that, instead of blowing holes in the tanks, basically “unzips” them pyrotechnically instead. Should hopefully make things a bit more instantaneous.

Yeah, the main development snag that’s holding up SpaceX at the moment is upgrading the OLM, and they’re on that 24/7 and seem to be making fairly rapid progress. In the meantime, they’ve got, what, 4 other ships and boosters ready to go with others under construction. Once the OLM is ready to go, their testing…

I’m glad this list went back as far as it did, and there are one or two I hadn’t heard of, so something to explore =) But I will say I’m disappointed Metropolis isn’t mentioned — seems like that is a pretty iconic film due in no small part to its (ground breaking?) effects ...

We’ve always been at war with Eastasia ...

Both of those are milestones that could be reached during testing