I’m looking forward to this. Musk aside, I can’t see how anyone who claims to be a science and technology enthusiast can’t be excited for this.

I was lucky enough to tag along with some press connections for the Godzilla Minus One premiere in LA and it was amazing! If anyone’s on the fence about seeing it, please do yourself a favor and go. By far my favorite movie of the year (at least so far).

Thanks for the even-keel coverage, and mentioning Scott Manley. His analyses are always great.

Great job George, you wrote the fair and balanced recap of the test that the rest of media somehow was unable to.

You might want to clarify the FAA role here. They won’t actually do anything to “investigate”, SpaceX will investigate, identify any actions it wants to take, then pass that to the FAA which will either say “Okay” or “We’re disturbed by X, do more”.

I assume you mean “engines” when you say “rockets” here. I got confused for a minute

I guess Lucasfilm figured they needed a Feige figure, a superfan turned pro, and Filoni was it, because it sure as hell wasn’t Kennedy, Abrams, or the Kasdans. (Not to diss Kennedy, who’s one of the most accomplished producers in her generation, and arguably Hollywood history, but the shared cinematic universe thing…

Actually the difference between the Cargo Dragon and the Crew Dragon were minimal with regards to propulsion. Crew has a Launch escape system. I don’t know exactly how many Cargo Dragon’s flew before the Crew Dragon but the entire system had been tested and flown quite a bit before putting humans on it.

Then there was…

There’s a big disparity about the time, money, and amount of disclosure between SpaceX and Nasa’s prior space shuttle program though. I think it was speculated that Nasa spent somewhere near $10.6 billion on developing the space shuttle program, including the recoverable rocket boosters. That’s like $50B today’s…

Actually it is the opposite. These mission “failures” speed up the process. If they waited to launch until more bugs were squashed, they would wait for years. Look at the landing of the boosters. They blew up a lot in the beginning and SpaceX got a treasure trove of info each time they did until they perfected it.…

NASA designated a “less than 1 in 270" requirement for failures resulting in loss of crew for the Commercial Crew capsules, among other requirements (that number was pretty arbitrary IIRC). That’s not a standard either Soyuz nor the Shuttle would have met, but it’s a decent starting point and something broadly similar…

Raptor engines burn Methalox - a combination of methane and oxygen. The exhaust is primarily water vapor and carbon dioxide. It burns far, far cleaner than hydrocarbon-burning rockets from, say, NASA.

It sounds counterintuitive, but SpaceX improves its vehicles through failure.

Next they’ll be telling us Abe Lincoln didn’t hunt vampires.

The solution is obvious: do the whole film in mime.

French GQ responded to Scott’s comments by farting in his general direction.

Yes, it just took them 14 years to do it with modified Shuttle hardware* and with cost overruns in the billions of dollars. If you’re willing to violate your deadlines and can blow out your budget by billions of dollars because you have an Alabama Senator covering for you on the Appropriations Committee, then you can…

Making it into space is not the same as making it into orbit (which was never the plan - if everything had gone smoothly, it would have done a suborbital flight that landed it in the North Pacific).

I really liked the Scott Manley walk-through too.

It was always planned to be a sub-orbital launch so nothing bad there. Seemed like a very successful test with a ton of progress being made from the first launch. I am encouraged that Muskrat was nowhere to be seen. The faster SpaceX and Tesla can divest from that idiot the better.