Recent content by mfb

Satellite images of Starship being towed You can just buy satellite images for a news article these days. Costs a few hundred dollars or so. Anywhere in the world, including the middle of the ocean. The images don't have the same resolution as military spy satellites, but they are good enough...

Starship is being towed The video is made by a shipping channel. The water type of ship. At the moment they are very slow, this is likely just to investigate the ship's behavior and to stabilize its orientation in the water. At the ~1 knot discussed in the video they would need a month to reach...

Themis completes a wet dress rehearsal This is Europe's reusable rocket test article. At 28 meters, it's already as large as some orbital rocket boosters. Starship in space, seen from one of the Starlink satellites it deployed: Alternative with music, and in case the above link doesn't play...

The author is writing for a broader audience, not for physicists. He is a particle physicist, so he knows it's not a very accurate description.

SpaceX will try to recover Starship The Swift rescue mission is spinning after reaction wheel failures Quick, send a rescue mission to rescue the rescue mission! If they cannot get this under control, Swift is probably doomed. This mission was already put together on short notice (which makes...

Still floating after 56 hours The drone/recovery ship is nearby, but at the moment the ship position seems to follow ocean currents so it doesn't look like they are moving it actively.

Starship launch in 8 minutes Edit: It's swimming! It hovered above the ocean as planned, then tipped over. It was expected to blow up from impact, but this one survived. Drones are getting great detailed views of the heat shield now. The booster didn't relight enough engines for the landing...

A Falcon 9 upper stage will hit the Moon on August 5. This stage launched Firefly's Blue Ghost Mission 1 to the Moon (the first fully successful commercial landing), so it was left in a high Earth orbit that came close to the Moon. Ejection from Earth orbit, hitting the Moon and hitting Earth...

Serious math done with Claude Fable 5 and an all-lowercase tweet. Finding the counterexample was hard (it's a relatively famous conjecture from 1939!), verifying that it is one is very easy. Edit: Human mathematicians are being outcounterexampled Difficult to find without checking many cases...

Starship might try again on Monday. Edit: Now targeting Thursday. Vikram-1 reaches orbit on its first flight This is the first privately-developed Indian orbital rocket.

T - 5 hours 40 minutes until the launch window for Starship opens. SpaceX's coverage will start in 5 hours. NASASpaceflight livestream Edit: Aborted right at the time of engine ignition. Some engines didn't start. They'll need a few days before trying again.

An orbit has 6 degrees of freedom, observing the direction of an object has two parameters. That means you need at least three observations to have any sort of chance to determine an orbit. If these three observations are close together then they are largely redundant - the object will move...

Hipparchus (129 BC), Ptolemy (137 AD) and al-Sufi (964) all described Theta Eridani as one of the brightest stars in the sky. Today it is still visible to the naked eye but unremarkable at magnitude 2.9. A new publication explains the larger historic brightness as mass transfer between two stars...

25 second static fire of the Starship booster. This is a new booster, and they immediately went to do the longest booster static fire ever. The video taken from above is slowed down, making the shockwaves easier to see. SpaceX released the second part of its documentary: Critical path ----...

They caught the booster! Video The landing profile looked a bit odd to me, with the booster being almost stationary before suddenly dropping again, but maybe that is intentional. Also, the interstage looks really toasty. That makes China the second country, and third entity (after SpaceX and...