Can’t wait to see this team, but I don’t understand why they paid this much. Wow.

Wow, the “little” max has gotten big! Going to take a while to get used to these numbers.

Musk is gross and SpaceX has some questionable marketing claims that you’ve identified, but I don’t see how anyone could claim that anything about the company’s products are a shitshow.

Falcon 9 has radically changed the economics of the space industry, and has no competition to force lower prices.

Starship has had a very successful testing campaign, and operates within a different development paradigm than Saturn. They’ve shown more progress on more technology in the last year than almost any rocket ever. It won’t be long before Starship has demonstrated all the capabilities you mentioned. While the price tag is large in absolute terms, it will be very cheap relative to the competition.

Dear Moon was not canceled by SpaceX, and no one who follows the industry has ever believed Musk’s timelines.

I guess I’m confused, because everything I know about Starship points towards it being one of the most incredible engineering accomplishments ever. There are lots of other problems with SpaceX’s leadership, environmental impact, and work culture, but aren’t the products inspiring?

This is really well done!

Commenting to boost this post, but roll again if you land on me. Thanks OP :)

Yeah that’s fair. I’m pretty low on these Mavs and would bet against them in a re-run of these playoffs, but they’ve certainly made a good case for themselves and initial odds are partly hype-based.

I’m not sure how to justify those Mavs odds. They had a great run, but will anyone be picking them over the Nuggets or Thunder (or Grizzlies?) next year? I’d expect them to be a 5 or 6 seed.

What a weird situation. I suppose it’s nice those workarounds exist, even if they’re not ideal.

I think I’ve come to a similar conclusion after IFT-4. Reusability is the top priority, not a stretch goal like with Falcon-9. As such, the expected value of testing reentry is a lot higher than that of orbital maneuvering.

What an insanely aggressive development approach!

It stands for “maximum dynamic pressure”, and is a fluid dynamics concept. It’s the moment when the spacecraft is under the most stress, and therfore where certain things are most likely to fall apart.

It’s caused by a combination of atmospheric density and velocity. To avoid issues, there’s a rough rule of “don’t accelerate too much until you’re high enough that the atmosphere thins out” during launch, and “don’t hit the atmosphere too fast” during reentry.

Here’s a chart for the IFT-3 launch. At one minute you can see that acceleration decreased for a few seconds, to minimize the strength of max-Q.

Interesting that there’s nothing special about acceleration at max-Q, unlike during launch.

Interesting! I assume it involves a smart plug and an automation script that monitors battery level?

Wow, Graphene really doesn’t have charging limits?

I assume this is the discussion you referred to, and I think it broke my trust in the project.

Edit: As far as I can tell, many of the frustrating parts of that thread are from random posters and not devs. I’m still annoyed that such a basic feature is considered controversial.

If it’s only the on-screen flap that had issues, hopefully that points to a minor fix instead of a major one. I wonder what sort of data they have on this. How many thermal tiles were lost on each flap? Where did the issues start? Are the other flaps alright? Hard things to track.

I can’t believe they (maybe) completed the landing burn with a shredded flap.

Between that and the booster engine issues, this seems like one of the best possible learning scenarios.

The Super Heavy hover looked way more stable than I was expecting. Amazing progress.

Thanks for this! I’ve spent several dozen hours trying to get SteamVR working well on Linux, and finally gave up.

Is the Monado experience close enough to Windows to be usable? Are you aware of any major tradeoffs?

At this point I accept that Valve probably can’t compete with the billions poured into the Meta Quest 3, but I’m glad they understand there’s an enthusiastic audience for whatever they do next.

The lack of vacuum relight is really interesting - I thought that was the biggest barrier to a “real” orbital flight with a payload that can start offsetting development costs.

But yes, everything else about this flight plan is exciting!

Correct, here’s a guide to enabling Wayland.

I’ve never had OP’s problem, but another avenue I’d consider is to set display settings in the nvidia-settings app, which can be opened with a GUI from the terminal. These settings are separate from those in the normal settings menu, in ways I don’t totally understand.