Starship has reached orbit
so much for all the people saying it was an engineering impossibility
wonder what brain dead leftists will say next in order to avoid having to ACTUALLY organize in preparation for this future
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@alberto they need to be able to do reentry into mars' thin atmosphere and i suspect that gliding won't work there
@beka_valentine
True. I suspect it's going to be a long time before Mars though. Well it's still awesome, in the original sense
@beka_valentine Did it loft any payload, though?
It's infuriating, especially how they do it to dunk on the mrat, not understanding that they're just contributing to the narrative that it's actually "his" rocket in any meaningful sense.
@beka_valentine Starship reached orbital velocity routinely on previous flights—it just didn't *stay* in orbit because they always put it on a trajectory with a zero-altitude perigee, to avoid creating 100+ tonnes of space junk if the engines failed to re-light and de-orbit it on command. Until now—with sufficient confidence everything would work.
@cstross oh i know, believe me :)
@beka_valentine It's like there's a short circuit in their head that goes Elon Musk Bad, therefore … EVERYTHING he has his minions do must be Bad!!! (And then they conflate *morally* bad with *technically* bad.)
@cstross indeed. its immensely frustrating
@beka_valentine Mightily Impressive. I still think the choice of landing is messed up (a belly flop instead of gliding) but these engineers seem to know what they are doing :D