Recent content by statisticsnerd

Haha, I don't believe so. I was making a joke about a potential scenario I thought of where some birds would make a nest in the payload bay while Starship is on the ground, the workers don't notice and close the payload bay door, Starship launches, the payload bay video feed is turned on for...

It is kind of embarrassing that the payload bay door didn't open. Shouldn't that be pretty simple? At least the video feed of the payload bay didn't show dead birds floating around.

Didn't IFT-5 work more or less as intended? The booster was caught by the tower and the 2nd stage landed in the Indian Ocean. I'm just an armchair expert, but it seems like they could go back to that design and make changes from there.

Won't Starship (the 2nd stage) have to overfly Mexico to make it back to Starbase? I'd imagine the Mexicans won't be thrilled about the possibility of chunks of metal raining down on their homes if it experiences a "RUD."

Have any other rockets had water-cooled steel plates underneath them rather than a flame trench or water deluge system, or is this another case of Elon half assing it and hoping it works?

Raining chunks of concrete on endangered sea turtle habit isn't a good look. This is their nesting season too.

Yeah, a Moon landing in 2025 is highly unlikely. Starship may not even reach orbit until then, but I believe that it will probably land on the Moon at some point. Although blowing out a gaping hole under the launch pad during the OFT was pretty stupid, SpaceX isn't usually incompetent. They...

Folks, I'm sharing the absolute best animation that I've seen of the Starship program. It really is movie quality. SPOILERS (read below after watching): From what I've read regarding the orbital flight test: the booster won't be caught by the chopsticks, Starlinks won't be deployed by...

Well, success means different things to different people. I was halfway expecting it to RUD and the launch mount to be obliterated. 31 out of 33 engines working properly with the launch mount still intact is definitely progress, so I'd call it a success.

It was 2005 or 2006 when I discovered Orbiter. I had played the various versions of Microsoft Flight Simulator going back to when I was a kid, and I believe that I had searched for a space simulator and Orbiter popped up in the search results.

Agreed. That's in bad taste. I'm looking forward to the mission and hope it's successful, as well as subsequent missions. Returning to the Moon is exciting. However, do we really need to reinvent the wheel? If these are just more "flags and footprints" missions, what's the point? I think...

To add on to my old list, Apollo 18, Passengers, Gravity, The Martian, and Ad Astra were all very enjoyable movies to watch. I actually enjoyed Ad Astra more than The Martian, although part of that may be because I had already read the book for The Martian.

I set up a base on Mars, set the landing pad as target and missed it by just a few kilometers. I was heading towards it, then the suicide burn started and I ended up in a Martian canyon. One thing that went very well was that by trial and error, I managed to execute an aerocapture. That was...

Thanks for creating this wonderful addon! I completed the 10km hop as well as the mission where Starship lands in the water near Hawaii. My next adventure is going to be a Mars mission, picking the right launch window and bumping up the propellant level to 100% after reaching LEO (of course...

My favorite is re-entering Earth's atmosphere in NASSP. Rolling the Apollo CM back and forth while watching the G's, making sure not to come in too steep or too shallow, is very enjoyable.