Recent content by Thunder Chicken

They basically get external imagery of Starship after ascent, get to test the deployment systems, and get to test v3 Starlink systems in space. That's pretty good payback for disposable satellites.

At least if they nuke the pad again they won't be blowing up another pricey transporter erector. Again, any information on the cause of the explosion? Progress on the pad is great, but having a non-exploding rocket to put on it would be nice too.

Again, what exactly is the problem with the model? What are your expectations for the atmospheric wind model? Nobody can fix the issue until it is clearly identified.

What exactly is wrong with the wind implementation?

I'm not fully understanding what you are working on, but my experience with computational modeling and numerical simulation causes me to suggest that you change the size of the time steps and repeat the calculation and see if that has an impact on that drift and your other results. Numerical...

Has anyone seen anything with regard to what caused the explosion? It's been a couple weeks and I haven't seen anything yet.

TLE and the launch deck are trashed. One lightning tower down. The launch tower has damaged strut members at its base. The doors on the far side of the horizontal integration facility are damaged, so the doors on the pad side and probably quite a lot of stuff in the HIF are damaged. Visible tank...

Agreed. Hence why I said "yet". It's not even a NASA thing. Vladimir Komarov died because Soyuz 1 had to be launched on the Politburo's schedule, not when the engineering punch list was finished. Any national space agency has these political pressures.

Here's some imagery of LC36 from this morning: Looks like a multi-kiloton explosion happened, which it was. One lightning protection tower is down, transporter erector is wrecked. The tower and deluge tank and other lightning protection towers and civil structures all took a similar blast to...