My understanding is that the real fly in the ointment has been that Starship isn't anywhere near its target payload capacity, and it may be difficult to get it there. I don't know if that's changed with this flight or not.
This launch put 50T in orbit, which is half the stated goal. If it never improved past this, it'd continue to be the largest and least expensive heavy lift rocket into the foreseeable future.
That's because when launching from Texas, they have to do a dogleg maneuver to avoid populated islands such as Cuba. If they launch from Florida, they claim they'll get 100 tons.[1]
> Flying Starship from Florida, he said, will further improve capacity compared to Texas launches. Launching from Florida offers more favorable trajectories to certain orbits, potentially allowing Starship to carry more satellites without expending propellant on dogleg maneuvers. Dontchev said a single Florida Starship launch will be able to carry up to 20 times the bandwidth of a single Falcon 9.
SpaceX currently claims that each launch is 10x the bandwidth of a Falcon 9 launch, and is 50ish tons of payload, so launching from Florida would be around 100 tons of payload.
This was the third heaviest payload ever put in orbit. None of the others had a reusable first stage, second stage or fairings, so they cost vastly more (throw away the entire stack each launch)
Even if they never increase it from here, this is an enormous achievement and success.
Due to the nature of spaceflight, payload tends to be around 1-3% of total mass. You don't tend to max payload during testing for stuff you expect to have a reasonable chance of going boom.
There are plenty of flat stretches all over the world: in Arizona, Kansas, West Siberia, Mongolia, all over Sahara, Egypt, Sudan, north of Argentina, etc, etc. There's no need for more than several dozen km. If a out-of-fuel Starship can still maneuver with its rudders, it can likely slow down enough for a rough landing.
As of the ocean, given low waves and the airspeed of say 200 km/h, most likely the craft will withstand it if it has withstood the reentry. At least one Starship demonstrated some limited seaworthiness.
I did see another statement where Mullin said this doesn't look like a malicious act, which just makes it even more weird that he's sort of taking point. Maybe the Real World actor leading transportation is in over his head?
And to paraphrase Douglas Adams, the stuff is basically just a rounding error in the not-stuff. And insofar as there is stuff, it's all stars, with everything else being a rounding error. This is the case in our solar system, which, mass-wise is the Sun, with Jupiter as a rounding error - everything in the Solar System that isn't the Sun is mostly Jupiter.
So we're potentially looking at a much different story, where the government took a bribe to ignore or enable an end run around an export ban. "CEO had affairs" is a far less damaging story to the United States than "our laws and national security are for sale".
Setting aside the whole "demote Pluto" and "dwarf planet" aspects, I find it amusing that we use the same term for small rocky Mercury (2,440 km radius, 5% of Earth's mass) and immense gaseous Jupiter (69,000 km radius, over 300 times Earth's mass). Only we don't, of course. Jupiter is a gas giant, while Mercury is a rocky planet, or iron planet; there's a lot of 'planet' terminology.
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