Get ready for a static-fire of the Starship booster.
21 thoughts on “First Fire”
Looks like they have got a lot of things figured out since SN 4 / 5 / 6. Were those only just a year ago?
At 59 years old now I was too young to remember much of the early US space program (I do however vividly remember 52 years ago today) but watching SpaceX progress is what I imagine it was like.
I’m only a little older than you and also too young to remember the heyday of Old Space. But from what I’ve read since, a lot of the development fever stemmed from the perceived, largely fictitious ‘missile gap’ of the mid to late 50’s, only exasperated by Sputnik. There was a lot of design, test, re-design, re-test… in those days. The early days of the US manned space program leveraged the fever to develop capable and reliable ICBMs. After the death of JFK, with LBJ in charge, Apollo became the long term goal. As Apollo progressed, the follow-on civilian/NASA Saturn rockets, being strictly in support of that goal alone, the pace of innovation in launch vehicle slowed a bit in order to coalesce on a single launch system to accomplish that goal. There were plenty of other areas of innovation apace. Especially, when it came to the LM.
I was a child growing up in and around Huntsville during the Apollo era. It was an exciting time. I remember going to Redstone Arsenal in 1966 (I was 9) and watching a static test of a Saturn V first stage from 3 miles away. Nine year old me was very impressed.
We didn’t have a TV during the Mercury era but I watched most of the Gemini launches and pretty much all of the Apollo missions. At its peak, NASA was getting several percent of the entire federal budget. Some 300,000 people were directly working on Apollo related work.
Watching SpaceX today is, to me, even more exciting than the Apollo era. The pace of Super Heavy/Starship development is much faster today than the Saturn V was back then, and they’re doing all of that with their own money and with far fewer people.
I grew up there during the space shuttle era. It was always a big day at school when we got to watch a launch. Except that one time . . .
You’re right: this is so much better! As a kid I didn’t understand how limiting the shuttle was, for all the wonder it inspired.
Seeing launches become routine is the best thing I can image.
I was in 1st grade when Sputnik happened and a freshly-minted HS grad when Neil and Buzz walked on the Moon so the entire Space Race happened during my elementary and secondary education. The rest of Apollo happened when I was in college.
It was a lot like now, especially from 1967 onward, including efforts by whiny lefties and racialists to shut down spaceflight for “the poor” – “the planet” not yet having fully gelled as an all-purpose left-wing excuse for opposition to fill-in-the-blank.
Al Capp, a popular cartoonist of the day, lampooned these folks as Students Wildly Indignant about Nearly Everything – S.W.I.N.E. Sound familiar?
Clicked the video and noticed it was NASASpaceFlight. Was very wary, but decided to continue for a bit. Then a discussion about using Starship to deploy troops and potential for causing an escalated retaliation as it might be confused with a nuclear tip ballistic missile, and done. Will search YouTube for another source. Yes, this is much better.
I’ll give credit to NASASpaceFlight; their video was less obnoxious than Blue Origin’s commentary. Congratulations to “Astronaut Bezos” as I guess he is called now.
Frat boys got to you eh? Yeah I went through that only not live but rather on replay. Fortunately for me, waiting until after the fact allows me to fast forward to what counts. Hilarity was at MaxQ when they (attempted) going silent on purpose so you could hear all the sounds of the test firing. But not knowing the countdown it became more like a “who can hold their breath the longest” contest. LoL. Eventually they just couldn’t do it and ‘natch ended up talking through it.
Those are not frat boys, lol.
I’ll take that as a compliment to frat boys.
My favorite was a night-time static fire earlier this year. The swirling vapors from the cryogenics had a blue glow to it, due to a very blue light located far behind the rocket which was obscured by the vehicle. NASA Spaceflight commentators were speculating that the blue glow was from Cherenkov radiation like you’d see in a nuclear reactor core, and then whether Starship had some kind of high-energy nuclear power source. Finally one of them said it was from the blue floodlight behind the rocket.
That’s several minutes of my life I will never get back.
As for Bezos’s flight I only have two observations. He didn’t have much faith in the capsule because he chose an 18-year-old boy from the Netherlands to fly with him. The only use a Dutch boy has in spaceflight is if the capsule develops a hole, in which case the Dutch boy can stick his finger in it and prevent total cabin pressurization.
Secondly, after they landed and the vehicles rolled up, they were swarmed by friends, family, and coworkers in a giant hug fest. They’d only been gone ten minutes. It’s like when your dog greets you as if you were Odysseus finally home from the Trojan War, when all you did was go to the mailbox and come back.
Was the cosmopolitan Bezos adopting a cowboy hat and boots a dig at Bruno? His preferred politicians hate cowboys so it was weird seeing him culturally appropriate their clothing.
Colorado is just a renegade province of Texas.
Colorado has become the state where all the Californican dope-heads, who fled the mess they helped make, think they’ll get everything right this time.
(So after a “pandemic” where too many people were originally afraid to touch anything because they might pick up bat cooties, we have a legislature that has now effectively banned plastic bags “to save the planet.”)
There is an art to wearing a cowboy hat. It has to be the right shape and size, tuned to the wearer.
One thing it ought never do is have the hatband run from the eyebrow to below the occipital hump.
Bezos looked like a total doofus with that hat.
So if Bezos was wearing the hat as a dig against someone I’d say it backfired hilariously.
My cat greats me with great joy whenever I come in the door, even if all I did was stick my head out to see if I need a hat. “Welcome home, Dad!” and then he rushes to the treat cabinet.
Production values for the VG flight were much much better than what BO laid on for the BO flight. But I think Branson is a better, more experienced showman.
It was hard to take all the gushing and frothing from all the BO commentators and the interviewed.
I’d ride New Shepard before SpaceshipTwo, but I notice Bezos & co. didn’t wear pressure suits either. And I do think the reason Bezos went up when he did is because Inspiration4 will call attention to his failure. Branson went up sooner still because NS would call attention to *his* failure. And now the so called media is equating Musk with Bezos and Branson. Shameful.
Looks like they have got a lot of things figured out since SN 4 / 5 / 6. Were those only just a year ago?
At 59 years old now I was too young to remember much of the early US space program (I do however vividly remember 52 years ago today) but watching SpaceX progress is what I imagine it was like.
I’m only a little older than you and also too young to remember the heyday of Old Space. But from what I’ve read since, a lot of the development fever stemmed from the perceived, largely fictitious ‘missile gap’ of the mid to late 50’s, only exasperated by Sputnik. There was a lot of design, test, re-design, re-test… in those days. The early days of the US manned space program leveraged the fever to develop capable and reliable ICBMs. After the death of JFK, with LBJ in charge, Apollo became the long term goal. As Apollo progressed, the follow-on civilian/NASA Saturn rockets, being strictly in support of that goal alone, the pace of innovation in launch vehicle slowed a bit in order to coalesce on a single launch system to accomplish that goal. There were plenty of other areas of innovation apace. Especially, when it came to the LM.
I was a child growing up in and around Huntsville during the Apollo era. It was an exciting time. I remember going to Redstone Arsenal in 1966 (I was 9) and watching a static test of a Saturn V first stage from 3 miles away. Nine year old me was very impressed.
We didn’t have a TV during the Mercury era but I watched most of the Gemini launches and pretty much all of the Apollo missions. At its peak, NASA was getting several percent of the entire federal budget. Some 300,000 people were directly working on Apollo related work.
Watching SpaceX today is, to me, even more exciting than the Apollo era. The pace of Super Heavy/Starship development is much faster today than the Saturn V was back then, and they’re doing all of that with their own money and with far fewer people.
I grew up there during the space shuttle era. It was always a big day at school when we got to watch a launch. Except that one time . . .
You’re right: this is so much better! As a kid I didn’t understand how limiting the shuttle was, for all the wonder it inspired.
Seeing launches become routine is the best thing I can image.
I was in 1st grade when Sputnik happened and a freshly-minted HS grad when Neil and Buzz walked on the Moon so the entire Space Race happened during my elementary and secondary education. The rest of Apollo happened when I was in college.
It was a lot like now, especially from 1967 onward, including efforts by whiny lefties and racialists to shut down spaceflight for “the poor” – “the planet” not yet having fully gelled as an all-purpose left-wing excuse for opposition to fill-in-the-blank.
Al Capp, a popular cartoonist of the day, lampooned these folks as Students Wildly Indignant about Nearly Everything – S.W.I.N.E. Sound familiar?
Whitey is on the moon
https://youtu.be/goh2x_G0ct4
https://youtu.be/_Cl5wrUffk0?t=8301
Neat.
More
CowbellRaptors.Clicked the video and noticed it was NASASpaceFlight. Was very wary, but decided to continue for a bit. Then a discussion about using Starship to deploy troops and potential for causing an escalated retaliation as it might be confused with a nuclear tip ballistic missile, and done. Will search YouTube for another source. Yes, this is much better.
I’ll give credit to NASASpaceFlight; their video was less obnoxious than Blue Origin’s commentary. Congratulations to “Astronaut Bezos” as I guess he is called now.
Frat boys got to you eh? Yeah I went through that only not live but rather on replay. Fortunately for me, waiting until after the fact allows me to fast forward to what counts. Hilarity was at MaxQ when they (attempted) going silent on purpose so you could hear all the sounds of the test firing. But not knowing the countdown it became more like a “who can hold their breath the longest” contest. LoL. Eventually they just couldn’t do it and ‘natch ended up talking through it.
Those are not frat boys, lol.
I’ll take that as a compliment to frat boys.
My favorite was a night-time static fire earlier this year. The swirling vapors from the cryogenics had a blue glow to it, due to a very blue light located far behind the rocket which was obscured by the vehicle. NASA Spaceflight commentators were speculating that the blue glow was from Cherenkov radiation like you’d see in a nuclear reactor core, and then whether Starship had some kind of high-energy nuclear power source. Finally one of them said it was from the blue floodlight behind the rocket.
That’s several minutes of my life I will never get back.
As for Bezos’s flight I only have two observations. He didn’t have much faith in the capsule because he chose an 18-year-old boy from the Netherlands to fly with him. The only use a Dutch boy has in spaceflight is if the capsule develops a hole, in which case the Dutch boy can stick his finger in it and prevent total cabin pressurization.
Secondly, after they landed and the vehicles rolled up, they were swarmed by friends, family, and coworkers in a giant hug fest. They’d only been gone ten minutes. It’s like when your dog greets you as if you were Odysseus finally home from the Trojan War, when all you did was go to the mailbox and come back.
Was the cosmopolitan Bezos adopting a cowboy hat and boots a dig at Bruno? His preferred politicians hate cowboys so it was weird seeing him culturally appropriate their clothing.
Colorado is just a renegade province of Texas.
Colorado has become the state where all the Californican dope-heads, who fled the mess they helped make, think they’ll get everything right this time.
(So after a “pandemic” where too many people were originally afraid to touch anything because they might pick up bat cooties, we have a legislature that has now effectively banned plastic bags “to save the planet.”)
There is an art to wearing a cowboy hat. It has to be the right shape and size, tuned to the wearer.
One thing it ought never do is have the hatband run from the eyebrow to below the occipital hump.
Bezos looked like a total doofus with that hat.
So if Bezos was wearing the hat as a dig against someone I’d say it backfired hilariously.
My cat greats me with great joy whenever I come in the door, even if all I did was stick my head out to see if I need a hat. “Welcome home, Dad!” and then he rushes to the treat cabinet.
Production values for the VG flight were much much better than what BO laid on for the BO flight. But I think Branson is a better, more experienced showman.
It was hard to take all the gushing and frothing from all the BO commentators and the interviewed.
I’d ride New Shepard before SpaceshipTwo, but I notice Bezos & co. didn’t wear pressure suits either. And I do think the reason Bezos went up when he did is because Inspiration4 will call attention to his failure. Branson went up sooner still because NS would call attention to *his* failure. And now the so called media is equating Musk with Bezos and Branson. Shameful.