Neat, but I had them beat by 20 years (data from the MOLA altimeter data set, but not the imaging one). Unfortunately browsers don’t support applets anymore—
antlers
5779
This rocket potentially represents a huge leap in access to space. The prospects for the United State’s human lunar spaceflight program really depend on the success of this vehicle.
Well yeah that’s what SpaceX does. Their approach is to build rockets fast and launch them to see what goes wrong. Then they fix that and try again, etc etc. It’s an approach that has worked really well for them considering that SpaceX launched more flights to orbit last year than everyone else combined.
I will be very surprised indeed if the flight goes without incident. Very excited to watch though.
Are the booster and spaceship bit both expected to hit the ocean? If they make it that far.
Yeah, this is just a test launch to see if it works and gather telemetry. I don’t believe there’s any attempted landings for either stage planned.
Man, has it only been a couple of years since a remote aircraft buzzing around on another planet became a reality? 50 flights in and still hopping.
Houngan
5786
And that’s 50 in roughly 1% the atmosphere! Incredible.
Tman
5787
No, they did not launch “more flights to orbit than everyone else combined”
Get acquainted with the monstrous volume of flights.
Here is Jan-Jun in 2022:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_spaceflight_launches_in_January–June_2022#Notes
MikeJ
5788
I think they are in the ballpark for orbital tonnage though.
Romalar
5789
SpaceX surpassed everyone else’s combined tonnage for each of the last couple of years. For # of launches last year they tied the Soviet government’s record and were a plurality (unless you count SpaceX against all Chinese companies and government combined, then the Chinese edge them out). # of satellites is where SpaceX really surpasses the rest of the world, but they’re almost all smallsats.
These quarterly reports are pretty good and summarize it all nicely: BryceTech - Bryce Briefing
The best raw launch data source for 2022 is from astronomer Jonathan McDowell here: https://planet4589.org/space/papers/space22.pdf
SpaceX is planning to attempt a soft landing on the water with the first stage just for practice (and telemetry data as you say) like the early attempts at Falcon 9 vertical landing before they used the drone ships and actually tried recovering them.
But yeah, the second stage will only attempt to re-enter the atmosphere (if they are lucky enough to get that far) and will just impact and break apart north of Hawaii. It sounds like they might try to get a data recorder out of the wreckage from one thing I heard.
Yep, I think I misremembered. I was thinking of tonnage, not number of launches.
Cheerful fan commentary from NASASpaceFlight:
Romalar
5795
I guess they got that wet dress rehearsal they planned to skip after all.
