14th Feb, 5 days away, Starship 3 test!

[Burgerman]

14th Feb, 5 days away, Starship 3 test!

[Arima]

Been watching the StarBase Live feed for a few minutes everyday for a couple months. Some fantastic images of all the activity going on. Especially the sunset and early evening when the lights come on but it's not quite dark yet. Also checking out a couple weekly update channels reviewing all the ground work on the tank farm, factory building and rework of the testing site. Super impressive seeing them solve problems as they develop the assemble process. Still it all seems daunting they will launch 5 or 6 times this year. Hopefully the OLM won't need as much work between launches going forward. No matter what it is damn exciting.

[Burgerman]

Well the bulk of the work isnt the startship as such. As musk says its the making of a mass production facility and learning how to mass produce rockets like cars. They already know that they can make a rocket work, and that a few teething problems (ending in a big boom or "rud") will happen in the way that they do their rapid iteration development thing. Its way way cheaper than nasas way, by around 25 times! And faster too.

The difficult part according to musk is building thousands of the things to send several hundred at a time to mars. Every 2 years when the planet is closer. These will each need 4 to 5 additional starship tankers to fuel them ready in orbit. All before transfering crews etc. So they need around 1000 ships every 2 years. In order to occupy mars as musk intends.

Hell they already build 15 boosters and 34 ships! Apollo only had 18 in total. And spacex is only just starting to build the mass production facilities. There will be 6 per day launching from 3 seperate sites every day in the future... All ending up either parked in orbit or returning to refill with fuel to transfer across. It will be manic. With a good few ruds to come! And many will die. The price of exploration.

[Burgerman]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mhJRzQsLZGg
Live 4/7

Ready to go! 7am central? CDT

Watch from the spacex site too starts 20 mins before launch. Will be here:
https://www.spacex.com/launches/mission ... p-flight-3

Should be on twitter as well. It WILL be here:
https://twitter.com/i/broadcasts/1LyxBnOvzvOxN

And this is now lauch tomorrow! In 22 hours to be more accurate.

[Burgerman]

T- 14 HOURS 13 MINS I am staying up.

Commentary on here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RrxCYzixV3s which is a 24/7 live stream starts in 4 hours.

https://www.spacex.com/launches/mission ... p-flight-3 twitter starts 11.30