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I ended up taking two days off this week, Wednesday and Thursday to watch rocket launches streamed live. Originally it had been just Wednesday as June 5th had been the originally proposed date for the Integrated Flight Test 4, IFT-4, for the Starship/Superheavy launch system but when the date slipped to Thursday, I just added an extra day off in my request and took both. (After yen years of working for my currently employer and thanks to a muscular union I enjoy a decent amount of paid time off every calendar year.)
Wednesday, I watched the Starliner, a crew vehicle from Boeing, launch on its first crewed mission. The launch went well but problem have arisen and Boeing continues to suffer for the evolution of its corporate culture. At the time of the writing the issues look to be something that can be dealt with, but I would not rule out the possibility that the crew will need to return on a different vehicle than the one that launched.
Thursday’s launch was much more interesting to me. The massive, almost inconceivable system that is the Superheavy booster and its mated large vehicle, Starship may represent an impressive leap forward in space access if everything can be made to work at projected. The ‘if’ in that sentence is not meant to disparage but a simple recognition that the engineering achievement is challenging and not all goals can be achieved. That’s why this is test flight 4, bit by bit and flight by flight a lot of being learned about the technical challenges this project represents.
IFT-4 succeeded in its mission objective and then some. The enormous booster returned to Earth for a soft ‘landing’ in the Gulf of Mexico, though the precision of the landing still needs to be studied and verified. The Starship vehicle achieved it orbital velocity and planned trajectory. (This flight was never intended to actually go all the way to orbit.) Reentering above in Indian Ocean fully under control even as the thermal protection system failed in spots, damaging some of the control systems. The fact that Starship is so large that is casts a shadow in the hot plasma of reentry and can transmit live video to the Starlink constellation of communication satellites is in itself a major evolution in what we can see and learn in space travel.
When I first searched for the live stream of the launch, I ended up on the scam site impersonality SpaceX’s official stream. The AI faked Elon Musk was as impressive that the rocket launches themselves. For at least the first round of ‘deposit one crypto coin and I’ll match it without another, doubling your money’ of pitches I just accepted that Musk, a known promoter of crypto, was real even if the deal stunk to high heaven of scam. (No one gives away free money.) I found another stream to watch and enjoyed the launch with all its excitement.
The fake Musk scam sort of invites all sort of sharp definitive opinions about the eccentric billionaire and illuminates for me the Manichean way so many people view the world. Something or someone is either ‘good’ and praiseworthy or they are ‘bad’ and worthy only of contempt. When focused on a particular thing or person these opinions are often not static. Musk when he touted environmentalism and saving the ecology through electric cars and such was praised, rightly so, by the left. When he assumed control of Twitter and unbanned a number of quite distasteful figures he became a subject scorn. The truth of the matter is that he has done both good and bad, he views have been both right and wrong, but it’s very hard for people to hold such complex views. The founding of the United States of American was a fantastic advancement for human liberty and American is awash in the sin of slavery and most of the men who founded this nation with high ideal of freedom were also enslavers. Both things are true. America is neither inherently good nor inherently bad, but so many insist on one or the other viewing the opposing facts as mere footnotes.
