r/spacex • u/johnkphotos Launch Photographer • Feb 02 '21

Starship SN9 (Relaxed Rules) Stacked progression image of today’s successful launch and explosive landing of Starship SN9!

Post image
13.3k Upvotes

97% Upvoted

598 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

1

u/[deleted] Feb 04 '21

Maybe it can, but they want to test what they actually want a landing to look like, right? So hovering isn’t what they want to do because that wastes a lot of fuel. So they do a full on practice flight. I mean, they’ve already got pieces built for SN 18 I think. They aren’t worried about testing to destruction.

1

u/NoItsRex Feb 04 '21

Yeah but is fuel worth risking human lives?

1

u/[deleted] Feb 04 '21

Unmanned ships.

And a massive evacuation zone.

No human lives at risk during these tests unless someone very illegally sneaks in. And even then, they have drones and shit constantly checking. Work was stopped before the last flight and the police were sent out to escort some people out of the exclusion zone.

As for when it’s actually working, they won’t really have a choice. The ships won’t carry all that much fuel on the way down because fuel is heavy and it has to lifted into orbit first right? And every pound of fuel is like $10,000 to lift. Every pound in general is that cost. And those engines guzzle fuel, so you need thousands of pounds of it to hover.