SpaceX catches the Starship to end Flight 15 (spacex.com)

May I know why ? And if the feat was done by NASA or China, would you change your conclusion?

Starship has its own design trade-offs, as any engineered object does, but it has the benefit of 50 years of technological development since Shuttle.

I'm not as certain as you about whether or not Starship will ever be human rated. But if successful, it will be launching a couple of hundred times per year. Talk to me in five years and we'll see where we are then.

As is, your comment has a bold claim backed by seemingly unrelated fact.

It might not change much for mars

Space Shuttle was a compromised design from the beginning. They originally wanted the Space Shuttle booster to also have wings and return to launch site (with a crew!). But they couldn't afford to develop two new vehicles, so they compromised by making the external tank as cheap as possible and adding solid rockets (which led to the Challenger disaster).

But their biggest mistake was having the engines on the orbiter (so they could be recovered) but not the fuel tank. That meant the orbiter had to hang on the side of the external tank, which made it vulnerable to foam strikes (leading to the Columbia disaster).

Landing with wings is aesthetically pleasing (compared to tower catches) but consider the waste: You have to boost the weight of the wings, landing gear, etc. all the way to orbit and then bring it all the way back. It's much more efficient to just bring fuel and use that for landing. And if your guidance is accurate enough, a pinpoint landing means you can land on the launch tower and not worry about landing legs.

Starship doesn't have that - and so it can be much more optimized for it's purpose. It's basically tanks with a cargo bay and control surfaces, while the shuttle had to toss it's tanks away every flight.

Definitely a name that won’t be forgotten anytime soon.

Continuing to iterate on self contained biospheres and long term closed cycle life support? (Not a solved problem!) Working on construction techniques for the Moon or Mars? Studies on the dose response curve for gravity, like sponsoring a spin lab for the ISS to at least see if mice can reproduce in 0.3g? Self contained industrial infrastructure leaning heavily on 3D printers? Psychological research on the best way to build interiors and run social units?

Musk could personally fund all of that with little impact on his net worth.

It’s also decades of work. Some of what I listed is harder than the rockets. Better get started if you want to have a settlement on Mars this century.

Nope. Nothing. Just rockets, the a satellite network that is clearly “dual use.” Then Trump 2.0 and lots of “golden dome” (Star Wars 2.0) talk.

It’s not to go to Mars.

I love space and I hugely admire the engineering achievement, but it’s disappointing to learn for this and many other reasons that the people behind it were not the visionaries they pretended to be. They’re just more territorial apes obsessed with ape tribal stuff like race and nationalism and fighting over dirt at the bottom of a gravity well. Small minds with big toys.

To be fair to NASA and the astronauts, NASA needed humans who behave like military test pilots. In physiology, in reaction time, in crisis management, in following chain of command. And the armed forces were willing to give them access to known quantities.

We didn’t know how control systems would evolve over the next three decades, but the pilots wanted to pilot, and did not trust the control systems. And the irony of it all is that the Space Race was a proxy war for nuclear armament, so control systems needed to be made autonomous anyway.

Better control systems, wider telemetry, and not worrying about incinerating employees let current generation rocketry iterate faster, and do more fucking around and finding out. We found out twice with the shuttle and it killed the program.

It’s curious how much the upper stage now resembles a space shuttle on a ballistic trajectory instead of a glide angle. Very different landing strategies for those two modes of descent…

Russ Olsen does a great keynote about the life-changing experience for those of us so affected. I happened to be in the audience for this edition and it was something special to be old enough to remember it much as he remembered it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eMZBA7KHnHQ

I think GP tries to compare _their_ experience (not the experience of "most people") with what people felt 55 years ago.

idk about them, but I watched it in a live stream starting about an hour early, because I wanted to see the reentry (that plasma is something special) and I didn't want to miss things. Still I don't think it is the same. Not after Falcon 9 landings, double Falcon 9 boosters landings and catching of the Starship first stage. I expected it to be caught today. Got some doubts after the booster missed the tower, but still pretty sure that 2nd stage would make it.