Soft landing for super heavy ✅ Starship cruising in space ✅

A couple of engines failed, but wow, so much improvement on each flight.

Awesome seeing condensation moving up as fuel gets loaded

I think that NASA is happy. It’s a very tight timeline for starship and the spacesuits from Artemis, but, despite decades of work and plentiful funding, Orion seems to be the slowest part of the critical path. I think that we’d be hearing a lot of public criticism if SpaceX was dragging the chain.

The change from landing in the Pacific to the Indian Ocean is really interesting but I haven’t seen much detail about why it’s happening. The best I’ve come up with is that Starlink improvements allow for enough telemetry that the Pacific Missile Test Range facilities aren’t needed any more, but it would be great to find out more about why it’s changed.

I can’t wait to see this happen in real life! Part of me finds it hard to believe that hot staging won’t destroy the first stage, but the length of time it survived after FTS detonation does help give me faith that this is a much stronger rocket than we’ve ever seen before.

Aside from the awesome satellite that was launched, I was amazed by the quality of footage during the landing. Rock solid HD from both the 1st stage and the barge. It’s not long since dropping out was universal, and it’s a great example of how much better starlink is than any other satellite internet.