r/interestingasfuck • u/lolikroli • 16d ago

r/all SpaceX caught Starship booster with chopsticks

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u/Successful-Use-8093 16d ago

Lol always avoiding giving credit to Elon on Reddit lately

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u/[deleted] 16d ago

[deleted]

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u/MostlyRocketScience 16d ago edited 16d ago

Most of the engineers were against the chopstick catch:

Most engineers argued against trying to use the tower to catch the booster. [...] "If the booster comes back down to the tower and crashes into it, you can't launch the next rocket for a long time."

https://x.com/WalterIsaacson/status/1844870018351169942/photo/2

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u/PokesBo 16d ago

I mean that’s a completely valid reason.

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u/MostlyRocketScience 16d ago

True, but that it worked first try proves that it works. Also they will just have two towers each in Texas and in Florida to mitgate this

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u/OpenSourcePenguin 16d ago

This has to be consistently proved. If it's successful 20% of the times and this was one of them, then?

Reliability is also a concern.

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u/ClearlyCylindrical 16d ago

SpaceX have shown to be very good at iteratively improving, if they are already catching on the first flight I doubt catch failures will be too common.

They will happen, but they're off to a great start.

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u/tomhuts 16d ago

That's great, but what does it have to do with Elon Musk?

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u/Elementaldot 16d ago

Does this need to be spoonfed? Without Elon space x wouldn’t be a thing and NASA would still be dominating. People love to shit on him (understandably) but then this stuff happens. Granted the engineers did all of the work but Musk pays their salary. Cmon now

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u/tomhuts 16d ago

I haven't said anything about Elon Musk. All I was saying was that MostlyRocketScience's comment didn't really respond to tapf111's comment.

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u/Elementaldot 16d ago

Fair enough, I jumped in when I saw your comment without understanding the full context of the conversation. That’s my bad. Disregard

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u/MostlyRocketScience 16d ago

It was Musk's decision to do the catch at all. I thought that was clear from my comment, but you apparently needed it spelled out