https://geekologie.com/2020/08/spacex-successfully-hops-their-starship.php
In another incredible achievement for Elon Musk, SpaceX successfully "hopped" their Starship SN5 150 m (490 ft) yesterday. This comes after the successful hop of their Starhopper back in September, which was retired after that launch to pave the way for this guy.
The SN5 is part of SpaceX’s reusable Starship concept and would serve as the upper stage for the launch vehicle. They’ve already managed to land the first stage (the Falcon 9) and the fruition for the Starship would be the ability to land both the first and second stages. Before this, NASA was just letting their rockets fall back to Earth and blow up, which seems like an awful waste of $500 million. It’s hard to fully grasp the scale of this thing, but the hull is 9 m (30 ft) in diameter and 50 m (160 ft) high. They basically launched a 15-story building 150 meters and then landed it. Which is only slightly more impressive than the time I flipped a water bottle and it landed upright. My friends were super impressed and I got some high fives out of it.
Keep going for the full video which is so well executed it almost looks fake, as well as the Starhopper launch from last year.
And video of their Starhopper also completing a 150m hop.
via Geekologie – Gadgets, Gizmos, and Awesome https://geekologie.com/
August 5, 2020 at 08:18AM