[Starlink] Starship's 4th flight test was magnificent

[Dave Taht <dave.taht@gmail.com>]

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Seeing the booster land on target was simply amazing.

When they kicked into the Blue Danube, during Starship's coast phase, I
started dancing around the boat. The landing phase was a real nailbiter,
but seeing starlink maintain connectivity through nearly it all of that
plasma was amazing, too. To be massively cheered up about spaceflight, hit
starlink's web site for the video. It is hard to imagine them attempting a
catch of the booster for flight 5, that close to boca chica, but...

But that left questions for me. How much overweight are Starship and the
booster now? How much payload can they actually push to an orbit suitable
for deploying starlink? When will they attempt payloads?

The second set of questions are that the newer, larger Starlink satellites
were designed, oh, 4 years ago? with about 4x the capacity of the existing
ones, and I imagine (and hope) that they have been continually redesigned
with an eye to latency now, as well as capacity. Seeing something like
fq_codel actually make orbit would be a capstone to my career, when I
started off wanting to be an "orbital mechanic"  in the first place but
exited entirely after challenger went down...

Lastly, I couldn't help but imagine small repair robots deploying once in
orbit to get a full view of every tile on starship, and perhaps effect
repairs. Call 'em Hewey, Duey and Louie....

Ad Astra!

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Donations Drive.
Dave Täht CSO, LibreQos

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