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.

They've made Orion look bigger than Starship - I don't know whether to laugh or cry

If anyone wants to know when the launch is happening in their local time zone: https://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/fixedtime.html?msg=Starship+launch+&iso=20231117T07&p1=104

Is anyone actually surprised by this announcement? To me it seems like such a trivial development that it was always going to happen.

Wet workshops are more interesting, and I honestly don't know if they will ever happen with Starship. In the short term, I think that they are more effort than they are worth - it will be easier to make a habitat on earth then launch it than to try and fabricate something in space. That will all change as we develop in-orbit fabrication technology, and I can see a time not that far in the future where cutting into an empty fuel tank to create an inhabitable space would be an easy day's work. This leads to a question of timing, and I think that Starship will be replaced by better vehicles before in-orbit fabrication becomes routine. Could go either way though and both are very exciting prospects!

What happens with booster 9 and hot staging is one of the most interesting questions about starship at the moment. I can see three possibilities for it - booster 9 gets scrapped without flying and they skip to booster 10, it gets modified for hot staging or it gets launched with minimal modifications. I think modifications before flight are the most likely, but it would be really interesting to see what happens with an unmodified booster. Just how much damage would hot staging do? Pretty much any outcome would be spectacular!