(December 16, 2023 at 5:49 am)zebo-the-fat Wrote: Yes, but the second launch did much less damage, he is getting better with each attempt. The next thing he needs to do is sort out the fuel situation after the hot staging, probably not a huge problem.
While the pad may have survived without completely being destroyed, it seems it is damaged. Probably heavily considering it did not support another launch 12 days later.
The other thing is the 2nd flight was supposed to be suborbital and there was no payload aboard. That means the entire rocket was much lighter than it would be for a moon mission launch. It also means the rocket used much less thrust to take off from the pad. So nothing in the 2nd launch demonstrated anything that's useful to meet their goal of going to the Moon. It was just a show.
And mind you the deadline for an empty starship to land on the Moon is something like in three months.
teachings of the Bible are so muddled and self-contradictory that it was possible for Christians to happily burn heretics alive for five long centuries. It was even possible for the most venerated patriarchs of the Church, like St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, to conclude that heretics should be tortured (Augustine) or killed outright (Aquinas). Martin Luther and John Calvin advocated the wholesale murder of heretics, apostates, Jews, and witches. - Sam Harris, "Letter To A Christian Nation"
