The next Starship mission has a tentative launch date: March 14
The next Starship mission has a tentative launch date: March 14
This third flight has a reasonable chance of success.
That's so soon!! I can't decide whether Pi Day is a coincidence here. Probably? The 4/20 thing has me permanently suspicious.
Seems unlikely to be a coincidence.
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.
Testing Raptor relighting on the float would be my guess. If the deceleration burn fails, the ballistic trajectory would still bring it down in the IFT-1 and IFT-2 target area.
From https://www.spacex.com/launches/mission/?missionId=starship-flight-3 :
00:02:42 Booster MECO (most engines cut off)
So we have a 2nd meaning for the acronym "MECO"!
(MECO 2, you could say 😊 )
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:
Fewer Letters More Letters MECO Main Engine Cut-Off ~ MainEngineCutOff podcast Jargon Definition Raptor Methane-fueled rocket engine under development by SpaceX Starlink SpaceX's world-wide satellite broadband constellation
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