I tried making a cup of tea earlier and burnt down the house, but everything after switching the kettle on, was just icing on the cake.

Woooooooo!!!! Go kettle!!!!

It's called testing, the results being used to improve the next one.

Yes, but it was fun while it lasted. Hopefully they got enough data to diagnose the issue and it is not something to fundamental. They seemed to have at least 4 engines that did not stay lit and produced the occasional outburst.

I'm most interested in how the launch pad survived as they seem to be setup to replace rockets faster then they could rebuild the launchpad.

"I'm most interested in how the launch pad survived "

AFAIK no.1 success criteria for the flight was not to trash the launchpad, then lift-off, both of which they seem to have achieved

Not too good according to pictures on [1]Twatter .

[1] https://twitter.com/labpadre/status/1649062784167030785?s=61&t=CJ4DuGqKva_sEJ2C6PBn9g

Sure. The only question is : how many more tests before getting something reliable ?

Not knocking it, SpaceX has largely been the most open and honest companies there is. It admits failure when failure happens, and I'm sure there are many valuable minds working the problem.

Musk not having a say in it more than likely has a lot to do with its existing success.

But hey, a bit of gentle ribbing can't hurt, now can it ?

So, carry on !

SpaceX ... It admits failure when failure happens

What else could they do? World+dog saw their rocket blow up shortly after launch.

However, a mouthpiece for His Muskiness - peace be upon the Mighty One - did their best at dissembling. Saying everything else after the rocket cleared the tower was icing on the cake is like claiming Texan hospitality was the icing on the cake when JFK visited Dallas.

Yes, but only to a degree. SpaceX finances this through government contracts and is, thus, somewhat insulated from the commercial risks. I think some of the other newer companies have even better records, because they don't have such deep-pocketed sponsors.

Even with its recent failures on Vega and Ariane 6, ESA has an enviable record on launches and some of the very hard science and engineering associated.

Not to mention that this was the first ever launch of the Booster, so its launch history started today.

Was a good flight - was interesting to see the raptors cut out on the booster... lots of engines does provide redundancy, but only if you can control it.

Definitely! I think there were 5 engines out by the end of it, would have been neat to see how the "soft wet" landing went with those engines out. At any rate, redundancy is exactly what you want when people start climbing on board these things ;-)

The problem you have with large numbers of engines is that the associated plumbing can be very, very complicated. Rockets don't like complicated - the prefer things to be as simple as possible to minimise the chances of something going wrong.

The Russians tried building a rocket (N1) with a large number of engines and they ran headlong into the problems caused by the complex plumbing. Its most spectacular failure saw a Rapid Unscheduled Disassembly event of not just the rocket, but the entire launch pad complex - took the Russians 18 months to glue the bits together again.

Redundancy only makes sense when you are confident that one failure does not start a cascade affect - like an exploding engine or when your data centre backup generators can't carry the load of all systems rebooting at once.

When they were desiging the Harrier jumpjet, they realised the safest design was having just one engine rather than multiple.

The plumbing isn't too bad on Super Heavy, the Raptors are directly connected to the bottom of the methane tank and a spider/octopus arrangement feeds them oxygen. One of the major problems with the N1 was the wiring, many, many individual wires carrying analogue sensor information running from each engine to the control unit and inevitably some of them got connected to the wrong terminals resulting in perfectly good engines being shut down because of sensors on other engines showing fault conditions. The individual Raptor engines each have their own control units built in and talk to the central controller(s) via digital data buses.

AWS EC2 servers see a massive spike in amounts of data transferred, which, of course, flags security systems. and cuts the transfer when SpaceX's credit buffer goes past $1 Million in fees mark, after only 3 minutes, thus, preventing stage separation.

Well, you can imagine this as a future scenario at least...

Well... they gotta leave some CPU cycles for the website scrapers and hackers that they host and don't do anything about.

I've blocked pretty well all AWS hosts from accessing my website because of the scraping and hacking (255 ways of trying to access myphpadmin for starters)

Amazon is a POS company.

Seeing as how dangerous and pointless this is,its no wonder that nasa decided barney gumble and homer should be the next generation of astronauts.

Am I the only one that thinks Elon’s spaceship looks like something from Thunderbirds? Or maybe Captain Scarlet?

Fireball SpaceXL-5

Well I think it looked like a giant cock. Not unlike Elon Musk, come to think of it.

The thing that usually gets the 5 year old me excited is the shot of the Earth as TB3 enters into orbit, with what looks lke a gas flame as one of the engines continuing to fire & how "close it is to the real"* shots of the Raptors engines firing in space from camera's mounted near them.

*Given the limitations of 60's filming & granted the modelwork & filming shots in any of Gerry Andersons productions were miles ahead of other programs of that era.

More like the ship in the cinematic masterpiece (sic) Flesh Gordon.

Was there a streaker or something? To me cheering before ignition is bad karma.

I think that was when they restarted the countdown - it had been on pause at around the thirty second mark for a while (not sure, I skipped forward rather than watch the whole thing)