Wow. Quite honestly, I was shocked in the best way possible while watching SpaceX’s Starship SN8 launch, reach an altitude of 12 km, and then fall gracefully back to Earth, nearly save itself, and then explode in a ball of fire. If you haven’t seen it yet, I highly recommend Googling it or watching any clip you can, because it is truly one of those things that you have to see to believe. I mean at its core, snate(my nickname for Starship SN8) is a stainless steel cylinder with a nose cone that nearly accomplished one of the most complex aeronautical vehicle maneuvers ever.
I think my favorite part of the launch was watching it fall back to Earth sideways. As snate descended, it looked almost as if it was floating; I think it’s an amazing feat of engineering to make something like that work. Not to mention when 2/3 Raptor engines reignited to so as to make snate stand upright again. That maneuver in itself just looked like pure magic. I had seen animations of how the Starship series was supposed to perform, but seeing it on a live broadcast. . . that was something else entirely.
As we look to the future of space exploration and where we might be in a couple decades, I wanted to document this moment so that I could look back on it. When they do successfully land a Starship, it’s going to be a ground breaking day for science and engineering. Just thinking about it makes me so excited for the future.
In honor of snate launching, I made my own mini-snate in Fusion that works with a C11-0 Estes rocket motor. It was the last motor I had after a semester a rocket launches, and unfortunately ended up being a dud, but I think the model still looked pretty cute on the launch pad at Rocket Field(my nickname for the field at which I launch rockets):
