One of these days, Alice . . .

Showcasing SpaceX's Shiny Stainless Starship
Elon Musk did a presentation last night about the new spaceship SpaceX is building. I tried watching it, but it's long (an hour and a half) and, as Scott Manley notes, Elon is not the best speaker. Scott sums up the presentation pretty well here.

The part that I find interesting is that 50 years ago the science fiction artists who drew shiny spaceships with fins that landed using their rocket engines were exactly right.

All this is going on in Boca Chica which is on the gulf coast of southern Texas a couple of miles from the Mexican border.

. . . pow! Right to the moon.

P.S. Somewhere in all this Elon mentioned that they are super cooling (or maybe hyper cooling?) the methane.

• Methane turns to liquid around −160 °C,. 
• SpaceX is going to be cooling it down very close to the freezing point, which is −182.5 °C, which is only 20 degrees cooler. 
• Oxygen, the bigger part of the fuel package boils at −182.962 °C. 

So the freezing point of methane is one half a degree higher than the boiling point of oxygen. Managing these two substances in close proximity to each other while keeping them both liquid is going to be a bit of a trick. Maybe that's why they call it rocket science.