RIP Eileen Dover

RAW VIDEO: SpaceX Starship SN9 test flight
WKMG News 6 ClickOrlando
Starship SN9 flew yesterday and in a repeat of SN8, crashed on landing. Have to give them credit though, it was an accurate crash. SN10 was sitting just a few hundred yards away and apparently unaffected by the explosion. I suspect the problem comes from not really having a good handle on how those cryogenic liquids are behaving while the ship is going through all these gyrations, but how could you? Nobody has ever done this kind of thing before.

I was surprised by how slow the liftoff appears. It looks like the ship is just crawling up the screen in the few seconds right after lift off. I try to remember this thing is nearly 200 feet tall, but I really don't have a feel for how big that is. Out here in the wilds of Silicon Forest the tallest building is maybe four stories. 200 feet? May as well say a zillion feet. It's incomprehensible. You feel me, man?

Title stolen from The Silicon Underground. In case you don't know how the ship got its name, I'll tell you because it is such a dumb story, so dumb that I will be repeating it for years. When it was being assembled in the giant assembly building (the 'high bay'), part of the support structure it was resting on collapsed causing it to lean over against the wall of the building, hence 'Eileeen'. I don't know about the Dover part, except that the fall back to Earth is done in the horizontal position and is called the 'belly-flop maneuver', and a belly-flop is a particularly graceless dive, and dove is the past tense of dive, and so we move on to Dover? I dunno, but I like it.