Its_Dimah

🇳🇱 Space enthousiast. @Feyenoord for life since 1999.

[Its_Dimah @_Its_Dimah]

For people still asking why I call myself "The Flying Dutchman" @TheVFL_

[Its_Dimah @_Its_Dimah]

@planet4589 @NASA Looks like it went well https://t.co/bvoNCyZyhj

[Its_Dimah @_Its_Dimah]

@DutchSpace https://t.co/NFuXrBErBO

[NASA @NASA]

We see our home planet as a whole, lit up in spectacular blues and browns. A green aurora even lights up the atmosphere. That's us, together, watching as our astronauts make their journey to the Moon.

[Its_Dimah @_Its_Dimah]

@_maxq_

[Andrew McCarthy @AJamesMcCarthy]

Immense planning and technical precision was required for this absolutely preposterous (but real) view: I captured my friend @BlackGryph0n transiting the sun during a skydive.

This might be the first photo of it's kind in existence. See a video of this moment in the reply 👇

[Its_Dimah @_Its_Dimah]

@dpoddolphinpro

[SpaceX @SpaceX]

Final descent and splashdown of Starship on Flight 11, captured by the SpaceX recovery team in the Indian Ocean

[Everyday Astronaut @Erdayastronaut]

I've been reflecting on the Starship program the last week and one thing has become obvious to me. SpaceX is enjoying the freedom to try and fail in a way they couldn't with Falcon 9.

Doing anything "experimental" on the Falcon 9 was risky because it was SpaceX's only source of income, it was their lifeline, their work horse. Making any tweaks to the Falcon 9 to try and land a booster back in the day was a delicate balance. Don't push the envelope too hard because it could lead to a failure of the primary mission (which did happen twice).

When SpaceX first landed a booster almost 10 years ago, they were fairly slow to refly and those first non "block 5" boosters were only capable of a couple of re-flights. This gave pause to some in the industry / community fearing all this reusability hype wasn't going to pan out.

But SpaceX learned from every landing attempt to develop their Block 5 Falcon 9 which has now gone on to have a single booster fly 30 missions. Absolutely unheard of.

Now imagine if SpaceX could've had the freedom to not worry about flying customer payloads to get data during Falcon 9's reusability campaign. Imagine if they could've tested engine out procedures or push booster reentry profiles, or try hot staging, or what have you.

This is the phase that SpaceX is in now during the Starship program. I know we hear the talking point of "today's payload is data" and it could seem like a gimmick or excuse even, but that's a freedom almost no rocket program has had before. To know you can just try things out, fly real life hardware, without bankrupting the company, is the ultimate development platform.

To be able to push engine out capabilities, remove heat shield tiles on purpose, test reentry profiles, have failures, have set backs, discover flaws, learn operations.

When people say things like "Starship hasn't even reached orbit yet" are completely missing the point. They're not just trying to reach orbit, they're trying to do something that's never been done, build a rapidly reusable rocket. A rocket that can land and refly. This has never been done before and honestly it's silly to think you COULD do something like this without trying some extreme things. That's what we're seeing today, and that's extremely exciting to me.

I can't wait to see version 3 of Starship fly because they've learned so many lessons already and they have a factory capable of making rockets at scale, and we just get to sit back and watch the cook. It's an exciting time to be alive.

[Its_Dimah @_Its_Dimah]

@ClarksonsFarm1

[Its_Dimah @_Its_Dimah]

@DJSnM Do these images help us in any way on what incident happend on the bottom of the flap? Looks like it went trough hell after the energetic moment.

[SpaceX @SpaceX]

View of Starship landing burn and splashdown on Flight 10, made possible by SpaceX’s recovery team. Starship made it through reentry with intentionally missing tiles, completed maneuvers to intentionally stress its flaps, had visible damage to its aft skirt and flaps, and still executed a flip and landing burn that placed it approximately 3 meters from its targeted splashdown point

[SpaceX @SpaceX]

Liftoff of Super Heavy, the most powerful launch vehicle in history, on Starship’s tenth flight test

[Its_Dimah @_Its_Dimah]

@NASASpaceflight

[Its_Dimah @_Its_Dimah]

@DJSnM

[Its_Dimah @_Its_Dimah]

@johnkrausphotos @SpaceX

[Its_Dimah @_Its_Dimah]

@fr12nl

[Its_Dimah @_Its_Dimah]

@StarshipGazer

[Its_Dimah @_Its_Dimah]

@thejackbeyer

[Its_Dimah @_Its_Dimah]

@elevchenko @Feyenoord 🤡

[Its_Dimah @_Its_Dimah]

@FRFC1908 Werklust