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News/Politics 7-25-26
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Wandering Views
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Wandering Views 
This is what Elon Musk and his companies are giving the US, and the world.
What good have Dems given us?
I know which I prefer.
https://x.com/i/status/2080844118922822040
“SpaceX launched 20 satellites on Friday. Some of them switched on flashlights, turned around, and photographed the rocket that had just carried them. Then all 20 deliberately burned up about 20 minutes later on.
They were not cargo. They were witnesses.
Starship Flight 13 flew the first real Starlink V3 satellites ever put in space, each designed to carry 1 terabit per second, roughly a ton apiece, 20 tons released in a single pass.
All 20 separated cleanly. They unfolded solar arrays, extended antennas and linked back to the network by laser and radio. 6 carried engineering cameras and lights pointed backward at Starship, to photograph its heat shield from outside.
None of them stayed. The flight was suborbital by design, so every satellite followed the ship down and burned. The mission added nothing to the network.
The network was never the point at all. A rocket normally watches itself from the inside, through cameras bolted to a vehicle that is shaking, glowing and wrapped in plasma, and a sensor destroyed in a failure takes the evidence of that failure with it. Reusability depends on the heat shield surviving, and the heat shield is the one part that cannot be seen from inside. So the eyes went outside the machine.
Everyone else has to persuade a paying customer to risk real hardware on an experimental rocket. SpaceX built the rocket, built the satellites, turned 6 of them into inspection drones, tested both in the same flight, and threw the instruments away once the images came down. The customer and the test department are the same company.
Most of the flight worked. The ship relit a Raptor engine in space 39 minutes in, cleared peak heating and peak pressure on reentry, and made what SpaceX called its softest splashdown yet. The booster came down under control but lit only 5 of its 13 landing engines and hit the water harder than planned.
Starship builds Starlink. Starlink now watches Starship. What those cameras saw will change the rocket that launches the next batch.
The piece works out what happens when a machine can manufacture its own witnesses.
Massive success!! Congrats legend”
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