The reason I make the distinction, and dislike the phrase "reached orbit", is because of the number of people who turn around and say "they haven't reached orbit yet!". Not reaching orbit by choice is very different to not reaching orbit because the rocket failed.

Very very different things to be comparing.

Saturn V wasn't launching a fully reusable 100t ship on a funny reusable booster. It was launching 4 expendable stages, one of which, with a mass of only 5.5t, would reenter and land, but never be reused.

The level of acceptable risk with Saturn V (and the Gemini and Apollo programmes as a whole) was also much higher. Saturn V wouldn't be allowed to fly today -- the FAA would never grant it a licence! Lol.

Plus the design and testing approach was very different. Saturn V (and Blue Origin) had a lot of testing on the ground, with multiple rounds of testing on individual components -- the first time they were all tested together was on its first launch after many years of planning and development.

The Starship programme has done it's design and testing throughout these test campaigns. They built something and flew it, and then knew what worked and what didn't, and changed stuff, and flew it. And charged stuff and flew it. Rinse repeat. They were able to test actual conditions of launch, space flight, and reentry.

Two very different methods. The SpaceX approach is more expensive, but results in a much better and refined product. It allows for design, full integration testing, and build to run along side by side so that changes can be made throughout the programme. The end result isn't what was on the initial design because the tests feed into the design improvements in an ongoing basis.

Saturn V took 5 years to design and build (nothing reusable). New Glenn took 10 years (reusable booster, no reusable upper stage). Starship is at 14 years, has reused a booster, and test landed multiple upper stages. (Hopefully a catch and reuse soon, maybe with the next month).

All different beasts. All impressive in their own right. All different design choices and goals. All amazing engineers.

Typically "reached orbit" means that an orbital rocket achieved orbit because on a launch nothing failed. It's all too common that a first launch of a ticket fails. Falcon 1 failed to achieve orbit twice, iirc.

Starship, because of their iterative testing process, just hadn't achieved orbit because they chose to not enter orbit. They could have, but because the ship is designed to survive reentry, they chose to stay suborbital during the entire test campaign, out of an abundance of caution.

I feel this is different to "not reaching orbit". They could have. They were only ever a few seconds off orbit on all of their suborbital flights.

Today to decided to do an extra burn, 15s long with 1 engine, to raise the perogee out of the atmosphere. Today they chose to go orbital.

And an amazing milestone.

But the wording "reached orbit" just doesn't feel right for this approach and for this achievement.

It's fine -- as the AI is defending itself in court, a compaction will happen, and while it re-researches everything it'll delete the law book it's using, switch tack entirely, and declare itself guilty.

Don't tell him NASA use metric or he might actually do that!

No, no, he knows stuff without having to be told..!

The US will do anything to avoid going metric! /s

But... But... Boomers are bad! You can't go telling them all the many many many good things Boomers have done -- that's completely against "the narrative"...!

which rules Trump himself it, I guess. How does he define "high I.Q." anyway?

Yep, use root for this so that if they hit the replication server first they have full access to your production server. smh.

How many times has an Antropic AI hacked other systems now? 4? 5? That we know of, anyway. A rogue AI hacking the wrong system and "pressing" the wrong button, and up goes a nuke or 5. Could be by misleading an early warning system (and Stanislav Petrov isn't working that day). There are a number of similar scenarios. I doubt an AI will kill us because it has a "kill all humans" vendetta -- it'll be something unplanned and unforeseen and accidental.

"_created in 2020 (Wuhan Labs)_" is objectively and proven to be false.

is very definitely NOT the right way to handle this. They WILL prioritised money over safety. We've sent this over and over and over. Money comes first, everything else is an afterthought.

Well, Trump says it is, so it must be. He _never_ lies or makes stuff up... /s

Web browsing, editing spreadsheets, viewing photos and videos. Occasionally running 2 things aside by side. Reading a book too. I didn't have my eReader to hand so opened the phone, loaded my reader app, and read a few chapters. I also have an app for displaying music. I generally use a tablet, but I now have everything backed up onto the phone because I could use the phone in a pinch. The tablet is bigger (14"), but the music is very readable on this too.