VP of Launch @ SpaceX and father of Finn and Otie
Cocoa Beach, FL
Joined January 2018
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The Cape Gigabay is getting closer to being ready for Starship! Teams recently installed the 420-ton crane – which we’ll use to break over and move Starships and Super Heavy boosters preparing for flight. One step closer to the Moon and Mars 🚀🚀🚀
For those at the Cape… The Starship docuseries lands at Cocoa Village Playhouse Oct 21! Go inside factories & launch pads chasing a reusable rocket & multiplanetary future.
All ticket proceeds go towards supporting Restore Our Shores & the Indian River Lagoon. The 2nd show even has a fireside chat with several awesome SpaceX’ers including @jstyer to tell tales of Ship 40 recovery
cocoavillageplayhouse.my.sal…
Kiko Dontchev retweeted
Why this morning's CRS-35 launch glowed like a jellyfish 🪼
The ground at the Cape was still dark, but a few minutes after liftoff Falcon 9 climbed into direct sunlight. Up high the air is so thin that the exhaust plume balloons way out, and the sun, still below the horizon for everyone on the ground, lights it up from underneath. We get the same jellyfish effect on West Coast launches in the evening shortly after sunset. This is physics showing off.
A few more fun bits:
🔹 Dragon is taking the scenic route. At about 52 hours, this is the longest phasing to the ISS in Dragon's history, so docking is Thursday around 8 AM PT. The long trip mostly comes down to orbital mechanics as Dragon races to catch up with the station: it fires its engines several times to raise its orbit a little at a time, then lines up and docks on its own. In less than two weeks, we've gone from Dragon's shortest trip ever (Crew-13) to its longest (CRS-35), which shows how flexible Dragon is as a spacecraft.
🔹 Dragon's trunk is carrying the fourth and final set of the station's upgraded solar arrays. Each one unrolls like a yoga mat and puts out more than 20 kW. This pair finishes the station's power upgrade and is just one of many things CRS-35 is bringing to the ISS.
🔹 This is the 4th flight for this Dragon, C211, after CRS-26, CRS-29 and CRS-33. Reusability isn't just for boosters 😉
And a great 8th flight and landing for B1096. Incredible work by the Falcon and Dragon teams, and thank you to our NASA partners! 👏
Kiko Dontchev retweeted
“The impossible is only impossible until it’s possible.”
Across @SpaceX, breakthrough innovation is driving toward one shared mission: making life multiplanetary. Hear from the leaders helping bring that vision closer to reality.
Kiko Dontchev retweeted
We’ve reached a point in human history where we can send people into space and bring them safely back to Earth, and it’s becoming almost routine. It’s easy to forget just how extraordinary that really is. Humanity is capable of incredible things.
Kiko Dontchev retweeted
Starbase: Render to Reality.
(Render from SpaceX. Colleen's (@colleenadastra) view today)
The new Astronaut emergency egress vehicle! LFG @cybertruck
Fingers crossed for good weather!
Three Falcon rockets vertical at three of our launch pads in Florida and California → spacex.com/launches
Great notes from @Erdayastronaut. Public and personnel safety has always been and will remain the #1 priority.
I find it funny that some people got hung up on Starship not having gone orbital before Flight 14 when in the grand scheme of things it was completely arbitrary in terms of performance. The 19ish second burn only added about 91 m/s of velocity (a 1.2% increase in velocity)
This capability has been physically capable since Flight 6 which demonstrated a single Raptor relight in space. Heck, Flight 13’s burn was about 14 seconds, but intentionally oriented to primarily do a plane change instead of a prograde insertion burn for continued safety.
Any of the relights COULD have done the orbital insertion burn, the duration was not of any special technical capability. The reason Starship didn’t go orbital until Flight 14 is probably what we should applaud them for the most… SAFETY.
Their methodical approach to getting good data and going one step at a time while hucking the single most massive object ever put into space proves they weren’t just doing things haphazardly, despite the occasional narrative from the outside.
While it’s easy to compare Starship to vehicles like SLS or Vulcan or New Glenn, the reality is the focus hasn’t been on orbit, it’s been all on the “downhill” side of that. Safe and targeted de-orbit, clean reentry, targeted and soft splashdown. That’s the part that has (almost) never been done before.
And here I do have to add a little Space Shuttle admiration for figuring out a lot of these things on its first flight in 1981 (although it came a bit close to not being successful). Pretty amazing there was a vehicle of similar scale capable of such precise deorbit and reentry that it landed on a runway with no go-around capabilities. Crazy.
But Starship is well on a path to absolutely leap-frog the Space Shuttle in terms of performance (already over double and someday 6 fold) and hopefully in terms of full and rapid reuse. I hope we see the latter part speed up even more now that orbit has been demonstrated.
Exciting times ahead!!! Keep going @spacex @elonmusk
One of our top notch recovery vessels, Doug, arrived in the Port of Long Beach last week. Reusability is core to @SpaceX operations, and Doug will help our West Coast teams safely and reliably sustain the blistering launch cadence 🚀
Shout out to the West Coast Recovery team in Long Beach. Keep crushing it!!!
Nailed it!
From concept to reality.
@SpaceX has successfully deployed Starlink V3 satellites into Earth’s orbit and made contact with them for the first time.
At scale, one Starship carries 60 V3 satellites, the same network capacity as about 20 Falcon 9 launches.
Kiko Dontchev retweeted
WTF
From concept to reality.
@SpaceX has successfully deployed Starlink V3 satellites into Earth’s orbit and made contact with them for the first time.
At scale, one Starship carries 60 V3 satellites, the same network capacity as about 20 Falcon 9 launches.
One (very big) milestone down! Three more launches to go. All systems go for the Falcon triple header on Thursday. Crew-13, Transporter-18, and Falcon Heavy NROL-97
Just insane work, LFG @SpaceX and Team Starship!
Kiko Dontchev retweeted
It is poetic that Starship reached orbit 18 years, to the date, after the Falcon 1 rocket. 'Orbit Day' should be a perpetual holiday at the company.
Who is ready for an epic week 🚀
The progress in Memphis is 🤯
SpaceX's supercomputing facilities in the Mid-South rank among the world’s most advanced AI training clusters, spanning over 2.5 million feet, millions of GPUs, and over two gigawatts of compute → spacex.com/Mid-South
Kiko Dontchev retweeted
We are committed to the Mississippi and Tennessee communities we call home, and to building the infrastructure that powers the next generation of technology.
Study finds no major pollution increase around Colossus 1 data center in SW Memphis wreg.com/news/local/study-fi…
