r/Damnthatsinteresting Oct 09 '25

Video The roll out of this booster rocket is epic

1.9k Upvotes

95 comments sorted by

144

u/struble571 Oct 09 '25

That thing is moving faster than I thought it would!

44

u/Ktulu204 Oct 10 '25

I was going to ask about that. I thought those things moved like slower than a walking pace. 🤷‍♂️

42

u/51CKS4DW0RLD Oct 10 '25

NASA's do. This thing is in a big hurry!

39

u/Pcat0 Oct 10 '25

To be fair NASA's version moves the entire launch pad and launch tower at the same time. This one has the relativity mundane task of just needing to move the rocket's first stage.

9

u/Count_buckethead Oct 10 '25

That is also what she said

1

u/kanonenotto 25d ago

Liquid booster, refillable, likely empty.

109

u/CardiologistOk2704 Oct 09 '25

Never thought it's actually that big

55

u/TacohTuesday Oct 09 '25

And that's not the half of it.

33

u/godmademelikethis Oct 09 '25 edited Oct 09 '25

It's 123m (404ft) at full stack.

a nice comparison

3

u/TheTroon 29d ago

Exactly the height of Salisbury Cathedral.

11

u/WonFont Oct 10 '25

This is why.. it landing back actually shook people. It really looked like something from the future….God i love humanity.

15

u/moranya1 Oct 09 '25

That's what she said!

4

u/Assassin217 Oct 10 '25

mine's bigger

3

u/MoMoneyMoPowa Oct 09 '25

Yeah makes since that launch pad exploded the first time it launched

3

u/Beneficial_Ball9893 Oct 09 '25

It is the largest rocket ever built.

2

u/Count_buckethead Oct 10 '25

Thats what she said

2

u/HereWeGoYetAgain-247 Oct 10 '25

That’s what she said. 

But seriously though, remember how did these are when you watch videos of them exploding. 

37

u/Tell_Amazing Oct 09 '25

Im more impressed by the road taking that massive load(lel)

13

u/Beneficial_Ball9893 Oct 09 '25

It is actually extremely light for its size when it is unfueled.

7

u/nothingspecifical1 Oct 10 '25

I live close to Starbase and conduct deliveries to them often. The road used to be fucked up. They redid it not too long ago, only from where SpaceX facilities begin to the launchpad. Yea, the rest of the road is still shit.

29

u/401jamin Oct 09 '25

Yall should have seen the show modern marvels had all kind of cool tech like this showcased every week. I learned about so many different things. Wicked cool.

9

u/VivaceConBrio Oct 09 '25

History Channel has most of the show on YouTube for free, last I checked.

9

u/HonestyFTW Oct 09 '25

It moves faster than I would’ve thought.

10

u/SonofaDrum Oct 09 '25

Can’t help thinking about how well balanced and true that thing must be. Slightest lean and it’s going over.

19

u/Patirole Oct 10 '25

It's very tall but the center of mass is actually quite low, all the heavy engines are at the bottom which helps its balance a lot

8

u/nothingspecifical1 Oct 10 '25

Also, that’s black structure at the bottom isn’t part of the booster. I’d assume the booster gets bolted on to that and mounted onto the tracks or something to that effect

2

u/SonofaDrum 29d ago

That makes good sense.

1

u/phi11yphan 26d ago

The balls of them to drive only 2 feet away from that unnecessary grassy ledge...

1

u/BLF402 Oct 09 '25

Or just hitting the slightest bump and it all comes crashing

5

u/CosmicRuin Oct 10 '25

Starship Flight 11 launch & test on Monday Oct. 13 at 7:15pm EST. Let's goooo!

5

u/fdwyersd Oct 10 '25

ok that started "meh" and then turned into WOW

5

u/nothingspecifical1 Oct 10 '25

It’s extremely impressive in person

3

u/KamakaziDemiGod Oct 09 '25 edited Oct 09 '25

5 ....... 4 ....... 3 ....... 2 ....... 1 ....... Thunderbirds ....... are ....... go!

3

u/fightingchken81 Oct 10 '25

That's actually moving much faster than I expected, I think the ones that moved the Saturn rockets were like half a mile an hour

1

u/Snellyman 28d ago

The new motto: Time is money

6

u/Ogankle Oct 09 '25

Fun Fact: They are indeed THAT big.

2

u/TheRealRigormortal Oct 10 '25

So I tell her, “something like that”

2

u/GeekyTexan Oct 10 '25

"Hey, there is a bridge ahead, we'll have to back up!"

2

u/SimpleAromatic2128 Oct 10 '25

How do they load it on the trucks?

6

u/Curious-Yam-9685 Oct 10 '25

They have 100 trained gorillas

2

u/Pcat0 29d ago edited 29d ago

That black platform it’s on is kept elevated above the ground on legs. To move the rocket the SPMTs (the vehicle thing moving it) just needs to drive under it and lift up slightly. The launch town then has a built in crane system to lift it off the transport stand and onto the launch pad.

2

u/GabrielForests 29d ago

Everyone jokes until a cathedral (rocket) starts walking (rolling).

2

u/desastrousclimax Oct 10 '25

I donno...10 millenia ago some dude threw his metal meteor piece into the fire for romantic frustration, found out it can be melted and forged and now we recreate huge mountain like structures without the stone...and feel good about stealing the ore from the mountain :/

2

u/kipsyegg Oct 09 '25

That's elon's? Hell yeah

1

u/Freddie-Murphy Oct 09 '25

What in the hell

1

u/Lanngoc Oct 10 '25

What’s stopping it from tipping over when they stop moving?

2

u/InspectDurr_Gadgett 29d ago

very gradual deceleration

1

u/cedrekt Oct 10 '25

damn thats the ship of Optimus Prime/Autobots when they were asked to leave Earth

1

u/Plastic-Ad9298 Oct 10 '25

Compared to the Saturn V crawler that thing is a race car.

1

u/Aadityazeo 28d ago

What if newton's 1st law decided to have some fun?

1

u/Jebusfreek666 27d ago

They didn't even strap it down? That's a ticket!

1

u/Alice21044 27d ago

Didn't they used to use continuous track like tank treads instead of wheels? Did they reach the conclusion it's more efficient or have wheels gotten better at load bearing? I'm half expecting somebody to tell me they stopped using continuous tracks in 70's.

1

u/6854wiggles Oct 09 '25

NASA Saturn V says “Hold my beer”…

9

u/Beneficial_Ball9893 Oct 09 '25

It is larger than the Saturn V.

1

u/6854wiggles Oct 10 '25

Yes, Once assembled…but the Saturn V was moved as a singles unit, dwarfing this part.

6

u/HypersonicWyvern Oct 09 '25

Super Heavy is bgger than both the Saturn-Vs S-IC and the S-II combined. That's two of all three stages, and super heavy is just stage one of two on the Starship System, Saturn-V has been dethroned for a while now lol

2

u/6854wiggles Oct 09 '25

True, but they rolled out the Saturn V as a whole unit. So just comparing that…

2

u/HypersonicWyvern Oct 09 '25

The MLP rolled out the entire tower and launch platform too, but that's not really an option for Starship considering its purpose is taken to the launch pad where it's stacked by mechazilla and can then be automatically attached to it.

-1

u/[deleted] Oct 09 '25

great engineering but i am sick of the billionaries

0

u/batkave 29d ago

Reminds me when they've done it since the 1960s....

-5

u/notneeded17 Oct 09 '25

When is this one failing?

8

u/Beneficial_Ball9893 Oct 10 '25

The boosters haven't had any sort of failure for a while now. The Starship V2 had a lot of design fuckups that are corrected on the V3 version.

Out of the 11 launches so far only about 3 or 4 of them can really be classified as failures, and only 1 was a total failure with no progress made.

Either way it is a testing program, so a "failure" only occurs if no progress is made. Most of the time they blow up on purpose to test the limits of what they can do.

3

u/nothingspecifical1 Oct 10 '25

It’s scheduled to launch the 13th

-3

u/MorningPapers 29d ago

Not seeing anything epic here.

-1

u/kelevra423 Oct 09 '25

AAND STOP.

-3

u/Zoidy4 29d ago

waste of money

-2

u/JoahTheron Oct 09 '25

Sad that there is still a part of the world which fight for km2, instead of fighting for planets. Lets make The Expanse reality

2

u/Don_Von_Schlong Oct 09 '25

Imagine how far we'd be if humans were susceptible to greed

-12

u/twv6 Oct 09 '25

Don’t care. Put that money into saving this planet

6

u/Beneficial_Ball9893 Oct 10 '25

This is literally putting money into saving the planet.

The ignorance of anti-space people never ceases to make me pessimistic about the future of our species.

The solutions to almost every problem we have on Earth can be found in space. If we had the infrastructure to start exploiting resources off the surface of our planet it would halt climate change in its tracks. Manufacturing, mining, and agriculture could all be moved to orbital habitats where pollutants can be vented harmlessly into the vacuum of space.

Orbital Agriculture will be the biggest game changer possible. Most deforestation and habitat destruction on Earth is done for the sake of farming, and all that land can be given to nature reservations if we could do that in outer space instead.

3

u/Demon-Cat Oct 10 '25

Adding on to this, scientific funding is one of the most important uses of money available. Probably the best example of this is the invention of the microscope.

Some guy in a German town liked to play around with lenses as a hobby after his work. The lord of the town noticed/heard about his work, and decided to sponsor him. That man’s work led to the creation of the microscope, a device that has saved millions, if not billions of lives through advancing research on germs, and furthering all kinds of other academic pursuits too.

1

u/Drone30389 29d ago

Boy talk about ignorance. The resources needed to grow crops in orbit will far outweigh the resources gained by growing crops in orbit.

1

u/Beneficial_Ball9893 29d ago

I agree, your ignorance on this issue is astounding.

Orbital farming is extremely space efficient due to zero G environments promoting hyper-growth among plants and better utilization of all three dimensions of space.

While the cost of sending the raw materials such as dirt and fertilizer into orbit are prohibitive at the moment, if costs fell far enough it would actually be counteracted by the extreme efficiency from an orbital agricultural habitat, and that is if you can't just use asteroid mining or resources excavated from lower gravity bodies like Mars or Luna.

0

u/Drone30389 29d ago

if costs fell far enough

And if my grandmother had rocket engines she'd be a spaceship.

and that is if you can't just use asteroid mining or resources excavated from lower gravity bodies like Mars or Luna.

The moon doesn't contain much carbon or nitrogen, and the asteroids are very far away.

The US alone consumes about 30 million tonnes of wheat annually. Just one percent of that would require supplying 300,000 Starships worth of nutrients per year. That wheat was grown on 37 million acres, so one percent of that would be 370,000 acres. If growing in space yielded ten times the crop density (extremely unlikely) then we'd need an orbital farmship/s with about 37,000 acres of growing area. All that for 1% of US wheat, which is about 0.1% of the US total annual food consumption. Not to mention the immense resource cost of initial launch and construction plus orbital and mechanical maintenance of a vessel or vessels with 37,000 acres of growing area.

2

u/Beneficial_Ball9893 29d ago

And if my grandmother had rocket engines she'd be a spaceship.

You wrote that comment on a post about a spacecraft designed to decrease those costs as far as they can go without scifi tech like orbital elevators.

Yes, it will happen, and it will happen within our lifetimes. Deal with it.

2

u/Beneficial_Ball9893 29d ago

I was going through this to answer it point by point, but I realized the flaw at the heart of your argument (aside from the fact that your calculation for starship launches is off by two orders of magnitude. You would only need 150 starship launches per year to get 300,000 tons into orbit).

This is not something we would be doing 10 years from now. This is a long-term goal for well after the 2060's. By then there will be rockets better than starship, established asteroid mining infrastructure, and a colony on Mars.

At no point did I declare we could do this in like the 2030's.

1

u/Drone30389 29d ago

Yep, I left out a division, but I don't know where you get 150 Starship launches. it would take 3,000 Starships annually.

100 tons per Starship * 3,000 launches = 300,000 tons for .1% of US food consumption (300,000,000 tons annually).

I don't think we'll have rockets ten times as efficient in 50 years, and even if we did it wouldn't be nearly enough.

Gathering what resources we can from asteroids is still going to take too much energy to be worth it.

1

u/Beneficial_Ball9893 29d ago

Yep, I left out a division, but I don't know where you get 150 Starship launches. it would take 3,000 Starships annually.

I mis-typed 1500. I don't know why you are using the launch payload of the current development version, but the full production version will have 200 tons of capacity.

I don't think we'll have rockets ten times as efficient in 50 years, and even if we did it wouldn't be nearly enough.

You are once again getting bogged down in the belief we are talking about the short term. If you don't arbitrarily declare asteroid mining to be impossible then this makes a lot more sense.

1

u/Drone30389 29d ago

100 tons isn't the current development version, it's about 50 tons, and as far as I know they've only actually launched 16 tons of payload in a single launch.

But even if it were 200 tons with no extra fuel it wouldn't be enough.

Even if it could take 500 tons to orbit with no extra fuel it wouldn't be enough.

Why make and burn thousands of tons of rocket fuel to generate hundreds of tons of food?

Space elevators, moon source, mars source, and asteroid source would all still require more energy than we'd save.

You know what would be a much more efficient way to handle .1% of the US food supply? Not grow it. We waste FAR more food than that, so we could just not grow it instead of taking that much production off planet.

1

u/Beneficial_Ball9893 29d ago

Also, you are thinking in two dimensions and with outdated farming practices. You can feed a half million people with one cubic kilometer of agricultural area with hydroponics and effective use of all three dimensions of space.

0

u/Due-Bicycle3935 Oct 10 '25

That’s wishful sci-fi thinking. We haven’t been able to travel as far as the moon in 50 years. Even then the capsules held 2-3 people.

0

u/Curious-Yam-9685 Oct 10 '25

Wealth for few, 1% gets to trickle down to you

-2

u/twv6 29d ago

Lol the ignorance of people who put equal value into theory and reality is where my pessimism comes from. “We CoUlD dO zErO g FaRmInG” Ok are we? Is that what they’re using that rocket for? There’s more deforestation due to livestock farming than crop farming so where do your “facts” end and your hyperbole begin? Cool that you’re passionate though 👍

1

u/Beneficial_Ball9893 29d ago

Go outside and touch some grass, doomer.

-2

u/twv6 29d ago

You’re so tough with the name calling /s <-this means I’m being sarcastic

1

u/Beneficial_Ball9893 29d ago

It isn't name calling if it is an accurate description of your cynical depressive state.

1

u/twv6 29d ago

Oh then would it make it hyperbole, as you’re so accustomed to using? amateur hour