Competent people have a look what the network can take in addition to what it carries, then shape a new thing down well below that. And make sure they can turn it off fast. Sounds a like nobody even checked. Amateurs.

I have seen this extreme level of stupidity only with IBM tech consultants before. They killed the network of a large bank were I also transferred monitoring data, pretty much the same as they did. The difference is my first question was how much data and my second how much bandwidth can I safely use. And the bank had all that very nicely. The IBM morons just built software and then pushed everything on the net and were surprised when that did not work. Fortunately the bank got their crap killed in half an hour or so. And then these idiots asked me where I got my traffic figures. 2 years into their project. Sounds like something like that happened here as well. Just with a teensy bit more damage.

You would think competent engineering and tech risk management is done of critical infrastructure. Microslop thinks differently, the all-mighty dollar is more important. And, to be fair, unless they continue to screw up this badly, nothing is going to happen to them. Their customer population is even more incompetent than they are.

That does not make it any better. It just means there is another area they are incompetent in. The main reason why you run tests like this and design and roll out any automatism that can take down a server very carefully is exactly because you may have other things that can come crashing down if you mess this up. Oh, and look, exactly that happened.

This is simply another piece of hard evidence that Microslop cannot hack reliable infrastructure. Smart people already knew that, but apparently more evidence is needed before the thick-skulled Microlop admirers notice something.

... and thinks the rules do not apply to him. What else is new?

Seems like the craft had a concern it couldn't rectify and chose to terminate itself at sea rather than get anywhere near humans.

I can assume the rules would be different if it were carrying humans and it would do everything possible to save them.

The rocket even did its maneuvers like it was waiting for the tower to clamp down on it until it ran out of fuel. Id trust it.

As far as I can tell, catching it was never in question. They chose to have a hard rule in a single engine out condition in advance, rather than making the call on the fly. The craft was fully capable of doing what was required to be caught at the tower, and in fact did exactly those maneuvers ... except over the ocean where the tower wasnt.

Seemed pretty successful to me, just safety over everything else. Thanks for that, it is rocket science after all.

Good point. They aborted at least one other catch attempt because of an equipment problem on the tower rather than the booster, but I'm pretty sure somewhere in the launch broadcast today they said the tower was good to go this time.

Yes. Pretty much no-one thought SpaceX could land a rocket that couldn't hover on a barge that was bouncing around in the ocean, and they failed a bunch of times but now it's routine.

The catch exists because as you say it means no need to add delicate landing legs, and it means the booster can be placed back on the pad to be refuelled and relaunched in an hour or two. Obviously we're a long way from the point where a booster can be relaunched with minimal maintenance but that's the long-term goal.

As for price, today's flight launched Starlink satellites with bandwidth equivalent to about 10 Falcon-9 Starlink launches. So at a conservative estimate it saved them about $200,000,000 in Falcon 9 launches.. if throwing away a booster and Starship costs less than that then they're already making a per-launch operating profit.

The video I've seen shows it descending to a tower-like height over the sea, then hovering until it ran out of fuel. So it they had been able to reach the tower it would probably have been caught.

So either it didn't have enough fuel to do that or they decided to be cautious to ensure they don't wreck the tower before the ship comes back. We'll find out when they make some official announcement later.

Yes. Very much so. And all the large tech enterprises are not either.

Sure. Not a direct dependency. But if it turns out L3Harris is dependent on O364 (with some delay), that would make it an indirect one.

Sad as that is, yes. But this is a step to make regulation more likely, even if only in Europe.

Oh, and now the White House claims no connection to Microslop. With the current probability of them lying, I would call that conformation.

Usually you get the people holding it to hand it over, for example another exchange or somebody that got arrested.

Canada is apparently not affected at least that is the reporting here in Europe.

But this may well be some indirect dependency on Microslop systems. For a direct dependency (which would be illegal) the shutdown would already have happened a day earlier, hence I guess that is not it. But IT has gotten way too complex and unintended consequences wayyyyy to likely. My bet is we are seeing one here.