Picture perfect
Starship blasted off at 8:03 a.m. ET from SpaceX’s Boca Chica launch facility on Saturday, November 18. Two things struck me as I watched the early stages of the IFT-2 mission: the rocket took considerably less time to clear the tower compared to the first flight on April 20, and it also churned out less dust, the result of the newly installed water deluge system. For this test, SpaceX experimented with a faster start-up sequence for the 33 Raptor engines, which aimed to streamline the launch process.
