All posts tagged: Starship

‘Starship Troopers’ deserves another look, plus the week’s best films in L.A.

‘Starship Troopers’ deserves another look, plus the week’s best films in L.A.

Hello! I’m Mark Olsen. Welcome to another edition of your regular field guide to a world of Only Good Movies. Let’s get right to the best rep-house screenings around Los Angeles this week. ‘Ordinary People’ Mary Tyler Moore and Timothy Hutton in the movie “Ordinary People.” (Academy Museum) The Academy Museum will screen a new 35mm print of 1980’s “Ordinary People” on Sunday. The feature directing debut of Robert Redford, the film won four Oscars, including best picture and director. An intense drama about a family torn apart by grief, the film’s austere restraint makes it a haunting experience with powerful performances, in particular from Mary Tyler Moore, who turns her sunny star persona inside out. In his original review, Charles Champlin lauded Redford for making the film, noting, “As an intimate and demanding family drama (demanding on the creator and on the audience), it was both a brave choice and a wise one. … It was also an admirable choice, using the power and prerequisites of Redford’s stardom to bring into being the kind …

SpaceX eyes mid-March for first test of upgraded Starship rocket

SpaceX eyes mid-March for first test of upgraded Starship rocket

The delayed first test of SpaceX’s upgraded Starship rocket is now slated for mid-March, according to a post from CEO Elon Musk on his social media site X. This third version of Starship, or V3, is larger and more powerful. Crucially, the company plans to use Starship V3 to launch its next-generation Starlink satellites, which will be capable of faster data speeds but weigh more and are larger. It’s also the first version of the rocket that is meant to dock with other Starships in Earth orbit, a capability the company needs in order to reach the moon or Mars. This all comes as SpaceX is racing toward an IPO later this year, and under pressure from the Trump administration to return U.S. astronauts to the surface of the moon before the end of his second term. Starship, the most powerful rocket ever developed, is currently a key part of NASA’s mission to fulfill that goal. SpaceX was making progress toward a launch of Starship V3 in late 2025. But in November, the booster stage …

Elon Musk’s Starship Explosion Endangered Hundreds of Airline Passengers

Elon Musk’s Starship Explosion Endangered Hundreds of Airline Passengers

On January 16, SpaceX conceded that the latest prototype of its enormous Starship spacecraft had “experienced a rapid unscheduled disassembly during its ascent burn” — a tongue-in-cheek admission that the massive rocket had exploded mid-flight. Countless videos circulating online showed a massive stream of reentering pieces of the Starship rocket blazing across the evening sky over the West Indian islands of Turks and Caicos. It was a dazzling sight to behold as the destruction streaked across the sky, like something from science fiction. “Success is uncertain, but entertainment is guaranteed!” a gleeful Musk wrote at the time. But it wasn’t all fun and games. Residents of Turks and Caicos, for instance, soon found scraps of burnt rubber and other rocket pieces littering the Caribbean islands’ otherwise pristine beaches. The incident, which was almost perfectly repeated on February 24, even forced airlines to quickly adjust their flight paths to avoid the terrifying field of burning metal. And now, eleven months later, the Wall Street Journal has obtained Federal Aviation Administration documents revealing that three aircraft — …