SpaceX’s Starship SN8 launches from the aerospace firm’s Boca Chica facility on Dec. 8.

Starbound Starbound Workshop Is something missing from your Starbound Universe? Maybe you'll find it here amongst the wonderful user created mods, or maybe you'll make it yourself! Starbound is a Wide Open Sandbox Scifi Adventure game. Not to be confused with a Classic Mac game that lets you conquer planets to get more ships and destroy opposing races, nor with a Lucky Star fic aiming to parody EarthBound. Take Terraria and give it a more Science Fiction based focus with space travel and you have Starbound.

Words by Gaige Davila
Photos b Patricia M. McGrath
editor@portisabelsouthpadre.com

Seven minutes have changed the course of space travel forever.

SpaceX’s Starship SN8 prototype spacecraft successfully launched from the aerospace firm’s Boca Chica facility on Wednesday afternoon, with a total flight time of six minutes and forty-two seconds. After climbing to an altitude of 8 miles, SN8’s three Raptor (powered by liquid methane and oxygen) engines stopped, causing the prototype spacecraft to drop horizontally through the sky. The Raptor engines reignited to bring SN8 upright, nearly landing intact before exploding.

“Fuel header tank pressure was low during landing burn, causing touchdown velocity to be high and (the rapid unscheduled disassembly), but we got all the data we needed,” Elon Musk, founder and CEO of SpaceX posted on his Twitter account. “Mars, here we come!”

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The highly anticipated launch was initially scheduled on Tuesday, Dec. 8, afternoon, but with a second to spare, one of the three Raptor engines auto-aborted, stopping the spacecraft at 4:35 p.m.

Crowds of people gathered at Isla Blanca Park on South Padre Island where SpaceX’s Boca Chica facility could be seen in the distance. Once the launch aborted, droves of cars began leaving the Island. But on Wednesday, they stayed put, watching the launch, descent and explosion.

According to flight data, two NASA planes flew over the Texas gulf coast just before the Starship’s scheduled launch on Tuesday, with another NASA airplane buzzing the Island on Wednesday. Musk said in a Twitter post that Starship had a “maybe ⅓ chance” of landing intact after its launch.

According to SpaceX’s website, Starship is designed to travel to Mars. SN8 is one of ten prototypes, with SN9 expected to be revealed soon, according to SpaceX.

“This suborbital flight is designed to test a number of objectives, from how the vehicle’s three Raptor engines perform to the overall aerodynamic entry capabilities of the vehicle (including its body flaps) to how the vehicle manages propellant transition,” SpaceX’s website states about Starship. “SN8 will also attempt to perform a landing flip maneuver, which would be a first for a vehicle of this size.”

Starbound Wiki

Just two days prior to Starship’s attempted launch, SpaceX’s Dragon cargo spacecraft launched from Kennedy Space Center and docked at the International Space Station.

Last August, SpaceX successfully launched its Starhopper prototype from the Boca Chica facility, sending the spacecraft 490 feet into the air, landing without incident.

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Starbound Dance

Hello everyone!

A few years ago we’d announced we planned to bring Starbound to consoles, and dedicated a lot of our studio resources into re-designing the UI for consoles and optimizing the game resources to work on consoles – working closely with Blitworks, who did a fantastic job helping us with the porting.

Starbound was playable to the public at a number of Xbox events in 2018, and had very positive feedback – it played very well on Xbox One and we’d publically announced our intention to finish and release soon!

Starbound

Late in development while evaluating the game we identified performance issues when playing with four or more players together, but still felt confident we could address them to have it release ready. We worked to optimize and redesign a number of systems specifically to optimize the performance in multiplayer, but ultimately after months of work it still wasn’t enough to get the game up to our standards. With four or more players together we’d still encounter some stuttering and frame drops.

We don’t want to limit the number of players or remove features to address the problem – that would mean releasing the game in a ‘less complete’ state and wasn’t a solution we were comfortable with. Free reign books.

Starbound Multiplayer

So what’s the plan?
We’ve spent the past few months working with some new outside porting partners to try and further optimize the game performance. We’ve got some very experienced programmers who think it’s achievable and are working on it – but we don’t want to give any assurances until we’ve tested it. Outside that the game is ready, but it’s a make or break issue and we can’t introduce Starbound to consoles with current performance.

We’d hoped to have better news to share in this update – and we’re sorry we’d waited so long to deliver it. For right now a console version is delayed while we continue to work on technical solutions to optimize large groups in multiplayer, and we’ll keep supporting the PC version (1.4 is available to beta test right now on Steam).