[HN Gopher] Super Heavy has splashed down in The Gulf of Mexico
___________________________________________________________________
Super Heavy has splashed down in The Gulf of Mexico
Author : thepasswordis
Score : 495 points
Date : 2024-06-06 13:02 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (twitter.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (twitter.com)
| thepasswordis wrote:
| Seeing it seemingly hover right over the water and then slowly
| tip over was amazing!
|
| Go SpaceX! Go Starship!
| bearjaws wrote:
| The rate of descent is absolutely astonishing, 8km -> 1km in 20
| seconds, then just hovers above the water. Absolutely incredible
| work by the SpaceX team.
|
| Living in central Florida I cannot wait for the new launch
| facility to come online. We're going to have lines of spectators
| into the space coast like we did for the shuttle.
|
| If any of you are heading to Disney World you should stop by the
| NASA Kennedy Visitor Complex, it is so well done and not that
| expensive (it takes less time than 1 line at Disney world to get
| to :) ). It has the original launch control room for Apollo that
| you can tour, a Saturn V rocket that is laid horizontally and you
| can walk under, the crew module for the moon landing. My favorite
| part is the Atlantis shuttle suspended from the ceiling, they
| left it in its "raw" landed format with scorch marks and tiles,
| it looks absolutely amazing.
| sixQuarks wrote:
| Yeah it's hard to comprehend how powerful those engines are.
| The booster is relatively light without all the propellant and
| starship when it's attempting to land, but it's still 30
| stories tall and I'm assuming it weighs dozens of tons.
| chasd00 wrote:
| iirc only 3 ignite for the landing burn, those engines are
| freaking monsters. I love how small they are, the latest
| Raptor revision is so slim and compact. The power density is
| just mind boggling.
| sobellian wrote:
| You can see for yourself in the video - all 13 center
| engines attempt to light, and all but one do so.
| arpinum wrote:
| Similar to ship, they start up more engines than needed
| in case a few fail, then immediately shut down the extra
| engines.
| arrowsmith wrote:
| Where is this visible in the video? EDIT: oh wait is it
| the diagram in the bottom left?
| foobarian wrote:
| It blew my mind that just the fuel pump for just one engine
| has a power rated in the tens of thousands of horsepower/kW.
| schmidtleonard wrote:
| Yep, those pumps have to push the propellant into the
| explosion harder than the explosion pushes back. That takes
| serious power!
| foobarian wrote:
| So thinking where the leverage is - is it like hydraulics
| where the input cross-section is a lot smaller than the
| output cross-section? That's kinda what the nozzle looks
| like.
| schmidtleonard wrote:
| Yes, but also the propellant explodes after being pumped
| in, so you pump in a tiny volume and exhaust an enormous
| volume.
| m4rtink wrote:
| Its 200+ tons dry apparently when landing.
| gadders wrote:
| It's mad how rocket landings are now more exciting than rocket
| launches.
| cjk2 wrote:
| They used to be far more exciting. It's the anticipation of
| less excitement that is nail biting :D
| tim333 wrote:
| It's one of the fun things with SpaceX that with many
| flights you don't quite know what's going to blow up or go
| wrong. The commercial flights are reliable but the
| experimental ones are interesting.
| steve1977 wrote:
| When I was young, there were no rocket landings.
| GJim wrote:
| My grandfather recalls (what he later found out to be) a
| rocket landing in London's east end during his youth.
|
| There were quite a lot of them at the time.
| jonah wrote:
| "RSD"? (Rapid Scheduled Disassembly)
| SoftTalker wrote:
| German V1 or V2, presumably.
| tialaramex wrote:
| Only the V2 is a rocket, the V1 is a flying bomb. They're
| both terror weapons, as actual products they have no
| direct military value, they exist solely in order to
| scare the shit out of enemy civilians, but liquid fuelled
| rockets are an invention with a whole lot of interesting
| practical applications - the V1 is just a bad idea
| (unless you have unlimited resources, which the Germans
| did not, and your goal is to terrify enemy civilians,
| which is not a legitimate military strategy).
| EasyMark wrote:
| V1: didn't they have to start somewhere?
| ElevenLathe wrote:
| V2 was of questionable legitimate military utility too.
| Sure you can hit a target the size of a city, but unlike
| carpet bombing, the payload isn't enough to guarantee
| that something specific is destroyed. So you can only use
| it to randomly harm civilians and maybe every once in a
| while hit a military target. Compare this with the
| Western Allies' approach where they also killed and
| maimed tons of civilians but at least stood some chance
| of also destroying the building-sized thing they were
| aiming at, given the stupefying tonnage of bombs
| involved.
|
| "Once the rockets go up, who cares where they come down?
| 'That's not my department,' says Werner Von Braun." --
| Tom Lehrer https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QEJ9HrZq7Ro
| amanaplanacanal wrote:
| Firebombing whole cities in Europe and Japan is still a
| black mark in US history. It's really hard for me to get
| "holier than thou" on other terror campaigns when I
| remember that.
| stctw wrote:
| It's easy to say that now. Have you lived through
| unrestricted, total warfare, where one side intends to
| conquer a continent or the world, invades without
| provocation, and won't stop until brought to submission
| through extreme force? The Allies did not initiate war
| and did not want war. How many of your country's people
| should you sacrifice to end a war of aggression started
| by the enemy? Should you not use the means that will
| preserve as many of your lives as you can?
|
| This century has yet to see anything like WW1 and WW2,
| and those who are alive today are incredibly disconnected
| from our recent past.
| czl wrote:
| > Allies did not initiate war and did not want war.
|
| An argument made that WW2 was continuation of WW1 and
| that WW1 was wanted by British leadership who were locked
| in an arms race with Germany that they could not sustain
| much longer and wanted a war with Germany while they were
| ahead so the assassination that triggered WW1 was the
| pretext tobstart WW1. If you disagree please try to
| answer why leaders are regularly assassinated and that
| does not cause a world war.
| lupusreal wrote:
| Listen, while I broadly agree with your grander point
| (Britain _wanting_ a war with Germany and taking any
| excuse given for it) your argument for this is flatly
| moronic; the assassination of the archduke was _not_
| Britain 's pretext for entering the war! That was
| Austria-Hungary's pretext for invading Serbia. Britain's
| pretext was the German invasion of Belgium. Read a
| fucking book.
| xcv123 wrote:
| Japan was already trying to negotiate conditional
| surrender when Hiroshima and Nagasaki were nuked. The US
| demanded unconditional surrender, and they nuked hundreds
| of thousands of civilians to force that demand.
|
| The bombing of Dresden is arguably a war crime by todays
| standards. It was unnecessary.
|
| Remember that we were allied with the Soviet Union
| (Joseph Stalin was the "good guy" on our side). After WW2
| he was given half of Europe as a reward, forcing that
| half of Europe to become communist, and the Soviets got
| to write the history books about Germany and WW2. Not the
| most transparent and unbiased source of information.
|
| The Soviets and other allied soldiers (the good guys)
| also had a free-for-all with the German ladies after
| winning the war.
|
| "The majority of the assaults were committed in the
| Soviet occupation zone; estimates of the numbers of
| German women raped by Soviet soldiers have ranged up to 2
| million"
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rape_during_the_occupation_
| of_...
| lupusreal wrote:
| Japan should have unconditionally surrendered in March,
| half a year before the nukes, when the US military burned
| most of Tokyo to the ground in less than two hours.
|
| And yes. Stalin was a bad guy and it's a pity the war
| didn't end with the demise of _both_ the Nazi and Soviet
| regimes. This is also irrelevant to the matter of
| strategic bombings perpetrated by America and Britain.
| xcv123 wrote:
| General George S. Patton:
|
| "We may have been fighting the wrong enemy (Germany) all
| along. But while we're here (on the Soviet border), we
| should go after the bastards now, 'cause we're gonna have
| to fight 'em eventually."
|
| https://books.google.com/books?redir_esc=y&id=32DxAAAAMAA
| J&d...
| lupusreal wrote:
| I literally just told you that the Soviets should have
| been taken out. This fact doesn't change the moral
| calculus of the strategic bombings against Germany and
| Japan. The fault was not doing the same to the USSR.
| xcv123 wrote:
| I understood what you wrote. The interesting part of this
| quote is apparently General Patton also realised they
| should not have been fighting against Germany in the
| first place. There are other quotes from him that
| indicate some regret of fighting against Germany instead
| of the Soviets, by the end of the war.
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| People who are ready to surrender don't need to be nuked
| _twice_.
| FredPret wrote:
| Conditional surrender would have been completely
| unacceptable given that they were the aggressor and had a
| million troops in China, and wanted to hold on to their
| conquests after the war. Even after the first nuke they
| didn't surrender. It took the emperor speaking up - for
| the first time ever - after the second nuke, and even
| then the military junta tried to stop it.
|
| Your points about the Communists stand, but keep in mind
| that the West always considered them the least bad
| option. They started out on Hitler's side and they only
| got half of Europe because they already had it occupied
| with masses of troops. The West couldn't have pushed them
| back to Moscow unless they were willing to fight a couple
| more years, killing millions more.
| xcv123 wrote:
| > Conditional surrender would have been completely
| unacceptable
|
| And some would argue that nuking entire cities is
| completely unacceptable.
| MattPalmer1086 wrote:
| You should not use the fact your own side has done
| terrible things as an excuse for others to do similar
| things.
|
| Feel free to be outraged no matter who it is.
| TMWNN wrote:
| V2 had no direct military value. V1 was a very cost-
| efficient weapon.
| steve1977 wrote:
| I actually thought about including a "non-destructive"
| qualifier... ;)
| mannykannot wrote:
| "Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down?
| That's not my department" says Wernher von Braun.
|
| - Tom Lehrer.
|
| https://genius.com/Tom-lehrer-wernher-von-braun-lyrics
| unethical_ban wrote:
| In German, or Englisch, I know how to count down... und
| I'm learning Chinese, says Werner von Braun.
|
| Written in 1961. Wild.
| chgs wrote:
| The rocket performed perfectly. It just landed on the
| wrong planet.
| pfdietz wrote:
| The 1960 von Braun biopic "I Aim at the Stars" had
| posters to which wags added "But Sometimes I Hit London".
| TMWNN wrote:
| That's a quote from the film itself.
| panick21_ wrote:
| Maybe if it was his department they would have hit London
| more often.
| gadders wrote:
| Nor for me, but I'm old enough to have seen re-runs of
| things like Flash Gordon in black and white which I'm sure
| had rockets landing vertically. (This could be the Mandela
| effect though).
| adolph wrote:
| > When I was young, there were no rocket landings.
|
| For all born after July 1969, you lived with rocket
| landings: Apollo lunar lander was a propulsive soft
| landing.
| pixl97 wrote:
| I mean the old rocket landings threw away 90%+ of the
| rocket first. Minus the hot staging ring and some molten
| metal almost all of this rocket was present at both its
| landings.
| dingaling wrote:
| If you were young between 1993 and 1995 then DC-X was
| making landings
| rqtwteye wrote:
| The first Space Shuttle landings were pretty cool though.
| BurningFrog wrote:
| Same thing with airplanes. The landing is much more important
| than the takeoff.
| function_seven wrote:
| Real quote from my grandmother, years ago: "I'm not scared
| of flying so much. I just wish the plane didn't have to get
| _so close to the ground_ before landing! "
| DavidPeiffer wrote:
| For anyone who has been there more than a couple years back,
| it's worth checking it out again. They added Gateway: The Deep
| Space Launch Complex, and have also been expanding the
| Astronaut Training Experience. The exhibits are all very well
| done.
|
| The bus tours are also neat, visiting and walking around launch
| pads from the early days of space exploration, seeing the
| bunker near a launch pad with ~8" thick glass and the
| mechanical linkage over a couple hundred feet which let them
| monitor the weight of the added fuel on an early mission.
|
| I've gone 7 times since I was a child, and love the new things
| I find.
| jzig wrote:
| Hello from Gainesville! Thanks for recommending the NASA
| Kennedy Visitor Complex. We will have to visit next time we
| make a trip to Orlando.
| mywacaday wrote:
| I had the pleasure of seeing Endeavour being brought out on a
| Crawler-transporter in 2008 from about 300 meters away on the
| LC 39 Observation Gantry. Its a missed bucket list item that I
| never got to see one launch. The visitor complex is well worth
| a visit.
| somenameforme wrote:
| The 'worst' thing about watching space launches on streams is
| that you simply cannot grasp how ridiculously huge these things
| are. Even if, like in the stream today, you see a water tower
| for some scale, the size discrepancies just make it so hard to
| intuit. Starship is 121 meters high. That's something taller
| than a football field, jetting off into space! I've only gotten
| to see a decommissioned Space Shuttle in person, but that was
| also amazing. Even its fuel tank [1] makes you feel just _tiny_
| , yet it's merely 47m. Getting to see Starship live would be
| such an amazing opportunity.
|
| [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_external_tank
| tim333 wrote:
| I've got the black and white arty photo as my lockscreen
| which gives you an idea https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/E46
| BxzjjUkpthVBNE6k8mn-192...
| jstanley wrote:
| It reminds me of the old photos of builders eating their
| lunch atop half-finished skyscrapers.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunch_atop_a_Skyscraper
| tim333 wrote:
| I think it was inspired by that. There's a high
| resolution version here:
|
| https://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?action=dlatta
| ch;...
| sleepydog wrote:
| That's an incredible photo. Something about it makes me
| think of an old-timey silent film about alien invasions.
| ekanes wrote:
| That is an incredible picture, thank you.
| franzb wrote:
| A striking picture! Thanks for sharing!
| pandemic_region wrote:
| oh wow, i always imagined those breaking fins to be about
| tennis racket size !
| adolph wrote:
| They look to be about 4m^2 in the main part. You could
| make a nice deck with one.
|
| Here is Musk describing them as a dinosaur bear trap:
| https://youtu.be/t705r8ICkRw?t=1714
| bjelkeman-again wrote:
| My desktop. My login screen is two Falcon heavy side
| boosters landing.
| nerdjon wrote:
| That is still my favorite background.
|
| It still almost doesn't look real.
| dotnet00 wrote:
| I only live close enough to be able to see Enterprise, which
| didn't go to space, but I like to go there at least once a
| year, just because seeing the sheer size of it and knowing
| that all the Shuttles were like that is inspiring (the SR-71
| helps too). I'm planning a trip to the space coast when
| family visits next year though.
| causi wrote:
| Man I hope Musk names one of the Starships Enterprise.
| andromaton wrote:
| Bet he will
| bonzini wrote:
| The SR-71 in the Richmond Science museum was even more
| impressive to me than the Saturn V. The thing is _huge_
| with a tiny cabin.
| jaggederest wrote:
| Standing next to the S-IC stage from the Saturn V at Kennedy
| really puts it into perspective. And the Starship full stack
| is larger and taller than the Saturn V!
| JackFr wrote:
| https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/51/Saturn_
| v...
|
| Saturn V slight larger than Statue of Liberty.
|
| I never realized that.
| httpz wrote:
| If you're in LA and want to see the first Falcon 9 that
| landed, you can see it displayed in front of Space X HQ.
|
| https://maps.app.goo.gl/2LMvohTfwJ1Sq3o56
| vl wrote:
| What is even more impressive to me is that they were able to
| quite reliably stream all this through Starlink. This shows how
| mature and usable Starlink is. The fact that you can have live
| internet connection on re-entering space ship - truly the
| future is here.
| IG_Semmelweiss wrote:
| Incredible demo of great service. If you can get reliable
| video from space, it makes wifi on a commercial plane look
| like cakewalk.
|
| What will viasat stockholders think now?
| amelius wrote:
| The video isn't really live. The original may have had
| buffering problems, etc.
| dcdc123 wrote:
| The Houston center is amazing as well! They have a tour where
| you get to sit in the guest theater/gallery of the original
| command room and watch a shortened version of the moon landing
| with all the controls, monitors, projectors, etc all automated
| to show what was presented during the original landing.
| chasd00 wrote:
| I think Houston also has the most complete Saturn V too. It's
| on its side in a shed out back basically.
| bartread wrote:
| The way the booster comes down is nuts. 90km to 1km in 100
| seconds, it reaches maximum velocity under gravity at a bit
| over 20km, then air resistance acts as a brake, and they only
| fire the engines to slow it down the rest of the way at 1km.
| Bonkers.
| dylan604 wrote:
| The thing that tickles me is that it has to slow down to
| reach terminal velocity rather than the normal way of
| thinking about objects speeding up to reach terminal
| velocity.
| andromaton wrote:
| Wait a minute; we've been lied to!
| bee_rider wrote:
| I'm probably missing something important here, but isn't
| this true of most things that de-orbit into an atmosphere?
| gpm wrote:
| They're comparing to the average falling object not the
| average de-orbiting object.
| dylan604 wrote:
| not missing anything, but it's just one of those things
| about how fast orbital speeds are. yes, i know orbital
| speeds are around 17,000 mph. this is just another
| example of just how fast that is. a lot of people might
| be familiar with falling objects speeding up to get to
| terminal velocity which is kind of a speed limit for
| normal things. for de-orbiting spacecraft, this is just
| another milestone of slow speeds to achieve and not a
| limit of how fast it goes.
|
| sometimes just looking at things from a different
| perspective makes me smile on the relative nature of
| "fast"
| jccooper wrote:
| Yes, but that's not the case for most objects you
| interact with in everyday life. All, most likely, unless
| you're in a particular job.
| trollerator23 wrote:
| Finally! It only took them 4 tries!
| metadat wrote:
| In case you want to watch from the time of liftoff:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lFkqZF-Ss7o&t=6250s
| dotnet00 wrote:
| That was breathtaking! Now just hoping we get even more
| spectacular views of Starship's reentry plasma than last time.
| Everything about this vehicle screams "sci-fi future".
|
| DAAAAMN looks like Starship made it! This truly fit their slogan
| of "Excitement guaranteed", that Starship reentry was so
| thrilling, falling apart, seeing the fins disintegrating, yet at
| the end they still moved and flipped!
| melodyogonna wrote:
| That was incredible!
| ninjamayo wrote:
| Incredible! Catching the booster next JIRA ticket.
| chasd00 wrote:
| > Catching the booster next JIRA ticket.
|
| someone update the status from Blocked to Ready for Dev
| bell-cot wrote:
| I'd put Starship Soft Landing first. That's easy and safe-ish
| to try in a remote location. Vs. any little oopies on a Booster
| Catch could damage a load of high-value infrastructure.
| pixl97 wrote:
| >I'd put Starship Soft Landing first.
|
| So that just happened. Been even better if the camera wasn't
| mostly melted, but looked like a slow enough landing.
| bell-cot wrote:
| (I figured "Landing" implied "dry land". Or at least a dry
| barge deck. Beyond the obviously-greater precision needed -
| a soft & dry landing is paradise for post-flight
| engineering analysis.)
| mezeek wrote:
| they're focusing on booster reuse and ship tile slash entry
| reliability. Ship reuse will come after.
|
| reason they're going hard on booster reuse is those 33
| engines, they cost lotsa money to be dumping them over and
| over.
| thebiglebrewski wrote:
| Someone call Behnke to file it
| dr_dshiv wrote:
| Wait, did it land or not? Retrieved or sunk? Couldn't tell from
| the video.
| ipnon wrote:
| It did not land. The plan was not to attempt a landing. But it
| maintained a controlled descent into the ocean and splashed
| down upright.
| wilg wrote:
| Hard to land if no land.
| almostarockstar wrote:
| It sead.
| thfuran wrote:
| It's sean, actually.
| harperlee wrote:
| Honest question, did they sink the remaining fuel? Or did
| they just burnt all remaining fuel whilst hovering? I would
| imagine that's pretty toxic.
|
| Edit: Thanks for the answers!
| cschmatzler wrote:
| Methane and oxygen are not very toxic.
| dotnet00 wrote:
| Depends on how packed the room is ;)
| trollied wrote:
| Liquid Oxygen & Methane, and not much of it.
| jstsch wrote:
| It's methane, so not a big deal (like hydrazine)
| bzzzt wrote:
| There was not much remaining, but it's just methane so not
| that toxic.
| ralfd wrote:
| Propellant is not kerosine, it is only liquid gas: oxygen
| and methane
| furyofantares wrote:
| I'm just happy so many people got to show off their
| knowledge of rocket fuel in response to this comment
| thepasswordis wrote:
| It simulated a landing over the ocean, but there was nothing
| there to actually catch it.
| mannyv wrote:
| Guess they didn't want to sacrifice "Of Course I Still Love
| You" for this test.
| thepasswordis wrote:
| Of course I still love you is not even close to large
| enough to catch this booster, is it?
| pintxo wrote:
| Catch, yes. Float: not so much.
| dotnet00 wrote:
| I think technically it's just barely large enough to fit,
| but, the booster isn't designed to land like that, it's
| supposed to be caught from the top by a tower. So, the
| Raptors would probably burn a hole through the barge
| trying to land on it.
|
| The eventual plan was to catch these with towers on
| modified oil rigs, then refuel and relaunch from there.
| But that has been put aside for now, there's so much land
| infrastructure to focus on.
| rtkwe wrote:
| AFAIK the Superheavy booster can't land on it's own and was
| never designed to. It needs (currently) the launch gantry
| to catch it in all the preview footage.
|
| It's always struck me as a very risky gamble on SpaceX's
| part to do that because you're risking your whole launch
| infrastructure if something goes wrong in those last
| seconds.
| indoordin0saur wrote:
| Yeah, it's mindblowing and seems reckless. Then again,
| they seem incredibly competent at everything they've done
| so far. It will certainly be a spectacle when/if they can
| pull it off!
| sbuttgereit wrote:
| Plan never was to retrieve this one. It was to simulate a
| landing, but over the ocean and then sink. That looks like it
| happened successfully... of course we'll need to wait to hear
| if it actually did things like hover in the right spot, etc.
| But looked pretty good; despite what looked like some issues
| with engine lights.
| arrowsmith wrote:
| Is there a better video then the one in the link? 90% of the
| screen in this one is taken up by the ocean and it's not
| clear at all what is happening.
| db48x wrote:
| It made a vertical "landing" burn and touched down on the
| surface of the ocean. Then it fell over, for the obvious
| reasons. How was that not clear?
| lupusreal wrote:
| I wonder what happens to it now. Does the USN scoop it up or
| do they wait for some other navy's submarine to start prying
| at that sweet ITAR hardware?
| creshal wrote:
| There isn't much to be gained from mangled, corroded
| remains of what used to be ITAR hardware at some point, so
| nobody really tried it before. All the Apollo engines e.g.
| are still where they were dropped (unless recovered by the
| US), because you'd really need to abduct a few of the
| designers or engineers involved to gain useful insights.
| lupusreal wrote:
| I think you're definitely wrong about that. It's
| generally believed that the US Navy puts a lot of effort
| into picking scraps of foreign missile tests up off the
| ocean floor, to see what they can learn. Hard to confirm
| from unclassified sources, but I believe it.
| natsucks wrote:
| Dear SpaceX: you guys are awesome.
| wilg wrote:
| The ocean landing is so cool. I believe they said that the next
| one they are going to try to land back at the tower? Seems
| plausible now.
| XorNot wrote:
| I think that might be a second IFT away personally: I imagine
| they'd like to see no engine relight issues on descent for at
| least one more mission first, since slamming it into Starbase
| would be a shame.
| chasd00 wrote:
| yeah one out on the way up and on the way down, that has to
| be very frustrating. It makes my issues with trying to get a
| stupid website working correctly seem easier hah.
| bluescrn wrote:
| It does seem like they could do with a more isolated launch
| site (with the tank farm in a huge concrete bunker) before
| trying to catch Super Heavy
| rtkwe wrote:
| They'd have to build the whole launch complex again which
| makes me doubt they'd do it.
| rtkwe wrote:
| You could however mock one up, either with just a big
| concrete pad or with a pad and tower, and the booster
| "return to launch site" and prove it can hover in a
| specific location long enough for the chopsticks to close
| to get a very low risk approximate test.
| bpodgursky wrote:
| They could keep the option open to splash down off the coast
| if the relight isn't acceptable. Default splash.
| rtkwe wrote:
| There were definitely some big chunks tossed out during that
| relight so I'd also be very surprised if they tried it during
| the next test flight.
|
| https://youtu.be/2G-L0u_L0qU?t=2665
| chasd00 wrote:
| I thought it was going to stay upright! that would have been very
| funny.
|
| 1 engine out on the way up, who would have thought getting 33
| full flow combustion rocket engines to startup at the same time
| would be so hard.. /s
| XorNot wrote:
| Honestly wondering if that's a Stage 0 issue: those outer
| engines get primed by the launch ring AFAIK.
| dotnet00 wrote:
| Yep, the outer ring is non-relightable and rely on the launch
| ring to light them. That said, part of the benefit of having
| so many engines is that you can tolerate a couple of
| failures. Similarly to how F9 is able to make orbit with an
| engine out. Still, agreed that they'll probably opt for one
| more water landing test first. Especially since the current
| license allows for multiple launches of this profile if the
| booster trajectory is fine.
| rtkwe wrote:
| I think the number is 3 so losing one immediately isn't
| great. They're much more reliable though than that first
| launch where so many failed.
| chasd00 wrote:
| oh interesting, i did not know that. Just before ignition
| there was a bottom up view of what looked like gaseous o2
| pouring out, was that the priming? They do that to get the
| pumps spinning to get pressure to the pre-burners so they can
| ignite and then get more power to turbo pumps to bring
| everything up to full power correct?
| sbuttgereit wrote:
| Could have been cool down, but also could have been the
| fire suppression system which uses (as I recall) both water
| and nitrogen to avoid combustible gas accumulation below
| the launch platform. That activates not too long before
| ignition, before the deluge.
| idkdotcom wrote:
| Anybody knows what the heck is going on with the broadcast? All I
| see is "awaiting acquisition of signal".
|
| Thank you in advance!
| cheerioty wrote:
| What a massive achievement. What a time to be alive.
| kemotep wrote:
| I am one of the people skeptical about Elon's specific claims of
| Starships abilities specifically about his Mars ambitions.
| Today's test, if the Starship reentry is as successful as the
| booster soft landing will be absolutely a great achievement and a
| 100% mission success. This demonstration keeps SpaceX on schedule
| for their part of the Artemis 3 mission.
|
| Keeping the mission parameters simpler (no "refueuling" or door
| bay demonstrations as far as I am aware, just orbital insert and
| reentry) definitely shows they are capable of the basic ideas of
| how they want Starship to work, especially for Starlink missions.
|
| The team should be proud.
| me_me_me wrote:
| Anything Mars is pure BS. Just anything and everything.
|
| The one way trip to mars is orders of magnitude more
| complicated than moon.
|
| Keeping people from being riddled with cancer in 6months trip
| is not trivial.
|
| Landing and then what you plan a flag and die?
| zpeti wrote:
| > Landing and then what you plan a flag and die?
|
| Pretty much, why do you think columbus set off? And he didn't
| even know if he'd actually find anything.
|
| I don't understand your attitude and people like you, human
| beings have been explorers forever, and seem to value
| exploring even over survival potentially. I'd say it's pretty
| obviously evolutionarily coded into us. Maybe not you, but
| into many people.
| simiones wrote:
| Columbus very very much didn't plan to die (though he very
| much would have if he didn't get lucky that there was a
| whole new continent there). His plan was to land in India,
| which he thought he would reach around the time he actually
| reached the new continent, because he had a completely
| wrong idea of how large the globe actually was (he alone
| had this wrong idea; the actual circumference of the globe
| was pretty well understood by this point).
|
| In general, human-based space exploration makes 0 sense. We
| have robots that can do everything a human in a life-
| support suit can, and don't need to carry 100 times their
| mass just to not day on the way there and back. Doing a few
| experiments with humans in space, like we do on the ISS, is
| indeed worth it for exploring the unknown unknowns of
| biology. Maybe some day, far in the future after we have
| explored Mars with many hundreds of robots, it will even
| make sense to send a human there. But until then, it's just
| a waste of everything.
| elsonrodriguez wrote:
| We will probably perform a human mission and return
| samples before a robot goes and picks up the Perseverance
| samples.
|
| We've been mars-capable since Apollo. It's a matter of
| will, which is a political function of cost, which is
| falling rapidly.
| me_me_me wrote:
| > We've been mars-capable since Apollo.
|
| serious citation needed!
|
| you cant make shit up. Apollo and saturn5 were nowhere
| near getting humans to mars. Not even close.
|
| It got us to moon with bare minimum. A weekend trip vs 6
| months trip.
|
| The scale up of needed resources is mind boggling. At
| every step. I mean pick any step and explain how Apollo
| could achieve it.
| rtkwe wrote:
| If you used multiple Saturn V rockets to launch and dock
| a multipart craft we could maybe have made it at least to
| orbit around Mars but landing would be a massively
| different story.
| elsonrodriguez wrote:
| You can read up on Mars Direct for more info.
|
| The gist of it is that the Saturn V has enough delta v to
| get to Mars, on the count of Mars having an atmosphere,
| which can be used for aerobraking.
|
| Given the capability of reaching Mars with a Saturn V,
| the rest of the plan revolved around using Apollo
| hardware, with some modification, for both transport and
| habitats(re-use of empty stages featured prominently).
|
| Ultimately even if we had hit some roadblock with martian
| soil or what have you, in an alternate timeline we could
| have at least sent uncrewed test flights to Mars and
| back.
| zpeti wrote:
| Ok great, you're definitely right, let's not do it.
|
| What now? Will Elon stop? If Elon doesn't stop, does that
| make you right?
| simiones wrote:
| I'm not saying it's impossible to send people to Mars and
| even bring them back. I'm saying there is no point
| whatsoever right now, at least no material or scientific
| purpose.
|
| Of course, building a "city" on Mars is _well_ beyond our
| capabilities, so that will either not be attempted at
| all, or it will fail. Maybe by 2124, but more likely
| 2524.
| avmich wrote:
| > I'm saying there is no point whatsoever right now, at
| least no material or scientific purpose.
|
| "No point" here means "no reasonable goal". In this case
| reasonability is subjective - somebody sees obvious
| reasons why Mars colony could be useful for humanity,
| somebody doesn't. Pro arguments are science, learning how
| to live off another planet, certain insurance against
| planet-wide cataclysms, general progress in space
| engineering. There are contra arguments as well, but
| which are more important is also subjective - we don't
| have hard data or commonly accepted facts which would
| solve this arguments one way or another, so, to some,
| it's natural to investigate the matter further...
| fwip wrote:
| It's difficult to imagine any cataclysm that would result
| in the Earth being less habitable (even for us squishy
| humans) than Mars already is.
| avmich wrote:
| It's really a matter of imagination :) . I learned about
| the existence of the Institute of the Problems of
| Asteroid Hazards long time ago, which suggested to me
| it's not a black-and-white type of question.
| keyringlight wrote:
| Also when we see a benefit to humans being on another
| planet, then spend a few missions before sending the mass
| of robots, prefab materials and equipment so there's
| habitats ready or nearly ready so we're not confined to
| whatever we have on one spaceship
| _glass wrote:
| Yeah, but it's in your text/comment. The logical thing is
| that it makes 0 sense. Columbus to not take the real
| circumference makes 0 sense. Let's go to Mars, start a
| civilization there. It'll be a lot of change for us
| humans. And only if you live somewhere you can really
| solve problems. Maybe it's a good plan against a nuclear
| war, whatever.
| simiones wrote:
| Columbus was just wrong, he was not motivated by some
| higher goal.
|
| And no, it's not a good plan against a nuclear war, Mars
| is far far far less hospitable than the Earth would be if
| we launched all of the nuclear weapons we have today.
| It's far more radioactive, dusty, cold, toxic, and
| everything.
| Ajay-p wrote:
| I think it is the indelible human nature, to go the
| furthest we can because it's there. At first I didn't agree
| with going to Mars, but if you think of it as the furthest
| place we know we can land on, and explore, then it makes
| sense. If we can safely land, and return from Mars, then it
| makes going even further a possibility.
| throw310822 wrote:
| Yes indeed. But still, nobody is building residential
| neighborhoods on the top of the Everest or in the middle
| of Antarctica. Exploring for the sake of it is indeed a
| human instinct. The idea that we should build settlements
| for people who would live there permanently is plain
| silly. We have the obsession of repeating the Age of
| Discovery- but people should get the difference between
| discovering the Americas, with their wealth of plants,
| animals, land and waters, and settling a planet where
| there isn't a sign of life, not even air to breathe.
| fwip wrote:
| And peoples.
| aperrien wrote:
| > But still, nobody is building residential neighborhoods
| on the top of the Everest or in the middle of Antarctica
|
| Nobody is permitted to build permanent habitats in either
| of those areas, even though they might be feasible.
| me_me_me wrote:
| > Pretty much, why do you think columbus set off? And he
| didn't even know if he'd actually find anything.
|
| hahahah
|
| Columbus set of because he wanted money, wealth for the
| crown. not because he was explorer.
|
| Columbus, Vasco Da Gama, Cortez et al were not dreamers but
| entrepreneurs.
|
| >> Landing and then what you plan a flag and die?
|
| Nobody (within reasonable definition of nobody) wants to go
| to Everest to die on top. Nobody wants to dive to Marianas
| trench to get crush to death.
|
| Who would go to Mars without a way back?
| trafficante wrote:
| >> Who would go to Mars without a way back?
|
| For a reasonable chance of being forever immortalized as
| one of the first humans to step foot on another planet?
|
| Granted, I myself will never get the opportunity so it's
| easy for me to say "oh hell yes I'd sign up in a
| heartbeat".
| rtkwe wrote:
| You're misremember the actual history of Columbus which
| makes sense it's been mistaught and mythologized for a very
| long time. Columbus thought he would reach Asia, both
| because there were reports from Marco Polo that Asia was
| much larger than it turned out to be and some mistakes
| about the size of the Earth. He didn't think he was sailing
| off into nothingness hoping to find land, he was hoping to
| find a better trade route to Asia than going around the
| Horn of Africa or overland.
| thegrim33 wrote:
| "Keeping people from being riddled with cancer in 6months
| trip is not trivial."
|
| It's pretty trivial. Put mass in between you and space. It's
| already been researched to death and we have many years worth
| of data about the subject.
| me_me_me wrote:
| > It's pretty trivial. Put mass in between you and space.
|
| Seems like you quite confident. So go on. Expand on that a
| bit... its trivial after all.
|
| You will teleport all that mass to ELO? Or use tracker beam
| to capture asteroid and space mine it to smelt shielding.
|
| I am super curious how you solve it trivially.
|
| edit: You downvote but dont explain this trivial solution.
| Am I asking too much? Calling someone out to explain
| something is offensive or something?
| phkahler wrote:
| We've had people in space for close to a year, so the
| trip to Mars shouldn't kill them. Once on mars they'll
| still need shielding. One option for shelter might be to
| bore some underground tunnels. A smallish electric tunnel
| boring machine that could fit in a starship might just be
| the ticket to building sheltered habitats on Mars. Funny
| that Elon already has another company that makes these.
| rtkwe wrote:
| The ISS is situated safely deep inside the Earth's
| magnetic sheath which protects you from a lot of high
| energy radiation though. You can use mass for shielding
| but you also desperately need that mass for cargo too and
| most cargo isn't going to be as dense as water which
| makes good shielding. The ISS has some fancier
| lightweight shielding but has issues with secondary
| radiation from particles hitting the metal skin of the
| modules which we'd expect to see on Starship too but
| higher since it'd be in interplanetary space instead of
| nicely close to Earth like the ISS.
| dole wrote:
| Already there as long as they're not filled with
| squatters.
|
| https://www.usgs.gov/news/caves-mars
| somenameforme wrote:
| Many basic materials, like water, make great shields _if_
| necessary. For Mars one plan is simply to organize the
| ship such that the water reserves can act as an radiation
| shield when necessary. You don 't need anything
| particularly massive or overly fancy.
| MeImCounting wrote:
| The problem is that paradoxically, thicker shields can
| cause higher doses of radiation due to secondary
| radiation production. Theres a balance there to
| minimizing primary and secondary dosage but you cant
| really get it below a certain threshold without some form
| of active shielding. Theres a lot of promising ideas for
| active shielding but they all require _alot_ of power.
| All this to say that someone on a trip to mars will
| indeed get a high dose and this is something that needs
| to be given thought. Its not an intractable problem but
| it is also not even close to being solved or trivial.
|
| Folks on Mars is still quite a ways away. Not impossible
| or pointless by any means but it will require significant
| advancements in many domains before we can really do it
| safely.
| _ph_ wrote:
| > It's already been researched to death
|
| Poor choice of words in this context :)
| malfist wrote:
| It's trivial in the sense that telling people trying to
| lose weight to just eat fewer calories is trivial.
|
| Simple idea, hard to execute.
| indoordin0saur wrote:
| Ramsar, Iran has similar levels of background radiation as
| being on the surface of Mars. And people live completely
| healthy long lives there. Chronic low-level radiation isn't
| nearly as bad as we once thought. It's acute high-level doses
| or consuming radioactive substances that you really need to
| worry about. Mars really won't be bad at all with some easily
| implemented mitigation measures.
| hackernudes wrote:
| The commenter is talking about the 6 month trip to Mars in
| space, not on the surface.
| indoordin0saur wrote:
| On that, if you orient the ship so that the rear is
| pointed directly at the sun (trivial to do once you're
| coasting) you'll have a hundred feet of liquid fuel and
| other solid material which will block the primary source
| of radiation (the sun).
| matthewpick wrote:
| I too, read Project Hail Mary (great book btw).
| backwardsmoo wrote:
| I was always led to believe that the primary source of
| radiation we need to worry about for space travel was
| Cosmic Radiation [1]. The shielding requirements for CR
| relative to solar radiation requires much more material,
| to protect from rays from every angle. [1]
| https://www.nasa.gov/missions/analog-field-testing/why-
| space...
| ceejayoz wrote:
| It's not _that_ different between the two; Mars lacks a
| magnetosphere, so the planet itself is left to block
| about half of what 'd hit you in interplanetary space.
| basil-rash wrote:
| If it's a one way trip, the cancer might end up being a
| blessing.
| mlindner wrote:
| > Anything Mars is pure BS. Just anything and everything.
|
| It is until it suddenly isn't. Just because it's very far out
| still and any timelines mentioned are wrong, doesn't make it
| 'pure BS'. It very much has been the goal of SpaceX from the
| day it was founded to encourage human travel to Mars, and
| we're getting closer every day.
| askvictor wrote:
| Even landing will be a huge problem. Think about the
| difficulties with the launch pad on Earth (engineering a
| launch pad for a heavy rocket is almost as hard as
| engineering the rocket itself). Well, to land a heavy rocket
| using retrofiring engines will require an engineered landing
| pad. Probably not quite as fancy as a launch pad, but you've
| got humans on the ship, so it will need to not bury itself
| completely, or melt the surface and weld itself to it, etc
| etc.
|
| And that's before you start to think about a launch pad for
| the return mission. So you'd probably need to have launch a
| series of robots and factories to build this in advance.
| Maybe, but we haven't even come close to robots building
| something of that magnitude on Earth, let alone a planet
| that's quite different.
|
| So, never say never, but it's a _long_ while off yet; long
| enough that social upheaval due to climate change will
| probably put a pause on any efforts for quite some time.
| ProfessorZoom wrote:
| i love hearing the spacex team cheer and roar together over being
| excited about a shared goal, it makes me feel good
| cletus wrote:
| So I'm excited to see this tech develop but I wonder how much of
| a market there really is for super-heavy lifters. I can't wait to
| see a future version where they land the various stages rather
| than just dumping them into the sea. The first Falcon Heavy
| launch was super impressive.
|
| SpaceX already has the Falcon Heavy and there have only been a
| handful of launches, primarily military.
|
| I guess the argument is it'll open up new opportunities but will
| this really replace the Falcon 9 workhorse, which at this point
| is I believe the most successful launch system in history?
|
| Won't someone make a fully reusable smaller launch vehicle
| that'll suit commercial needs?
| multimoon wrote:
| There's lots of things that are just too big and heavy and need
| launch vehicles like that.
|
| It might be overkill for satellites, but space stations and
| habitats need the payload capacity of something like this to
| become anything resembling economical.
| seydor wrote:
| how many of those things are there?
| dotnet00 wrote:
| Well, most prominently, thousands of Starlink satellites.
| dwaltrip wrote:
| There'll be a lot more once it is actually possible and
| economical to put it in space.
| throwthrowuknow wrote:
| A bit like asking how many 30 story buildings are there
| when we first started building modern steel and concrete
| buildings. How many cathedrals could we possibly need?
| ceejayoz wrote:
| This is such an odd argument; it's like asking how many
| airports there were in 1904.
| malfist wrote:
| If you build it, they will come
| avmich wrote:
| > how many of those things are there?
|
| Apollo program flew once in 6 months.
|
| If we're to build a Moon base, we're going to have at least
| this frequency of flights - really, I'd prefer to have a
| great margin on top of that, because Moon is much harder
| than LEO, and we might need more resiliency to safely
| explore.
|
| Each flight to the Moon will likely need to involve 10-20
| Starship flights (rough number) to LEO. So even if we're
| flying twice a year - and 6 month stay on the Moon right
| now looks like a pretty serious expedition - we need to
| have a Starship flight every ~10-15 days.
|
| So even for a robust Moon exploration program we need as
| many Starships per year as the whole world was launching
| rockets per year just some ~20 years ago.
| vl wrote:
| Mars launch window is every two years. It is very
| inefficient to launch at other times.
|
| As for moon, I'm surprised with the estimate you have
| provided. Apollo needed just one launch for each mission.
| Even if SpaceX will do orbital re-fueling, it's just two-
| three launches, why would you need more?
|
| BTW, the idea of getting heavy Starship to the moon and
| back is interesting, but at the end flying the vehicle
| optimized for re-entry far away and back is suboptimal.
| My prediction that they quickly will go to specialized
| LEO-LMO vehicles with LEO re-fueling.
| avmich wrote:
| > Even if SpaceX will do orbital re-fueling, it's just
| two-three launches, why would you need more?
|
| Wikipedia says Starship weights 120 ton empty and 1320
| ton fueled, plus 100 ton payload (approximate numbers).
| That means fuel weights 1200 ton. So to carry fuel to LEO
| to fuel up a Starship you need 1200 / 100 = 12 flights.
| You can change this number maybe 2 times into both
| directions, but I doubt you'll fuel Starship with just 2
| or 3 flights of tankers. Would be glad to err here.
| vl wrote:
| But you don't have to fuel it fully to go to the moon and
| back.
|
| It's a bit hard to compare to Apollo since Apollo dropped
| stages at every step of the process, but it seems they
| used 70 tons of fuel in the third state of Saturn V for
| original trans lunar injection of 45 ton Apollo. Apollo
| itself was 2/3 fuel. So it's ratio of 15 tons to 90 tons.
| I.e. 1/6.
| avmich wrote:
| > My prediction that they quickly will go to specialized
| LEO-LMO vehicles with LEO re-fueling.
|
| Two comments here. First, we assume now SpaceX is going
| to have Starship HLS - human landing system - which
| doesn't go back to Earth, doesn't have flaps or heat
| shield, and is going to be used between low Moon orbit
| (LMO) and Moon surface - maybe one roundtrip, maybe more.
| Yes, for each following roundtrip HLS needs to be
| refueled.
|
| Second, Musk mentioned "Moon base Alpha" in his talk.
| Having a serious Moon base makes it possible to produce
| some of propellants there. Oxygen is plentiful in the
| form of oxides on the Moon, and by mass it's 2/3 - 3/4 of
| the propellant load of the Starship, so it might be
| useful to produce it on the Moon.
| mavhc wrote:
| Has to be large to be reusable due to scaling factors.
|
| We can finally start sending useful amounts of things into
| space, millions of solar panels for one
| simiones wrote:
| How is putting solar in space more useful than putting it on
| Earth? You still have the problem of a capricious atmosphere
| between the source of the beams and the place where you need
| the electricity. Sure, you can slightly modulate and do a few
| things, but the extra energy is extraordinarily unlikely to
| make up the extra costs even if the transport costs were 0.
| throwthrowuknow wrote:
| It means you can have abundant power in space to run all
| kinds of hardware.
| simiones wrote:
| Then what is this hardware that you'd want to run in
| space, that needs more power than it can generate on its
| own?
| throwthrowuknow wrote:
| Anything that will fit in a 30ft diameter faring weighing
| less than 150 metric tonnes. I'd love to see commercial
| space stations that can house large numbers of people in
| comfortable cabins so it's more like a cruise ship than a
| submarine. Gotta power all those amenities somehow
| without diesel generators. But you could also put things
| like datacenters in orbit if the cost savings on power
| production made it worth while. Longer term you need a
| lot of power for resource extraction and processing and
| manufacturing. Would also make light sail propulsion of
| probes or deep space missions possible using lasers or
| beamed microwave power for ion thrusters so you don't
| have to sacrifice mass for nuclear and aren't constrained
| by how much wattage you can produce on board.
| mavhc wrote:
| Works 24/7 with 0 atmospheric reduction.
|
| You can send the power via microwaves so less interference,
| problem is the largish ground based capture device.
|
| Apparently $200/kg makes it economic, Starship is aiming
| for more like $2/kg
| adolph wrote:
| Bezos predicts data centers in sun synchronous orbit so
| they always have solar power. The audio is poor but I
| consider the below video an excellent listen because Bezos
| outlines his vision of the future which is very different
| from Musk's.
|
| https://youtu.be/Bn0jTLgyjAg?t=1124
| creshal wrote:
| FH had the problem that it had a comparatively small fairing
| compared with an upper stage that's "only" okay-ish for deep
| space insertions, so you can neither put really huge LEO
| payloads on it, nor can you give a deep space probe a really
| big kick stage to make up for the deficits of the upper stage.
|
| Starship solves all these issues: The upper stage is more fuel
| efficient, _and_ it has more room for really big payloads and
| /or kickstages.
|
| > Won't someone make a fully reusable smaller launch vehicle
| that'll suit commercial needs?
|
| Half of the people tried went bankrupt already due to F9: It is
| already _too big_ for most payloads, so it does a lot of
| rideshare missions that pool multiple smaller launches
| together. It 's very hard to compete with that.
|
| So even if, for some reason, commercial customers don't really
| want to exploit the capabilites of Starship (ignoring the fact
| that multiple did already), SpaceX can again offer ride shares
| at a larger scale for F9-class payloads.
| rtkwe wrote:
| Starship might honestly have a similar payload issue with the
| weird door design, the way it hinges up means you need a more
| complex release plan than most which just pop straight off
| the front of the booster.
|
| During the third test flight they also tested their weird
| side eject design for Starlink (or other flat pack style
| satellites) and the video looks like the door completely
| ripped itself apart.
| creshal wrote:
| The door design isn't final yet, there's no point in
| whining about it. They need tankers and landers for NASA
| contracts short term (neither of which require payload
| deployment), anything else is a nice to have that can be
| tinkered with on the side until it works.
| macintux wrote:
| > The door design isn't final yet, there's no point in
| whining about it.
|
| Your first clause is correct, the second is unnecessarily
| hostile.
| creshal wrote:
| I'm just getting really irritated by the amount of
| concern trolling surrounding SpaceX. Everything they do
| "must" have a gotcha, because clearly they _cannot_ be as
| far ahead of the competition as they daily prove to be.
| mrandish wrote:
| Yeah, I agree with you. Healthy skepticism is generally a
| good thing but now SpaceX has clearly demonstrated an
| unprecedented ability to solve a large number of insanely
| difficult problems. At some point, it becomes
| unreasonable to "yeah, but..." less difficult things like
| cargo doors.
| ordu wrote:
| _> Healthy skepticism is generally a good thing but now
| SpaceX has clearly demonstrated an unprecedented ability
| to solve a large number of insanely difficult problems._
|
| I'd add "again" into your sentence. They already did it
| before. Now they proved that they hadn't lost that
| ability yet.
| rtkwe wrote:
| The door is a major issue to using super heavy to deliver
| other payloads which is a goal long term and the need for
| a heat shield on the bottom makes it hard to make it
| fully open towards the front. Kind of need to have this
| fairly well sorted from the beginning because new designs
| mean new testing and certification which are expensive.
| creshal wrote:
| No. That's the whole point of SpaceX's development model,
| testing _done right_ is absurdly cheap.
| TkTech wrote:
| Yes, there won't be as many customers purchasing 150-200 tons
| of lift, but that's the point of "rideshares". All that really
| matters with space launches is the cost per kg and if it's
| capable of lifting multiple payloads into multiple orbits,
| it'll have 10-15 customers per lift, not one. The current model
| has a kind of pez-dispenser but for chucking out multiple
| payloads.
|
| There are purchasers for the full lift capacity too, like ISS
| modules and major telescopes.
| cletus wrote:
| If you think about this, it doesn't make a lot of sense
| because different satellites are going to sit in very
| different orbits.
|
| Geosynchronous satellites are an obvious case where
| satellites will collect into a limited number of orbits but
| they vary on what point of the Earth they sit over. Also
| getting to geostationary orbit takes a lot more fuel so the
| rocket has less room for payload than, say, low EArth orbit.
| I'm not sure one rocket can launch a geostationary satellite
| above the Americas and above Europe in the same mission.
|
| But you can't really launch a satellite in a polar orbit and
| an equatorial orbit in the same mission, for example.
| Likewise, how economic is it to deploy one at 150km and
| another at 250km?
|
| Starlink is a special case because it's a related
| constellation of satellites where a number of satellites are
| in the same orbit.
| TkTech wrote:
| The (unproven) target cost per kg of a re-usable starship,
| from even the most conservative source I could find, was
| under $300/kg[2]. The next cheapest, the Falcon Heavy, is
| around $2.3k/kg[1]. The cost difference is astronomical,
| and so low that it becomes viable send less payload and
| more orbital adjustment fuel, not to mention its (again,
| unproven) designed to be refueled in orbit. At that price,
| you could fly multiple refueling flights and still be under
| the cost of any other life provider.
|
| [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falcon_Heavy [2]:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX_Starship
| Majromax wrote:
| > I'm not sure one rocket can launch a geostationary
| satellite above the Americas and above Europe in the same
| mission.
|
| Easily. Moving within an orbit is a matter of fine
| adjustment. For example, any stationkeeping that expands
| the orbit slightly will cause the satellite to "fall back"
| over time. Geostationary satellites are the _best_ orbit
| for this, since every satellite in such an orbit
| essentially shares it with all others, differing only in
| position along the orbit.
| cletus wrote:
| I'm not sure this is true. if it were, there wouldn't be
| launch windows because any correction within a given
| orbit would be, as you call it, "a fine adjustment" yet
| we clearly do have launch windows.
|
| Also if you're in a geostationary orbit to deliver one
| payload you have to leave that orbit to get to another
| geostationary orbit because there are other satellites in
| your way.
| DarmokJalad1701 wrote:
| It is a fine positioning, which takes time. The launch
| windows get you to the right spot right away. Someone
| paying for a dedicated launch doesn't necessarily want to
| wait around to get their satellite operational. Someone
| launching for cheap on a rideshare might be willing to.
| krisoft wrote:
| > I'm not sure one rocket can launch a geostationary
| satellite above the Americas and above Europe in the same
| mission.
|
| It can. Geostationary satellites are a certain distance
| above the equator. If they adjust their orbit a tiny bit
| lower than that they start to drift east, if they adjust
| their orbit a tiny bit higher they start to drift west.
| This process is called "repositioning".
|
| Generally there is a tradeoff between how much fuel you
| spend on it and how fast the repositioning is done. So you
| can do it quick and then your sat will have less fuel for
| position keeping. Or you do it "slow" and then you
| preserved more fuel potentially extending the lifetime of
| your satellite.
|
| But these are all done with tiny bits of fuel (compared to
| the fuel needed to put the satellite up there in the first
| place) because the delta-v involved is very small.
| mjh2539 wrote:
| Eventually it will get cheap enough to where people can be
| buried on the (shot at the) moon.
| datameta wrote:
| Talked about this with my partner this week. Somebody is
| going to yeet their ashes into the regolith some day.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| It has already been attempted.
| https://www.axios.com/2024/01/08/peregrine-moon-lander-
| launc...
| datameta wrote:
| And indeed has been done too!
|
| "The human remains aboard the lander won't be the first
| on the moon, as ashes of Gene Shoemaker, the founder of
| astrogeology, were buried on the moon in the late 1990s
| by the Lunar Prospector."
| simiones wrote:
| I believe that is illegal in every country, putting human
| remains on foreign bodies.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| It's not, and there've already been (failed) attempts.
| https://www.axios.com/2024/01/08/peregrine-moon-lander-
| launc...
|
| > In addition to the NASA science experiments on board the
| Peregrine lander are cremated human remains and DNA
| collected by two private companies, Celestis and Elysium
| Space.
|
| > People hoping to memorialize their loved ones or
| colleagues pay the companies thousands to send a few grams
| of cremated ashes to the moon in metal capsules.
| lazysheepherd wrote:
| Payloads are designed according to available spacecraft
| capabilities. When this thing flies, market will form around it
| in no time.
| cletus wrote:
| I'm skeptical because satellites, like pretty much any
| technology, tend to get smaller over time. I remember reading
| about how it was profitable for someone to buy up 4
| geostationary slots and replace 4 satellites with 1 that was
| probably smaller than any of the 4 (because geostationary
| slots can be incredibly valuable).
|
| There are large bespoke payloads (eg JWST) but these are
| inherently so expensive anyway the launch vehicle costs
| almost don't matter.
|
| I'm not yet convinced there's a huge demand for super heavy
| payloads.
| throwthrowuknow wrote:
| They're expensive (and often delayed and over budget) in
| part due to the ridiculous demands of fitting everything in
| a small faring and reducing weight e.g. needing it to fold
| up and using expensive high strength low weight materials.
| Lessen those constraints and things get cheaper and easier
| to build with standard methods and materials.
| Karellen wrote:
| > There are large bespoke payloads (eg JWST) but these are
| inherently so expensive anyway the launch vehicle costs
| almost don't matter.
|
| If launch costs are going to be $250M, you need a budget of
| that order of magnitude to make a mission viable. At that
| point, you might was well spend anywhere from $50M to $1B
| on the payload because that's where your budget is. Or, to
| put it another way, only payloads with a $50M to $1B budget
| can afford to exist if the launch costs are of the order of
| $250M.
|
| However, if launch costs are of the order of $5M, then
| missions with much smaller budgets suddenly become
| economically viable. And there are a lot more potential
| missions out there with $10M budgets than there are
| missions with $500M budgets.
|
| Satellites get smaller not only because the tech gets
| smaller, but because launch costs/kg are so expensive, or
| so limited. Currently it's worth spending $10M to reduce
| your mass by 10%, if doing so means you can reduce your
| launch costs by $25M. Or, if doing so means you can double
| your onboard station-keeping fuel, and double the lifespan
| of the satellite.
|
| If launch costs are less and available upmass is higher,
| your budget for engineering to reduce your payload mass is
| less, and so is the reason to do so.
| dotnet00 wrote:
| There are a couple of great examples of this playing out
| in "reverse" with some missions that, at pre-F9 launch
| costs could only afford to be on a rideshare or small
| launcher and thus were expecting to have to deal with all
| sorts of limits, only to end up being able to afford a
| dedicated F9.
|
| There was IXPE, which has been the smallest dedicated
| payload launched by F9, which otherwise would've had to
| launch on a much smaller, air-launched pegasus rocket to
| get to the right inclination. I recall that they were
| able to simplify some aspects of the satellite deployment
| due to the roomier vehicle.
|
| There was another mission, maybe Psyche? where the
| original plan would've required the risk of testing a new
| kind of engine to get to its deep space destination, but
| being able to get a dedicated ride instead, that risk was
| eliminated, such that it was going to be able to get
| there even if the engine tests failed.
| gravescale wrote:
| Why is there's always an Akin's law?
|
| > 38. Capabilities drive requirements, regardless of what the
| systems engineering textbooks say.
|
| https://spacecraft.ssl.umd.edu/akins_laws.html
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| > in no time
|
| Sure, if a decade is "no time".
|
| 5 years from concept to prototype, another 5 years to
| operational and then another 5 years to full capacity.
|
| Starlink was super quick, but it's design started in 2014.
|
| Iterations on existing concepts like telecom or imaging will
| be quicker, but truly new fields like mining or tourism are
| at least a decade out before they're using substantial lift
| capacity.
| qsi wrote:
| The vision is that the cost per unit of mass to orbit will come
| down massively with Starship, once it's launching like the
| Falcon. That will open up hitherto unimaginable missions and
| markets. And customers. It's all about the the cost!
| simiones wrote:
| Like? What industry really needs things floating in space
| that are only constrained by cost to launch? I can see lots
| of science mission perhaps, but even that seems somewhat
| limited.
| tekla wrote:
| Internet
| dylan604 wrote:
| There have been tests of producing fiber optic cables
| (iirc) made in zeroG. There are other things as well that
| are way too cost prohibitive now, but might become viable
| opportunities with this type of capability.
| ctoth wrote:
| Asteroid mining.
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| Tourism is likely the next big market; cost is a major
| barrier.
| the8472 wrote:
| It's not only about cost per kg but also maximum payload
| mass. If you can build bigger satellites then you don't need
| to optimize for weight as hard and can use cheaper
| components/standardize. Which means both launch cost and sat
| costs will come down.
| _ph_ wrote:
| Or entirely new capabilities get developed. Look how long
| it took for the F9 Heavy to get any business because
| fitting payloads really only got planned and developed
| after it demonstrated its abilities.
|
| With the Starship, there will be single payloads of 100t or
| more - Elon is even talking about 200t in future versions.
| That is a total game changer. A station like the ISS could
| be set up much quicker. You could start designing real
| spaceships with e.g. ion drives. And a 100t payload might
| even cost less than currently a single F9 flight.
| tjpnz wrote:
| It will make space tourism viable for people who aren't super
| wealthy, an influencer or both.
| jwells89 wrote:
| For one, Starship+Superheavy will enable launching of large
| objects like space telescopes without forcing object in
| question to be engineered with expensive, delicate, failure-
| prone folding mechanisms (like the James Webb Space Telescope
| was). Just build the thing as big as it needs to be and launch
| it in its final form (aside from minor folding bits like solar
| panels).
|
| It could have similar impact on other scientific missions like
| rovers and probes. The ceiling for what's possible is much
| higher when you're not having to question the worth of every
| gram and square millimeter.
| cletus wrote:
| So JWST has (IIRC) a 6.5 meter mirror once deployed and yes,
| it was a challenge to develop that tech. Plus it added risk
| of failure. The Starship Super-heavy seems to have a max
| payload dimension of 9 meters. I imagine some buffer is
| required (ie it won't just allow a static 9 meter mirror) but
| I could be wrong.
|
| So that's larger but not _that_ much larger. Remember the
| JWST was a huge step up from Hubble 's 2.4 meter mirror.
|
| I expect NASA/ESA will take the opportunity to deploy even
| larger mirror by using the folding tech they've developed.
|
| But here's the main point: these kinds of flagship missions
| don't support and sustain a commercial launch system. There
| are only so many JWST 2.0s that you can and will build,
| launch and deploy. Your bread and butter is going to be
| commercial communications satellites and other than deploying
| large constellations like Starlink, I'm not sure what the
| market is here.
| Ajay-p wrote:
| Ever seen the incredible classic Moonraker? Larger satellites,
| larger rockets, it's about more at a lower cost. Bigger trucks,
| bigger ships, bigger lifters.
| nialv7 wrote:
| > Won't someone make a fully reusable smaller launch vehicle
| that'll suit commercial needs?
|
| Rocket Lab is doing that.
| jve wrote:
| Ask yourself what is the market for a super heavy lift vehicle
| that may cost 2M to launch... even if it turns out 20M, thats
| much cheaper whatever you get today and still order of
| magnitude cheaper than yesterdays options.
| somenameforme wrote:
| Here's where things get really counter-intuitive. If Starship
| lives up to even a fraction of its potential, it's likely
| Falcon 9 will be completely retired, because Starship will cost
| less to launch! The entire point of the Starship is complete
| and instantaneous reuse. The idea is to have it launching
| something up, landing right back into its launch pad slot, and
| then going again. The ridiculous cost saving potential is what
| makes all of this so much more revolutionary than most realize.
|
| This isn't just a new big rocket. This is the most powerful
| rocket ever built, with the goal of launching it for less than
| the cheapest rockets cost. The current goal is to aim for $10
| million within a few years, and then keep pushing it lower. For
| contrast, a Falcon 9 currently costs about $67 million to send
| 18 tons to orbit. Rocket Lab's Electron micro-rocket costs $7.5
| million to send 0.3 tons to orbit. Starship can deliver 150
| tons to orbit, a number that is planned to increase
| substantially.
|
| The thing about space is that the potential is infinite, but it
| only becomes possible to start doing stuff once you get launch
| costs _really_ low. Falcon 9 has brought launch costs down by
| orders of magnitude, but most people don 't even realize this
| because unless you're a giant telecoms company or something,
| then $2000/kg doesn't sound that different than $50,000/kg ---
| wayyyyy too expensive for anything. But now imagine a world
| where you could launch things for $10/kg. Suddenly the entire
| universe opens up to expansion and exploitation, and life as we
| know it would basically change overnight.
| simiones wrote:
| The second stage is basically gone, so it seems the new heat
| shield failed pretty badly, though still better than the previous
| one.
|
| Congrats on the booster, still an awesome achievement! Still a
| long way to go, unfortunately.
|
| Edit: seems I was premature in thinking that pieces melting off
| would mean it exploded. A partial success, ultimately!
| consumer451 wrote:
| They are still getting telemetry at this very moment, it looks
| like they landed it.
|
| My question: is the US Navy going to blow up this largely
| intact Starship, or are we just going to leave it on the floor
| of the Indian Ocean for another country to find?
|
| Actually, it's probably just floating there at this moment.
| simiones wrote:
| Given how many pieces were being burned away, the fact that
| the camera and telemetry survived is amazing.
| consumer451 wrote:
| Watching that fin burn away was crazy, I can't believe that
| they were still able to actuate it afterwards!
| moffkalast wrote:
| It just landed (though difficult to say how softly), with a
| partially melted front canard stil actuating lol. This thing is
| built.
| pixl97 wrote:
| You didn't hang around till second stage relight I see...
| somehow the smoking remains landed lightly in the ocean,
| rtkwe wrote:
| It actually made it through the belly flop and maybe made the
| landing burn which I also was not expecting. We got some better
| looks at the flap near the end and it had a huge chunk burned
| out but seems enough remained for it to keep working and keep
| the craft under control.
| pixl97 wrote:
| What the hell, half melted starship actually did the landing flip
| and hit the ocean slow!!!
|
| That was amazing!
| openmarmot wrote:
| yeah that was absolutely incredible to watch. Starships fin was
| melting away like the terminator robot in the smelting pot but
| it still did its job. Absolutely excited about the future of
| humanity and spaceflight!
| themgt wrote:
| That was seriously some of the most dramatic television I've
| ever watched. Video of Starship being melted/torn apart by
| supersonic plasma, the broadcast stream dying multiple times
| maybe due to ship destruction, then finally back online,
| peeking through the cracked camera to see the nearly destroyed
| grid fin STILL ACTUATING. The announcers laughing about the
| ship being "maybe held together by some nuts and bolts" and
| then it still pulled off the fucking landing burn!
|
| Absolutely wild and historic.
| mavhc wrote:
| You can tell the ship still exists because the telemetry
| still updates
| kevstev wrote:
| I have never rooted for a flap so hard, and likely never
| will. I am ready to buy flap merch. The energy of the SpaceX
| employees gave me goosebumps, this was great, it was hard not
| to get caught up in it- you know this is the culmination of
| years of hard work that is mostly theoretical until tests
| like these.
| mrandish wrote:
| Yes, Flappy McFlapFin for the win on that flight!
| fifilura wrote:
| I think the camera deserves a medal too!
| inglor_cz wrote:
| Life is really beautifully unpredictable. When I got up
| today (Central Europe, so several hours ahead of Texas), I
| never had an idea that a random steel flap is going to be
| my new superhero in mere hours.
|
| Its tenacity in the face of hellfire was epic.
| rtkwe wrote:
| Really wish the camera housing had held up to get a complete
| video of the fin being eaten away. I wonder if any of the
| other cameras got good footage too because they stayed on the
| camera with the obliterated lens for a long time which makes
| me think the others also fair pretty poorly. There wasn't
| much to see on the fin cam after the housing broke until
| right at touch down.
| avmich wrote:
| I'd really expect SpaceX to have more cameras, and to have
| some shielding - maybe so that cameras would get open
| shields at different points in flight, so they'd be
| protected before that. We only saw left-back flap, I
| suspect there's a camera looking also on right-back flap,
| maybe towards the engines section too. SpaceX is known to
| have rich telemetry, that would be awesome to see.
| rtkwe wrote:
| They had at least 3 (I think 4 but there were 3 visible
| at once) different camera's on the upper stage I think
| they also got destroyed though and the melting fin was
| the most interesting thing they could show so they just
| stayed with it.
|
| As neat as the idea of different shields is that's a
| whole extra layer of weight and controls for a non
| critical thing so I'm not surprised it doesn't happen.
| rtkwe wrote:
| I might have been thinking of one of the earlier shots
| that had some of the booster cameras. There's only ever
| two views of the upper stage.
| cududa wrote:
| Can you please explain how exactly you would heat shield
| a camera?
|
| Like, your suggestion is a box attached to the ship that
| changes its aerodynamic profile, with an actuator that
| can be a point of failure/ fly off and hit other critical
| instruments?
|
| They have lots of cameras. Were we watching the same
| video? The thing got absolutely melted and you're
| complaining that you didn't get a front row seat?
|
| 5 short years ago we would get a few frames from the
| camera on the barge where Falcon 9 landed and that seemed
| incredible.
|
| Just because they've accomplished something hard (mostly
| reliable cameras), doesn't mean it's suddenly easy and
| saying "why didn't you just put more cameras on it?"
| comes off as mind bendingly pedantic
| avmich wrote:
| No, I didn't complain about the front row seat :) calm
| down. And yes, SpaceX is the trend setter in the industry
| right now, there is no question that their approaches are
| more modern.
|
| Having said that, cameras today can be really small. Not
| a big box. Lenses or their protectors can be rather,
| well, protective (I'm thinking about moissanite here, but
| may be better solutions are possible). And I didn't see
| lots of cameras when Starship was going through
| atmosphere back - how many did you see? Yes, flap melted
| - but if, say, the ship had cameras all over
| (figuratively), you could switch to the one which works
| at the moment.
|
| All of that and more should be, and I'm sure is, rather
| obvious to SpaceX guys, just like some reasons why some
| of this can't or shouldn't be done - they are the
| professionals here most intricately familiar with the
| hardware and the landing conditions. We'll see how they
| choose to move forward soon.
| jiggawatts wrote:
| Sapphire optical windows are cheaper than you think, but
| in this case the problem seemed to be that the lens was
| splashed by molten metal that then solidified.
| sebzim4500 wrote:
| I think the only other external camera was on the fin that
| disintegrated, so I wouldn't have high hopes.
|
| They will have had internal cameras pointed at the
| structure looking for hot spots, and presumably those will
| have been fine
| zizee wrote:
| A friendly fyi just in case it wasn't a slip of the tongue:
| grid fins are only on the booster.
| codeulike wrote:
| Holy crap, you're right, about 1h45m in the video (about
| T+1hr04m mission time): camera is nearly out but you can see
| engines relight and flap moving at Starship goes below 1km
| altitude. It got through re-entry and did a soft-ish landing!
| edit: From the telemetry at the bottom of the screen you can
| also see that it righted itself to vertical just before hitting
| the water
|
| https://x.com/SpaceX/status/1798098040588480826
| datameta wrote:
| Absolutely beautiful! The hypersonic plasma flow was like no
| footage I've seen!
| bufferoverflow wrote:
| Their older fairing reentry plasma also looked really cool
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ke_QI7_UtA8
| rkagerer wrote:
| Does the fairing have attitude control thrusters used
| during descent, or is its orientation maintained passively
| due to its shape?
| consumer451 wrote:
| Do we have Navy assets nearby to destroy it, or is it just
| going to bob around in the Indian ocean? Or will we trigger the
| abort system now?
| georgeecollins wrote:
| Gulf of Mexico
| consumer451 wrote:
| This branch of the thread is about Starship, which landed
| intact in the Indian Ocean afaik.
| consumer451 wrote:
| I just found the area of the India Ocean via a post from
| Jonathan McDowell:
|
| https://bsky.app/profile/planet4589.bsky.social/post/3kub
| 775...
| datameta wrote:
| I believe they said they would trigger the abort on
| splashdown.
| krunck wrote:
| I assumed they would try to recover it. So much data could
| be gathered from the remains.
| mhandley wrote:
| The fact that it managed the flip and landing burn means the
| fuel tanks (i.e. most of the fuselage) must have suffered no
| burn-through, despite what happened to the front flap. They've
| obviously got some redesign needed on the thermal protection
| around the flap hinges, but broadly, the thermal protection
| system and aerodynamic control during reentry seem to have
| worked well enough. It's finally starting to feel like Starship
| could actually work!
| tocs3 wrote:
| One of the NSF commentators commented the fuel for the
| landing burn comes from the header tanks (little extra tanks
| for this kind of thing). Still, I would think if one of the
| closed up sections had a hole that it would cause all sorts
| of other troubles.
| mhandley wrote:
| Yes, that is correct - they need the header tanks to make
| sure that fuel is immediately available, not sloshing
| around the main tanks as the ship flips. Rockets really
| don't like sucking in vapour. I'm not sure if they're
| pressurized separately from the main tanks though - I would
| assume not, as that would be more complicated, but I could
| be completely wrong.
| notact wrote:
| Can someone explain why reentry must be so hellish? The energy
| gained during the rocket burn into orbit must be bled off
| during reentry, and that energy is enormous. However, why must
| reentry occur so quickly? It seems if the descent into the
| atmosphere was slower, the heat shield would be able to radiate
| the heat energy away more effectively, thus lowering skin
| temperatures, and significantly reducing the engineering
| challenge.
| tocs3 wrote:
| They use the atmosphere to help slow the ship down. It takes
| most of the tank of fuel to get up there and moving so fast.
| It would take most a tank to slow down. So, they would need
| about double the fuel plus some for landing.
|
| P.S. I have not done any of the math (I might be able to
| figure it out but it might take a week or two to figure it
| out).
|
| P.S.S : Maybe if they could refuel in space efficiently
| (asteroid mining?) it might be worth looking at but it will
| be a while before I would expect anything like that. It would
| just be the ship.
| bagels wrote:
| Its more than double.
| baq wrote:
| It's mind-boggingly more than double. The rocket equation
| takes no prisoners.
| notact wrote:
| I understand the atmosphere is used to slow the vehicle -
| it's basically free brakes that you don't have to carry
| with you. I never suggested using rockets in reverse to
| slow the vehicle down. What I am asking is, instead of
| effectively standing on the breaks and generating enormous
| amounts of friction in a short period of time, why can't
| the vehicle ease onto the breaks and spread the friction
| out over time so it can be more safely dissipated (via a
| more shallow reentry angle).
| bagels wrote:
| They already use a shallow angle. There's just a lot of
| energy involved. As soon as the drag kicks in, the angle
| gets steeper and steeper on its own as the drag slows the
| craft down.
| notact wrote:
| I guess this sorta makes sense - the slightest slowdown
| starts to deorbit the vehicle, at which point a
| particular descent rate becomes difficult to maintain?
| phkahler wrote:
| See lift to drag ratio. To get enough lift to maintain
| altitude you need a certain amount of drag. At those
| speeds the drag causes the heating while still not
| producing enough lift to stay up.
| gitfan86 wrote:
| If you had extremely big light weight wings it would
| help, but the materials that can do that don't do well
| when heated up
| panick21_ wrote:
| You also run into issues of what do with the wings on the
| way up. You can't just put huge ass wings on that thing.
| You likely need it deploy-able.
|
| And then the wings would also survive the flip and
| vertical landing. Or if you want to land like a plane,
| then you also need landing gear.
|
| So there is really no way to add wings without adding a
| huge amount of mass. You are building a completely new
| thing.
|
| There are some super cool mega-space planes designed in
| the 70s (I think). But of course these were never built
| or even tested. I remember they had some overlapping
| metal heat shields and a big ass delta wing. They would
| also start vertically and use air breathing engines.
| ta1243 wrote:
| The shallower the angle the less energy you lose, but you
| are still losing altitude.
|
| At some point you lose enough energy that your speed
| drops enough that your altitude starts dropping
| significantly. You can't lose the energy without losing
| altitude, and once you lose altitude you start losing
| energy whether you like it or not
|
| I think what you are wondering is "can I stay in the thin
| atmosphere bleeding X Joules of energy for 50 minutes
| until most of the energy has gone rather than entering
| more steeply and bleeding 10X Joules for 5 minutes"
|
| However once you lose energy, you lose your altitude, and
| as you lose altitude the atmosphere thickens and you
| start very quickly losing 5X, 10X, 20X joules every
| minute.
| yalue wrote:
| The velocity of a spacecraft in low earth orbit is over
| 15,000 miles per hour. Smashing into the atmosphere is
| perhaps the most fuel- and cost-efficient way to slow down to
| a speed at which landing is possible.
| 93po wrote:
| It doesn't really answer the question though. Why not
| descend slower so that the 15k MPH isn't meeting so much
| air? And bleed it off much slower so there is less heat
| verzali wrote:
| It's hard to do that. What you suggest would mean losing
| all your orbital speed before you hit the thicker layers
| of the atmosphere. You could probably do that, but you'd
| use a lot of fuel to decelerate. And then you are still
| being accelerated downwards by gravity, so you need
| something to counter that, which means you need to burn
| fuel all the way down. All that fuel adds a lot of
| weight, which cuts down on the amount of useful stuff you
| can take with you.
| avmich wrote:
| Ellipse, circle, parabola, hyperbola - all so called
| conic sections - are orbital trajectories; when you
| entering the atmosphere (which means you're technically
| not on a strictly circular orbit), you're initially
| following the part of that curve which is closest to the
| planet.
|
| The curve is such that if you don't lose enough speed,
| you're going to start moving way from the planet.
|
| If you're still on parabola (technically you never are,
| it's infinitely thin case between ellipse and hyperbola,
| physically not really possible) or hyperbola, you're not
| comping back - so if you need to get to the planet, you
| have to be on elliptical trajectory.
|
| Even if you're on ellipse, you don't want that ellipse to
| be too elongated - e.g. the elliptical trajectory from
| the Earth to the Moon, which is rather close to parabolic
| one, takes about 4 days one way. You don't want to spend
| that much time when you're landing, so you need to lose
| enough of speed in the atmosphere. Which means you need
| to brake relatively aggressively.
|
| This means there's a "reentry corridor" - not too steep,
| not too shallow, and the spacecraft needs to survive the
| reentry, and going from the Moon is harder than going
| from LEO because coming from the Moon the spacecraft has
| higher initial speed entering the atmosphere. It's still
| possible to balance various approaches, but you can't
| have (correction: it must be particularly hard to
| have...) zero fuel use, relatively fast landing (without
| long ellipses between reentries), speedy planet approach
| and low heating at the same time.
| garaetjjte wrote:
| If you are coming at higher speed eg. from the moon, then
| it's possible to slow down to get reentry equivalent to low
| earth orbit one. But you can't really slow down much more
| because you would just plunge into atmosphere at steeper
| angle. Some vehicles utilize skip reentry trajectories, where
| it does high altitude pass through atmosphere and then goes
| in second time: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-
| ballistic_atmospheric_entr...
| bagels wrote:
| It would take a tremendous amount of fuel to do what you're
| imagining, probably to the point of making the craft
| impossible to build with current technology.
|
| Your orbit would have to be high enough to do a burn to
| cancel your orbital velocity (lots of fuel), then you have to
| burn against gravity for a slow vertical descent (lots of
| fuel). The rocket equation says... you'll need a larger craft
| and more fuel to carry the extra fuel in to orbit. It gets
| pretty out of hand.
|
| Instead of using fuel to slow down, spacecraft make a small
| burn to have the orbit intersect the atmosphere, and then use
| drag instead of fuel to slow down.
| notact wrote:
| I'm not sure why people are misunderstanding my question as
| "Why not bring more fuel and burn the rockets in reverse".
| I am simply asking: why not reenter the atmosphere at a
| shallower angle, spreading the atmospheric braking friction
| over a longer period of time, which I'd expect would allow
| more time for the accumulated heat to radiate away before
| it becomes catastrophic.
| pixl97 wrote:
| Gravity is one you are still being pulled down.
|
| The other is at too shallow of angle at high speed you
| bounce off like skipping a stone off the surface of a
| lake.
| mrandish wrote:
| I'm no expert but I think reentering at a shallower angle
| results in "bouncing off" the atmosphere. So, even if you
| did it multiple times like a rock skipping on water,
| you'd have to have extra fuel to counter the bounce "up"
| and go back down for each skip. Thus, back to the same
| "bring more fuel/weight to orbit" problem.
| rtkwe wrote:
| Any heat you see is velocity lost to the craft will
| eventually hit the atmosphere again. I think the main
| reason is that the skip and the second reentry is way
| less predictable than doing the descent in a single pass
| so for predictability of landing agencies much prefer to
| do a harder more controlled reentry.
| jaggederest wrote:
| What makes you think they aren't already taking the
| shallowest possible descent?
|
| Once you start touching the atmosphere, it very quickly
| becomes deterministic. There are a limited number of
| descent profiles that actually get you to the ground, and
| believe it or not, starship as far as I can tell is
| actually taking a "shallow angle" and spreading the
| atmospheric braking friction over the largest possible
| time. A steeper entry would melt every conceivable
| material
| saratogacx wrote:
| Scott Manley has a good video looking at this question and
| goes into a bit of a dive into the physics and engineering
| issues involved
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5kl2mm96Jkk
| CarVac wrote:
| To get a gentler reentry, you need a greater lift-to-drag
| ratio.
|
| To have a better hypersonic lift-to-drag ratio you need
| significantly more wing area, which is dead weight (and drag
| and a control problem) on the way up.
| avhon1 wrote:
| Exactly! Re-entry is the transition from orbital dynamics
| to aerodynamics. If you want the transition from orbit to
| flight to occur at a lower speed, then you need to be able
| to produce lift equal to your weight at that speed, at the
| altitude where you will hit that speed.
| panick21_ wrote:
| That's one of the reason why space planes were preferred
| for so long. Bleeding of speed while skipping along the
| atmosphere and then coming in for landing.
| jtriangle wrote:
| If you want to do slow star-trek style landings, you need
| star-trek level tech. Namely, propulsion tech that doesn't
| exist.
|
| That doesn't mean that it's impossible, just means that it'd
| require things that don't exist yet.
|
| Worth mentioning that, additionally, reentry heating isn't a
| huge problem, and you're not going to create new propulsion
| tech to counter it, you're just going to make better heat
| tiles. What you need new propulsion tech for is doing expanse
| type stuff, where you can accelerate for months at 1G so you
| essentially have artificial gravity and can get places
| extremely fast. If you're into sci-fi, the show/books "The
| Expanse" goes into what that looks like in practice fairly
| well.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| A positive way of framing it is that atmospheric recently
| is free. If the Earth didn't have an atmosphere it would
| take just as big a velocity change to land as it does to
| get into orbit and getting to be orbit would be as hard as
| an interplanetary flight. It's worse than it sounds because
| the rocket equation has a logarithm in it...
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsiolkovsky_rocket_equation
|
| double the Dv means you square the mass ratio. The space
| shuttle had a mass ratio of about 16, a mass ratio of 256
| would be absolutely insane.
|
| You get this velocity change at the cost of dealing with
| the heat and all but a tiny fraction of that heat ends up
| immediately in the atmosphere.
| thehappypm wrote:
| No atmosphere would be much easier.
|
| There's enough energy in a Tesla battery to for the Tesla
| to reach escape velocity. If you could simply drive at
| max acceleration (and the car didn't fall apart, and the
| tires continued to have grip, and a million other reasons
| why this is impossible) eventually you'd reach escape
| velocity and still have some percentage left.
|
| In a more realistic sense, a long railgun type system
| would be very practical in a no-atmosphere environment,
| and then not being subject to the tyranny of the rocket
| equation, you could launch whatever you wanted. Enough
| fuel to decelerate is no problem.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| Seems challenging to get decelerated by a rail gun, coil
| gun or such at the destination. You get one chance to get
| caught by it otherwise you crash and die.
| Denvercoder9 wrote:
| > There's enough energy in a Tesla battery to for the
| Tesla to reach escape velocity.
|
| No, it's not even remotely close. A Model S weighs around
| 2000kg and has a battery of 100 kWh. That's [?]((100
| kWh)/(1/2*2000kg)) = 600m/s of delta-v. Escape velocity
| for Earth is 11.2km/s, almost a factor 20 more.
| chasd00 wrote:
| Slowing down from Mach 20-something takes a huge amount of
| energy in its own right.
| dotnet00 wrote:
| You need to balance peak heating and heating duration.
| Shallower reentry means lower peak heating, but higher
| heating duration. Steeper entry means higher peak heating,
| but lower heating duration.
|
| The heat shield material can handle a certain amount of heat
| and a certain maximum temperature before it starts to ablate
| away, so you're forced to thread the regime where both
| variables are within its tolerances.
| friend_and_foe wrote:
| So, speed of reentry is directly a consequence of surface
| area (or energy expended by fuel to counter, in the case of
| the booster which does not use friction with the atmosphere
| to slow down) of one side. You'll produce the same amount of
| heat (and sound, light, but let's keep the model simple so we
| can understand better) no matter how fast you come in and no
| matter how wide your surface area is (assuming the same
| mass), it's just the thermal properties of the material and
| the surrounding environment dictate how quickly that heat
| dissipates, and the surface area determines how distributed
| the heat is, and the speed it's entering determines how
| quickly the heat is generated.
|
| So to slow down more evenly and have less heat at the max
| point per square inch, you need wider surface area (or you
| need to expend fuel firing engines in the opposite direction
| of travel, what both parts do at the end to slow to 0, and a
| problem due to the rocket equation, fuel has mass and so
| increases the amount of kinetic energy you must dissipate),
| and that means more mass and more engineering and a bigger
| vehicle. The goal ultimately is of course optimizing all
| these variables.
| robertsdionne wrote:
| You are not riding the atmosphere down, the atmosphere is
| riding you.
| magicalhippo wrote:
| I tried what you said in the most realistic simulator we
| have, Kerbal Space Program, assuming like you that a gentler
| approach would be better. And I learned that no, that most
| certainly is not better.
|
| What you need to protect is on the inside of the heat shield.
| Heat conduction is based on temperature difference and
| time[1] and the conduction of the material[2]. Since the heat
| shield tiles have a very low thermal conductivity, it takes a
| long time for significant heat to pass through.
|
| Yes a more aggressive approach will lead to a greater
| temperature, but it'll also provide significantly greater
| drag, thus the the extreme temperatures only exist for a
| relatively short amount of time, and thus it doesn't have
| time to pass through the tiles and heat up the inside.
|
| A very shallow approach has significantly less drag, and you
| spend significantly longer slowing down. The temperatures
| might be a fair bit less, but the much longer time spent
| decelerating means it has a chance to make it through the
| heat shield tiles.
|
| It's not entirely unlike iron meteorites which can still be
| cold when landing, as they only spend a brief time in the
| atmosphere[3] and thus don't have time to heat up.
|
| [1]:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_equation#Interpretation
|
| [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_conductivity_and_r
| esis...
|
| [3]:
| https://earthscience.stackexchange.com/questions/127/what-
| te...
| ActorNightly wrote:
| What happens if you do a geostationary deorbit? I.e
| straight down.
| pricechild wrote:
| You still need to reduce your horizontal velocity. (For
| "geo-stationary", think "really high and really, really
| fast")
|
| Either you do that with atmospheric drag, or a huge
| amount of fuel. The weight of heat protection is much
| lower and more efficient than the fuel option.
| ReptileMan wrote:
| The guy that designed the flaps of the main starship needs a
| raise. The thing was glowing red hot, almost disassembled and
| still functioned and they managed to do a second splashdown.
| Amazing work from the Spacex team.
| andruby wrote:
| The fact that the flap survived is amazing design indeed!
|
| I wouldn't assume it's 1 guy though, probably a team, or a
| woman for that matter.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| Holy shit, that was incredible.
|
| One of the fins burned half away and still managed to control for
| a soft splashdown. https://imgur.com/a/zNXUjbt
| malfist wrote:
| It was crazy seeing that thing show back up in the camera
| XorNot wrote:
| Sometimes the test works and it's exciting, sometimes it goes
| wrong and suddenly I'm hugely invested in the drama of a
| stainless steel aerodynamic control surface.
| Laremere wrote:
| The other external view we got was mounted on one of the other
| flaps, and we didn't get footage from it even after the camera
| we did get was obscured. So some amount of damage/overheating
| on multiple fins is likely.
| mulmen wrote:
| I was wondering how much video bandwidth they have. Do they
| have all angles streaming all the time and they switch in the
| booth or can they only capture one video feed at a time? With
| that fin melting they may have just elected to stay focused
| on it.
| HPsquared wrote:
| I don't know how they had any communications at all,
| doesn't the plasma surrounding the craft act as a Faraday
| cage?
|
| Edit: supposedly the Space Shuttle could also communicate
| with satellites during re-entry. There's a hole in the
| plasma behind the spacecraft and, Starship being large,
| must leave a bigger opening for the signals to pass
| through.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communications_blackout#Spa
| cec...
|
| > Until the creation of the Tracking and Data Relay
| Satellite System (TDRSS), the Space Shuttle endured a
| 30-minute blackout. The TDRSS allowed the Shuttle to
| communicate by relay with a Tracking and Data Relay
| Satellite during re-entry, through a "hole" in the
| ionized air envelope at the tail end of the craft,
| created by the Shuttle's shape.
|
| Starlink's just much higher bandwidth.
| neverrroot wrote:
| Incredible. And still, the guy who makes things possible again
| and again gets a lot of poison thrown his way.
|
| Human nature at work. On both sides.
| thebiglebrewski wrote:
| How about the other 10K+ people who did the actual work to make
| this happen? Or is it all about that one guy? :)
| neverrroot wrote:
| It's not his work alone, but indeed it's all about one guy.
| yareal wrote:
| Gwynne Shotwell isn't a guy, though...
| admissionsguy wrote:
| If not for Musk, they would be working at Boeing, Blue Origin
| and such...
| shamefulkiwi wrote:
| Would they? If not for the audacious decision to attempt to
| land an orbital booster with F9 and the public display of
| the failures that led to the inspirational success of the
| first landing, how many of those brilliant young engineers
| would have decided to pursue a career in a boring and tired
| space industry?
| madaxe_again wrote:
| Those 10k+ people would all be doing something different if
| it weren't for that one guy - so ultimately, yes.
| krapp wrote:
| How do you know? It's entirely feasible someone other than
| Elon Musk could have founded a similar company with similar
| goals, the same or equivalent competent staff, and had the
| same success. There is no unique magic sauce that Elon
| brings to the table here, other than money.
| madaxe_again wrote:
| It's feasible - but nobody did, and nobody has.
|
| I get the dislike - his politics are pretty reprehensible
| - but it's hard to argue with the results his businesses
| generally achieve.
|
| What he brings to the table apart from money is an
| absolutely bull-headed madcap drive to make the
| infeasible into reality in the face of a chorus of
| naysayers, and that, I respect.
| krapp wrote:
| I'm not arguing against the results his businesses
| achieve, I'm arguing against the incessant drive for hero
| worship which ascribes those successes to him and him
| alone.
|
| >What he brings to the table apart from money is an
| absolutely bull-headed madcap drive to make the
| infeasible into reality in the face of a chorus of
| naysayers, and that, I respect.
|
| This is exactly my point. Elon didn't _make_ the
| infeasible into reality, other people did, and could have
| done without him. And if his behavior at Twitter and
| Tesla are any indication, his "absolutely bull-headed
| madcap drive" has to be managed and worked around lest it
| do more harm than good.
| neverrroot wrote:
| It's indeed his success primarily, it's thanks to him
| primarily. And for that there's a huge amount of praise
| that he has earned.
|
| But it's not due to him alone, but also due to the people
| that he managed to attract, hire and keep. Due to the
| people he passed the responsibility onto, and just as
| much due to the processes and philosophy he put in place.
| Alone having the people doesn't guarantee success on this
| scale, you need the magic stuff, and the vision.
|
| Nobody else did what he has done today with Starship or
| in the past with enough other things. And when it comes
| to costs and capabilities of Starship, nobody is even
| close. Not even close.
| cubefox wrote:
| The reason SpaceX is so much more successful than Blue
| Origin is Elon Musk. I'm sure Jeff Bezos is a great CEO,
| but Musk is clearly much better.
|
| It can't be merely "other people" who are responsible for
| the success of SpaceX, because Blue Origin (and other
| rocket companies like ULA) also have "other people", but
| are not anywhere near as successful.
| synecdoche wrote:
| Feasible but not likely.
| HPsquared wrote:
| Depends on your opinion on the "Great Man Theory of
| History".
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_man_theory
| dotnet00 wrote:
| This argument is not convincing, considering that there
| were other private space companies, some with far more
| funding and far more support from NASA at their inception
| (eg Kistler Aerospace) which never got anywhere. That's
| why the joke when Musk expressed his desire to get into
| aerospace was "how do you become a millionaire in
| aerospace? Start as a billionaire".
|
| Musk had, at the very least, the ability to pick good
| talent, enough commitment to try for one last launch even
| after burning through most of his fortune with no results
| and the ability to establish good culture for an R&D
| focused company. This is relatively well documented in
| books about the early days of SpaceX.
|
| Theoretically someone else could have made the exact same
| decisions as him, but by that same logic Einstein should
| not be praised for his contributions to science because
| someone else could've theoretically had the same
| realizations.
| elevatedastalt wrote:
| That noise you keep hearing at night? It's the sound of
| goalposts being constantly shifted.
| tssva wrote:
| Getting things done and being a shitty human being aren't
| mutually exclusive.
| neverrroot wrote:
| One of the humans who did the most for humankind. Being
| called names.
|
| Shame.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| George Washington did a lot of important good, while being
| a slaveowner.
|
| Galileo was notorious for being a douche.
|
| The world is complex. I'm a huge SpaceX fan, and a big
| critic of Musk's handling of Twitter. It's OK to hold these
| opinions simultaneously.
| hagbard_c wrote:
| Odd, I think Musk is doing quite well with 'Twitter'. It
| is a very good thing that the ideological censorship
| which the _Ancienne Regime_ at Twitter was guilty of has
| been lifted, especially in the light of the oncoming
| elections in Europe /the US and the current mess in
| Brazil etc. It is clear as daylight that those who are
| ideologically aligned with the previous regime at Twitter
| are annoyed that their playground has been opened to 'the
| other side' but this is one of the few areas where
| _diversity_ really matters: diversity of opinion. You don
| 't have to like what the opposition says but you should
| allow them to speak, no matter whether you're on the
| 'progressive' or 'conservative' or 'libertarian' or
| whatever other side you can think of.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| > You don't have to like what the opposition says but you
| should allow them to speak...
|
| Then we're in a agreement that Musk's arbitrary bans
| (https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2023/04/elon-musk-
| twitter-st... / https://theintercept.com/2022/11/29/elon-
| musk-twitter-andy-n...) are bad. I'm glad!
| hagbard_c wrote:
| <soapbox>
|
| Musk is not perfect but compared to the way the previous
| leadership handled the ban hammer he's doing quite well.
| I hope he ends up leaving TwiXXer in capable hands who
| take freedom of expression seriously and who are on the
| level with regard to policies and supposed violations of
| such. Who do not allow themselves to be used by
| governments to circumvent their own laws with regard to
| the suppression of speech. Who follow the law of the
| land, not the feelings of a few noisy extremists. I'd
| rather have people like Musk focus on projects like
| SpaceX but I see it as a net positive that he wrested
| control of 'the public square' away from ideologues who
| had turned it into the 'Red Square'. May it end up like
| (my possibly idealised idea of) Speaker's Corner in Hyde
| Park where anyone can put down a soapbox, climb on it and
| say what's on his mind as long as he stays within the
| bounds set by _law_. If what he says makes sense he 'll
| mostly get applause plus a few boos and jeers, it it
| doesn't he'll get pelted with rotten tomatoes.
|
| </soapbox>
| dotnet00 wrote:
| Most Musk, Bezos, Zuckerberg equivalents were similarly
| divisive and controversial figures while they were alive or
| active (say, Ford). That only went away when the people who
| experienced them aged out.
|
| Steve Jobs is a nice, more recent example, being just about
| old enough to remember his death, I know he was very much
| an asshole with many strongly held opinions most people
| would've disliked, but a current teenager is probably only
| aware that he was the visionary founder of Apple.
|
| Bill Gates is also an interesting example, he was notorious
| for being cutthroat back in his day, but since he has
| mostly just been doing charity stuff since retirement, that
| reputation is fading.
| snapplebobapple wrote:
| I cant think of any modern examples of people that did a
| rapid wealth ascent that dont also have a substantial number
| of haters (modern being after the low hanging fruit of basic
| service provision as a path to wealth being filled in the 2
| decades after ww2, leaving only disruption through much
| better business process paths to wealth ascent). So i think
| being viewed as a shitty human by a subset of people and
| getting things done probablly are mutually exclusive.
| admissionsguy wrote:
| Wait for the so called "mainstream media" headlines: _Another
| Starship lost after falling into the Indian Ocean_
| neverrroot wrote:
| I'm not sure about the headline, but they will for sure play
| this milestone in the history of humankind down.
| ReptileMan wrote:
| Also lost the booster and emitted copious amounts of CO2
| thanzex wrote:
| Seeing the fin still moving and keeping attitude despite being
| chewed trough was amazing
| mulmen wrote:
| As soon as I saw heat on that fin I knew it was over. Then it
| was... fine? Clearly I'm not a rocket scientist.
| HPsquared wrote:
| It was like that on the earlier test launch with the flying
| concrete and several failed engines.
| mechhacker wrote:
| The upper stage re entering was the craziest thing I've seen
| live. Can't believe it was burning thru the flap and still had a
| gentle splash down.
| pixl97 wrote:
| Yea, when I saw the flap melt I had wrote it off and was
| waiting for the explosion. The explosion never came and I was
| awestruck.
| delichon wrote:
| Watching pieces of the ship melt off, but then seeing it make a
| relatively controlled landing, is perversely confidence building.
| If it can survive that kind of damage on a control surface maybe
| it's a quite robust craft.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| Yeah, and what a useful recording for "where do we buff up the
| heat protection?"
| liamkinne wrote:
| Survivorship bias!
| gibolt wrote:
| Hopefully the takeaway is something straightforward, like
| thicker shielding in one area and not a big redesign of the
| flaps
| dotnet00 wrote:
| They already do have some pretty significant flap
| redesigns in the pipeline. Slightly smaller and placed
| slightly farther back from the centerline.
| Maxion wrote:
| Thats... not quite survivorship bias.
| neuronexmachina wrote:
| Yeah, survivorship bias doesn't quite apply if there's
| real-time telemetry. ;)
| amoss wrote:
| Part of the build up said that they had deliberately weakened
| / thinned some of the tiles in order to test what the
| tolerance was. It seems that they must have gotten some
| incredible data about the mode of failure.
| convery wrote:
| That was for the base of the ship, so that they could add
| more sensors.
| idontwantthis wrote:
| It looked like plasma got between the flap and the body. I
| wonder if that means something broke/melted to allow that, or
| if the design just allowed it accidentally.
| dotnet00 wrote:
| They've been concerned about burn through in that area for
| a while, but they didn't get to test it before now to
| understand how it'd perform in reality. IIRC they were even
| calling out that they were surprised that the temperature
| readings in other parts were in good agreement with the
| simulations, which is probably indicative of the limited
| confidence they had for that part.
| lsaferite wrote:
| It looked like the flap was starting to glow internally in
| the middle, right before the burn-through on the hinge
| point. I wonder if it maybe had a lost tile on the other
| side that evolved into the burn-through we saw in the
| video.
| dylan604 wrote:
| I imagine this is what happened to Columbia
| api wrote:
| I've said for a while that we won't be ready for the real space
| age until you can have a rusty pickup in space.
|
| What I mean by that is that we have it down well enough that
| the tech exceeds tolerances and can degrade gracefully.
|
| You see this in some sci-fi where there are rust bucket old
| ships that work.
| ryandvm wrote:
| You have to be careful how much wisdom you glean from
| fiction.
|
| The sheer hostility of space kind of precludes the "she's a
| good ol' ship" trope. When your door doesn't shut on your
| pickup, you can bang on it a bit. When your door doesn't shut
| on your spacecraft, you've got a ship full of corpses that
| look like a blob fish brought up from the Marianas Trench.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| That's more an argument for redundant doors than perfect
| doors, though.
| HPsquared wrote:
| The oceans are very hostile to humans too, really not much
| less than space, and a lot of ocean-going vessels are rusty
| hulks.
| panick21_ wrote:
| A lot of ocean going vessels were literally made from
| wood that was continuously rotting.
| flerchin wrote:
| A naked human can survive the ocean for 3 orders of
| magnitude longer than they can survive space.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| Calm ocean, yes.
|
| The real problem are the storms, as a naked human you
| won't survive in an ocean storm any longer than in
| vacuum.
|
| At least you are going to space in a sophisticated vessel
| full of redundant life support systems. People sailed the
| high seas in old, barely seaworthy wooden ships
| dangerously overloaded with cargo, which didn't even have
| a reliable way of determining where precisely they were,
| because no one could tell longitude at sea before the
| mid-1700s or so.
| foota wrote:
| Didn't they die by the droves?
| inglor_cz wrote:
| In fact, they did. Being a sailor was about the most
| dangerous profession that you could choose, including the
| military.
|
| Until today, some jobs at sea are pretty dangerous. Being
| a fisherman in Alaskan waters is much more risky than
| being an (American, not Russian) soldier.
|
| People still do it. Which convinces me that people will
| risk their lives going to Mars, and more than a few of
| them. Some people are just built that way.
| api wrote:
| I think the definition of workable old ship is going to be
| different in space, but ultimately you can expand workable
| envelope for it by over-engineering critical parts. That's
| kind of what I mean. Right now we don't quite know how to
| do that efficiently or effectively.
|
| Still remember that at one time moving faster than 15mph
| was considered insane and pushed the limits of materials
| and vehicle design. Same for high altitude flight, McMurdo
| station, deep ocean diving, etc.
|
| In a lot of ways very deep ocean diving is harder than
| space. The pressure differentials are a lot worse.
|
| The hard part about space is really launch and delta-V
| budgets.
| solarkraft wrote:
| No, that's the point: It's a significant technological
| advancement for some unreliability/imprecision to _not_
| mean critical failure.
| somenameforme wrote:
| Everything's relative. People a century ago would probably
| have felt uncomfortable at the idea of DIYing a multi ton
| vehicle being accelerated by a extremely high power pistons
| pounding up and down thanks to creating a controlled
| explosion inside a tight little box, that you can then hop
| in and cruise around at 80MPH+. And indeed if something
| goes critically wrong, you're dead. We just work to reduce
| the number of ways that things can go critically wrong.
| hot_gril wrote:
| I think a century or longer ago, they wouldn't care. It
| was already pretty easy to fall off a horse and die.
| 7952 wrote:
| Although space flight tends to have long periods of time
| where the craft can just coast. You have time to work the
| problem. A complete system failure could be worse on a
| plane in cloud than a spacecraft in orbit.
| Zigurd wrote:
| That doesn't work IRL. Space is insanely unforgiving. While
| Starship has a vastly better chance than STS had of achieving
| rapid reusability, you really can't launch with a rocket that
| isn't up to spec because adding robustness adds weight.
| Unlike a multi-stage expendable rocket, Starship uses all its
| fuel to get to orbit. To go to the moon or beyond, it
| requires refueling by several other Starships that also just
| get to orbit. If the payload spec can't be met you need even
| more refueling launches. If reusability isn't rapid, you need
| a starship for each refueling launch. If cost goals are not
| met, the cost difference vs expendable rockets shrinks.
| Everything has to go right.
| bombcar wrote:
| There's a difference between getting _to_ space and being
| _in_ space.
|
| A true space age will involve many ships that never enter
| atmosphere or land.
| foota wrote:
| Won't you still need to enter and exit gravity wells? I
| guess you never lose the energy from launch though if you
| stay moving, so maybe it's easier?
| aeternum wrote:
| The vast majority of the weight however is oxidizer which
| you could theoretically eliminate since the rocket is
| surrounded with various amounts of oxygen depending on
| launch trajectory.
|
| A scramjet power first stage for example could overcome the
| tyranny of the rocket equation (at least on earth).
| echoangle wrote:
| I would compare it to Airplanes, and there are not a lot of
| rust-bucket airplanes, because just like in space, failures
| can lead to unavoidable death very quickly. That's not
| comparable to a reliable pickup
| hot_gril wrote:
| We also won't be ready for the sci-fi-style space age in real
| life unless there's a use case for it. Imagine Star Wars
| except there's no life on any reachable planets, what would
| they even do with their spaceships?
|
| And Star Trek doesn't have "good old rust-bucket" ships in
| it, but the whole premise of it is that they found a way to
| move faster than the speed of light.
| merek wrote:
| Agree, a successful mission needn't be a perfect mission
| golol wrote:
| Exactly. Everyone was worried about reentry, but perhaps more
| concerning than the question of whether the headshield tiles
| work was the question how well the material below can handle
| failures. Now we know significant failures of tiles do not have
| to lead to mission loss.
| cryptonector wrote:
| Failure of the tanks would undoubtedly have been
| catastrophic. Partial failure of a flight control surface
| proved survivable.
| mathsmath wrote:
| It's also worth noting part of the craft flew
| (intentionally) without heat tiles, and another part with
| thinner tiles.
|
| They're gathering a ton of data to make it robust! Many of
| these engineers built Falcon 9, and I have a pretty high
| degree of confidence they'll shake out the issues. SpaceX
| operates _very_ differently from traditional aerospace, so
| we 'll likely see many more issues come up before Starship
| is human rated.
| rkagerer wrote:
| Two tiles were intentionally left out, in a non-critical
| area (the anticipated damage was still bad for re-
| usability, but tolerable for re-entry) and instrumented
| with sensors to collect data like just how hot it gets.
| dotnet00 wrote:
| Reminiscent of the booster in IFT-1 just doing spins in the
| air, refusing to break up even after the flight termination
| system was triggered. Completely unlike KSP with its wobbly
| rockets.
| aeternum wrote:
| A KSP with more realistic physics would just be amazing.
| Unfortunately from the KSP2 vids it looks like they instead
| doubled-down on wobblyness.
| mulmen wrote:
| With a successful propulsive splashdown will the ship be
| recovered for examination?
| ceejayoz wrote:
| Only one of the SpaceX Falcon 9 boosters stayed afloat after a
| gentle touchdown (they weren't quite sure what to do with it,
| with a persistent rumor the Air Force used it for target
| practice); there's usually enough propellant left to make it
| kaboom when it tips into the water. I'd also imagine they
| didn't put a boat close to the landing target this time around
| for safety reasons.
|
| I'm hoping they had a reconnaisance aircraft out there, though.
| voidUpdate wrote:
| Well, I guess we finally know kinda what it looked like from the
| inside of Columbia... ouch. I did think the colours looked like
| some kind of metal fire, but I didn't think _that_ was going to
| happen
| mckirk wrote:
| 'The little flap that could'...
|
| Watching the stream and hearing the excitement of the whole team
| in the background honestly made me tear up a little.
| Congratulations!
| matthewpick wrote:
| A bit more exciting than my standard day at the office!
| Production outage is about as spicy as it gets...
| jrs235 wrote:
| Reminds me of playing Lunar Lander[1] back in the day.
|
| [1]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_Lander_(video_game_genre...
| gibolt wrote:
| Here is a reminder that the only other rocket that can survive
| re-entry is Falcon 9.
|
| Now we have the 2nd!
| mulmen wrote:
| Falcon 9 cannot survive re-entry. The first stage doesn't reach
| orbit and the second is expended. The Dragon capsule can
| survive re-entry but that's not unique among spacecraft.
| namlem wrote:
| The Falcon 9 second stage doesn't survive reentry and the
| booster only needs to get through a partial reentry at much
| slower velocity.
| gibolt wrote:
| It is not fully reusable. But partial reentry is reentry,
| something no other rocket had been able to do.
| mulmen wrote:
| You can't re-enter if you never leave. If Falcon 9
| "survives re-entry" then so do minivans.
|
| Falcon 9 is an impressive and revolutionary vehicle. We
| don't need to overstate the capabilities.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| The Falcon 9 first stage goes past the Karman line and
| does a reentry burn. It's not reentering from _orbit_ ,
| but it is from _space_.
| mulmen wrote:
| So does New Shepard. If crossing the Karman line is your
| definition of re-entry then the Falcon 9 isn't unique.
|
| What Starship is doing is completely different from what
| Falcon 9 is doing. Falcon 9 is not the only other sub-
| orbital booster to propulsively land. Starship isn't the
| only other spacecraft to survive hypersonic re-entry.
| It's not even unique in being reusable.
|
| Starship and Falcon 9 are incredible achievements. It's
| simply not necessary to lie about their capabilities.
| HPsquared wrote:
| I guess the Space Shuttle did have main engines (and
| orbital maneuvering engines) but it's notable that they
| weren't expected to relight afterwards.
| mulmen wrote:
| Why is that one implementation detail notable? Is it also
| notable that Starship's main engines are unused at
| launch?
|
| I realize re-lighitng main engines is novel but it isn't
| _unique_ and even if it was that doesn 't make the up-
| thread claims any less inaccurate.
|
| Shuttle was a reusable orbital vehicle with multi-day
| endurance capable of hypersonic reentry. Falcon 9 is not
| that.
| HPsquared wrote:
| I guess it implies that all major systems are still fully
| operational after re-entry. The engines still work etc.
| So in theory you could just refuel and send it back up.
| astral_drama wrote:
| That's a nice big ladder for getting to the heavens and back.
| ironyman wrote:
| Some highlights:
|
| Booster splashdown at about T+7:30, Ship engine cutoff at 151 km:
| https://x.com/NASASpaceflight/status/1798700946983358535
|
| Starship splashdown in Indian Ocean, mostly intact, with landing
| burn just before splashdown; landing burn:
| https://x.com/DJSnM/status/1798715665916014715
|
| Full flight profile:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX_Starship_integrated_fli...
| mhandley wrote:
| Also at T+57:20 or so, watching the front flap start to come
| apart: https://x.com/SpaceX/status/1798098040588480826
| toephu2 wrote:
| How do they recover the booster? It doesn't sink to the bottom
| of the sea?
| dave78 wrote:
| They are not recovering it this time. Once they demonstrate
| that it can achieve a controlled "landing" at sea, then they
| will move on to trying to land it back at the launch site.
| jantissler wrote:
| Man, that will be spectacular.
| krustyburger wrote:
| That flap showed the kind of tenacity and courage under (literal)
| fire we need in our leadership. I hope it will consider entering
| the presidential race.
| HPsquared wrote:
| Funnily enough, the Simpsons did it:
|
| https://simpsons.fandom.com/wiki/Inanimate_carbon_rod
| krustyburger wrote:
| I'll show you inanimate!
| HPsquared wrote:
| Just noticed the name.
| nomilk wrote:
| Full video: https://twitter.com/SpaceX/status/1798689697184764071
|
| Various shades of plasma visible during re-entry:
|
| Reddish/orange: 1h 26m
|
| Blue/purple: 1h 28m
|
| White/blue: 1h 34m
|
| Yellow: 1h 37m.
|
| The forward flap visible in camera view starts melting away
| around 1h 38m (until basically the end of coverage).
|
| (the two stunning minutes from 1h 27m to 1h 29m were the
| highlight for me)
| xnx wrote:
| Big respect to that camera lens cover. The drama of seeing the
| camera get obscured and then have the cover crack was peak.
| mlindner wrote:
| Everyone said it cracked, but it didn't look like cracking to
| me. It looked like carbon vapor deposition/metal vapor
| deposition.
| xnx wrote:
| That's how it started, but there was a specific moment where
| it suddenly cracked. Further deposition and debris may have
| obscured that crack later.
| mlindner wrote:
| Yeah on re-watch I saw the moment it cracked, but it didn't
| really damage the view much as the crack was relatively
| small. It was only the cover rather than the lens itself.
| Probably from the flash cooling after how hot it got.
| Ajay-p wrote:
| Imagine being the engineer who designed that flap.. Wow. What an
| incredible spectacle.
| chilling wrote:
| It was such a well-done engineering drama! Everyone had already
| written off the main hero, but he returns from the dead.
| okdood64 wrote:
| Absolutely incredible how we were able to see live, on-board
| video of virtually the complete flight and re-entry with the help
| of Starlink.
| jmward01 wrote:
| This is the 'more awesome' side of the world we need a lot more
| of.
| doctoboggan wrote:
| Despite Elon's recent turn into divisive politics, I am still
| very happy he is pushing spacex development forward. I love
| watching these livestreams, and always look forward to Scott
| Manley's analysis a day or two later.
| doctoboggan wrote:
| Looks like Scott Manley has been working hard and was able to
| release his video very quickly:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8m0TY6i1Kuo
| jlangenauer wrote:
| A seriously incredible achievement, and I'm sure everyone at
| SpaceX is very happy with what they've done right now.
|
| I was absolutely certain it wasn't going to make it when I saw
| chunks breaking off the flap.
| namlem wrote:
| I'm sure NASA is thrilled as well, since this is great news for
| the Artemis program.
| bradley13 wrote:
| I hope they have footage from ships. It would be great to see
| actual videos of the soft landings.
|
| One dumb question I have: There was no payload, and yet starship
| used essentially all of its fuel to achieve this trajectory. How
| does this compute?
| dirkc wrote:
| I don't think they fueled it up all the way. But I do thing the
| booster and maybe also starship itself is a little heavier than
| they plan to have it at the end.
|
| *update* if you check the video just before launch (39:54), you
| can see that the fuel bars for both the booster and the ship is
| not 100% full: https://twitter.com/i/broadcasts/1OwxWYzDXjWGQ
| inglor_cz wrote:
| Not a dumb question, they simply didn't fill the rocket
| completely up.
| HPsquared wrote:
| That thing is built like a tank, in more ways than one. (Get it?
| Tank?)
| mrandish wrote:
| Just watched the recorded live stream and... wow! What a show.
| Incredible views of a test that appears to have successfully
| achieved all potential objectives through reentry, rotation
| maneuver, relight, landing burn and upright water landing in the
| Indian Ocean.
|
| The only unfortunate bit was some debris cracking the camera lens
| during the last part of reentry so the view for spectators was
| occluded but SpaceX maintained their live data feed all the way
| through, which is the important part. As they say, for these
| tests "the data is the payload."
| salesynerd wrote:
| The real-time view of the re-entry through the plasma was
| phenomenal!
| world2vec wrote:
| Seeing the Starship's flap visibly burning in the reentry heat
| and still survive well enough to move around and get to a
| splashdown was just incredible. Amazing progress in just four
| test flights.
| baq wrote:
| yeah the thing did a soft splashdown with a leaking flap, the
| fluid in question being molten stainless steel.
|
| this was hard sci-fi, streamed live for everyone to see.
| marmakoide wrote:
| That flap is already a legend, kept at it even mangled by hot
| plasma, crazy accelerations and pressures, spitting molten
| steel at the camera. What a role model, the little flap that
| could.
| thelittleone wrote:
| Someone on the Everyday Astronaut live stream named it "Flap
| Norris".
| somenameforme wrote:
| I wonder what the odds are that some deep sea salvage group
| is moving to collect that this very instant (or being
| contracted for such). If Starship lives up to even a
| fraction of its potential, that [not so] little guy is
| going to have some serious historicity.
| hindsightbias wrote:
| What makes you think it sank? If the hull is intact it
| might be floating. Given the flap damage, it's probably
| leaking though.
| Andrew_nenakhov wrote:
| It looked like the booster exploded when it submerged
| after soft splashdown. There was some fire and the stream
| cut off. Maybe that's what happened to the ship too.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| IIRC the intent was to sink it using explosives (Flight
| Termination System) in case it stays afloat after
| landing.
| dotnet00 wrote:
| They had a plane flying in the area shortly after
| landing, probably to drop some marker for a group to come
| around and recover the black box. I think they've stopped
| bothering with preserving the test articles though, in
| the process of test driven development, they're going to
| have so many "historic" test articles, that it's kind of
| pointless.
| BurningFrog wrote:
| I'd be really surprised if they didn't have a GPS in the
| ship.
|
| Which should mean they know where it "landed".
| dotnet00 wrote:
| They still would've been in position to put down a
| marker, since they had to be prepared for that before
| they knew they'd be able to maintain telemetry down to
| the water, and if they're already in position, it doesn't
| hurt to place the marker anyway.
| a_paddy wrote:
| And the coordinates of where it "landed" are less
| important when it's drifting in the middle of the ocean.
| thelittleone wrote:
| Not sure if I heard the commentary correctly, but I
| believe they said the video uplink was via starlink. If
| so, they should have the precise location.
| amelius wrote:
| Makes me want to play flappy bird.
| gpm wrote:
| Also lost an engine at startup and another engine during the
| landing burn on the booster. Judging by the debris maybe a
| third engine during landing burn shutdown (or maybe that was
| the second engine just exploding a bit more).
|
| Still a successful test, still a lot of work to do before they
| can meet their promises for Artemis (which require >10 back to
| back launches for one lunar mission...)
| thelittleone wrote:
| True. Heard SpaceX commentator today saying they plan 4
| launch towers in near term. Hopefully the major issues that
| lead to FAA investigations are resolved and the cadence can
| ramp up. Probably won't be long before Starship's launch as
| often as Falcon 9s today.
| DylanSp wrote:
| The FAA's license authorization for this flight mentioned
| that they wouldn't require a full mishap investigation
| unless someone got hurt, property got damaged, or debris
| fell outside the designated areas, so the turnaround for
| approving the next flight should be pretty quick.
| https://x.com/SciGuySpace/status/1798089390708687106 has
| the full text.
| dividedbyzero wrote:
| > SpaceX won a multibillion-dollar contract from the agency to
| use Starship as a crewed lunar lander as part of NASA's Artemis
| moon program
|
| So four people would arrive at Lunar orbit in an Orion, board a
| huge prepositioned Starship, and fly that down to the surface?
| nyokodo wrote:
| > So four people would arrive at Lunar orbit in an Orion, board
| a huge prepositioned Starship, and fly that down to the
| surface?
|
| That's the idea, yes. [1]
|
| 1.
| https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/1/13/20...
| shmoe wrote:
| Because the SLS can't do anything close to what the Saturn V
| did, yup.
| dotnet00 wrote:
| Unfortunately Orion is stupidly heavy.
| Rebelgecko wrote:
| Is that in addition to taking a pit stop at the lunar
| gateway?
| nyokodo wrote:
| That's where they transition from one to the other, yeah.
| jlmorton wrote:
| The eventual plan is to build an orbiting space station, the
| Lunar Gateway. Astronauts will then launch on SLS/Orion, which
| will perform a Trans Lunar Injection.
|
| However, before that, a Starship will be launched into LEO.
| There will then be something like 17 (the actual number is not
| clear, but it is a lot) Starship tankers that will launch to
| re-fuel the original Starship.
|
| The Starship then does a Trans Lunar Injection. The Orion docks
| with the Lunar Gateway, Starship docks with the Lunar Gateway,
| the astronauts transition to Starship, which does a propulsive
| landing on the moon.
| cubefox wrote:
| More precisely, those ~17 ships will fill a propellant depot
| ship, and once that is done, they can launch the HLS ship,
| that will then be filled with propellant from the propellant
| depot.
| pants2 wrote:
| Seeing Live HD video of the outside of the ship on reentry is
| just incredible. Here's a link to the timestamp:
| https://youtu.be/8VESowgMbjA?t=35093
| idontwantthis wrote:
| Wow I actually got served the Elon crypto deepfake scam as an
| ad on that video.
| adolph wrote:
| Elon crypto deepfake scam is the new rick-roll
| idontwantthis wrote:
| Except Google is making money on it too by serving the ads.
| andruby wrote:
| It's crazy that Google doesn't prevent those videos. It
| can't be that hard to detect and block.
| MeImCounting wrote:
| Theyre incentivized to serve any and all ads, if they are
| scammy illegal or otherwise google doesnt care because
| theyre insulated from any potential consequences.
|
| I marvel every time I see people on HN talking about
| being served ads on youtube videos or elsewhere. You
| would think here of all places adblock would be standard.
| dave78 wrote:
| The difference in presentation between the launch of Starliner
| yesterday vs Starship today was stark.
|
| For most of the Starliner launch, all we got to see was a Windows
| desktop showing some basic animations that look like they're from
| the late 90s and unexplained telemetry with about a 1Hz update
| rate. Perhaps interesting to hardcore space nerds but not very
| exciting for John and Jane Public. Also, the "timeline" at the
| bottom of the webcast looked broken most of the time since it
| only updated when a couple major milestones occurred. Boeing even
| tried to address some of this in the press conference stating
| that video of the crew riding up to the station will be available
| after they download it post-flight (which, at that point, hardly
| anyone will care about).
|
| Meanwhile, Starship had nearly-continuous live HD-quality feeds
| of video from multiple cameras from both the booster and
| spacecraft including all the way through reentry, producing some
| absolutely incredible views, some of which have probably never
| been seen before. Also, SpaceX puts very user-friendly telemetry
| displays on the bottom of their webcast that are easy to
| understand and seemingly have high update rates.
|
| Maybe in the end it doesn't matter. On the other hand, if you
| were a potential future aerospace engineer, I think the Starship
| launch this week was the one that would have created most of the
| interest and enthusiasm. SpaceX is winning in the public-
| relations battle and a lot of that is because they've put focus
| and attention into their webcasts for a long time. Old space
| needs to learn a thing or 2 from them.
| shmoe wrote:
| We did get a lot of those Starlink views on flight 3 before the
| ship was destroyed, but yes -- definitely first time we've ever
| gotten to visualize re-entry live. Crazy stuff.
|
| They are so far ahead if you're paying attention it's not even
| funny.
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| > hardcore space nerds
|
| Can confirm. My coworkers are hardcore space nerds and datavis
| nerds, and they took over our #random slack channel yesterday
| really digging the Starliner visuals.
| baq wrote:
| flap leaking steel in almost-space is definitely a first for
| live TV.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| Stainless steel is one helluva material.
|
| Already the first launch of Starship a year ago showed how tough
| the rocket was. It was out of control, spinning wildly in high
| winds, and yet it still held together and had to be blown up
| remotely. Anything made of aluminium or aluminium alloys would
| have been torn to tiny pieces by the sheer aerodynamic force
| alone.
|
| And now, the melting flap that was still capable of actuation and
| steering the ship towards a successful landing...
|
| One day, this sturdiness is going to save some lives.
| ericcumbee wrote:
| >Already the first launch of Starship a year ago showed how
| tough the rocket was. >It was out of control, spinning wildly
| in high winds, and yet it still held >together and had to be
| blown up remotely.
|
| and even when they blew it up, it just laughed until it
| depressurized enough to break up.
| ein0p wrote:
| How did Boeing fall so far behind?
| baq wrote:
| cost-plus.
| yayitswei wrote:
| Booster executed a successful landing burn and had a soft
| splashdown. Starship survived reentry, did the flip and landing
| burn, and splashed down. There was visible damage to the flaps.
| toephu2 wrote:
| How do they recover the booster? After the soft splashdown
| isn't it going to sink to the bottom of the sea? Or they have
| nets or something?
| jantissler wrote:
| They don't right now, because they are still testing. They
| can't risk bringing the booster or the ship back over land,
| because they don't know yet how well and precise they can
| steer and maneuver them. When they've figured that out, we
| will see the first landing of a super heavy booster for
| recovery and that will be pretty spectacular I bet ...
| mjamesaustin wrote:
| Booster is designed to land directly on the launch mount, but
| that won't be attempted until they are confident it won't
| blow up the whole base.
|
| Starship is designed to land on any flat surface (earth,
| moon, mars) but again they won't attempt ground landing until
| they feel confident in the design.
| liuliu wrote:
| How come the stream not cutting off during re-entry "blackout"
| period? Is it because the re-entry is low / slow enough so no
| thick plasma layer, or because it is streamed through StarLink
| which happens to be on the other side of the plasma layer?
| the_duke wrote:
| They indeed started streaming through Starlink on the third
| (previous) test flight.
| DarmokJalad1701 wrote:
| There is a "hole" in the plasma in the wake of the re-entering
| Starship due to its shape. They used Starlink terminals to beam
| the data up to Starlink satellites. Starlink also uses higher
| frequency signals than older systems and that also helps.
| spdif899 wrote:
| I'm not sure if they have shared details but I assume this
| leaves a relatively narrow window over the ship that they
| need to put a satellite, which would be really cool to see
| more on logistically.
|
| Like how do you move a satellite or satellites to a certain
| area, at the right time, avoiding other space objects, and
| then keep them there for 45 minutes during the mission or at
| least 15 minutes during the blackout zone. I'm sure it takes
| a huge amount of planning, math, coordination with various
| entities....
| abulman wrote:
| They might do some minor optimisation in terms of when the
| fly to keep some coverage but ...
|
| > As of May 2024, there are 6,078 Starlink satellites in
| orbit, of which 6,006 are working -
| https://www.space.com/spacex-starlink-satellites.html
| moffkalast wrote:
| Starship is so absurdly massive that the plasma doesn't fully
| encompass it, and can get the starlink signal through to the
| satellites above.
| hulitu wrote:
| > Super Heavy has splashed down in The Gulf of Mexico
|
| I see a lot of newspeak used with Musk's firm. Is this
| intentional ?
| elevatedastalt wrote:
| What?
|
| Which word in that is Newspeak? Unlike other companies Tesla
| and SpaceX usually use very straight-speak.
| avmich wrote:
| The 4th Starship test flight was absolutely great test, which
| really pushed the state of the art - both in general (after all,
| Starship 2nd stage is 1.5-2 times heavier - when empty - than a
| Space Shuttle returning from orbit) and specifically for
| developing the Starship as a robust launch system.
|
| Regarding return from orbital (and above) velocities - there was
| a flight ( https://space.skyrocket.de/doc_sdat/irdt-fregat.htm )
| in 2000 when the payload was returning from orbit using
| inflatable heat shield, which would tolerate much less of heat
| flow than Starship. The approach was to dissipate a lot of energy
| in high enough atmosphere, so that while temperature (measure of
| gas molecules kinetic energy) is high, the heat flow (amount of
| gas molecules with that kind of high energy to the ship) is low
| and so heat effects on the ship are also low.
|
| Another approach was used e.g. in Zond-6 flight (
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zond_6 ) when the spacecraft
| entered the atmosphere, shed some speed and got heated, then
| ballistically exited the dense atmosphere layers, cooled down a
| bit, then got into atmosphere again with less speed and so less
| heat load.
|
| The point is we still have some tricks up our sleeve to fight the
| problems of atmospheric reentry.
| thelittleone wrote:
| As an ex-army guy who never misses a launch, I was both surprised
| and delighted to choke up and almost cry while witnessing today's
| historical launch. Thank you SpaceX for reconnecting me with my
| inner child.
|
| Thank you Flap Norris.
| mlindner wrote:
| For some reason the main hacker news article keeps getting
| deleted and merged with this one. The link should be changed to:
| https://x.com/SpaceX/status/1798715759193096245
|
| Also the title is wrong for the subject. It should be about
| Starship, not Super Heavy. I don't know who did this but you did
| it wrong.
| dotnet00 wrote:
| It was posted when the booster had just landed and the ship was
| still coasting. I guess the mods figure the topic should be
| contained here for being the first related post.
| mlindner wrote:
| But there was already a growing post with the other link,
| they forcibly merged that one into this one rather than the
| reverse.
| vl wrote:
| There is a full launch video on the SpaceX website:
| https://www.spacex.com/launches/mission/?missionId=starship-...
| szundi wrote:
| All enthusiast people, just buy the Kerbal Space Program (1, not
| the 2), play it through. Then play it without reloading saves.
| That's something!!
|
| And then, install the RP-1 mod and get blown away.
|
| I have 2k hours in this game, worth every of those hours.
| itslennysfault wrote:
| After a TON of trial and error I made it to orbit. I decided
| that was "beating the game" for me and never played it again.
| Ain't nobody got time for a moon mission.
| philomath_mn wrote:
| I always get chills hearing the live viewing audience just losing
| their minds during these recordings. Must be an incredible
| feeling to be a part of such a massive accomplishment.
| riffic wrote:
| for context which is often lacking in posts like this, this is
| what a _Super Heavy_ is (I had to look it up lol because it 's
| not really obvious from the title alone):
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX_Super_Heavy
|
| meta but it absolutely would not kill anyone to include some
| context in your submissions here.
| mlindner wrote:
| There WAS more context, but some moderator of hacker news
| merged in the post with more context into this link that was
| posted first. That erased all the context.
|
| Also the significance is not Super Heavy landing in the Gulf of
| Mexico, but Starship landing in the Indian Ocean.
| resolutebat wrote:
| Both are very significant events, since previous tests didn't
| get even close to soft landing.
| sam_goody wrote:
| I kinda feel bad for Boeing. SLS should be docking about now to
| the ISS, and instead everyone is watching their competition.
| SmartJerry wrote:
| Mayba a dumb idea, but given we have regenerative braking on
| cars, why not harness the heat energy produced while landing to
| store and/or use the energy generated for whatever mechanism that
| might help counter the heat.
| fernandopj wrote:
| I've been trying to find an "outside" view of the landing, as it
| is usual with SpaceX' dropships. So far no luck, they just
| haven't showed it yet or because it was middle of the ocean they
| probably don't have one?
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