SpaceX launches and nearly lands starship on its first suborbital flight

Getting involved is a dream of mine, but it's been quite difficult for me to get my foot in the door, so to speak.

This may be off topic and probably person specific, but what made you change your mind?

> MDRS

Is it Mars Society's Mars Desert Research Station ? Space nerds tend to abuse acronyms almost as much as developers.

Thank you! I'm pursuing engineering science. Until recently, I wasn't sure what I wanted to go into... but now I think I know.

Perhaps Elon is not the best example for climate change due to his battery research, solar panels, electric cars, etc...

Earth's problems are largely political, bureaucratic, and cultural. The people who love and are good at those areas have very little overlap with people who love and are good at tech, science, or space. The best we can do is provide something that magnifies our aspirations as a species, so that we and others will be inspired to improve our lot.

Did you read about how the whole space race (and the first photo of earth) inspired people to start the environmental movement in the first place?

Also, btw, my gf is a full time climate change activist and watched sn8’s start witb as much excitement as myself.

Irrational optimism is far more likely to lead to irrationally optimistic outcomes. Today is a good example. Space exploration gives people hope for what is possible. That is very, very important.

"terribly well"

What would be your standard in treating employees terribly well?

And it is strange to mention Musk and Bezos side by side. Their mode of employment is very different.

In Amazon, you are a preprogrammed cog in a spinning retail machine, micromanaged and followed everywhere by algorithms that seek to squeeze maximal output from you and punish you for slight deviations from the script (such as "not having your hand on a railing if you go upstairs"). They even encourage other workers to report you if you do something frowned upon. Human robots - which corresponds well to the nature of Bezos, who is often described as a way-too-rational, aloof man.

This is not what happens around Musk, who is a very different type of personality. In SpaceX, young engineers do overtime voluntarily because they are working on interesting unsolved problems, precisely the thing that you want to take part in at least once in your life. And it is understood that once they leave for a workplace with less driven culture, their stint at SpaceX will be considered very valuble.

Edit: If you are a youngish creative engineering type, you want to have a go at something that is both difficult and world changing. Most people will never have a chance to do so. So if you really become a part of a team that designs Starship etc., no wonder you will spend hours and hours there.

From my personal experience, chasing a difficult bug in my program means that the day flies by and suddenly, the streetlamps are lit. But the victorious feeling is worth it. And my software products are nothing like Starship.

> The fact that SpaceX's President and COO is a woman seems to get surprisingly little publicity

How much publicity do COOs of other companies get? Hardly none.

Shotwell is all over media. She has given tons of interviews that are on youtube/social media as well. Most of them are great so feel free to watch them at your leisure. She's also in the 2020 Time's 100 most influential list.

For a COO, she's gets surprising too much publicity rather than too litte.

> especially given that she seems like the more qualified engineer out of Musk and herself as well.

Why does she seem like it? Just because she's a woman? She's mostly worked on the business side at spacex.

Are you as concerned that the male COO of tesla is getting no publicity? It's a trick rhetorical question so you needn't answer it.

I think CEOs tend to be publicly assigned most credit for what their companies do, for some reason.

This also happened to Jobs.

People talk about "Elon Musk is building rockets to go to Mars". While not strictly incorrect, the insane numbers of people working long, hard hours for years on end is the reason these rockets are getting built, despite the indelible fact that Musk has served as a nucleation site that allowed and facilitated so many incredibly talented people to come together around a shared dream. Zubrin tried for decades and failed, and yet Musk succeeded.

Anyway, Jobs would usually get pretty much full credit for just about anything that came out of Apple, too. He accomplished a lot, to be sure, but I always tell those people the iPod fishtank story, or the details of the wage pricefixing scam he masterminded that successfully stole billions of dollars from his staff.

I think people just really really need to personify large groups into a person or facsimile, so that they can fit large entities into narrative structures in their heads (whether true or false). The same thing happens to nations, too: the political result of tens of thousands of people working very long hours is assigned singularly to Xi, or Putin, or Trump.

The system is not its figurehead.

SpaceX doesn't compete directly with them but the rockets from Virgin Orbit, RocketLab, and Relatvity Space are also exciting.

It seems people are giving way too much credit to Blue Origin; they haven't even sent hardware to orbit yet. They have a bunch of cool paper rockets, but they haven't achieved much beyond New Shepard (and that rocket has only done test flights). They are not even in the same league.

ULA on the other hand is much more accomplished. Tory Bruno seems like a cool dude (he even comments on /r/SpaceXMasterRace!), and his factory tour with SmarterEveryDay (on YouTube) was very instructive. However, they seem to have absolutely no regard for costs. You can see it in the factory tour; they machine huge aluminium blocks down into panels for the rocket sides, removing ~90% of the material in the process. How is that cost-effective in terms of time or materials? They send back the chips for recycling, but still. And that's not even starting on the reusability angle; SpaceX is currently working on a fully-reusable rocket (and has flown hardware!) when ULA only has vague plans to save the engines at some point on their next rocket.

I think the only launch company that could credibly compete on innovation would be Rocket Labs, but I fear they're too small and too late to compete commercially; they'll probably end up in the "very small sats in weird orbits" niche, as ridesharing on Starship will eat the rest of the small-sat market.

As I understand it the landing legs didn't deploy because velocity was too high and angle was wrong. All this stuff gets reported by telemetry because they know exactly how likely it is that a first attempt flight will fail catastrophically (very). So these test rockets are heavily instrumented and networked. Watching it the first time I also thought one of the engines had failed but then that engine had a successful relight and another did not, and the fuel mix ratio appeared to be wrong on one of the engines. This is all consistent with loss of propellant (there was a quite significant leak after the first fire in engine bay) and not consistent with "engines ate themselves alive".

Your greater point about it being better to land than not land stands, but these are experimental rockets. They're expected to fail catastrophically and you plan accordingly.

I think it’s more like 30

The starship (what we saw yesterday) should have 3 sea level and 3 vacuum Raptors. The booster is currently scheduled to have 28 Raptors (some of which are fixed and some which can gimbal) although these numbers are subject to change depending on what kind of performance they can achieve in the end.

I think their goal is to make the Spacecraft reliable enough that it wouldn't need the abort system. In the same way that 737s don't have one. However I think crew is a long way away for now. If they are launching 100 passengers it may be hard to do an abort system that isn't just the entire Starship itself. Maybe for smaller crew launches they will have ejection seats like Soyuz?

> TEA-TEB is not used on Starship

This is correct. The Raptor uses an electric spark igniter.

I don't think it's malicious, it's just a lot of amateur speculation in the absence of an official report.

Definitely not misinformation, just misinformed armchair enthusiasts. SpaceX did the hard thing using spark ignition which goes against the industry norms. Even the everyday astronaut YouTube guy said tea tab on his stream and he’s a space nerd.

RUD is very much a euphemism that has I guess drifted a bit from it's initialism; I'm pretty sure in this case the disassembly was planned and the survival case would have been unplanned.

”Unscheduled”, I think

I like reading Musk's tweets when he talks about something he knows (e.g. engineering). I don't much like them when they're ignorant and irresponsible commentary on Covid-19 (something he knows less about than even most ordinary but interested people, seeing as he wouldn't have the time to follow much expert commentary), or when he's sharing his puerile taste in humour or music or literature etc (although, to be fair, it's his personal account so he can share what he likes).

While it isn't humorous, "delta P event" is so dryly understated that IMO it belongs (when not involving human tragedy). Delta P events would be explosions if they happened in air. As violent as an atmospheric shockwave is, the speed of sound is >4x higher underwater, in a medium that is >800x heavier. The amount of casual violence implied in a "delta P event" is profoundly unnerving.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=flzpRbWl8bQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fzRb2vMfGyk

Oh yes, today I learned that RUD (rapid unscheduled disassembly) is apparently an established term, but I didn't get what "engine rich" means until now.

Shivetya is talking about landing rockets afterwards.

If they keep up the launch cadence next year, they will surpass the Shuttle in number of reuses in a space program.

I think they're saying we've come to expect SpaceX rockets to successfully land, so much so that one not doing so is noteworthy. Something nigh unfathomable 10yrs ago

Very few rocket launches end with any kind of soft landing, let alone main boosters.

Soft-landing a small payload, or in the case of the shuttle, a winged reentry vehicle, is the exception. (And yes, the Shuttle also soft-ish watered its SRBs underr chutes.)

Retrorocket-soft-landing intact boosters from production launches fully upright was science fiction until four years ago.

https://geekologie.com/2016/04/unreal-video-of-spacexs-first...

The test platform was first hopped in 2012, only 8 years ago.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=pzXlUw2WhcE

(I'm not a Musk fanboi,I thought the powered landing was nuts, he proved me wrong.)

It's clickbait because it implies test failure, which isn't true. The test was successful, as the primary objectives were all met.

To add to my comment-- I think the CNN headline got it better without the softening euphemism by pointing out it was a success: "A SpaceX Mars rocket prototype just exploded. It was still a success"

Landing safely was an unexpected outcome, so it’s remarkable (thus making it into the headline) that it came close to doing so. The right wording is highly context dependent. Here the “nearly landed” phrasing appropriately acknowledges the realistic expectations for the launch by those most in the know, the SpaceX team.

“Crash” would be totally appropriate in a different context with different expectations. But it would make less sense in this case.

My understanding is that the speed didn't get low enough for landing legs to deploy.

That one's not actually true though, e.g. the lowest-altitude formation-flight record currently stands at -422m (over the dead sea).

In September 2018 Elon Musk estimated that the total cost of Starship will be $5 billion, and no more than $10 billion but no less than $2 billion. In that same presentation Yusaku Maezawa later seems to confirm that he is paying 5% of the Starship development costs [1], but it could be something lost in translation.

5% of $5 billion is $250 million (and of $10 billion is $500 million). Maezawa’s contributions are all going directly toward [developing Starship into an operational system] [2]

Given he's taking himself and 6-8 artists plus 1-2 crew members. It's hard to believe he's paid just $250 million. That would probably make NASA very angry given they're paying $400 million per launch for Crew Dragon to carry 4 people.

I know its not a direct source, but the above analysis suggests he's paying several hundred million dollars for the Dear Moon project. $500 million is a reasonable estimate. Though I suspect that's on the low side.

[1] https://youtu.be/0q2gUWTcLRI?t=4313 [2] https://www.businessinsider.com.au/yusaku-maezawa-zozo-ceo-r...

NASA is a public institution and has been beholden to the Senate's irrational whims for it's entire life.

SpaceX is a private company. They receive public grants, sure, but they have a profitable launch business with the Falcon 9. Their requirement is that they can sustain themselves, not that they can keep their own internal project from being cancelled by directive of the US government.

On some level what the public (and really, it's space nerds like us) think doesn't really matter. The public would in fact be hard pressed to stop them getting contracts from the US government provided they can underbid Boeing at this point.

What SpaceX is doing is nothing like anything NASA has ever attempted.

Now you are just making things up. SpaceX definitely needed the COTS contract to build the Falcon 9, but NASA got a massive cut in launch costs out of it.

NASA has contributed very little to Starship development. The in orbit refueling experiment contract is tiny, as is their Artemis contract.

And Musk used a Falcon to promote SpaceX in Washington DC, what’s your point?

All of these points are well known and understood. Frankly, so what? Musk has been effusive in his praise of NASA’s help at SpaceX and many times has said he couldn’t have done any of it without their help. We know that. What actual point are you trying to make, other than list mainly irrelevant facts.

Yes some Musk fans ridicule NASA for past failures or lost opportunities and that’s a shame. It’s also widely understood in the community that this is mainly due to political interference and constraints forced on the organisation. But none of that has anything to do with your ‘criticisms’.

Take the points about steel. That matters on a non reusable system because you’re wasting weight for no mission relevant purpose, but if it allows you to reuse the vehicle rather than not, is it really still an inefficient choice? What point are you even trying to make? If that even is a criticism, it’s just not relevant. If you genuinely think it’s a bad choice, just say so and say why. But you don’t actually give any explanation of why any of these points matter.

>I hope this comment helps you adjust your mental model to a better picture of the industry.

I hope you realize that not only are you getting downvoted for factual inaccuracies, style of writing etc, but this passive aggressive coda at the end does you no favors...

I could also appreciate your enthusiasm if you could get your facts right.

1. Raptor does not use Pintle injectors (invented at Caltech), it uses coaxial swirl injectors.

2. Raptor was designed and developed completely by SpaceX for six years before the USAF gave it small contracts to develop specific versions for their potential needs.

3. Raptor is the first full-flow staged combustion rocket engine ever flown. Flying is a lot more important than the lab. And a lot harder given vibration and acceleration effects.

4. The Shuttle autoland system was incomplete when first implemented, it could not land the Shuttle. Even when “completed” NASA never trusted it or allowed its use . The Russians did land Buran with their system.

5. While it’s technically true that RS-25 engines were re-used, they were also required to be completely torn down and rebuilt between flights. At some point you’ve replaced so many parts it’s basically a new engine, and it was an extremely expensive maintenance requirement that entirely negated the value of reuse.

6. BO has never made an orbital flight, which is the key first step for any space travel. It’s never risked a human life in its mini rocket, nor ever flown a paid cargo. It’s still behind the 2006 version of SpaceX, which was attempting orbital flights and succeeding in 2009.

7. Without a thermal protection system your flights are one way and everything is “mass inefficient”. The inefficiency of throwing away a complete launch system every flight is the only inefficiency that matters.

SLS is designed to put 100 tons of payload in orbit. Not including development costs, each launch will cost roughly $1B, with development costs it will be over to $4B per launch. Every bit of that hardware will be destroyed every launch. It’s payload cost per pound will be over $40,000.

The Starship stack is designed to put 110+ tons of cargo in orbit, inside a 120 ton Starship. It’s launch mass will be nearly double the SLS. So on paper it’s actual payload mass percentage is about half the SLS.

But none of the Starship stack is destroyed at launch, it’s all reused. Cost of fuel for each flight is around $500K. It’s launch cost will be less than $50M, eventually maybe $5M. That means it’s payload cost per pound starts at $200/lb and could drop as low as $20/lb.

Sure, build a Starship out of aluminum or carbon fiber if you never want to be able to land it on earth again, or want to land on Mars with far smaller payloads without the massive fuel savings from Aerobraking.

NASA isn’t paying SpaceX to develop Starship. SpaceX is actually getting paid to design a lunar only version of Starship that won’t need thermal protection. Perhaps they’ll custom build NASAs versions out of lighter materials to increase their lunar landing payloads.

But they won’t do that for Starships in general because it makes them too inefficient for their planned missions. Starships efficiency cones from in-orbit refueling, which is how the same Starship can take the same 110+ ton payload to earth orbit, and on to land it on Mars.

Elon explicitly tweeted the mission's goals:

"Goals are to test 3 engine ascent, body flaps, transition from main to header tanks & landing flip."

So the SpaceX team went four for four...

I take your point but if this flight had landed they would have probably kept test flying SN-8 until it did crash. There is really no other use for it.

Would they actually throw it away if it worked flawlessly? Why not try another test?

I'm not sure they'd even reuse them, they're still tweaking the design. The Raptors that flew yesterday were probably already outdated; the ones on SN9 are improved versions already.