SpaceX discloses cause of Starship anomalies as it clears an FAA hurdle
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
OTOH imagine if a reusable launch of this costs approximately the same as an expendable Atlas 5 in it's most performant configuration and reliability is proven - NASA could launch a Pluto probe like New Horizons, except it'd be able actually make orbit over there.
But for Starship, most people don't seem to realize what a potential game changer this is. The goal for Starship is to get costs down to about 15x less than Falcon Heavy. When you can start sending stuff to space for a few dollars per pound, we're not talking about just probes, but rather opening the door to the complete commercialization and exploitation of space.
Such an exponential jump (downward) in prices would also largely end the only-for-the-super-rich phase of space we're currently in. You could be doing a flyby around the Moon for what you might spend on a holiday to Asia, in the very foreseeable future. That's what makes Starship so tantalizing. If it succeeds - this is a revolutionary step forward for space. Of course, there's no guarantee that it will succeed, but it increasingly looks like it will!
Also, the issue of getting boosters to all of these destinations seems like a problem. Planes don't split in two and have half return to the launch site but Starships do. So you could land the upper stage in Tokyo, but then what? How do you get a booster there for the return journey?
Personally I doubt they'll even use these to bring people to orbit anytime soon. I think they're purpose built for launching massive LEO constellations.
>Also, the issue of getting boosters to all of these destinations seems like a problem
You launch them, presumably.
IIRC, the suborbital point-to-point transport use case doesn’t use the booster (SuperHeavy), just Starship.
The NFL wants to expand to Europe, Asia, South America badly. Problem is the logistics of Mach-1 air travel won't allow that. Same for the NBA, NHL, and MLB. A true world super league of futbol.
We're talking 10s of billions of dollars in new annual revenue for these sports leagues ... if they could transport a whole team anywhere in the world in 4-5 hours.
It costs a couple hundred thousand per flight for a team? Um, the Super Bowl brought in 600 million in ad revenue and probably another 50-200 million in ticket costs.
That said, having a sports team arrive in town by literally descending from the heavens on a burning rocket sounds badass. Unfortunately I can't really see it happening, but I'd be happy to be proven wrong.
The Miami Dolphins charter a private 747 with 143 business class seats, 36 economy seats, 26 upper deck business and 10 first class.
Not only do all 55 players need to travel but so do all the people accountable for electronics, medical, gear, coaches and staff, etc.
It's a lot to transport and a lot of risk on one vehicle.
Realistically, they'd be dropping into an allied base in-theatre with a pad able to support a Starship landing, and then taking conventional means the rest of the way. Of course, I suspect that when it comes to "drop operators from space" vs. "train extra operators who can be forward deployed," the latter is probably going to be way more cost efficient. Would make for a cool movie though.
I thought Concorde failed commercially because it couldn't get approval to fly over the US elsewhere over land because of sonic booms. I know reentering spacecraft cause sonic booms but thought that they occur high enough to not cause the same problems on the ground.
Or, if you're more cynical, because the US' own supersonic airliner failed and they wouldn't let those Euros show them up.
Also, Concorde wasn’t even the first supersonic airliner—that was the Tupolev Tu-144.
It's not that customers preferred slower and cheaper flights over Concorde—they didn't, Concorde had very healthy average occupancy rates and operating the flights was very profitable for BA and Air France (they got the planes for free, of course).
It's that you can't fly a 1960s plane forever and you also can't amortize the design and development cost of new models with the only addressable market being first class customers travelling between the East Coast and a couple of European capitals (and this was directly caused by the overland flight restrictions).
Flying Concorde is one of my fondest memories :/
The fundamental physics involved in suborbital flights mean that you are likely experiencing sustained acceleration of 3+ Gs minimum. That is a lot, something near the max g force of a roller coaster but lasting for minutes. Combine that with the launch/landing zones needing to be many miles from anything, and it isn't really ready for primetime. Just for reference 1.3 Gs is the max sustained load you will feel in a regular airliner, very rarely 1.5 Gs for terrain avoidance.
For cargo, maybe medical stuff like moving organ donations around, but largely I can't imagine a ton of use cases where getting something to an antipode in 3 or 4 hours is that much more valuable than getting it there in 19 hours.
Then again, maybe I lack imagination.
Forces that run out of ammo don't have access to cutting edge ICBMs is a rule that I would bet money on.
Like what if steel were cheaper than plastic? If there was enough of it around to build a bridge between New York and London? If you could build a ship the size of Manhattan and then a city on top of it to roam the oceans? If you could build entire cities in orbit or city-ships that slowly wandered the solar system.
Returning bulk products to earth might not be viable in the short term, but this could really bootstrap what we do off planet and I'm hopeful it might eventually make space elevators viable which would open a lot of options.
I hope to see in my lifetime a large asteroid brought to Earth orbit, for both mining and as a very large space station.
Think of all the science you could do with asteroids! Peer into the early history of the solar system . . . see what precursors to life existed before Earth was habitable. . . and all people think about is how fast they can strip-mine our extraterrestrial heritage. . . All that belongs in a museum!
/s
Here’s a great place to start: https://www.factoriesinspace.com/
That's about what it costs to fly freight across an ocean.
Fuel usage being the limiter of terminal economics once launch systems are commodified to the degree ships are.
As for the fuel itself, natural gas is much cheaper than jet fuel per unit of combustion energy.
It almost sounds too good to be true or something.
That's a greater than 40x reduction in costs, which sounds too good to be true - but the problem is that even at $700/lb, that's still far too expensive to do anything remotely interesting. But take that down again and suddenly everything changes and we, more or less instantly, enter into an entirely new stage in human development and history. It'll be akin to the automobile. Henry Ford didn't make the first automobile, but he did make the first commercially affordable one. And, in the blink of an eye, society permanently changed because of it.
---
As a fun aside, when doing a web search to grab the numbers above somehow this [1] ended up in the search results. It's from 2012 and somebody pondering SpaceX's wild claims of being able to get costs below $1,100 per kg ($1,500 inflation adjusted).
Is that an apples-to-apples comparison? Each shuttle launch cost $1.5 billion when including development cost (that is, $200 billion in total spending on the STS program / 135 launches); as your link discusses, the incremental cost per launch was "merely" $450-500 million. The $0.1 billion figure per Falcon Heavy launch is only the incremental cost since we don't know how much Falcon Heavy cost to develop (And how to account for the Falcon 9 development costs that Heavy is heavily based on?). Obviously Falcon 9/Heavy has every potential for launching far more times than the shuttle, further reducing the development cost allocated to each launch (or at least, until Starship gets going I guess). But we ought to be as accurate as possible in comparing Falcon and STS.
SpaceX's 'real' (in the sense you're speaking of) per launch costs are going to be substantially lower than even $700/lb. In the case of Boeing/Lockeed/etc, they didn't have to pay for any of this - as it was all completely taxpayer funded. That should have enabled them to offer prices that would be unbeatable by any company paying for their own operations.
---
To put this another way, imagine Boeing et al operated like SpaceX, or frankly most any "normal" company does. They would need to set their launch prices in a fashion such that they'd be able to recoup their tens of billions of dollars in development costs on the Space Shuttle, and then also add a profit margin on top. It's likely their charged cost per launch would have been even higher than $1.6 billion!
Good point. I agree that from the customer's perspective, the flyaway cost is what matters. That said, wouldn't that also mean that for Starlink launches, the development cost would still have to be amortized across them when they are not for other launches? That doesn't feel right to me; surely the flyaway/incremental cost is still what matters.
---
Space Shuttle - $54,500/kg to orbit, $93,400/kg to the ISS
Falcon 9 - $2,720/kg to orbit, $23,300/kg to the ISS
---
The Falcon Heavy is about $1500/kg to orbit. Note the units as we're swapping between kg and pounds in this thread pretty regularly.
Which is why the rocket has been discontinued.
This is also why Boeing Starliner is dead man walking. Starliner is only certified for Atlas 5, and there are enough spare boosters for the launches NASA contracted with Boeing for, no more. The consensus is that Boeing will fulfill the contract then that'll be the end of Starliner, which is great for Boeing in the sense that it'll finally close that money-leaking wound, but not great for NASA because the whole point of Starliner + Crew Dragon was to have two separate US-owned ways to send people into space.[1] Even if Starship passes every test going forward ahead of schedule and gets man-rated, NASA would prefer to not have one company provide both methods, but I don't know what would be a better alternative. Sierra finally gets that big contract to man-rate Dream Chaser? Blue Origin?
[1] Setting aside how everyone at the time believed that Starliner would be the first one into orbit
That said, right now it's kind of up in the air, since as it stands, Dragon's second crew contract and Starliner's existing contract are likely to cover all remaining ISS launches. So what's needed afterwards depends on the commercial space stations NASA is pushing for.
I'm not certain what is meant by "certified" because it still hasn't made a human flight test yet.
Notwithstanding the retirement of Atlas and Delta, Starliner was intended to be compatible with multiple launch vehicles, including the ULA Atlas V and Delta IV, and the SpaceX Falcon 9
Keep in mind we would have to compare it to the ~20M marginal cost of a F9 launch, not the $70M sticker price that a customer would pay.
Falcon9 is estimated to cost about $30M/launch. $20M to build the upper stage, and $10M to launch. Starship is estimated to cost about $100M to build both the booster and the second stage. Add $10M to launch.
So 17t/$30M vs 150t/$110M.
If I remember correctly, a starship can deliver 440+ starlink satellites compared to around 60 for falcon 9.
Between the construction pauses during testing/launch, and things they can't really speed up like concrete hardening times, I don't think they'll be able to both have 9 flights AND operationalize the second tower this year.
The ambition level is really high with Starship but if there's any company that can get it done it's spacex.
Basically what they are doing is a form of agile development where instead of speccing out the whole thing years in advance, they basically iterate and redesign what needs redesigning. Even if the project ultimately fails, there are multiple things coming out of the project that are at this point valuable. Like the merlin engines. Or their welding innovations. The notion of launching a steel contraption this size to orbit is ludicrous. Yet, they almost pulled it off last time. Worst case they have learned a lot to do a better falcon rocket. Best case, this thing actually starts working.
It is not exactly cheap to do it like SpaceX does, but the savings in time and increases in robustness may very well offset the cost of all the prototypes that undergo a RUD.
E.g.,
Design_A fails. We quickly pivot to Design_B, which works. However, we don't spend the time ultimately understanding why Design_A failed. This can be operationally great, but it can also risk conflating being lucky with being good. If you don't fundamentally understand why the thing failed the first time, it's much harder to understand if those failure modes are fully mitigated.
Personally, I think the ideal approach is to have SpaceX continue the rapid enginneering iterations, but give NASA (or some other entity) the resources to research the rest.
Take for example the work on the failure of Amos 6. They went really deep into that one and its a pretty interesting result from a scientific perspective.
On the other hand, there is no point in doing endless science on why the pad blew up during the first orbital flight test. They solution was already in development anyway and its pretty clear that the solution would migrate the problem. It might introduce new problems but the old one wasn't happening again.
So there is a limited need to the exact detail of underground steam explosion or whatever exactly happened there.
Did you read TFA? It's about the release of an extensive report documenting why Design_A failed and what corrections are to be made regarding each specific failure.
Also, from the HN Guidelines: "Please don't comment on whether someone read an article. "
This is just basic science: theory experiment result.
And with all the documentation and instrumentation on the flights, The theories can be experimentally validated or invalidated.
This isn't like some agile programmer shoving in a couple hundred lines of code over the course of a one week sprint.
1) Risk on safety critical operations is not something people tend to want to roll the dice with.
2) The nature of the industry makes each trial pretty expensive. Over decades, the shuttle only had something like 135 launches and the managers still didn't have a good handle on the actual risk.
Sort of proving the point here, no? There is a reason SpaceX has gone to orbit more times than the Shuttle has. Soon they will have launched more Starship prototypes than the shuttle ever did. And they will be safer, because SpaceX understands why their rockets fail.
Obviously this strategy does not work with humans in the loop. It might have been impossible to do what SpaceX is doing now in the 80s given the advancements in computer control and simulation that have happened since then.
I don't think so, for the same reason you identified: it only works when the risk isn't safety critical (ie when humans are in the loop). In other words, it's acceptable when risks are low. It's the same reason NASA is more risk-tolerant with non-human-rated missions. But keep in mind CCP is also meant to transport humans. The risk we'd want to bolster against is the human biases that lead us to get complacent. There are some instances that make me wonder about that with SpaceX, but I'm giving them the benefit to the doubt that they've learned from those.
1) The failures themselves aren't all too complex (relatively speaking), and by the time the design made it to a flight vehicle it has been vetted for all immediately knowable risks. The rest you discover during flight. And even then the actual nature of the problems rarely (if at all) are esoteric or present breakthrough scientific discoveries.
2) Failure in rocket launches are catastrophic leaving behind very little evidence. There could be a limit to how much you can learn. But...
3) ...SpaceX is a business serving customers, and if a pivot means going away from a complex cloud of possible failures (known and discovered) to more robust, more deterministic, more reliable, you should do it.
4) At what level do you stop and go "this is fundamental enough"?
>The failures themselves aren't all too complex
The COPV failure mechanisms may not be terribly complex (e.g., voids or delamination), but managing the processes to mitigate them isn't.
>by the time the design made it to a flight vehicle it has been vetted for all immediately knowable risks.
SpaceX has already shown some bad processes that disprove this statement. E.g., the strut failure was due to poor supplier quality control, which is a relatively mature process in the industry. I'd give them the benefit of the doubt and say they've gotten better as they've matured as a company.
Failure in rocket launches are catastrophic leaving behind very little evidence.
The difference, I think, is that you are constraining this to launch failures. I'm talking about knowledge and data about individual component failures, from which you can derive the overall reliability of the design.
if a pivot means going away from a complex cloud of possible failures (known and discovered) to more robust, more deterministic, more reliable, you should do it.
I don't disagree that more simple tends to be more reliable. However, the point was that iteration doesn't necessarily advance knowledge of failure. I think these two points are not mutually exclusive. A good business case doesn't mean it makes for good engineering or good science.
At what level do you stop and go "this is fundamental enough"?
It's a tough question. But if you can't characterize why a failure mode occurred reasonably well, that's probably not good enough. So if they say, "We know voids in the COPV manufacturing process contributed to the failure" they should probably make sure they have a good understanding of why they occurred. (And maybe they have at this point)
Each Starship has 30+ engines required per flight and tons of precision welding. All of it can now be made in a month. That means massive cost savings going forward, the faster each can be made
Rather than spend 10 years designing and building one telescope, they could spend 2-3 years and keep refining the hardware, with multiple types on the same platform
If this pace can continue unabated, maybe it’s not too unrealistic to hope that my grandkids’ generation in a few decades has astronaut as one of their most aspired careers much as was the case for the kids of the 70s, 80s, and 90s… except this time it’d be much more practically achievable since there’d be greatly increased demand for people with that skillset.
Last I checked asteroid mining was not super feasible, but maybe some like space based solar.
It doesn’t have to be cheap enough to make e.g. asteroid mining profitable on its own (which is an awfully high bar), just high enough to make construction of large, permanently spacebourne ships feasible.
Ships like that ease the bootstrapping problem and make it more feasible to mine asteroids in-place instead of having to move them to an orbit that’s not expensive to reach. Their flexible, multipurpose nature also helps pay for them over time; they can for example drop crew and cargo off at the moon and Mars en route to the asteroid belt.
There are things far closer to earth that are far easier to get to, and those things are also far smaller then Psyche and thus far easier to mine.
The most serious space mining company right now is targeting near earth asteroids for platinum group metals.
If you need 1 kg of something in space, the cost is {extraction} + {getting it there}.
For anything raw or low tech, it'd seem way easier not to have to bulk lift it off Earth.
That would mean huge savings to the military in naval fleet investment, overseas bases. The military would likely pay SpaceX ongoing contracts of tens of billion dollars per year for that exclusive nation-state capability.
The growing Starlink constellation will sustain huge business.
NASA would fund additional missions with the reduced launch costs.
Space tourism and fast global travel is worth another 10 billion dollars annually.
Then there's space telescopes and instrumentation.
Space industry is completely TBD. Here's a kooky idea: how much is antimatter harvested from the solar wind worth? Near earth asteroid capture and mining may be feasible. Moon mining may be on the table.
Militarization of space is an inevitability, and starship provides the payload to get equipment into space.
Starship might provide the launch ability to deal with space junk.
Anyway, you drop the cost of launch by 10x-100x, THINGS WILL BECOME POSSIBLE.
[0] https://www.metaculus.com/questions/?status=open&has_group=f...
Should be much more accurate than a simple poll, because people with the belief that the odds are undervalued will put money in the game to hopefully profit off their belief
It's more like the Efficient Market Hypothesis
This is why you see a somewhat absurd skew on AI doom/safety questions, using Metaculus is a hobby of the cult^H^H^H^H movement, and no one's swooping in to steal their money because there isn't any.
RAMS engineers do a bottom up analysis. However, it is fairly typical for the to be subtlety biased in a way that changes the final answer. (Usually by ‘rounding up’ on individual hazards).
Top down takes an outside view and says ‘this looks like these other past projects. It should land in around the same place.’
I’ve found top down tends to be more accurate project wise. Bottom up more accurate for specific subsystems.
But everyone assumes it means something because it's an average of a bunch of people making it up.
Anyway, I dunno. I also don't believe that people predict well even with incentives, and think the whole thing is a farce, so I'm just a pretty dogged skeptic.
Even if there is a catastrophic failure that destroys the launch tower, they are building another and will still likely get 2-3 attempts.
It's a very interesting space (no pun intended).
On the other hand, if there wasn't any dirt, the filters would not have clogged, so I guess it does make sense after all.
SpaceX has long had a very different idea about FOD than most other rocket companies, famously Merlin engine qualification testing contains ingesting stainless steel nuts.
What size nuts do they pass through their engine? Every engine before it goes to space has to have a nut passed through the system? Like a 12mm "go into space" grade nut or a little itty bitty nut like I might find holding down a heat sink assembly in a 1998 vintage motherboard?
I'm off to the googles to find videos...
Robustness and anti-fragility may not be so critical for an expendable vehicle that operates once for something like 12 minutes, but seems a key attribute for a refuel-able and reusable spacecraft?
You can make all sorts of rules about what's not allowed to happen, but often those things happen.
I'm just ... astonished if they've got a little practice room somewhere in their factory where they give each of their new rockets a nut to process... "Okay kid here's your graduation test!". A "we need screens to cope with big things and filters to deal with small things" is probably smart for any anything that's going to be reused.
A nut's probably in some ways easier to deal with than a blob of wd40 (in your lox tank).
That's what their McGreggor test site in Texas is for. It's a long, boring, two hour drive from anywhere or anything.
Anti-fragility means more than robustness, it means that the system is getting stronger with each adverse event, and it is not a realistic goal that ingestion of a nut should make the engine better/stronger etc.
It is all "just" about robustness, resilience.
But Anti-Fragility as you define it definitely should be a goal for their overall organization and system of building and operating the fleet.
Each issue or incident should feedback into the engineering of new units and updating of existing units so that they are improved, stronger, less likely to create issues, more able to handle issues, etc. on each iteration. This actually seems to be the case at SpaceX, including this incident.
Or, am I missing something?
Thinking about that, an important feature of that antifragility is not to risk human lives during the process if that risk can be avoided. Even though space exploration is inherently risky, any actual fatality is a huge setback.
"Boisjoly wrote a memo in July 1985 to his superiors concerning the faulty design of the solid rocket boosters that, if left unaddressed, could lead to a catastrophic event during launch of a Space Shuttle. Such a catastrophic event occurred six months later resulting in the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster."
Here's an account of just one such incident:
Edit: I will say that what actually is a test commonly done (also in industry in general) is doing a “roll test”. They put the stages on these massive rollers and slowly turn them… listening for any “clinks”. Pretty funny seeing it done.
> Part of the Merlin’s qualification testing involves feeding a stainless steel nut into the fuel and oxidizer lines while the engine is running—a test that would destroy most engines but leaves the Merlin running basically unhindered.
They're not running it through the engine, they're verifying that the filter is installed and functional so it doesn't get to the engine.
Maybe it's more of a type certification/ crash test thing. Test one to failure and assume it works
Better to just design with filters.
I wonder how frequently the filters need to be clean/changed? After every flight? After X flight hours?
And what is involved in changing them?
I imagine, initially at least, they'll remove all the engines after every flight, and that will give them easy access to inspect/clean/replace the filters, when necessary. However, I expect the longer term goal is they don't want to have to remove the engines after every flight, just like how a commercial aircraft doesn't have its engines removed after every flight.
It's like a showerhead, except if the fuel side clogs, the oxidizer might eat your chamber wall.
Ah, good old 'engine rich combustion'
Yes[1]. You want the fuel and oxidizer mixed as well as possible to achieve efficient combustion.
There are also other small channels fuel has to flow through, like the ones used for regenerative cooling[2].
And not sure how well most turbopumps[3] would tolerate debris either, though that probably depends on the exact design.
There are some really simple rocket designs out there that I could imagine tolerating debris (like solid motors[4] or pressure fed hyperbolic engines[5]) but Raptor definitely doesn't fall into those categories.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid-propellant_rocket#Injec...
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regenerative_cooling_(rocketry...
[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turbopump
[4]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solid-propellant_rocket
[5]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypergolic_propellant#Characte...
That is wild. I need to learn more about rocket fuel pumps :-) Thank you all for these comments.
https://www.teslarati.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/Block-5...
Rocket Fuel Injectors - Things Kerbal Space Program Doesn't Teach https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aa4ATJGRqA0
You car has a fuel filter because dirt causes wear and tear on the engine over time.
In a rocket, a stray particulate is a potentially explosive event. the Fuel pumps are approximately 100,000 horsepower and particles in flow can have enough kinetic energy to trigger combustion with the walls of the system the fuel is flowing through. Most metals will burn as fuel in a high oxygen environment, even at standard pressures, let alone pressures 100x higher.
1. Launch vibration is real. There's a reason why the Merlin 1 engine has to survive a nut being fed into the fuel and oxidizer lines while running.[1]
2. My understanding with this particular issue is that SpaceX uses autogenous pressurization. It pressurizes the LOx tank with the output from the oxygen-rich preburner. Well, that output is mostly oxygen, but it contains various hydrocarbons. Which, when combined with pure oxygen can form ice and dry ice.
It's generally not good to feed solid CO2 and H2O into a high performance turbopump that's designed to accept liquid oxygen.
---
1. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/air-space-magazine/is-spacex-...
Things can freeze at cryogenic temperatures. Water ice, dry ice ... or other gases solidifying. There can also be FOD knocked loose by vibrations.
Determining whether it was a design defect or a manufacturing defect would likely require ground testing. After CRS-7[1] exploded during launch, SpaceX tested a batch of struts from a third party manufacturer and found they failed at 2,000lbs of force instead of their rated 10,000lbs. Their solution was to switch to a different type of strut and implement more rigorous QA processes on their hardware.[2]
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX_CRS-7
2. https://web.archive.org/web/20150721152601/https://www.space...
RUD conveys the same idea of the vehicle losing structural integrity, serves as a bit of tongue-in-cheek humor for those who understand it, and limits the number of idiots screaming "look this project is obviously a scam" slightly.
retarded used to be a medical term to replace loaded terms such as imbecile. You can see how successful that was.
It turns out, dressing up an idea does absolutely nothing since it's the idea that has the negative connotation. And why shouldn't "exploded" be viewed in a negative light?
A starship prototype exploding in a flight right now is completely different from a Falcon 9 exploding in a flight. With the former it's almost desirable by making points of improvement obvious, with the latter it's a potential capacity crisis for the US launch industry.
Yet that's not really how most journalists will report it, and also isn't how most people who don't actively keep up with developments will interpret it.
Also, as you say, retarded replaced imbecile, and since then retarded has also been replaced, same will happen with RUD. Not really a big deal since they'll just change their language usage too.
It is a fascinating linguistic phenomenon, but it makes sense if you think about it. People start using technical terms as a pejorative, so those technical terms over time become less professional, so professions introduce new terms, and the cycle continues.
Another fascinating thing is that pejoration can be cyclic, sometimes enough terms are introduced to replace a term that eventually the original pejorative term becomes innocuous or even becomes endearing.
"Dickens" went through a pejoration cycle when it was used to replace the word "devil." There was a time when saying "what the Dickens" would be quite rude, but now would be seen as old fashioned to the point of being charming in some circles.
** 2006-10-31: The default prefix used to be "sqlite_". But then
** Mcafee started using SQLite in their anti-virus product and it
** started putting files with the "sqlite" name in the c:/temp folder.
** This annoyed many windows users. Those users would then do a
** Google search for "sqlite", find the telephone numbers of the
** developers and call to wake them up at night and complain.
** For this reason, the default name prefix is changed to be "sqlite"
** spelled backwards. So the temp files are still identified, but
** anybody smart enough to figure out the code is also likely smart
** enough to know that calling the developer will not help get rid
** of the file.
The self-destruction system triggers a RSD.
The rocket exploded because it was instructed to explode. In fact, one of the problems was that it didn’t explode on time: the flight-termination system did not destroy the vehicle immediately.
Many rocket failures, especially those are high altitude, do not explode in a classical sense. The correct term would be that they failed; RUD seems more fun.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boca_Chica_(Texas)#Plans_for_a...
We generally recommend a bypass valve for any filter so that the valve opens with sufficient back pressure blockage. It is generally better than complete failure.
Excitement about space is back with a vengeance!
What does this even mean if we can't scrape together funding for NASA
NASA is great in some tasks (interplanetary probes etc.), but not so great in others (getting people into orbit). That is quite normal in every quickly developing field: specialization.
As an analogy, Microsoft is quite good at Windows on desktop, but failed miserably with Windows Mobile, and other players are dominating that field.
It’s also a bit of damned if you do, damned if you don’t with nasa - play safe and people complain they’re not doing much, why are they funded. Play more risky and inevitably end up with a failure, get questioned why they’re wasting money. I don’t think I’ve seen much criticisms of when SpaceX or blue origin win govt grants for funding.
Again, this isn’t to say that enterprises don’t deserve govt support if they’re truly helping (lobby concerns aside). But it’s a multifaceted issue.
NASA projects carry a lot more gravitas than "move fast and break things" Musk projects. If something explodes at SpaceX, as long as people aren't hurt, no one really cares. People who dislike Musk will simply point at the debris and say: "We told you he's an idiot" and people who like him will rush to his defense, but the standing of the US as a whole isn't on the line.
Also SpaceX’s launch stream production quality and PR has been surprisingly good from the start as well.
You might even be able to get a periscope link
Let me say that again: space launches got boring. I hoped, but never believed, I'll live long enough to see this happen.
Exactly what you want for a reliable space vehicle.
Funny thing though: I occasionally see some old (like, 1970s old) book or comic cover with a rocket ship landed vertically, or most recently, such drawings in my daughters' books; I used to laugh at them being nonsense, but after first few successful booster landings, I'm no longer laughing. I'm ashamed to admit that our forefathers got that thing right, and Star Trek et al. got it wrong.
Also, one of the books my little daughter has a picture of Falcon 9 next to the usual lineup of Vostok-K / Saturn V / Space Shuttle lineup. I shed a few tears when I saw this - for the first time it really hit me that there was meaningful progress in space exploration that happened within my adult lifetime, a fundamental shift I got to see and follow closely as it developed, and which my kids will see as "just how the world is". Sure, same is true about the Internet and smartphones, but neither made me feel the generational perspective gap, the way SpaceX rocket landings (and subsequent uptick in space missions) did.
Genuinely, or just because the marketing for it is that good?
The size+weight+frequency of payloads this enables will drastically alter the industry and how we interact with space.
Edit: Image for scale of other rockets: https://www.visualcapitalist.com/comparing-the-size-of-the-w...
I think they become genuinely interested. People pretend when there are some benefits from pretending, social or monetary or whatever.
I can say for myself that my excitement about space is genuine, but I cannot say is it a result of the marketing. When two Falcon 9 boosters land side by side with a sub-second interval is it marketing or engineering excellence? I do not care, I like that moment, it seemed unreal at the time, it changed my perception of what is real and what is not. In other words it changed my perception of reality. It is a big deal, and I cannot care less if it is a marketing.
What does that mean? The videos aren't slick enough? Personally, my excitement isn't based on hucksterism. The worst sophists (and megalomaniacs) will have the best self-promotion and slickest videos.
For those wondering, it refers to when a rocket engine is literally burning itself into oblivion—so the exhaust plume is compromised less of fuel particles and more of, well... engine :)
Doing something to keep spirits up when months of hard labor explodes in a few milliseconds is practically required.
There are a lot of hands at very hard work here in the Texas heat. It’s easy to abstract away whilst sitting in an Aeron with a text editor.
His way of pushing through is something that gives me hope in the capabilities of humanity.
Blew up the second launch?
Based on your response I won’t go any deeper, it would be time wasting, you appear to have made up your mind already.
Elon delivered when nobody did, now it’s quite a bit easier.
(And it's arguablely a failure, as the Senate is still earthbound, and likely to remain so for the forseeable future.;))
If SpaceX had ask themselves, can we make a Super-Heavy of SLS class and launch it the first time, SpaceX could have almost certainty have done that.
But that not the goal or the ambition of the project.
I have serious doubts.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/08/world/europe/elon-musk-uk...
Maybe stop looking for reasons to hate on him simply because it’s popular to do so? His works speak for themselves.
As a Ukrainian you ought to be on your knees thanking God that Musk was born. Starlink is that vital to Ukraine, and he had zero obligation to provide it (let alone for free) when the Ukrainian government asked for his help early in the war. The US-funded Starlink subscriptions and Starshield have only increased the value Musk's enterprise provides to Ukraine, of course, but it all began for free.
Let me repeat: Zero obligation. Musk is not Ukrainian. The United States is, contrary to what many subreddits' denizens seem to believe, not actually at war with Russia. Ukraine is not a member of NATO or EU. He can say whatever he wants whenever he wants about anything thanks to freedoms that exist in the US but not in Russia (or Ukraine), and Musk is a lot more entitled to do so than you or me or every bleater on Reddit whose collective actions have saved fewer Ukrainian lives than the results of Musk's capital and innovation and risk-taking.
Suggesting that a civil war will end in a cease fire along battle lines is a very common way for civil wars to end. Even if during those wars both sides absolutely are convinced that they will have total victory.
Ukraine actually managing to retake all of their prewar territory might plausibly cause Russia to go totally insane and start nuking, but the way things are going it seems like a pipe dream for Ukraine to make that much progress. Maybe if some serious changes to the balance of force occurred, like a surprise admission of Ukraine to NATO, but this isn't very realistic.
(Anything more than that, some sort of "Ukrainian forces in Moscow executing Putin for war crimes" is just pure fantasy. So no matter what happens, relative security is the best anybody can hope for.)
Irrelevant to the fact he went on to also blatantly dick the Ukrainians over in late 2023.
Frankly I think the way they treat him is ridiculous. A media discord based on bad and inaccurate information heavily biased reporting somehow making him out to be the bad guy.
Ok got it. Makes total sense. War really makes people lose touch with reality.
During that time of separation the actual elites of the country treated the boarder between the two countries as essentially meaningless. The same group of oligarch took over in both countries for the most part and treaty the sovereignty and democracy as a joke.
I think its totally fair to call it a civil war. You could call it other things as well that wouldn't be incorrect either.
For historical context, the Austro-Prussian War is often called the German Civil War, or in German 'Deutsche Krieg' or 'Deutsche Bruderkrieg'. And those two countries were no where near as close historically as Russia/Ukraine.
Its more like if England and Scotland fought each other, but they are both Anglican and English people believed they origin of the Angles/Saxons was in the Scottish highlands. After 250 years of British history, calling that a civil war would be totally reasonable.
The "national origin story" (unless you mean the 1917 Revolution) is nothing like how the two countries were created.
Mexico and the US have "tons of families and other connections over the (sic) boarder as well."
The reason the elites treated the border between Ukraine and the Russian Federation as meaningless was because ex-Soviet cronies were running Ukraine to plunder its assets. Until the Maiden Revolution, these cronies were basically stooges controlled by Moscow.
The current conflict (2014 to now) is nothing like a civil war. Moscow uses some proxy forces from the Luhansk and Donetsk oblasts, but the majority of forces are from the Russian Federation. They control everything, supply all the equipment and determine goals and objectives. If you were to remove the Russian forces from these two oblasts (as well as Crimea and Zaporizhzhia) these proxy forces would collapse immediately.
Oh and regarding England and Scotland, well, many Scots would like to leave the UK. That wouldn't be a civil war either, but an independence movement. A civil war would be the more like the Hundred Years war...
As would all of the so-called rebellions in the East from the very start (2014).
While there were indigenous elements - even their own leaders acknowledge they wouldn't have gotten anywhere without support (or at least the hope of support) from the Motherland.
What strange talk is this. They annexed them, period. 17 months ago.
If you were to remove the Russian forces from these two oblasts (as well as Crimea and Zaporizhzhia) these proxy forces would collapse immediately.
In 2024 (which is now) there is precisely one proxy force in this war. That would collapse immediately without support. You can’t spell its name without “rain”.
If we like it or not, national myths are and always have been an integral part to nationalism. So what different countries consider their origin myth does matter. Just as religion and language matter. And of course shared history.
> The reason the elites treated the border between Ukraine and the Russian Federation as meaningless was because ex-Soviet cronies were running Ukraine to plunder its assets.
This was literally my point. So you had the Soviet Union, witch was a country. And now different parts of that Union are fighting one another. Both countries were controlled by the former elites of the previous country.
The collapse of the Soviet Union literally was an Ukrainian/Russian independence movement based on the politics of the elites at the time. And the war now could be described as a independence war again.
My point here is that its simply isn't a strict defined what all these different things are. You can call it a civil war, and independence war or an imperial war. All of them are correct depending on how you look at it.
> The current conflict (2014 to now) is nothing like a civil war.
What we call things depends on how you look at it.
Consider the situation in Yemen for the past 35 years (the same amount of time as the Ukraine exists). You can call it a civil war, an independence war and many other things.
You seem to be attached to perfectly rigidly designed categories of what everything is. The real world just isn't that simple and fits nice into those categories. You seem to be against calling it a civil war between you interpreted what I sad as it being a 'Ukrainian Civil War' but you don't like that because the 'Ukrainian rebels' are outside supported and would normally not actually have a chance. Guess what, that is true in many civil wars.
But whatever, I wasn't even saying 'Ukrainian Civil War' anyway. I was just calling it a Civil War because of the extreme close historical connect, simply put for the last 400+ years what is now Ukraine and what is now Russia were one country. That to me is by far enough to consider it a civil war.
During the Soviet period, 'in theory' the different members were independent and just part of a voluntary union. But we know this wasn't the case because the communist elites really controlled both governments and the party was really in control of the whole thing. And while the Soviet Union went away formally, 'in theory' the two countries are now fully separated and independent, but in actual reality this was never really the case.
A civil war is not just a situation where you have a international recognized country as defined by the UN at the current moment, splitting into two groups fighting each other (with nobody from outside involved) until one wins and then are are reunified the same way.
> Oh and regarding England and Scotland, well, many Scots would like to leave the UK. That wouldn't be a civil war either, but an independence movement.
Speaking in actual realist terms England and Scotland don't actually exist, its one country called the UK who had a unified foreign policy for many 100s of years. If different parts of the UK fight each other for whatever reason, calling that a civil war is totally reasonable.
The Southern States were also an independence movement but yet somehow its called a Civil War. Independence movements often lead to civil wars. Literally a leading cause of Civil War. To say 'it wouldn't be Civil War but an Independence movement' makes no sense what so ever. Its would obviously be both.
An empire, not a country.
Which dissolved itself peacefully enough and with no outside prodding of any kind on 26 December 1991. In the process, fully and unequivocally recognizing the complete sovereign independence of all of its constituent members at the time -- along with their inviolable borders -- including Ukraine.
End of story, full stop.
This idea you have that it's basically "still one country, hashing things out" is seriously misinformed nonsense.
Kievan Rus
And the idea that anyone, anywhere should be fighting a full-scale war in 2024 based on (or "explained" by) events of the 9th-13th centuries is, by all objective standards -- batshit crazy.
If you've been studying the topic for "decades", and then you say things like "they speak essentially the same language" (in reference to Russians and Ukrainians) -- then I don't know what to tell you.
Second, I am Swiss and Swiss German is quite different then High German with somewhat different historical routes. When I was in Ukraine we were talking about languages and how they differ from each other and came to the conclusion that Swiss German <-> High German was a reasonable comparison. In some way Swiss German is more different to German then Ukrainian to Russian.
I do consider Swiss German and High German 'essentially the same language' as well. Now if Germany invaded Switzerland I would likely also argue against the notion but that's just politics.
You can of course be nitpick and quibble with the term 'essentially', the fact is they are extremely close related languages.
There is a lot of interesting history of both nationalist movement trying to influence the language. Imperial Russian tried to make Ukrainian more Russian (generally promoting Pan-Slavic policy with Russia as the leader). Specially in the Pre-WW1 period when it became increasingly clear that Ukrainian nationalism was a potential disaster for Imperial Russia. Ukrainian nationalist did the opposite, tried to remove Russian influence and promote the differences. Language unification and dis-unification is an interesting aspect of all modern nationalist development and its always political.
Yikes - you definitely lost me there, man. I'm going to have to let you hash this stuff out on your own.
The same Empire, you mean. Are you saying that all empires that ever existed need to be maintained into perpetuity?
They speak essentially the same language
Absolutely not the case. Are Spanish and Portuguese "essentially the same language?"
And use the same national origin story
Nope.
I think its totally fair to call it a civil war.
You really are very misinformed.
After 250 years of British history, calling that a civil war would be totally reasonable.
And if you tried walking into a bar, and telling an Irish person that the whole situation with England has been just a "civil war" and that they really ought to get over this idea of Irish independence -- I think you know what would happen.
I remind myself that the real genius at the head of SpaceX is Gwynne, and hope that Elon continues to let her be awesome.
For example, Musk wanted to cancel Falcon Heavy when it started to become clearer how tiny its impact would end up being relative to cost (since F9 had improved so much as to eat up most of the demand they had expected FH to take). It was pretty fair reasoning, but Gwynne insisted that they keep FH development going because they had already started trying to sell it to customers and she felt that cancelation would affect how seriously customers take future offerings from SpaceX for rockets which haven't been fully built ahead of time.
And even if she is 'the genius' then Musk is the guy who recruited her, promoted her multiple times and put her in the position she is in now.
But its also just the reality that Shotwell job is made 10x easier because she has a reusable rocket to build, sell and launch, while the others do not.
Shotwell is awesome, no question. But the Musk hater story line of 'she is the real hero while Musk hits himself in the head with a hammer' is just nonsense.
SpaceX has many super smart super talented people, and of course in any company the leader can only do so much, by definition most of the work is not done by the leaders, Musk or Shotwell.
But on the other hand we also no that leadership is incredibly important. And there is no question who is leading and has lead SpaceX since Day 1.
I was with you until this part. The general common sense and MBA consensus is that leadership is important. And I suspect that it is more so with smaller companies. But the data seems mixed with large companies and some research seems to point out that high level leaders don’t have an appreciable impact.
Also there is a difference between short term and longterm. Most companies don't have the same leadership for 20+ years. Musk has been leading SpaceX for 20+ years and SpaceX has been consistently growing and consistently amazing track record of execution and technology development.
I don't really think there are companies like that who have terrible leadership.
~ Jonathan Swift, demonstrating Horatian satire, characterized by its attempt to raise questions with gentle humor rather than attacking -- that is characteristic of the Juvelian school of satire
I see now the idea is it is further evidence of Great Man theory to question Jewish involvement in this serious problem.
So yes, not antics in your book.
It makes me sad some subset of Congress decided this didn't need solving suddenly, for no apparent reason.
At the moment we put more debris into Earth's orbit, Star Link is nice but not a sustainable solution, same with many other satellites
If you're talking about environmental sustainability.. get over it. Rocketry, even as SpaceX's scale, is a tiny drop in the ocean of throwaway consumer culture.
Building landing rockets was thought to be too expensive not impossible.
Why is Tesla's FSD still not working? Wasn't Musk around?
The Spaceship is also nothing impossible, let's wait for his Mars colony.
Biden, Trump, Elon, etc., depending on what side you are, there's always someone to think of as an example.
I get it that Musk was necessary to get the money but money doesn't build rockets otherwise Bezos company would have succeeded too.
Seems like the actual engineers are the ones to praise.
Musks seems more like the type who has read a sci-fi book or seen a movie and has enough money to pay people to build what he has read or seen.
The problem is that he often underestimates the technical challenges. This sometimes works when the problem only needs an evolutionary step, like landing rockets, but fails when it comes to revolutionary discoveries.
The whole Twitter thing is only accelerating the destruction of his nimbus.
When he makes announcements and promises, I now always hear in my head: "Monorail, monorail"
Or how do you explain his desire for a growing population?
The concept of increasing productivity seems to be foreign to him in this context.
He was always like this. He started SpaceX because he thought putting a dome on Mars within which plants would be grown would be inspiring. The only reason it wasn't on social media was because it wasn't really much of a thing at the time. He didn't care about the optics and tried to buy an ICBM from Russia for this purpose.
To me that sounds like the same person as he is on social media.
So randomly claiming someone's a pedophile is somehow "the same" as wanting to put a dome on Mars because it's inspiring?
I honestly don't see how you can say that sounds like the same person.
> sharing what he finds to be worth sharing?
Are we honestly looking at the same tweets? Just looked and his pinned tweet is about Mexico and asylum seekers, does that sound "inspiring" to you? What about "My pronouns are Proscute/Fauci"?
He's fully lost the plot. He's no longer about grand inspiring endeavors, and is instead knee deep in social wars, posting shitty memes all day. What's the last inspiring thing he's done?
His pinned tweet expresses concern about the border crisis, specifically the risk of undesirable people crossing the border.
He's expressing what he cares about, is the parent's point. Abrasive or animated expression of views, isn't losing the plot.
As for jokes about pronouns and other triggering issues, it can sometimes be defended when the joke is similar to the Gemini jokes. That is, poking fun at things that might deserve a bit of poking fun at, even ridicule in the case of Gemini.
And my point is that he used to care about inspiring stuff, now he spends all his time caring about useless culture wars.
"Useless" is your opinion, not an objective measure. "Culture wars" is a trope designed to broadly smear the target, disregarding specifics.
Do you want Musk to be an inspiration vending machine? Your insistence he tighten his inspiration schedule to meet your expectations, is odd.
Bought twitter and assigned an entire team to work overtime and figure out why his follower count is dropping? And banned the ‘Elon-jet’ account? And called cave diver that rescued children a pedo after Elon’s rescue - submarine failed?
..
I love "Stokes Space" design for example... https://youtu.be/EY8nbSwjtEY?feature=shared
I cant wait to see that progress.. Imo the upper stage / re-entry design so much more elegant and practical than Starship. It re-enters just like an Apollo capsule, not like the space shuttle or starship's weird bellyflop. Also it doesnt rely on ceramic tiles, which were a big problem with the space shuttle. Even forgetting about Columbia, maintaining and replacing the tiles after each mission was incredibly expensive and time consuming. Imo re-entry is the biggest hurdle to a re-usable upper stage and Stokes Space have based their design around nailing that issue first and foremost.
he has put a lot of money and taken risks on interesting and useful ventures, but i don’t think his vision for humanity outweighs the negativity and hatred; we can’t go to mars if we all kill each other
We have more and cheaper satellite launches, but we're not really any closer to colonising space.
That's Musk's trick, selling revolution, delivering evolution.
The hardest thing to achieve is delivering when anyone has access to the same technologies, resources etc. He delivered, the others didn’t. Especially NASA, by comparison.
Be fair and give the man the props where the props are due.
I belittle nothing but landing rockets wasn't a new idea and wasn't seen as impossible.
It was an evolutionary step and that's what I acknowledge.
But people treat Musk as if he single handedly built a Mars colony.
Good god. SpaceX is doing "more and cheaper satellite launches", as you so dismiss them, on a scale and at a cost utterly unachievable by anyone else today. Not Russia, despite 65 years of spaceflight experience and an entire nation state's resources. Not ESA, despite resources of dozens of the wealthiest and most sophisticated nations on Earth. Not NASA itself.
If you don't believe me, believe Tom Mueller - Ex SpaceX Propulsion CTO - He was with SpaceX from the very start and the Merlin (Falcon 9 engine) and early work on the Raptor (Starship engine) was him. Tom has commented in various articles and on his twitter (I'm too lazy to find a link) that Elon was 100% involved in the technical issues and design of everything, and knew his stuff. He has said this after leaving SpaceX too, so it not just don't-badmouth-the-boss going on there.
Yep, it seems Elon has also become a hard-right asshole in recent years. Maybe he always was?