Starship Flight 5: Launch and booster catch [video]
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The 'chopsticks catch' was amazing to watch. Seems like it adds a lot of risk and clearly the booster needs additional fire suppression systems :-) perhaps the tower could mount something that sprays the booster like the barges have for the F9 boosters.
The heatshield held out for a much longer time, the asymmetric heating on the flaps was interesting. I had guessed that all four flaps would have equivalent heating based on an approach that was basically that side of the rocket perpendicular to the flow but it seems like that isn't the case. Still it seems like they are close to having something workable here.
The detonation at the end was pretty spectacular too, but I suspect that structurally the tanks failed as the rocket hit the water vs anything that was an engineering failure. Engineering it to be strong enough to land on water would presumably compromise the cargo to orbit number.
The use of Starlink was really interesting. The ability to get live video for the entire re-entry is pretty game changing for engineering. I'd guess there are even more 'views' than they showed (there would be if I were running things :-)) but overall that capability is something that really helps evaluate the changes made.
I can easily imagine that flight 6 will be nominal end to end without any unintended damage. That would enable, perhaps, one of their 'massive' Starlink missions to test cargo delivery. It will also start to give us some better numbers on exactly how much cargo Starship can put in orbit in 'full reuse' mode which is essential if they want to create a fueling station on orbit for the Artemis program.
Again, hats off to engineering at SpaceX, y'all did good.
It's possible that SpaceX programed the AFTS to trigger some time after the rocket touched down in the water. Just to make sure that it completely submerges quickly.
> I can easily imagine that flight 6 will be nominal end to end without any unintended damage.
I think it depends on what you mean by "nominal". SpaceX ultimately wants to catch the 2nd stage as well. I suspect that they are a ways off of that, since it would have to approach over land. The FAA is going to need to have very high confidence that it will do exactly what it's designed to do before they're going to allow that.
Why would they want to do that? (genuinly curious).
I reckon there would be a lot of useful data left if they could recover or even just inspect the remains. The remains are one big tank, so it would have floated.
With Starship it could have been similar & possibly worse given the size and more complex shape (various voids that might fill/drain & the thing is not really built for floating). Also you are in the middle of an ocean (Indian in this case) with potential for all kinds of weather on the way. Towing might again be very slow, so you might need to stage a massive submersible transport ship or something similar to make a recovery successful. And then the thing might still tip over and explode anyway - meaning all this was in vain.
I think is most likely they won't bother and instead just stream as much data as possible over Starlink in real time (or heck, even via WiFi once the buoy is in range) for analysis. They want to catch the shop eventually anyway, so manual post flight analysis will wait.
They can now check all over the first recovered booster anyway. :)
[0] https://www.flickr.com/photos/europeanspaceagency/3700131835
I get that towing is probably too expensive for what it's worth. But I'm surprised they don't even go pick up some tiles before kablooing it.
At the same time, this is SpaceX and they have a few others ready to launch already. Perhaps they indeed can keep it somewhat coarse and wait for detailed inspection until one of them makes it right back to solid ground?
the scale of Superheavy is such that the above two items are making the arms scheme make sense. The number of engines also gives this rocket the ability to hover, which probably makes the scheme easier to pull off.
All high performance engines tend to only throttle in a range in the upper half of the engine's performance, the difference making hovering possible in this case is that the Super Heavy has _so many_ engines that it can turn off. This is a sort of secondary throttling, or meta-throttling, and the rocket can use the combination of engine throttling and engine-off to hover comfortably (while near-empty) with three engines going.
True, but wouldn't the deceleration burn be putting much more compression onto the near-empty rocket than the landing?
The SpaceX host on the stream said that they were going to try and touch it down on the water at more of an angle than the previous flight to attempt to get it to survive the initial splash-down so they could get some more data and video footage.
Obviously this wasn't guaranteed to succeed, but it indicates that they weren't planning to immediately detonate the ship on touchdown.
As I recall it was common on the early Falcon 9 landing tests that splashed down in the ocean to also explode after tipping over and smacking the water. Once they're actually landing them on a pad, tower, or ship that should be much less of an issue.
I think they've towed stuff in the sea before so I would have thought that'd be their preference if it were possible.
I'm not sure if they would have actually attempted to tow this one somewhere given its location in the Indian Ocean, but they might have taken the opportunity to do some inspections before sinking it.
They have to prove out the landing of the second stage, either with another catch or with landing gear, which they need for the lunar lander anyway.
Starship is not really in a true orbit, I forget the exact terminology but the trajectory is designed to re-enter regardless of what happens with the the flight.
Think of it as instead of thrusting perpendicular to gravity for the most optimal energy usage Starship instead points its nose up gaining more altitude but now lacks the speed to miss earth as it comes down.
Heat shielding didn't look relevant at this section of the flight at all. The booster didn't have any shielding.
Where was a heat shield holding out?
The booster never travelled fast enough to need heat shielding ever. Only the starship needs it.
If chuck is talking about both likely he doesn’t know what he’s talking about.
However, Raptor 3 is supposed to obviate the need for this shielding.
The booster doesn’t travel fast enough to need heat shielding ever.
It makes zero sense to use heat shielding behind the engine bells. Why? Think about it. If the booster renters the atmosphere engine bells first the engine bells would burn up BEFORE the air even touches the heat shield. If there are actually tiles there it’s just there to protect the booster from the heat of the exhaust.
> However, Raptor 3 is supposed to obviate the need for this shielding.
Not completely getting this. So there’s a case for the booster entering the atmosphere at orbital velocity engine bells first? I would think if they did this then THEY want the booster to burn up. Anything entering the atmosphere at that velocity needs to be made aerodynamically stable as it will be traveling faster then the speed of sound. This is what causes the heat. If you send something at the speed of sound engine bells first that’s not stable and is unlikely they will do that at all, with or without heat shielding.
I don’t think parent knows what he’s talking about.
The engine bells are made of different material than what's behind them (a material that has to directly withstand hot exhaust) and the aerodynamics of the ass end of the rocket are complex; some combination of these factors means this heating isn't an issue for the bells but is a concern for what's behind them. The booster does not re-enter from orbital velocity, but does come down engines first at supersonic speed. Stability in this orientation throughout the descent is a problem SpaceX solved with Falcon 9, and SH works the same way.
See the other reply to your comment for timestamped video of aerodynamic heating behind the engine bells.
Is it possible you're confusing the booster with the second stage (Starship)? They are not the same thing.
Don't appreciate this at all. I can be wrong, but there's no need to make personal comments on my mindset.
> I don’t think parent knows what he’s talking about.
We can all do better.
This is a better view than the sibling comment linked. It's a greater close-up and you can clearly see the yellow glow behind the engine bells. This view is from Cosmic Perspective, a partner of Everyday Astronaut, whose video is linked:
https://www.youtube.com/live/pIKI7y3DTXk?si=LI4-xQ7UhnvITTiG...
In case you get confused due to lack of context, the booster shot is a replay. When Tim goes to split-screen view, the right-side image is a live view of the second stage ("Starship") as it re-enters from orbital speed. It is not a different angle on the booster that is shown on the left.
Later commentary explains that the heating behind the engine bells is due to atmospheric compression and SpaceX specifically orients the drop of the booster to focus heating in this spot.
I think the primary reason would be that landing legs are heavy, and it wastes performance to carry them. If your landing mechanism is mostly on the ground, you get that performance back.
Secondary reasons might include that it's simpler to get the booster right back to the pad. Once things have settled into an operational cadence, it's likely feasible to lower and lock the booster onto the stool, stack a ship on top, refuel, and relaunch -- no more messing around with barges, transport, weather issues, etc.
Landing on a device that spreads out the shock moves that weight to the static landing platform.
I'm actually wondering about that. If I understand correctly, the arms can move up and down, and pivot around the tower. This allows them to correct for some error in the rocket trajectory and also (presumably) "soften" the final contact. Between the nozzles and the arms, it gives SpaceX a lot of degrees of freedom in the final seconds (you can see how the booster kind of "hovered" right at the end) and in certain respects might even offer more forgiveness than the hard ground.
Could it smash into the tower? For sure. Would that be more dangerous than smashing into the pad? I don't know.
It's a new technique with which we don't have a lot of experience.
It can arrive to the designated intermediate point with some already good accuracy, and then take some time to trim the remaining errors to the noise level more slowly, possibly with feedback from the ground sensors.
The chopsticks also include rails with shock absorbers, the action of which can be seen in the view from the tower during the landing [1], so the required accuracy is probably relatively modest, provided one plans the maneuver carefully.
How different those consoles with pins are from possible landing legs, and how much savings they provide is an interesting question. It's quite possible they provide some savings - but it would be nice to know some details.
IIRC at least one returning Falcon 9 stage was lost to a landing leg collapsing.
That is, unless the falling rocket could abort a tower catch and move to a secondary nearby tower if a failure is detected in time.
They will have a tower in the Cape. It’s conceivable they could land there depending on return trajectory and save some mass for payload with that maneuver. I am also quite sure they will be a dozen towers in Boca Chica and I wouldn’t be surprised if they build a couple in California for Southward launches.
The tower is used for various stacking and craning operations between launches. There is a better chance to detect any developing anomalies outside the launch context.
Also, being on Earth and flying nowhere, it can be sturdier and heavier than any flight hardware. Much like Roman aqueducts, it can be overbuilt a bit to ensure some extra resilience.
Plus, more towers at the same site, as you say. If one malfunctions, another one can act as a backup. In contrast, every single landing leg is a mission-critical component and cannot be replaced in-flight by another one.
I'm curious how late in the catch sequence they can still abort.
It is not just about shift of complexity from A and B. Anything that stays on Earth permanently can be built without particular regard to its weight, e.g. much stronger, much more resilient, with bigger safety factors etc.
With any flight hardware, you need to make painful tradeoffs between reliability/sturdiness and weight.
If anything out of the ordinary happens, massive steel chopsticks can take a lot more strain than a landing leg which needs to be carried to the edge of space and back.
Starship will get landing legs.
The second stage might want to land in other places. Not as a satellite launching bus or fuel truck though, that just wants to go up and down in an uncomplicated and unsurprising way, and that's where the vast majority of their launches will come from.
For inter-planetary missions yes, but they have different second stage designs for those that aren't made for tower landings. If it gets used as a military transport, then similarly it will be a different second stage design.
It's the C5 Galaxy, but with only a couple of hours needed to deploy into any theater in the world.
In comparison, simplified, if you have a bunch of things you need to send somewhere, you can go to the nearest airstrip and call a bunch of C5:s from somewhere a couple of hours away.
Instead, with a near-future rocket, you could have some sort of assortment of "most likely stuff needed" stored near a launch site and be ready to pack and launch in an hour.
The capability hasn't been tested but why wouldn't it work if it works on a x-37?
Do you have a source for this where I can read more?
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RS-25
[2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sound_suppression_system#NASA [3]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pIKI7y3DTXk&t=6850s
The catchzilla solution is an example of their amazing ability to think out of the box. This solution, and things like the rapid evolution of the Raptor engine (see picture, story here: https://medium.com/@futurespaceworld/the-evolution-of-spacex...), dynamic engine configuration (33, 13, 3, zero, up again) and control is almost magically impressive. This is the stuff of Sci-Fi, brought to life.
There's no reason to reinvent the airport firetruck.
There is. The booster is high above, and is larger than basically any aircraft. There's no flat concrete airfield around either.
I would suggest blowing CO2 or nitrogen through pipes positioned at the right height on the tower.
The way these chopsticks are set forces the booster into a dangerous, snake like maneuver (a SnakeX maneuver) at the last second from a vertical setting, to get into the chopsticks. This maneuver is due to the fact chopsticks are short and the booster has to land on one point in space. No degrees of freedom.
Now, imagine if the chopsticks were long. The booster wouldn't have to land at one specific point, but it could now land on a line. One degree of freedom.
Now replace the long chopsticks with cables, and then add another pair of cables perpendicular to them. So you have a pair of parallel cables perpendicular to a second pair of parallel cables. Now the booster doesn't have to land on a line, but can land anywhere in the grid that's covered by the cables. Two degrees of freedom.
Pushing this thought leads to having a sort of iris diaphragm, like the ones in optics, but an iris diaphragm of cables. The diaphragm is open when the booster is about to land, then closes in quickly. Imagine this[1], but it's cables cinching in.
Now, it's a diaphragm of cables, not a diaphragm of rigid beams, so I imagine the deceleration to be even smoother as the cables elongate, and an additional system of springs and dampers to counter the weight of the booster.
The booster is vertical and stays vertical. Granted, an unstable equilibrium, but it beats doing the SnakeX maneuver to get to the chopsticks, and that's another story.
Now, imagine the iris cable diaphragm can move up and down like equipment handling containers, and now you have three degrees of freedom. That's less control to worry about on the booster's side at the worst possible moment, landing, where you can't make adjustments anymore.
This not only means being more forgiving on mistakes related to position, but also on speed and angle. The diaphragm catches the booster at any angle, and given that it cinches way above the center of gravity, the booster goes back to a more stable vertical position.
For the fire, maybe you just need a big hole down there.
- [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arresting_gear
- [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Iris_Diaphragm.gif
Moreover I think Elon discusses the mechazilla arms in one of Tim Dodd interviews. They dont want longer arms, ratger shoeter.
Think about physics involved for longer arms and how much more stress you will putt on the connection points.
Yes. Something falling into a web of cables. I'd say it may be simpler than optimally controlling that last SnakeX maneuver to be hugged by a short-armed T-Rex.
>Think about physics involved for longer arms and how much more stress you will putt on the connection points.
That's why I wasn't talking about arms, but cables, as explained by most of the reply.
What do you mean?
>Now you got other problems to target into some cell. Moreover cables could be lingering depending on thrust. Or maybe thrust will just cut em easily.
It's an iris diaphragm that's open but cinches on the booster.
I'm sure you think it's easy, but I'm sure some people thought a bit more
Mechanical advantage. The booster weighs 250 tons. A 40' shipping container has a max payload of about 30 tons. There are cranes that can lift 250 tons, and it won't be one, but many. Have you seen gantry cranes?
>So you need a big-ass structure to hold all of these cables.
Similar to the big-ass structure holding the 250 ton booster with the T-Rex arms?
>They must be able to circulate around the perimeter, while being in tension, while not collapsing the structure that holds them, etc..
Not circulate, but translate. The cinching in is a result of them translating. Again, see cranes and gantry cranes. Or, just see the actual chopsticks: circulating, not collapsing the structure that holds them, while being in tension, holding the booster at the free end.
Are you seeing the shear and moment diagram of that cantilever beam with point load? (I know, it's an extension of a supported beam, but still cantilever).
>I'm sure you think it's easy
I'm not sure I think it's easy, I can't see how you're more sure than I about my own thoughts.
>but I'm sure some people thought a bit more
You are people, too. Nothing prevents you from thinking as well, if for nothing than to have a civil conversation on a forum.
Now, that's all fun. Imagine they keep it the way it is, but they duplicate the setting to make a circle, so the booster lands in the middle of many chopsticks... What do you think about that?
And how exactly this requires less precision? I see multiple issues:
- No way to escape/last second abort away from tower once you dipped into that net.
- The booster arms must be longer/heavier, the tower support structure need to support more weight.
- Cables have a lot less thermal mass than the tower/arms - if the torch coming out of raptor engines will touch the cable, it may either cut or soften the cables and they will behave in a different way.
I mean we could have had this discussion previously but now they demonstrated on the first try that they can catch the booster... why bother?
Because these things must work every time, not just the first time. Because why not talk about it, it's an interesting topic and musing about it is amusing. Because it's not a bother. I'm surprised one needs a reason, but here are three already.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=27TvGDpPLNw
It will be interesting to see how these two approaches fare vs. one another.
Then again, I just watched the launch and that was the first thing that popped into my mind, and the first "design" that popped into my mind as I was replying to the thread, so not much thought went into it.
The rocket was set to come down on the pad just in front on the tower and launch mount until the final 3-engine landing burn started. This kept the infrastructure safe until the last moment, but also required that lateral translation you referred to.
First, to the extent the booster is out of position in the x (sideways) direction, the chopsticks can move to accomodate error. But actually I think this dimension is the easiest of the three, as the booster has plenty to time to null any error in this dimension.
In the y direction (direction of travel towards the tower), the rails on the chopsticks can cope with the booster touching down along quite a long distance. But importantly, they appear to be smooth, so the pins can initially skid along them and then the booster can swing if it has not fully nulled any horizontal movement. In contrast, if the booster used legs and has not yet fully nulled any horizontal motion at touchdown, there is a greater risk of breaking a leg or simply tipping over.
And in the z direction, it should be possible for the chopsticks can absorb more vertical motion than legs can absorb, because you can easily build in huge springs/dampers/etc into the ground equipment without concern about mass.
Catching also puts the booster in tension rather than compression - it's easier to be rigid in tension than compression.
Finally, if legs were used, the engines would have to get close to the ground during landing, so reflected shock from the ground could cause damage. I know Falcon 9 does this, but the area of the base of Starship is much greater, so there's effectively less room for the reflected energy to escape. Catching completely removes this risk.
On balance, I think they would have better chance of success for each mission by catching. The main downside would be if you fail to catch, you may need to build a new tower, whereas a flat pad would be cheaper and easier to repair.
I have experience with docking large boats and it does seem to be a bit similar. In the case of boats, wind is a big deal, and the booster has nothing "below the waterline" to slow down the effects of wind.
Not because wind wouldn't affect an empty booster; it certainly would.
But since the booster returns within 8 minutes of the launch, the weather in which a booster lands is restricted to the weather in which they will launch a rocket.
Source: Kerbal Space Program
Had flashbacks to playing Jupiter Landing on the C64!
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jupiter_Lander
Edit: SpaceX should create a simple 'catch' the rocket game. Play in browser style. Just for kicks and marketing.
there is, it was discussed in the FAA thread.
lunar.unnecessarymodification.com
They did: https://starshipthegame.spacex.com/
Another interesting thing SpaceX is doing is to use consumer-grade chips in triple redundancy configurations instead of using $100,000+ radiation-hardened aerospace/defense grade chips.
If it's no stronger than a sudden wind gust, it's just something the controller has to be able to take care of without a heads-up.
Then the next launch crashed due to slosh induced oscillation - and the one rocket after that had anti-slosh baffles. ;-)
More fluid dynamics
By their very nature model predictive controllers operate in a world where not everything is perfectly modelled. Engineers do their best and whatever is left is the "error" the controller is trying to deal with.
Sort of like how you can balance a few pitchers of beer on a tray in your hand by remaining aware of the weight, even when people remove one! hahaha :)
Which is why we use wind tunnels, for example.
These are indeed heavy computations. What I meant is that VoF is one additional equation to be solved besides the N-S equations (either filtered as in LES or Reynolds-averaged as in RANS), the energy equation, your turbulence model equations, and so on. Certainly, not instantaneous at all, but simply an additional "simple" model that we can hook into our current way of doing CFD.
So, my point was, sloshing is a problem that we know how to simulate, although certainly you need HPC resources. Though, looking at those 100k NVIDIA H100 Elon has, I guess they have them! :P
I think it's a huge problem when re-lighting the engines in orbit, though.
Bug tanks make sense there & they might not be always full. So I can imagine all kind of interesting ways you can work with the fuel in zero go to avoid not only slosh but also the need for ullage thrusters. Eq. some programmable nozzles using in-tank gas to nudge liquid fuel blobs to move in the right direction. Or even some nets or bags that herd in the fuel in the middle of the tank + prevent it from directly touching the side, reducing boil-off or refrigeration requirements. :)
Even a real-time simulation should have some measurements to self correct to some degree. Otherwise it'll diverge.
They used trios of regular consumer grade disks/servers etc as a cluster and it looked like a single node.
They had to replace a LOT of hardware but this was still cheaper than big iron industrial grades servers.
This has been known in the high availability and safety systems industry for a while and a good book to learn these reliability engineering techniques is "Reliability Evaluation of Engineering Systems".
The book is available on amazon: https://a.co/d/1nH824K
https://www.epa.gov/radiation/radiation-basics#:~:text=Gamma....
Maybe you could improve the system availability considerably by a bit of gamma radiation protection combined with some more parallelism of the components ..
A second layer blockage for the secondary particles wouldn't have to be as dense or am I missing important physics?
(I guess a lot of gamma radiation would still reach this second layer so please ignore my question :)
https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=+lead+cube+with+side+le...
So something might be off with your assumption of 1500 usd / kg.
I can't decide if I'm joking or not.
(Though likely not of course ;)
But would using redundant systems separated in space connected with each other not offset the chance that they all would be affected at the same time? This is actually not rocket science .. just hard engineering and hardware/software design for redundant systems which is also usable on the ground.
"Hollman also found that creativity got him a long way. He discovered, for example, that changing the seals on some readily available car wash valves made them good enough to be used with rocket fuel."
"Elon Musk" by Vance pg 123
I doubt any Lowes parts made it to space, but you know some went into test articles
Perhaps the key is to be relentless, and resourceful.
The Fukushima and Deepwater Horizon disasters show that this knowledge has not penetrated other industries.
But it turns out, it doesn't matter how many redundant backup diesel generators you've got if a 45-foot wave comes along and they're all left underwater.
the orbital and planetary mechanics kind of suck. They're meant to provide a decent 'arcade realism' for the sake of player/player interactions and pvp/pve.
if you want to experience fuel slosh/weight during a vertical ascent/descent go with kerbal. It models a lot of that stuff without mods -- and mods can make the model even more accurate.
Algorithms can be faulty as well.
Which was never claimed.
That paper is a little bit about Erlang and a whole lot about OTP and other methodology and design technique.
It is still, very much "the paper" for distributed systems, though its applicability to this particular problem is limited.
Does anyone know (or have educated speculation on) what kind of hardware is running these algorithms? Like, do they have a linux machine that's running the control loops? Are we talking megabytes, gigabytes of SRAM?
I would think no -- you would definitely need hard real time for something like this. But my only experience with real time systems is in tiny MCUs with kb of SRAM. That's definitely too small for a controller like this.
Really curious about the nuts and bolts of this.
When you build something like this, you're torn between having a big model that represents everything and a smaller model that is easier to validate and reason about. Based on simulation, you might go for a smaller model that "knows" to stay away from operating areas where hidden variables (like really complicated tank slosh) invalidate the small model.
I doubt the actual control loop is too much processing, but it's certainly possible to build controllers with SDRAM, millions of variables of state, and hard realtime processing, though I wouldn't build it on top of preempt-rt. ;)
>probably involve some kind of fast numerical fluid simulation
https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/19700023342/downloads/19... (search for "slosh" or "shaping network")
My stepfather worked as a programmer on the Apollo program, and the thing he always talked about as his biggest accomplishment was working on the "slosh problem" -- so yeah, props to the SpaceX team for managing that landing. And props to my stepdad for managing it on hardware that was... a billion times less capable? :-)
I am curious but clueless about these problems, can you expand more?
Well, that makes perfect sense considering that both the spaceport infrastructure, and the booster need to do their calculation on the ground level instead of the highly radiated environment that is space. However, for the rockets themselves, which happen to reach that harsh environment, they may use more resilient and expensive hardware in the future, after passing over the current "let it splash in the Indian Ocean" development and testing phases.
Surely this isn't necessary with a small enough sensor granularity or whatever the terminology is. You can have very dumb software if it reacts quickly enough to changes in perception.
Instead, it's more common to use gasses injected at the top of the tank to push the liquid to the bottom. Falcon 9 uses helium. Starship uses https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autogenous_pressurization as well as small header tanks for the landing propellants.
Where his vision hit a lot of speed bumps is second stage reusability. Starship is a beautiful second stage to throw in the ocean. They’ll probably get it landing but the heat tiles will require a lot of refurbishment between flights. They’re going to have to figure something else out.
This likely means they are targeting 10 flights in a day at least. They've mentioned 1000 trips to Mars during one transit window, which means ~10000 Earth launches within 3 months, or >100 per day.
"Is there a word for that - something out of fiction becoming mundane?"
Musking?
But I lump both these together as the *"Wiseass Movable Feast"*
Fuel is the vast majority of the vehicle weight at launch, kind of like an empty vs full can of soda.
They ignite a subset of engines just a few seconds before landing for the final slowdown and maneuvering.
Edit: here is a video from further away that shows the rocket gliding in under control of the grid fins before the engines light and execute the final landing maneuver:
They sure made it look easy...
Surprising to see this work first time though - I don't recall them doing any hover and lateral movement tests, but I assume they must have done.
What's also wild is that the booster isn't being caught/supported by those giant grid fins, but rather by small lifting pins just below them, and seems to only have two of these (one on either side), so it also has to get it's rotational position right so those pins engage with (are supported by) the arms.
Watching the video, it looked like the bottom of the rocket was glowing hot, but the engines were cool. I imagine that means they were probably running some amount of methane through the engine bells to cool them.
Also I don't think the telemetry on the feed is that accurate, so with all of the atmospheric braking, it was probably going a bit slower than the 1200km/h at engine reignition.
Going by the telemetry of the seconds before the landing burn and noting the speed vs time, it seems drag was around 40 m/s^2 when it was going at around 3000 km/h. Since drag depends on velocity squared though, it had reduced to just above 10 m/s^2 just before the engines lit at 1250 km/h, and so would quickly become negligible once the engines lit.
Going by Wikipedia, the Super Heavy[1] has 3400000 kg of fuel at launch, so 3% of that is about 102000 kg. For the landing burn, it used 13 Raptor v3 engines[2] to scrub speed. Each Raptor flows about 650 kg/s max, so 3% fuel is enough for about 12 seconds for the 13 engines.
The empty mass of the Super Heavy is about 275000 kg, so about 377000 kg before the landing burn with 3% fuel.
Using the sea-level vs vacuum performance of the Raptor v2 engines, one can estimate that each Raptor v3 produces about 2.45 NM of force at sea-level. So 13 of them would produce about 31.85 MN of force.
Using Newton's second law, F=ma, this gives an initial deceleration of about 84 m/s^2 and about 104 m/s^2 when empty. If we do a rough spreadsheet integration, we get that a burn of roughly 4 seconds is needed to scrub the speed assuming no other forces.
Now, comparing this with reality, the full 13 engines were lit for a little over 5 seconds.
In my simplified calculations I was assuming full throttle the whole way, which obviously isn't realistic, and I also assumed 3% fuel. So over all I think that's a pretty decent estimation.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX_Super_Heavy#Engines
So, 34M kg of fuel has to be burned (in this booster alone) to facilitate a flight ... and I see that the propellant is CH4 / LOX[1].
Burning methane is much, much better than simply releasing methane but the release becomes CO2 instead ...
What is the back-of-the-envelope conversion of 34M kg CH4 vs., for instance, 34M kg of kerosene/JP ?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX_Super_Heavy#Engines
[1] https://www.engineeringtoolbox.com/co2-emission-fuels-d_1085... [2] https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1298426245991063554?lang=en
IIRC there's a tradeoff between efficiency and thrust as well. Heavier fuels aren't quite as energy-efficient, but it's easier for them to develop a lot of thrust, which is important for the initial stages of launch. If I'm remembering events described in Ignition! correctly this led to "thrust density" being something that was optimized for - to the point that there were experiments with mixing mercury into the fuel!
[0]: https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/facts-and-figu...
Long ago though so rusty, $dayjob doesn't involve any advanced math at all.
edit: To expand, the "rough spreadsheet integration" was just the Euler method[1] assuming a constant acceleration. So
v(t+dt) = v(t) + a * dt
v(t+dt) = v(t) + F/m(t) * dt
m(t+dt) = m(t) - 650 * dt
Using dt = 0.1 seconds, I got almost exactly 4 seconds until the velocity reached zero.
That should of course be 13 * 650 * dt.
Anyway, plugging in the Raptor V2 thrust numbers the approximation increases to 4.25 seconds. This is in line with the thrust I used for the V3 being ~8% higher than the V2 thrust figures.
The last part of the live stream they showed footage from a different angle and there it didn't look too bad though! For sure controlled.
Scott Manley put out a tweet that they went down towards a non-tower position until they were at three engine controlled burn, and only then did the side shift.
Check Steve Brunton youtube channel, he is one of the leaders in this area: https://youtu.be/gb_C9LcjDSI?si=xUjqUZ9-0MIFohX6
does anyone have any literature about how the Rocket localized itself with respect to the chopstick arms? It must've been some combination of GPS and Radar pings to the arms?
And then the onboard IMU to make sure it hits it straight.
To speculate more, they could also be using something like ultra-wide band positioning. This relies on the same time-of-flight principle as GPS but instead of using satellites in orbit to provide the precise time information you rely on various nearby ground stations. Would only be useful right at the final approach, the last couple hundred meters, but it's another way they could get very very precise position information. (fun fact: Ultra Wide band positioning is also how iPhones can locate AirTags with centimeter accuracy)
In the wide open sky, I’m guessing it’s pretty reliable.
Vision systems would be pretty useless with the low visibility of the smoke and fire. So I thought maybe it was some kind of radar configuration.
Anyways, I’d pay a lot of money to pick the brain of the GNC team here.
Absolutely impressive accuracy and precision.
> Mechazilla has caught the Super Heavy booster!
Obviously the primary mission was successful, in spite of anomalies (good system design!), but people are and should be curious about this aspect.
100% with you. The teams I’ve worked with would be celebrating and trying to figure out what’s burning at the same time. And especially trying to figure out if there’s anything that they need to do to collect evidence for that investigation (eg zooming the remote PTZ cameras in on specific areas or things like that)
I bet SpaceX does. They've solved the big problems, now it's time to solve the small problems and make reuse a reality.
The vent out the side before touchdown didn’t look right, though. Something blew, but non-critically.
For example, prototype number 10 exploded 8 minutes after landing [1] because of a seemingly insignificant fire at the bottom.
After today's flight there was a long lasting fire in the engine section, with occasional flaming pieces of plumbing raining down from the rocket. Examining the aftermath should help SpaceX to understand what improvements need to be made to prevent this from happening.
It's an object lesson in rapid engineering development. If everything goes perfectly in a development test, it's a sign you're not moving fast enough (meaning not taking enough risk per increment to maximize learning). As valuable as Falcon, Starlink and Starship are, the biggest near-term value of SpaceX may be providing such a clear demonstration of well-executed "fail fast, learn fast" engineering that even politicians and bureaucrats can understand it.
Historic viewing :)
> Holy flying fuck, look at that thing!
Gold.
Thats like a 747 to space.
No idea about the other costs.
Also, while 150t is the target payload capacity, the current test vehicles are closer to 50t in payload capacity, there are revisions in the pipeline based on data from these test flights which will bring it up to 150t.
The dumping of this excess propellant actually caused an explosion and loss of vehicle on the second test flight.
Whatever that means is what it means, the ship was out of control and I don't know whether or not the mission requiring that payload was successful, but the fact is that it did carry the payload.
A modern airliner on a long flight might burn around 80 tons of kerosene. It's slightly cheaper than methane. Call it 75-80K$.
Am I mistaken, or are there distance/payload combinations for which Starship is cheaper per pound on a point-to-point basis than air transport, even setting aside 30 minutes versus 12 hours? Isn't that the non-intuitive outcome of ballistic trajectories?
It's quite possible that SpaceX has access to some cheaper methane source. Texas produces a lot of it.
And SpaceX has speculated about eventually switching to some renewable source by e.g. synthesizing methane. In which case that would boil down to cost of electricity and carbon. I don't see that becoming cheaper short term but that could happen long term.
They did [1].
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_retirement
Material: stainless steel is much cheaper
Percentage of reusability: boosters of shuttle cannot be reused, maintenance of shuttle itself is also very expensive (heat shields were pricey). whereas the starship stack has higher reuse percentage and allegedly cheaper to maintain.
The other big difference, an elephant in the room grade difference I think, is that SpaceX reliability was developed with memories of a reusable vehicle failing mostly due to turnaround costs and risks on everyone's minds. That clearly wasn't the case when the space shuttle was designed, they were the first and enjoyed the privilege of making all the beginner mistakes.
He emailed back that he agreed with my reasons and had argued that case with NASA in the early stages of the shuttle program.
So NASA was aware of this at the time.
Yes, both systems are reusable, but there are key differences in the refurbishment of the systems that partly explains the cost difference. It took more labor, resources and time to refurbish the shuttle. Also consider rapid reusability was a stretch goal when it was being designed, but we have come a loooong way since, spacex in particular has had it as a driving competitive differentiator for years now.
Another big difference is that NASA post Cold War was a skilled jobs program, with an incentive to do distributed, high overhead work to appease their bosses (congress), while SpaceX has the opposite.
Starship uses essentially the same ceramic heat shield tiles as the Space Shuttle, so the fact the Shuttle had so much trouble with refurbishment doesn't mean that SpaceX has solved these refurbishment issues with the Starship upper stage.
Though the Starship lower stage, which contains the most expensive engines, doesn't have this problem. Since it doesn't need a heat shield. So partial reusability should be pretty realistic.
> In terms of shapes, the tiles were not uniform. In fact, there were over 17,000 different shapes used to fit specific areas of the shuttle's body. Each tile had to be individually manufactured and shaped to fit a precise location due to the complex curvature of the shuttle's surface. The unique shapes were necessary to ensure that every part of the shuttle received the proper protection against the extreme temperatures during re-entry.
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b&sca_esv=11e08...
This gives a direct answer (24,300) while citing a NASA source.
Note that the question here is how many uniquely shaped tiles there was, not the total number.
This is interesting because if you have to manufacture and keep in stock 17,000 separate tile shapes, that will be vastly more expensive than SpaceX who, from what I hear, only uses a singe hex shaped tile everywhere.
But on a more technical level. I think the vertical landing is the main difference. Vertical landing was obviously known and done by NASA, this is how the lunar modules landed on the Moon. But doing it on Earth, with vehicles weighing hundreds of times more, I don't think the world had that technical readiness a few decades ago, when the space shuttle was designed.
And another major difference is the mass manufacturing idea. From the start SpaceX planned for getting to mass manufacture its rockets. The Falcon rockets are much cheaper than any other alternatives even if you remove the reusability.
Then it's the methane burning engines. This was pure old fashioned engineering progress. SpaceX's engines are miracles of rocket engineering. Aside from that, the fuel choice is extremely smart. Methane is better than all other fuels, except for hydrogen. Hydrogen was the fuel of the space shuttle, but it's very tricky to work with. It has very low volumetric density, so the tank of the space shuttle was absolutely humongous. Hydrogen needs to be stored at an absurdly low cryogenic temperature, so this adds to the complexity. And that tank was not reusable, so it adds to the cost.
It is also yet to be seen how Starship will ever be profitable (outside of spending government money), who is going to pay for those launches and for what purpose. Other than Starlink, of course.
Now personally I’m looking forward to NASA, ESA and JAXA to launch outer solar system probes like new horizons but with tons of fuel left in the tank to safely make orbit around there.
Partially. They have a fixed-price contract to land humans on the Moon, and notably got that contract because they severely undercut the other bids and were the only bid that actually fit within the available budget: they bid $2.94B, while Blue Origin bid $5.99B and Dynetics $9.08B.
That 3 billion is also much less than what they're spending on the project.
So was the space shuttle, so that's not a difference between the launch costs of the two vehicles.
It also allows for launching individual space station modules that have almost the same volume as the entire ISS in one launch.
Their plans for refuelling on orbit with tanker versions of the starship open up the entire solar system to unmanned missions with much shorter timelines and much higher payload size and weight.
The fact the entire system is re-usable will make it both cheaper and faster to use than any other launch system.
All of this combined mean that it won't just be countries and space programs bidding for space on launches, it puts space within reach of many corporations and some private individuals. This isn't conjecture, it's already happening with the Falcon 9. Starship will make it even more accessible.
Of course, that means you could also fit a James Webb-folded telescope except make it a lot bigger :-)
My favorite related thing is that the Starship itself could serve as a large space or moon station.
About 10% funded by NASA. Starship is a >$10B program; SpaceX is getting $3B for Artemis of which >2/3 is for operational tasks and moon-specific stuff that SpaceX aren't relevant for SpaceX's goals of LEO and Mars.
Now taxpayers have a 10x return on investment.
But it's high cost was the end of it.
The high cost should have killed the project before it ever flew, but that's not how governments behave.
All of that adds tremendous weight, complexity, and cost.
There are better fuels in terms of Isp and density. They have some downsides such as being corrosive or having highly toxic exhaust.
And unbreathable and full of sulphuric acid. You may as well just stay in orbit.
On Venus, a puncture doesn't immediately destroy anything - because of equal pressure on each sides of the balloon wall. You have more than enough time to put on a protective coat and fix it.
And building more living space is much easier + you could source the material (carbon) on site.
a. Cheaper, more durable material (stainless steel).
b. Cheaper, easier to manufacture engines.
c. Easier to use fuel (methane is much "tamer" than hydrogen).
d. Standardized heat shield with much smaller requirements for manual work.
We'll have to see how it works out.
Contrast that to the Space Shuttle which required a human crew to flight test anything.
Same thing for SLS.
The need to codify what work is to be done in contacts is antithetical to SpaceX's rapid development processes.
SpaceX builds vehicles. The Shuttle was “reusable” because they needed a term between the default for transportation capital expenditures (e.g. trains, planes, cars and ships) and the modified missiles that defined post-War spaceflight. “Reusable” in the Shuttle’s context meant months of specialist overhaul time and the cost of a Falcon 9 launch in SRB booster replacements alone [0].
At the end of the day, in 2010, “the incremental cost per flight of the Space Shuttle was $409 million, or $14,186 per kilogram” [1]. ($591mm and $20,512 in 2024 dollars, respectively [2].) SpaceX’s prices per kg are around $3,170 on Falcon 9 [3] and $1,520 for Falcon Heavy [4]. Starship should bring those costs below $1000.
[0] https://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?topic=51959.0
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_program
[2] https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/
[3] https://www.spacex.com/media/Capabilities&Services.pdf LEO
[4] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falcon_Heavy LEO, theoretical
It might even bring the costs below $100/kg.
(My guess is the economics are fine, but the politics would kill it on earth, so the moon or mars will get one, but that's just an interested amateur opinion).
(I may be misremembering or getting confused with a thing specific to tidal locking?)
I suppose the same effect is there with satellites much smaller than the moon, but it would be tiny.
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Orbital_Debris_Lifet...
But yes, eventually things decay.
https://www.esa.int/Enabling_Support/Space_Engineering_Techn...
StarShip consists of the Super Heavy booster that we saw "caught" today, and the StarShip (orbiter) itself. Having the booster return to launch site vs requiring ocean recovery should potentially increase cadence and reduce cost of reuse. StarShip is also meant to be reusable, although it remains to be seen how that will pan out. On the previous flight there was burn through from inadequate heat shielding - maybe we'll see an improvement with today's vehicle. I'd expect SpaceX to iteratively arrive at a quicker and more cost effective orbiter reuse procedure than NASA had with the shuttle, but how quick remains to be seen. Of course they are planning many of these to go on one-way trips to Mars rather than being reused.
Worth noting that Starship's heat shield is very similar to the one of the Shuttle. They actually got the manufacturing method from NASA.
The difference is that they have already proven to be the lowest cost and most reliable launcher due to reuse. This is them lapping the industry with second stage reusability.
Starship is supposed to be (and clearly well on the way to being) fully rapidly re-usable. That means all stages (in this case two) are re-usable, and that the capital and time required to get either stage flight ready again after a flight should be minimal.
Said another way – it is cheaper for SpaceX to build an entirely new Starship + Booster than it was to refurbish a Shuttle between flights, by a factor of about 4x ($90M for a Starship+Booster / $400m for Shuttle refurb).
Let's start with the fact that it was designed in the 1970's. If you had a Cadillac DeVille from 1970 it would get 8-12 miles per gallon. Just the mere fact that the design is about 70 years old makes that vehicle too expensive to operate, and that's before we even start talking about other issues with the design (performance, safety, reliability, etc).
One of the design goals of Starship is for the booster and ship to relaunch with zero refurbishment. To literally land over the launchpad, refuel, and go back to orbit within hours without people even approaching them. The heat shield is the biggest risk to that goal IMO, and we saw today that it definitely sustained serious damage despite improvements. But if they ever get there then per-launch costs will be a tiny fraction of the Shuttle with 6x the payload.
This is in contrast to something like the falcon, which has a very standardized mfg process and components, which allows for really rapid iteration
The shuttle would have been much, much, cheaper per launch if it had flown more often. The expected costs for the shuttle included a range based on how often it flew which turned out to be reasonably accurate. They were much worse at predicting which end of the range they would be flying in. At the rate they ended up flying they had the extra costs of reusability without any of the benefits.
Starship is ludicrously expensive, but still much cheaper than even the best case for the Shuttle, and it has a guaranteed source of launches to help it benefit from resuability.
It actually would have been a lot cheaper if they had gone for serialized, mass assembly line production of Saturn V class disposable rockets to launch piece of space stations, satellites and manned missions into low earth orbit.
More than 40 years and many lessons learned.
SpaceX took advantage of tech from both the US and Russia, including the experience with the Space Shuttle. They have better computers, better metallurgy, advanced 3D printing and their own experience with the Falcon 9.
There is no guarantee that it will reduce the costs that much, but will all that experience, the chances are success are higher than with the Space Shuttle.
One big issue that isn't talked about much and that SpaceX takes very seriously is simply a lack of demand. There is only so much stuff you want to put in space. Satellites are expensive, and even with disposable rockets, the launch is only a smaller fraction of the cost. It is already a problem with the Falcon 9 as they have a bunch of rockets and not much to do with them. Starlink, orbital refueling, and crazy ideas like earth to earth transport are all ways to address this problem.
It was a problem for the Space Shuttle too, they couldn't achieve the economies of scale they planned it for. It was supposed to fly for routine maintenance missions but it didn't work out.
What this also means is that if you want to get into the space economy, work on things to do in space, not yet another launch vehicle startup.
Is their timeline too optimistic? Yeah, but if the industry still catches up with F9 and they are close to having something a lot more advanced it really doesn't matter.
Even without reusability nothing comes close to Starship's cargo capacity. If you don't have to put a lot of engineering into getting things as small and light as possible you can put things in space a lot faster.
She's not an enthusiast; she's got an impression from SciFi that going to mars shouldn't be that hard.
Seeing Starship get burnthrough on these suborbital launches really shows how hard it'll be to do Mars return entry with a fair few extra km/s.
Other countries have sent satellites to orbit around Mars, which is not the same thing.
Pedant mode: the USSR did land softly on Mars, but the lander got caught in a dust storm and was not able to transmit back the data ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_3 ).
But other than that, yeah, there are two Schiaparelli craters now on Mars. :P
she got me a while back with ink solvents. Monks may have been more illuminated making those pretty manuscripts than we appreciated.
I’m sure it still didn’t do the article justice, though.
Note that the booster is not really being "caught" although this is the word it seems we're stuck with. It's really more like landing on the arms, since it throttles to a hover at that point.
Not necessarily for reusability, but it helps significantly for rapid reusability: it eliminates the need to transport the booster from the landing site to the launch site. Given that it's 9m x 70m and weighs 270 tonnes, that's not an easy process.
That was the exact reason they went this way.
Maybe they will have to sacrifice more payload mass for active or passive shielding or more fuel for powered deceleration. That would yield a less impressive lifter but with full reusability.
It was one of the technological breakthroughs of von Braun's team with the V2.
You're way too optimistic. Starship will deliver commercial payloads, with SpaceX phasing out Falcon 9 outside of ISS launches, before anyone has a reusable Falcon 9 equivalent.
It pains me to say this, but SpaceX is in a class all its own.
Blue Origin plans to launch New Glenn in a month, with landing planned. They are a wild card.
SpaceX is one of the greatest, if not the greatest, private technology company in history.
Musk is getting something from Trump: most likely protection from some legal issue.
You mean that time that the FCC removed Starlink from the broadband problem when they couldn't deliver the speeds that they had committed to, as defined very explicitly in the program?
- He called some guy who worked for him a pedo for no reason, which he was sued over
- Took over Twitter and promoted right wing tweets to everybody, unbanned far right accounts and sued critics who said he did so
- Started promoting far right ideas, like when he retweeted "Interesting" to some tweet of a 4chan post saying that high-status, high-testosterone males are the only ones who can think freely and should be the only ones who can vote
- Took the side of the right-wing rioters who attacked mosques in the UK, saying civil war is inevitable
- Just seems to insult companies for little reason - advertisers who leave him, and Apple
There has been kind of a slow back and forth. Some people who liked him were miffed about the pedo thing, but they didn't hate him. But he has just kept doing things that some people hate.
Leave out the part where the riots were started because someone with an immigrant background killed a bunch of kids at a Taylor Swift concert and police were withholding the identity. Along with your other 'anecdotes', can you make your political position any more transparent?
> because someone with an immigrant background killed a bunch of kids at a Taylor Swift concert and police were withholding the identity.
It might be somewhat justified if they burnt the house down of the murderer, or those who assisted him. They didn't - they burnt down houses, shops, and mosques, because they wrongly assumed the guy was Muslim and decided that was just cause to target any Muslim. His identity was hidden because he was a minor at the time of the attack.
and coincidentally he makes cars and rockets too!
Supposedly they’re working on both a reusable and cost optimised non-reusable second stage at the same time. And they don’t really know yet which one will end up being cheaper.
You also see this kind of thinking with Rocket Labs neutron rocket. Where they focus on making the reusable booster do more, while making the second stage smaller, cheaper and simpler.
I think if it wasn’t for the rocket engine this wouldn’t be a question at all. The tank doesn’t have much value. It’s just a thin shell and probably a fraction of the cost of the fuel.
So I’m thinking, perhaps the optimal solution is something like this: the bottom part of the second stage with the engines separates, and a small engine and fuel tanks places the engines in a stable orbit. The tank itself is deorbited and burns up.
At some point later something like the Starship collects several second stage engines and deorbits them safely to be reused.
Or perhaps just the engines can be immediately deorbited with an inflatable heat shield and parachutes.
Sure, SpaceX has been doing first stage reuse for a long time now. But they have demonstrated landing the second stage successfully at sea twice now with the same sort of smoothness that they demonstrated once for the booster before they then caught the booster on the first real try.
A partial list of unbelievably hard things that SpaceX has so far made seem easy:
- building a rocket from scratch
- landing Falcon 9 boosters
- landing Falcon 9 boosters *reliably*
- 3x weekly launch cadence (Falcon)
- the bellyflop manoeuver
- mass manufacturing(!) a rocket engine
- catching the booster
- simulated landings of the ship
Anyways, if they can do all those things then it's pretty clear that they can catch-land the ship.
There's still a huge list of crazy-difficult things that SpaceX say they want to do that are hard to believe are possible, except for the fact that SpaceX has already done so many unbelievably difficult things already.
They could do the same thing with S2 recovery here.
But I imagine that by IFT6 they'll have nailed the flap burn through problem.
IMO a better use for it might be to ferry up large pieces of purpose built craft with less excess dry weight. A single reusable Starship launch can put the entire mass of the Apollo craft needed to make it from LEO to the Moon and back into LEO. Put a craft in two launches and dock it in orbit and you've got a huge capability to put a lot of mass onto the moon and still use the cheap cost to orbit Super Heavy gives.
The tiles in combination with ablative materials and the insane robustness of a steel vehicle is sufficient to get Starship through re-entry and soft land in the ocean. We know ceramic thermal tiles worked on Shuttle and X37B and presumably will on Dreamchaser so while the success was an awesome achievement it wasn't unlikely given time to refine their methods.
SpaceX are limited by the properties of real materials, not their ambitions, and we still don't know if rapidly reusability is possible with ceramic tiles or if their fragility will require inspections and refurbishment. They can't do it with ablatives and there aren't many other options. I am optimistic but also realistic about the difficulties of what they are attempting. Sometimes risky projects run into brick walls and you don't know what is possible until you try.
SpaceX continues to blow me away with these unbelievably lofty ideas. I remember seeing their "grasshopper" flights years ago and they blew it up because they couldn't land it at the time, who knew within a few years they'd be doing this.
They were originally going to do high-altitude tests with an "F9 dev2" (similar to some of the early starship test launches) - but they gave up and just did some testing with real landing Falcon 9s instead.
A bit tricky to aim though - basically the moment you initiate the burn for re-entry, you give 15 minute warning.
Plus it's easier to intercept orbital bombardment since you know where it is ahead of time and have plenty of time to intercept.
These are fired from light hours away at approximately 0.2 to 0.3 c. I had assumed that something going so fast would just disintegrate if it hit an atmosphere head on? The projectiles are described as "increasing velocity" as they approach, and they strike with gigaton effects. I remember reading an xkcd that showed something traveling so fast in atmosphere would cause huge explosions from air turned into plasma.
It's impossible to intersept something going 10km/s.
Even just one engine in minimum thrust would make the rocket go up when empty.. so the computer lights the engine at the precise right moment so it will have 0 velocity at 0 altitude, then it cuts off the engine. "Hoverslam".
The Starship booster is different, it can actually hover.
Point is it always seems like you’re coming in too fast
People say 200$/kg just with booster reuse, and 20$/kg with full reuse. Of course this might be too optimistic, but I truly believe we might reach under 50$ in this decade.
There is a lot of possibilities to make a trip to the moon cheaper though. If we make LEO that cheap, we can build a lot of infrastructure in the space that would make the tourism to moon more affordable. Like keeping a few starships always in orbit as some kind of space-hotel-metro system.
This will probably take a few more decades, though.
All we can say is under $1,000/kg. Which is conservative, that limit being about two thirds that of Falcon Heavy’s theoretical cost to LEO in a reüsable configuration.
On the civilian side, SpaceX saved NASA $2 billion for just one payload, Europa Clipper <https://arstechnica.com/space/2023/10/a-year-from-launch-the...>, so who knows how many billions more from other launches.
On the other hand, I imagine you could wipe out any benefits to $/mass launched pretty quickly by blowing up the tower.
Also landing on the launch pad means you don’t have to transport the rocket. Just have the arms set it down and you’re ready to launch again.
In short, it would require such huge and heavy landing legs and landing barges that it probably wouldn't be feasible.
The second link seems to show a version of Starship that's relatively up-to-date.
For Falcon 9 that's not that big a deal because they're NOT trying to reuse the second stage. Whereas with Starship they need more fuel to recover the ship, and that means they need to save weight elsewhere to avoid losing too much payload to orbit.
Question for hackers: How does this reorient space programs world-wide? If I were a politician or technocrat in China, Russia, or the EU this would feel like an inverse and intense Sputnik moment — “holy sh—- we have to up our game!”
And why "eventually"? SpaceX should have already convinced people of that. Yeah it's not yet in production, but the momentum and progress have been amazing to witness.
(The previous one was convincing everyone that there was lots of space for tech improvement. Wake up call achieved just a few years ago also by SpaceX.)
See also this blog post: https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2021/10/28/starship-is-st...
It gets to complete and upgrade Starlink. Sure. And that keeps it busy for what? Two years? At most. Sure. Done. Just kidding, that provides some background launches as a guaranteed customer going forward. But nowhere near enough to make a dent in what will be the new SpaceX launch capabiity.
So what else can it do, that exploits its own launch capability?
Going to Mars is not an obvious commercial venture - not at first - not until some government somewhere convinces itself to fund that.
So what else? What can SpaceX do on its own with this launch capability?
A bit like Amazon then: if SpaceX needs some capability in their grand plan to Mars or whatever, they could try and package that as a commercial service after using the bare bones version for themselves.
Apart from Starlink, not much I believe. The main thing will be the Artemis contract with NASA, which requires two figures worth of Starship flights to LEO to refill the Starship tanker to get the HLS Starship to land a few people on the moon.
So I do think Starship will mostly generate money through NASA contracts, Starlink, and commercial launches. Though there aren't that many commercial launches currently. Perhaps there will be more once the launch prices drop due to reusability, though that remains to be seen. Developing a satellite is already more expensive than launching it.
> Q: Callisto looks very much like Grasshopper, the SpaceX Falcon 9 first stage reuse prototype.
> A: Callisto is Grasshopper. The Chinese are also building a similar prototype, I have no problem saying we didn’t invent anything.
https://satelliteobservation.net/2018/06/02/cnes-director-of...
(also, while NASA has been generally helpful to SpaceX's efforts, American FAA bureaucrats have managed to inject unnecessary delays and uncertainty into the process (in addition to some necessary delays).
The first SpaceX barge landing had just taken place, and I asked him what he thought. He got a faraway look in his eyes, and agreed that it had been spectacular. For those guys, it must have seemed like all of their dreams were coming true.
What cameras do they have that can look at something 30 KM up in the air that well?
It's an amazing material that is not used as much as it should be.
https://open.spotify.com/track/7wFmJxJfGCN6DM5913y7pr?si=-Uo...
And I’m mostly asking this out of scientific curiosity, not as a criticism.
Why do they always portray movement in space by showing stars moving past the view at variable rates, or even at all?
The opening screen of this video while you’re waiting for the feed to start shows stars moving that seem to be only feet away, and only a few inches in diameter. Like little orbs of light just passing outside the window.
Isn’t this highly unrealistic, for even extremely fast travel in space?
I would imagine at most you would see very slow movement of a very static field of stars. But every depiction in sci-fi, video games, and other simulations like in this video insist on making it seem like space is full of tiny 6-12” stars floating only feet away from each other.
Is there any explanation where this could actually be considered realistic that I’m not thinking of?
I’m just a lowly software engineer, so my expertise in this area is null. But from a basic understanding of stars and physics, this seems unrealistic.
Admittedly, I guess it wouldn’t be very exciting to view movement in space in a way that I’m imagining would be realistic, and maybe that’s the only explanation there is/needs to be.
But I guess I’m thinking that there would be enough people at SpaceX (for example) to scream “this is not even close to realistic!” for something like that to not make it to production, even if it is more exciting to watch.
That said, “the expanse” is an exception here - they make it look as realistic as possible, including the battles where ships don’t even see each other. Stars barely move on it too
Brand association with familiar depictions of “the future” is the goal, not realism.
You could record the full trip, and then speed the record up. What the point to watch at thousand years of the record with slowly changing picture, if you can watch it in a few minutes.
There might be small variances in velocity, but it seems like not near to the extent we see in these simulations.
Again, this was mostly a theoretical/scientific curiosity — I understand why they do it like this, I’m mostly trying to figure out what real movement might look like, even at nX speed.
As an example, if you're watching an airshow against a clear blue sky, especially filmed with a long lens where you can't see the ground, it is very hard to understand what's actually happening because you can only see attitude changes, but not the velocity vector. Add just a few clouds in the background and the impression is very different.
Daily trips to space likely also mean more debris in space and falling to earth.
I hope there is a balance that includes the lives of people near these sites and all of us sharing the same atmosphere.
Maybe a future architecture with more redundancy could get there someday.
I dug into it, found this clip. Elon says that it’s those two tiny knubs! Saw a few pictures and yes, I confirm, it’s not the grid fins.
Here is a brilliant profile shot looking down one of the "arms" after the catch today, you can clearly see it resting on the "pins", not the grid fins.
https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2F7...
They also use those "pins" to raise/lower it with a crane when they need to during construction and during transport to the launch tower. It's the primary mode of lifting the thing
Truly incredible. A day for the history books.
Random link with the actual 10 minutes of magic:
Every fucking time we don't need to increase the size of the Government. It only gets bigger. Never smaller.
A prime example is the environmental impact stuff. They have already done that multiple times. Nothing really changed. If it succeed and doesn't blow up the impact is X, if it blows up the impact is Y. Yet these approvals take weeks and months.
There are also multiple agencies that put their foot down. Famously fish and wildlife was worried starship would crash in the water and hit a shark/whale. No seriously. https://youtu.be/kS8G5D9fg3g?t=21
Then there is the story that at Vandenburg air base, they had to strap a seal to a board and play rocket noises through headphones to see if it was distressed. Keep in mind Vandenburg has been a military rocket launch site for decades. But only now when its SpaceX do these agencies put up road blocks. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3SvJP5wfN4k
Not one of which ever returned to base with a sonic boom.
I assure you, the folks who tried to kill goats via mental powers and staring at them have required weirder tests than the seal.
They need to die off and get replaced by better competition when they mess up. And their market centralization ground to a halt instead of encouraged by the gov because of jobs and total risk aversion.
The FAA manages more flights and space launch operations than it did in the 1980s, when it had a budget more than quadruple the size.
To put it bluntly: you get what you pay for.
Our risk-to-regulatory oversight cost benefit analysis seems extremely off - we overregulate small things that do not have large-scale meaningful impact while basically grandfather in stuff like depleting the Great Salt Lake, coal emissions, etc. which have vastly less regulatory $ spend per environmental impact.
Ideally, if we could quantify all environmental impacts into a single number (ie. CO2 emissions but also wildlife impact, etc.), the $/impact spent across different fields would be equal.
Currently, however, we are likely spending 100x+ on a per-impact basis on SpaceX regulation.
Gee, almost as if decades of austerity politics, lobbying by financial interests, and regulatory capture has malformed a well intentioned regulatory apparatus? Seems like we need more regulation that's less interested in what "united citizens" have to say. (read lobbyists)
How are you arriving at that assessment of regulation of spaceX? i'd be interested in reading more.
> How are you arriving at that assessment of regulation of spaceX?
I mean, SpaceX launches simply do not have a large impact on the environment compared to say, all cumulative coal emissions in the US. The FAA AST budget (which is for SpaceX launches) is about 60 million. Total EPA budget is about 9 billion. That’s about 160x the size of the FAA launch regulatory budget, but the environmental impact of things the EPA covers (and mostly fails to cover) is much much much more than 160x the impact of spacex launches.
Reagen's and thatcher's whole agenda can be summed up by: "the biggest lie is 'i'm from the government and I'm here to help'"
Have you not paid much attention to politics since Reagan and Thatcher? Their whole objective was to hollow out the government piece by piece, then point to its declining performance as justification for getting rid completely, or to gut further. Repeat. This has been the modus operandi for conservative parties since at LEAST thatcher and Reagan.
>we have record spending as a percentage of gdp and are approaching a sovereign debt crisis
Yeah, it's those pesky regulatory agencies riding up that tally I'm sure, not the almost 1 trillion we spend a year perpetuating apartheid states or our military bases all over the world while 3 americans hoard more wealth than 50% of all americans combined. Silly, patently false defense for an already silly position.
Couldn't be the trillions we spent on the war on "terror". Or the trillions we spend on futile measures like the war on drugs. It's def the ftc and the epa. Those lot. That's who's causing our problems. Yep. That makes sense.
Are you serious? Either you're not a student of history or we have drastically different readings of the past 40 years of american government.
>We never really had an austerity movement
Patently false, dishonest rewriting of history. Did you not pay attention to Reagan actually did?
Reagan's whole thing was the whole govt helping is a lie.
Reagan cut food stamps and almost all other spending while drastically increasing the military budget, cut taxes on the wealthy, deregulated in the name of austerity, got the war on drugs going to villainize his political opponents.
You simply can not be serious. Maybe read Reagan's wiki page before writing such demonstrably revisionist history.
https://www.politico.com/news/2024/10/10/california-reject-m...
I cannot remember a more explicit case of authoritarian government abuse in a developed nation in recent memory, and it’s especially infuriating given SpaceX and Musk are one of the most important and innovative companies and leaders of all time. No other country would think to look at such accomplishments and try to undermine themselves through petty politics and lawfare.
Ideally, the commission will withdraw its objections and allow the launches; SpaceX obviously chose this site both for its proximity to the Pacific Ocean and for redundancy in case of poor weather in Florida (like this past week for example).
But then, there may be military missions that require launching from an air force base.
An orbit from there is useless for a mission profile that was slated for Florida. It costs more fuel and has completely different ground tracks.
The sats that spacex launches for Starlink, which are about as interchangeable as you can get, are less valuable in polar orbits because they spend significantly less time over population.
Congress shall make no law respecting
an establishment of religion, or
prohibiting the free exercise thereof;
or abridging the freedom of speech, or
of the press; or the right of the
people peaceably to assemble, and to
petition the government for a redress
of grievances.
Therefore, for a California state government agency to punish SpaceX for its founder's speech is unconstitutional.
Title 18 USC section 232 lays out criminal penalties for violating a citizens civil rights, thus unconstitutional acts can be and often are criminal acts.
https://twitter.com/shellenberger/status/1845131546501734440...
This one's for you. Hit it Perry. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_VJlHWESyLI
Apparently the rails that catch the booster can translate in and out relative to the "chopstick" arms so the booster can be positioned and rotated to match the launch mount after landing.
I turned 50 yesterday and it feels a bit like the future I dreamed of as a child.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/yearly-number-of-objects-...
With Starship, SpaceX is striving to make rockets fully reusable, which, if they succeed, will transform human civilization by radically reducing launch costs and enabling large-scale space exploration and industry. The kinds of possibilities this opens up include economically viable permanent lunar bases, Mars colonization, and revolutionary industries like asteroid mining.
Earth to moon without Aerobraking is a delta v of around 13k/s, mars is 13.3
Anyone know whether the fire toward the bottom of the booster during/after the catch is normal?
Good to see some good ol hardware breakthroughs in another industry.
The amount of progress we have seen in rocketry and space travel in the last decade is mind blowing, I never thought I would see this in my lifetime.
Edit: Decided to give it a shot and applied for a backend software engineering position at SpaceX. I'm not sure if it will be noticed, but its worth a shot. I may not be a rocket scientist, but it would be great to contribute using the knowledge I do have.
IIRC they were talking about 100+ Apollo launches to get a real space station, moon base, and expedition missions to Mars by 1980 and with that would have come a real drive to innovate and improve on the Saturn V.
Without the computational power that we take for granted today they would have definitely brute forced their way to elegant solutions and got somewhere close to where we are by the mid 90s.
This would have lead to tremendous innovations in solar panels, batteries, and metallurgy much sooner than we ended up getting to them.
Instead we chose a different path and made ourselves completely dependent on oil.
I think that the Saturn V was a solid platform that was robust enough to do the kinds of things that Von Braun and others had in mind as well as versatile enough to be improved upon.
They would have done it with sufficient budget but the political drive wasn't there. The politicians were more concerned with killing Vietnamese and Cambodians and then selling out American interests to oil companies.
Now only if Project Orion had not been canceled due to international treaties banning nuclear testing we’d be on the moons of Jupiter by now (sigh).
He’s a twat. But he has vision longer than the next quarter and can inspire / coerce people into delivering.
“Never been done before – xAI did in 19 days what everyone else needs one year to accomplish.”
He’s a twat? What are your credentials?
It's a lot less impressive being the second person to fly a plane. Grok was released in November 4, 2023; Llama was released freely in February 2023. They had plenty to build off.
> He’s a twat? What are your credentials?
What credentials would be relevant to determining that?
I credit Musk for a lot of the vision behind SpaceX, but I'm glad he seems a bit distracted from it right now with X etc. It's possible to be both visionary and a twat simultaneously. Howard Hughes serves as a similar example.
For sure. Outstanding vision. I'll give him credit. But vision doesn't launch a rocket or finance a business. There are probably thousands of people out there with sufficient "vision" to build a space program, but only one of them is a billionaire willing to finance it. Musk is not some one of a kind unique person. He just happens to be one of the few who have the means ($$) to hire people who can actually bring his vision to life.
Musk isn't Tony Stark, single-handedly building everything. But then again, that's not how most innovations work.
Engineers who worked directly with Musk, such as Tom Mueller, have spoken about Musk's technical acumen and involvement in managing projects.
There have been many rocket programs, both public and private, that have accomplished less with more money. Bezos's Blue Origin, for example, started earlier than SpaceX and had a much richer backer for most of its existence, but is only now hoping to launch its first orbital rocket (and I hope they succeed).
There's more to it than just writing a check.
First there are solid state inertial motion sensors[1]. Those combined gyros, accelerometers, and magnetometers that way just a few grams. Those bad boys weighed a couple hundred pounds in the Apollo rockets. We put the equivalent up in a $100 quadcopter these days.
Second there is 3D printing of rocket engine alloy, this allows SpaceX to 3d print a raptor engine[2] both faster, lighter, and without error than any engine we could have built before 2010.
Third was the development of fracking which created so much methane availability [3] that using it for rocket fuel became cost effective.
Fourth and fifth changes were three decimal orders of magnitude on the ability of computers to compute with a commensurate drop in cost, and with that an explosion the the ability to use high frequency radio to do things that used to be done by cable harnesses and wiring. (sorry no citation, general knowledge)
I can appreciate that it is really really hard to internalize how much as changed and improved since Apollo and can strongly recommend a trip to one's local science museum if you have one to get a visceral sort of amazement at what Apollo engineers did with the technology available to them at the time.
So it isn't accurate to say we could have had this all along, although if one of the 'big' players like Lockheed Martin or Grumman Aerospace had continued investing even after the 'Star Wars' program was cancelled I do agree we would have had it sooner than we did. How much sooner? Maybe 5 years? But it is important to realize that at that time (late 80's early 90's) they didn't know that the Internet was going to be a thing and so they didn't have a built in "market" for all of that launch capability. Even with Teledesic[4] which tried to go there, you needed someone who like Musk who was too ignorant of what "could be done" to push a bunch of really smart people beyond what they thought they were capable of.
[1] Apollo PGNCS --- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_PGNCS
[2] SpaceX simplifies Raptor engine: Has it used additive manufacturing? --- https://www.tctmagazine.com/additive-manufacturing-3d-printi...
[3] The U.S. fracking revolution has caused natural gas prices to drop 47 percent compared to what the price would have been prior to the fracking revolution in 2013. --- https://www.brookings.edu/articles/the-economic-benefits-of-...
[4] Teledesic -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teledesic
so there’s something at least. :)
The least developed country on earth is currently developing faster than any country ever has at any time in history.
Read the book “factfullness”
Maybe 'the Jetsons' and 'the Flintstones' aren't as far apart as we think, us being people who like to think we are witnessing 'the Jetsons' now. Maybe that is just a relevant distinction.
Maybe those two descriptors are much closer than they would appear to some outside observers. Maybe it's really just 'Flintstones part 1;' and 'Flintstones part 2', right now.
Or...
Our 'Flintstones' was already 'Jetsons' compared to everything else in this observable universe, which winds up mostly being just peat bogs on Dagobah, comparatively, and we're just inching out the icing on the cake at this point.
Who knows.
Does that mean the landing burn was unsuccessful? Or was that just a glitch in the telemetry?
So the landing burn seems to have been a success.
Great success!!
(I mean I still think it's mind blowing, because I think landing a rocket is also mind blowing)
The big advantage of catching it with the tower is that it'll (eventually) allow them to put another Starship on top, refuel and launch again within hours, as opposed to the weeks it currently takes for Falcon 9.
Super heavy can hover and even go down by throttling down more. This gives them more control for the landing and don’t have to time it exactly perfectly
This video goes into details pretty well: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=OYvWYp0--bQ&t=832s
Which means that the weight savings are nontrivial with the "catch the rocket!" landing method.
Plus it's really big https://images-bonnier.imgix.net/files/ill/production/Starsh...
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/7b/SuperHea...
Landing via tower catch versus on a pad is advantageous because the weight of adding retractable landing legs to such a large rocket would be significant.
but things would have to get pretty extreme in the "routine" dimension for that to be very useful. If there are 20 first stages and 5 land/launch towers, for a first stage that only spends an hour in flight in between inspections.... well are you going to keep them parked on a scarce launch tower for maintenance? The towers with fill/launch infrastructure (such as reinforced concrete, fuel tanks, cold filling system, deluge water system) become the bottleneck. It's more likely then that the 1st stage lands, is safed, then is taken a couple hundred yards away for inspection and maintenance while the next in line is moved to be stacked for the next launch. The inspection / maintenance would have to be truly minimal (think airliner) to keep it right there on its own relaunch tower.
"No landing gear" is more key, compared to Falcon 9 - because of the effort toward minimal launch cost.
That's what they are aiming for, eventually.
It's hanging pretty high in the air, I assume so the engines do less damage to the pad. One wonders how they're going to get it down. Do the chopsticks lower on the tower?
My hunch is that they don't put it down for awhile. If there's still an issue were there are fires lingering inside, my hunch is they want that as far from the ground infrastructure as possible.
Either way incredible progress.
Wasn't perfect, some things to work out... but still pretty damn good.
What an amazing morning!
The 3rd Saturn V launch put three men into orbit around the Moon. The 6th landed two of them there.
As a complete lay person with little to no physics knowledge: what stops the use of something dumb like a parachute, or even wings and landing gear, to "land" the booster? I assume it is impractical (since they don't do it), but what are the actual particulars that stop it from working? While super cool to watch, it seems crazy that plucking it out of the air like that is the best way to preserve the booster for reuse.
Wings, parachute, etc... All very easy to break or burn at hypersonic speeds, and very chaotic to control. It probably (very probably) wouldn't be possible to land back exactly where the rocket launched on wings or chutes - that would probably need an extremely long and wide runway, but compare the size of Starship to the Space Shuttle... It's like braking a toy car vs braking an actual truck.
The main advantage is that you don't need to spend any of your payload mass budget on a parachute, or wings and landing gear. The secondary advantage over a parachute is that you don't need to fish it out of seawater and make your refurbishment process more of a pain in the ass.
Wings and landing gear are useless extra weight during launch, and excess weight on the booster has a super-linear reduction weight delivered to orbit. (the Tyranny of the Rocket Equation)
During the 1960s, NASA investigated using inflatable Rogallo Wings (basically hang gliders) to land the Gemini capsule. It worked fine, but was more complicated than parachutes, and re-use was not one of the goals of the Gemini or Apollo programs.
None of those give much margin for error on landing. Without any kind of propulsion, there's no option to come to a hover or do another go-around if the landing isn't going well. Space Shuttle pilots had to do extensive training in simulators for the landing because they only got one shot at it during the mission.
Propulsive landing doesn't require any hardware that isn't already on the launch vehicle, only a little excess propellant. (And it is a small amount; Super Heavy is like a soda can that's full of liquid at launch and only has a swig at the bottom during landing.) Propulsive landing gives Falcon 9 and Super Heavy the ability to overcome wind and other weather conditions to make pinpoint landings. Engine throttling gives Super Heavy the ability to hover, so it has a huge margin for error when coming in for a landing.
Super Heavy could have had legs, like Falcon 9, but it has such a huge payload capacity that they can simply choose to always launch with enough propellant to come back to the tower, and it saves a lot of flying weight and complexity by simply not having them. The arms on the tower can be massively overbuilt to ensure however much reliability SpaceX wants.
Can someone explain to me exactly WHY it's such a big deal though? Like subjectively I can see it's incredible but while watching the video there were enormous applauses at points I knew were a big deal but I lacked the understanding of physics to truly appreciate.
This and other weight savings will enable high payload to orbit in a fully reusable launch platform.
Landing without legs requires something like this catch system -- something never done before, and clearly very difficult to do.
Is it to explore more options? Or because it's faster to re-use the booster if it's already in place? Were the other approaches not satisfactory, perhaps? Or no longer applicable due to size?
Optical/camera alignment is probably out of the question due to fire and smoke.
Also, I doubt centimeter scale precision would be needed; the arms have some compliance in them, I'm sure, as well as the ability to control how far in they swing.
https://arstechnica.com/space/2024/10/spacex-catches-returni...
Surveying GPS can do that with WAAS and a bunch of integration time and extra receivers, but not in real time:
https://www.gps.gov/systems/gps/performance/accuracy
So that's why I think they need to have a high resolution, close range, 3d positioning method for the final seconds.
Compared to Falcon-9, Starship/Superheavy additionally has a command link from the ground. Whether it is used to coordinate the movement during the catch is not publicly known, but it is easy to imagine how this could be useful.
He's allowed to believe whatever he wants. He's too valuable to the United States. Imagine what a BRICS country would pay for his talent? Worth his weight in gold wrapped platinum.
Maybe the bottom uses some ablative material, then a new coat of it needs to be applied / attached.
All the internals should have enough resource for likely dozens of launches, if Falcon-9 is any indication.
This starship landed in the Indian ocean a bit west of Australia, it's like 3x deeper.
For extra context: that "3× deeper" makes costs seriously explode. People do know how to engineer for that depth, but it's a lot of effort and there's pretty much no commercial market. For shallower stuff there's oil rigs, deep-sea cables, seafloor mining, even just tourism… but at some point it just peters out and only research vessels tackle the depth.
(source: friend of mine works at a UK university doing deep-sea vehicles)
As in he works on their development? That sounds exciting, do you have something like the name of one of the vehicles?
Yes, she works on their development.
> That sounds exciting, do you have something like the name of one of the vehicles?
No vehicle name, but this is the university department/lab: https://www.southampton.ac.uk/research/facilities/maritime-r...
(Their vehicles don't even go that deep, but again that was the point I was trying to make… even in research, the very deep stuff is rare and a "big project" that ends up fanned out ⇒ MRIL made only the cameras for a 4km vessel…)
Also noone mentioned submarines, debris can just float and drift around (sometimes even at some depth below the surface).
The CIA did something very similar to this in the Cold War [2], though they used a boat instead of a submarine.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akula-class_submarine#Operatio... ("In August 2012, the news media reported that another Akula-class submarine operated in the Gulf of Mexico purportedly undetected for over a month, sparking controversy within U.S. military and political circles...")
[1] https://old.reddit.com/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1fvdekt/more_... ("More images from B11 recovery + new info "26 of the Raptors have been recovered but they are trying to get all 33")
(If anything, I'd be more worried about North Korea or Pakistan getting their hands on stuff…)
Either way the risk is the shit that's left floating, if they don't fish it out it'll randomly wash up in Madagascar or so…
Don't get me wrong the engineering and physics are crazy ugly, but it's at least consistent within a range. Humans are messy, unpredictable, unreliable and chaotic.
I can't believe what i just saw!
They have New Shepard, a crew-rated suborbital spacecraft, primarily targeted at tourism, but it has also done some science payloads for NASA, university and commercial clients.
But they also are doing a lot of non-tourism stuff: they designed and manufacture first stage engines for ULA’s new Vulcan launch vehicle; they have their own reusable orbital launch vehicle (New Glenn) due to launch soon (planned for next month, but might slip to early next year); they have a contract with NASA to build a lunar lander to compete with SpaceX’s; they are part of one of the teams NASA has chosen to compete for the contract to build a commercial ISS replacement.
And SpaceX is involved in space tourism too: both directly, and indirectly via resellers such as Axiom.
It is just that the most publicly noticeable thing Blue Origin has achieved is space tourism, which makes people think it is primarily a space tourism company; meanwhile, SpaceX has had numerous publicly visible achievements other than tourism, so people view tourism as just another thing they do, not their main thing.
It's not like engineers don't come up with wild ideas all the time to their leadership, but is the leadership good enough to understand the good ideas from bad ones? Take the risk, spend billions to actually execute?
Elon has enough of a physics/engineering background to ask the right questions, understand the trades engineers put in front of him, and make the risk/reward calculation to make the right decisions the ends up winning.
To get what SpaceX has you need strong technical leadership all the way up the chain. Many companies don't. Their CEOs are experts in legal, PR, finance, etc... They make poor technical decisions.
You can hire new executives, you can't easily find a new Musk, and then you will fail.
See the problem?
Holy shit. I almost had a heart attack when it looked like the booster was about to slowly careen into the tower
Same but it looks more dramatic on the feed we all got: on other vids the angle is different and although close it doesn't look it's going to crash into the tower.
Still: feels pretty close.
Heartfelt congratulations to the folks at SpaceX!
It seems someone hijacked and played a video of the previous launch. Just as we got to launch time it cut to a fake badly dubbed speech by Elon Musk going on about Bitcoin, with a handy QR code.
This was a bit confusing but since it was 10 minutes in advance I managed to switch to another channel.
Still amazing, even if the video glitched at the key capture point.
And an hour later the Starship itself re entered to soft salty sea landing.
I don’t know how many prototype runs they need to do, I’m guessing they could stuff a shed load of Starlinks into the next one.
There is a real SpaceX channel: https://www.youtube.com/spacex
Note that it's just "spacex" and does have the verification mark. Also, SpaceX doesn't stream anything there (anymore): it's all just promotional videos... some of them are cool, but that's all they are. Nothing real-time. SpaceX only streams on X now, so I'd recommend one of the third party Youtube channels like https://www.youtube.com/@NASASpaceflight (which isn't NASA) if you'd prefer to stick to Youtube for such things.
My experience is that, while YouTube has a lot of content creators that I very much enjoy... I enjoy YouTube stewardship of the platform... less so.
I have an admittedly old Chromecast Ultra and Pixel Pro 8 phone which I usually use to control it. As they continue to upgrade the app and the service, they steadily make it worse and worse. Damn thing is almost unusable.
In the end, I think they may well be poorly product managing themselves into a position where they could be vulnerable to a more able, savvy, and competent competitor.
All this is to say you're probably just out of luck on being able to see these sorts of scams if you aren't already hip to them existing.
Yet the US administration hasn't congratulated SpaceX. Incredible.
The current head NASA admin (a political appointee) did it a few hours ago and it's retweeted on the official @NASA account.
(not linking as peer comment already did)
The violent anger I felt and still feel for scammers has ruined my day.
Quite the embarassment, I think I begin to understand how my parents feel when they are completely unaware of some technical aspects I try to explain, and how easy it would be to scam them. Seems like it is getting easier to scam me, too.
To be fair, once they switched to Fakelon, it was quite clear. But I started the same stream again later as the YT app does not properly highlight the channel's name before clicking.
It’s very clear — all the MSM are top of the list for anything Trump related, and for Elon it’s all crypto scam channels
It’s intentional folks
For everything he does that has annoyed me (like Gloating at people being bombed in the middle east) — his business acumen has completely unlocked for people what they we thought was impossible.
There should be nothing wrong with recognizing that any individual is a mix of things you're going to like and things you're not. That could be judged all the way to a mix of things which are morally correct, amoral, or immoral... but the reality is probably a mix.
It should be OK to praise the guy for those good traits and in turn to criticize the guy for what he does wrong: both in turn calling out the specific actions and less "the person". Its rare that demonizing someone is really appropriate or anything other than self-serving and we should see those that make that effort in that light.
It does beg comparison to the typical evil genius. He could literally be a villain from a Bond Movie, funding Specter. It's all fun and games. But just on surface, it is hard not to talk about him. He embodies too many sci-fi tropes.
On days like today, that was amazing to see. I'd like to think all the bad is overblown.
Capitalism does nothing to ensure personal/individual freedoms. There is no 'empowering'.
Technically slaves were also a valuable part of the capitalist system at the time. They were integral to the flow of capital, as they were an asset.
You can have Dictator/Authoritarian governments also be capitalist. Huge misunderstanding these days is thinking China is communist. They stopped being communist decades ago and are not as Capitalist as the US. But that doesn't help individuals that much.
Even today, Human Resources, is about 'humans' as capital, how to manage the human assets. Capitalism doesn't help the individual, the induvial is the resource to be mined.
Slavery existed well before capitalism and is economic system independent. Slavery occurs across a wide spectrum of economic systems today. It will always exist. It’s up to governments not capitalists to outlaw it. Capitalists need rules to play by.
Human Resources are the socialist/communist/leftist contribution to our economic system. They can’t actually contribute anything useful but they can deploy commissars to ensure the humans in the organization have right think. HR and all the associated schemes are simply leftist grift that infects everything.
Doesn't change my statement that they aren't communist anymore, now. You are just agreeing. I didn't make any statement that was pro-communism.
>>>Slavery existed well before capitalism and is economic system independent. Slavery occurs across a wide spectrum of economic systems today. It will always exist. It’s up to governments not capitalists to outlaw it. Capitalists need rules to play by.
Yes. That was my statement. That capitalism alone does not lead to individual rights. I guess you agree again. I miss-understood your previous statement that seemed to imply capitalism had lead to individual flourishing, and thus SpaceX.
>>>>Human Resources are the socialist/communist/leftist contribution to our economic system. They can’t actually contribute anything useful but they can deploy commissars to ensure the humans in the organization have right think. HR and all the associated schemes are simply leftist grift that infects everything.
HR has nothing to do with socialism. It is clearly a Risk Management department. They are just as likely to fire victims as the guilty. The only calculation they use is the risk/cost to the company. If it is more expedient to get rid of a victim they will do it. They are not on the employee's side. If HR fires you for hanging a noose on your coworkers locker, that is minimizing the risk from someone unhinged.. That is not being socialist.
I used to argue in reddit (same username as my HN) basically calling Musk a fraud and Gwynne Shotwell being all the brains 6 years ago, but I've since changed my position after seeing engineers in spaceX give props to Musk at podcasts, twitter, and various interviews.
In The Expanse (which I highly recommend), they give a new lease on life to that quote attributed to Einstein "I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought with, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones" - hurling asteroids towards a planet. I really hope humanity's real future will play out in accordance with some of the more optimistic elements in The Expanse.
It's always funny seeing people pretend they live in a world where small issues like land or food don't affect them, even though they only have that privilege because a larger military says they should.
Got my answer: it's a theory that SpaceX is a partner for the US DoD and is not just an internet provider.
Genuinely curious if you find an answer.
My first thought was nuclear anxiety; it’s nice to feel like we have a secret shield in space. Then I saw Trump talked about it, so my current hypothesis is the partisan parroting that happens on both sides. (Or if someone doesn’t like military spending, maybe it’s an anti-Musk thing?)
That said, the three accounts that have been posting about it seem to really like this topic [1][2][3], so maybe it’s a niche thing. They all seem to really like one Reddit thread.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=forgot-im-old
But Elon also started one of the greatest revolutions mankind has ever seen, up there with the Apollo project, which one can say is mankind's greatest achievement.
What do you do with that dichotomy is up to you to resolve.
Trump will run so much stuff into the ground nobody will be able to achieve anything.
The media needs to stop blindly attributing this to "Elon Musk". He did well taking the risks NASA was not allowed to take at the start. But these days he is toxic to the media and toxic to reporting, so for that reason alone the media could smarted up a little. Well done SpaceX and NASA engineers.
It's 100% Musk that this happened, literally no one else would have done it. Everyone thought it was dumb until today. No company, no government or sci fi movie for that matter had even thought of it in the first place.
SpaceX engineers given the green light by Musk, not NASA, made it a reality. That's not to say Elon didn't make many decisions along the way in the design and development of both Starship, the launch towers and everything else.
The point is, Elon deserves a hell of a lot of credit along with everyone else. Everyone has their part to play in the success of the mission.
Because if NASA risked billions on "crazy ideas" they'd get shut down, being a government agency.
No point pretending it's all Elon.
Musk's biographer tweeted the pages from his book <https://x.com/WalterIsaacson/status/1844870018351169942> discussing how in late 2020 Musk suggested, then insisted against considerable opposition from his engineers, that Superheavy be caught with chopsticks instead of landing on legs like Falcon 9.
(If this sounds familiar, also according to the book, Musk is the person who suggested and, against considerable opposition from his engineers, insisted on Starship switching to stainless steel instead of carbon fiber.
Hint: Musk was right and his engineers were wrong. Both times.)
Of course I’d rather they just stream to YouTube in 4K.
It’s intentional
Here. Or try Space Affairs on YouTube
The older we get, the likelihood that we get scammed approaches one. Be weary.