> I do not see this Starship and its mission profile ever being a human-rated system in this incarnation, ever.
May I know why ? And if the feat was done by NASA or China, would you change your conclusion?
May I know why ? And if the feat was done by NASA or China, would you change your conclusion?
If you asked me if I wanted to return to earth on something that glides like a plane and lands on a runway with no propulsion... or a pressure vessel that needs it's engines to work perfectly to get you back to a single spot at the pad, within a few meters, to be 'caught', and if that doesn't happen, you hit the ground vertically and explode...
I know which one I'm taking. Yes I know the shuttle had no 'go-around' as a glider. But wings and wheels and a big runway in the desert.... versus the insane acrobatics of Starship...
We haven't seen how Starship would deal with crosswinds in the atmosphere being predicted wrong. What happens when it knows it is off course on the way down and can't make it back to the pad? If there were people onboard? I assume there would be a contingency where it just vents fuel and hits the ground and hopes to act as a crush-can at terminal velocity but I don't know how people survive that. By comparison, ditching the shuttle like a plane with an engine-out failure seems easy by comparison.
I am not demeaning the amazing achievement of the Starship and its booster and this ability to catch it and reuse it. I think that is indeed an amazing achievement that should be celebrated. But I don't see this as being a thing to put people on that can somehow be intrinsically safer than the Shuttle, just yet. These are just my basic opinions, I think they are opinions with some merit, and I don't feel that deserves downvotes.
Obviously, we're a really long way away from that from a reliability standpoint? But you know, if they launch 10,000 of these over the next decade... we're going to know a lot more about the safety of this design. I'm sure they'll clobber one in to mechazilla eventually? But what if they don't?
Winds are not a significant factor in the trajectory of the ship. Reason is that it spends almost all of it's time very high, above all weather, and only descends to the less stable areas of the atmosphere at the very end, when it's in a vertical belly-flop, going very rapidly through all the different weather layers. You can see this clearly in the return video, at 2 minutes before landing it was still 15km up. And when it's high, it has much more ability to steer by adjusting drag than any winds can move it up there.
What could actually be a problem is sudden high winds or other problems at the landing site. The ship commits to a landing when it does the deorbit burn ~60m before landing. at L-20m, it has about 1000km of cross-range capability, at L-10m only 200km, and after that it goes down quickly, with only 50km at L-5m.
If it's coming back with something valuable, you'd better have plenty of divert options.
Could see one that is specialized for taking humans into space and then returning them to Earth. It could have a dedicated abort vehicle that takes over the top half of the ship (similar to the abort vehicles they have now on most human-rated rockets). And maybe it uses landing legs instead, because they're more fault tolerant than a catch tower. All this might take up a ton of weight, but starship can carry so much tonnage to space, they'd probably still have a lot of tonnage left for humans and cargo.
Yeah, it could be pretty amazing, able to to take hundreds into orbit instead of just a handful.
If I had to ride along in one of them, I'd choose the Falcon 9 booster over the space shuttle.
Also, the Columbia failure occurred because it was a glider. The Starship doesn't have any leading-edge tiles for debris to fall onto. Arguably, the Challenger failure also occurred because it was a glider, which required the odd fuel tank and booster mounting that failed.
A passenger airliner is vastly more complicated than a parachute, yet both work.
(You’re also in a lot of trouble if you don’t hit the runway in an airliner)
With a normal capsule, you have multiple fuel tanks and redundant RCS thrusters so you’ll practically always be able to deorbit and land (since you also have redundant parachutes). If starship has a fuel leak, how are you going to land, even if you’re able to deorbit?
But during landing? You can't send another ship to rescue the crew that is aboard another Starship that just failed being caught.
There are multiple flight computers. Practically every essential sensor has copies. Oxygen generation, ram air turbine, life jackets, inflated boats. Onboard radar. TCAS. The airplane itself glides. Then there are thousands of procedural rules and regulations for safe operation.
A system like starship that relies on precise active propulsion has no such room for error.
Soyuz has a very impressive record, Starship has been horrifically mismanaged by comparison. The falcon heavy flew 14 times and SpaceX is all in on a heavy launch vehicle because what? Even if they hit every target perfectly from now on it was a wasteful project.
They're averaging over 2 successful launches+landings per week now, and it's so routine that nobody cares.
What? The first version of something that looks anything like Starship was the ITS announced back in 2016, later "BFR" in 2017 and the stainless steel version (which is now flying) in December 2018.
Eight years is very reasonable for a fully reusable heavy lift system - something no one has built before.
The Space Shuttle took roughly 12.5 years from formal concept studies to its first flight (and 9 years from official program approval)
Even taking you seriously, it has made it to effective orbit more than it has exploded. Nearly all 'landings' have exploded, because that's what happens when you intentionally land a 30 story building full of fuel in the open ocean
Where did i deny it was not a work in progress ?
So why pretend it is a success until it is ready ?
> Nearly all 'landings' have exploded, because that's what happens when you intentionally land a 30 story building full of fuel in the open ocean
Thanks for agreeing with me.