I mean, it didn't nearly land. It landed. For certain values of that verb.
It simply utilized it's Full Vehicle Ablative Landing Armor
SpaceX launches and nearly lands starship on its first suborbital flight
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Re: SpaceX launches and nearly lands starship on its first suborbital flight
#72I make efforts to add to discussions instead of subtracting with negativity. Recently, I've broken my rule quite a few times, fretting over the future of general compute. I'd vowed to not break it again, but the discussion about Starship lacks a vital perspective. . I don't understand the hype behind Starship. It's confusing to me. It is touching and nice; it's great to see people excited about space. However, the ex…
"Starship isn't anywhere close to the primetime. It's at least half-a-decade to a decade away from initial reusable testflights, and perhaps more given the under funding of the Artemis program."
What would be the reason to believe it's that far from being usable? How would Artemis funding have anything to do with Starship?
"It is worth remembering that early on in SpaceX's history, Musk made a dummy rocket and took it to DC to convince politicians to help allocate COTS & CRS funding to SpaceX."
Reference for this?
Re: SpaceX launches and nearly lands starship on its first suborbital flight
#73i know they got the data they needed/wanted but can you really call it a success with that ending? on a side note: how much money do they lose whenever they have a crash landing like that?
Elon Musk tweeted this a few weeks ago: > Goals are to test 3 engine ascent, body flaps, transition from main to header tanks & landing flip. Considering they achieved all their goals, I would say it was a success.
Huge Success. This is a prototype. It was going to be thrown away next week regardless. Obviously long term the landing is very important. Just not today.
Re: SpaceX launches and nearly lands starship on its first suborbital flight
#74HN: "SpaceX Launches and Nearly Lands Starship on Its First Suborbital Flight" vs Article: "SpaceX Launches—and Crashes—Its Starship Mars Rocket"
For whatever reason, Wired preferred the clickbait title, but the opening sentence of the article is: "On Wednesday afternoon, SpaceX successfully launched—and nearly landed—a fully-assembled prototype of its next generation Starship rocket on a suborbital flight from its facility in south Texas."
Given that it's a rocket, "nearly land" could mean it kept going in some way, towards space or simply not yet touched down.
So when I read the HN title and thought "what do they mean by nearly landed?" I then saw the article and realized "oh, it crashed".
I'm not sure where the balance should be... "Crash" has a negative connotation, but "nearly lands" is a pretty soft euphemism.
Re: SpaceX launches and nearly lands starship on its first suborbital flight
#75Lmao at all the people hating on a test launch. If this was even 10 years ago, you wouldn't even get a live stream of the launch and attempted landing. Perhaps Elon shouldn't even live stream this, so negative trolls wouldn't be able to assert and express their chair philosopher opinions.
The fact that there are another 8-9 SN vehicles being readied at this time for testing tells you exactly what is happening. Slow progress, until they get all the data and metrics to slowly and incrementally making improvements.
To all the haters, go find somewhere else to spread your negativity.
Re: SpaceX launches and nearly lands starship on its first suborbital flight
#76I make efforts to add to discussions instead of subtracting with negativity. Recently, I've broken my rule quite a few times, fretting over the future of general compute. I'd vowed to not break it again, but the discussion about Starship lacks a vital perspective. . I don't understand the hype behind Starship. It's confusing to me. It is touching and nice; it's great to see people excited about space. However, the ex…
"Starship isn't anywhere close to the primetime. It's at least half-a-decade to a decade away from initial reusable testflights, and perhaps more given the under funding of the Artemis program." What would be the reason to believe it's that far from being usable? How would Artemis funding have anything to do with Starship? "It is worth remembering that early on in SpaceX's history, Musk made a dummy rocket and took i…
Re: Artemis & NASA
The Artemis program and other contracts fund the bulk of Starship development. NASA has poured billions into SpaceX and they're SpaceX's largest "investor" by far, except NASA doesn't take equity and treats it as "pre-funding" an eventual contract (which would also pay per launch).
Starship is (likely) to be mostly (up to 60% to 70% or so) NASA funded.
https://www.nasa.gov/press-release/nasa-names-companies-to-d...
https://twitter.com/SpaceX/status/1316417597257129985
https://twitter.com/SciGuySpace/status/1316421539521327109
Re: early SpaceX history.
Re: SpaceX launches and nearly lands starship on its first suborbital flight
#77Earlier quoted context omitted.
That one's not actually true though, e.g. the lowest-altitude formation-flight record currently stands at -422m (over the dead sea).
Has anyone ever tried to top that?
Well, it wouldn't really be 'topping' it would it?
I don't think its really possible to fly any lower. The dead sea is the lowest place on earth, and -422m is even pushing that as it must have been a very dry season when they did the flight. Unless the dead sea evaporates even lower, flying below -422m is going to be pretty hard.
Re: SpaceX launches and nearly lands starship on its first suborbital flight
#78Great Job Elon & team. Just keep swimming.
Re: SpaceX launches and nearly lands starship on its first suborbital flight
#79I make efforts to add to discussions instead of subtracting with negativity. Recently, I've broken my rule quite a few times, fretting over the future of general compute. I'd vowed to not break it again, but the discussion about Starship lacks a vital perspective. . I don't understand the hype behind Starship. It's confusing to me. It is touching and nice; it's great to see people excited about space. However, the ex…
I agree with basically everything you said except for your assumption of what people are excited about. To be fair you lead with saying you don’t understand it if course, but where you’re landing isn’t anywhere close to what interests me about it.
For me the excitement is in the try, in the front row seat in failure and success. It’s not that it couldn’t be done, or that it hasn’t been done, but that somebody is doing it and we get to see it warts and all. The flight today is a perfect example. It was a lot of fun to watch. I’m sure there’s lots of amazing innovation happening at Blue Origin, but there’s nothing to really talk about because they don’t share it. If Bezos started some mad max bullshit and it felt like a legit race with giant explosions the whole damn world would be tuning into these things.
SpaceX has lots of new fans, but there are lots of old fans that have been around for a decade and are still excited. Elon time is what it is, two years or five it’s still progress. They nailed their first barge landing five years ago. If the first time we see the giant streak of a white hot Starship re-entering the atmosphere is 2025, it’ll still be worth the wait.
Re: SpaceX launches and nearly lands starship on its first suborbital flight
#80Great flight! Elon tweeted that the header tank pressure was low: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1336809767574982658 There was also a substantial green flame coming from the raptor engine used for landing. Group consensus over on /r/SpaceX is that it was copper burning. We're amazed the engine didn't explode sooner.
as soon as I saw the green I thought "uhoh". That's called running "engine rich". still, so amazing to see the belly flop and relight.