271–280 of 298 posts
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The belly flop is also how passenger variants will be landing so you do actually need a reliable program....
How many G’s will passenger experience when the ship transitions from the belly flop to the suicide burn? That looks like an awful lot of G’s that this maneuver is pulling there.
This suicide burn is just to try to recover the rocket to save money.
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I've walked along the length of the rocket at NASA in Houston. It's massive and to think it took all that power to get that tiny capsule to the moon with a few men. Pretty amazing... The Starship is designed to carry 100 people. SpaceX will be able to send more people to the moon in one mission than all the moon landings ever sent. Wow...
There's another Saturn V you can walk the length of in Huntsville, AL. It made quite an impression on me -- on first sight from below it's like that opening scene in Star Wars IV when the Star Destroyer hoves into view.
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Nice use of "factoid". Most people use this world incorrectly.
If most people are using a word to mean something different, doesn't that mean the meaning of the word has changed?
I remember being amused the first time a flight attendant said "we'll be taking off momentarily".
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Like Apophis in 2068?
"The Sentry Risk Table assessed Apophis as having a 6.7-in-a-million (1-in-150,000) chance of impacting Earth in 2068"
> The fully integrated Starship/Super Heavy launch vehicle will be approximately 400 feet tall and 30 feet in diameter. For reference, the Saturn V rocket from the Apollo program was 363 feet tall. It was 33 ft wide at the first stage, while Starship is 30 ft wide all the way to the top. It's just massive. And it's fully reusable. What a game changer.
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> Do we have any feasible non-rocket options to do on Earth, though? Not yet, no — but a decade ago we didn’t have powered landing and rapid reuse of first stages either. While that observation doesn’t guarantee future tech could (or should) be made, I am an optimist when it comes to tech.
One is an iteration on a proven design. One is a completely unknown new design. I’m not being defeatist, just pointing out that I’m not sure the latter is easier than chasing SpaceX’s strengths.
There are a couple of projects along these lines right now, both involving Burt Rutan's Scaled Composites [2,3].
Stratolaunch went through several iterations of spacecraft, at one point I believe it was even going to drop a SpaceX rocket! With Paul Allen's passing not sure what the plans are currently.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_American_X-15 [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scaled_Composites_White_Knight... [3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scaled_Composites_Stratolaunch
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How many G’s will passenger experience when the ship transitions from the belly flop to the suicide burn? That looks like an awful lot of G’s that this maneuver is pulling there.
The capsule containing passengers will separate during re-entry and land with parachutes. This suicide burn is just to try to recover the rocket to save money.
This sounds even crazier than the bellyflop-swivel-to-suicide-burn (BSTSB).
So the Starship system is some type of 3 piece mechanism? Where the 3rd piece is the human module?
And they’re going to land this with parachutes? Where? In the ocean?
Won’t this kill the reusability of the plan, for quick turn around time?
Granted, if the BSTSB is to only be used for transporting inorganic materials, like fuel, then G-forces does not matter for human usage.
What are the odds of Starship working? It seems really complex. And that last phase where the ship flips vertical from the bellyflop, looks insane for human passengers inside. How many G’s is that maneuver pulling? SN8 appears 90% successful, but I’m wondering if that remaining 10% is the killer. As they say: You spend 10% of your time, solving 90% of your problem. And then you spend 90% of your time, solving the las…
If you look back at how they learned about landing Falcon 9 first stage - they failed many times before succeeding : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bvim4rsNHkQ
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I'm really interested in seeing how it will perform its "belly flop" landing. Seems like a high risk maneuver https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DdTYMry7fq0#t=1m17s
I guess the counterargument is that as long as you bring it down in a "safe" area, you don't really need a 100% success rate. If you can reuse it, great, if not, well, it's a rocket.
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I don’t think you’re right about many others having unlimited resources. This situation is a novelty in the post-cold-war era. Admittedly in the Cold War military projects probably did have unlimited resources.
Do you think sls development is less than what spacex is spending on starship?