141–150 of 203 posts
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I doubt there's any plan to fly SN10 again. The point of this vehicle was to learn about controlling the flight with the flaps. The landing was a bonus, and reuse isn't part of the plan for the early prototypes (they already have several more in the pipeline, including SN11 which is pretty much ready to go) EDIT: I take that back... It did fly again...
> It did fly again... One last time.
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I'm sorry, a giant asteroid just hit the Earth and wiped out all life on the planet rendering your questions meaningless.
If you want to prepare for that eventuality, instead of wasting your time and money colonizing Mars, you should be spending your time and money on doing asteroid surveys, and working on deflection strategies. It's far cheaper, and will save billions of lives. Your ROI from doing so is going to be a hell of a lot better. In comparison to that, colonization is a science fiction fantasy, in search of a problem to solve.
There are many practical reasons for exploring the universe, but IMO we human being explore because we can't help it. As technology advance the smart and fearless people will dream of using the new technologies to achieve goals previous generations can only dream of.
Colonization will happen naturally: explorers come first, set up bases, recruits will arrive later to build infrastructure. Lot of people will die. If a place isn't survivable after several tries we will move to another place and repeat. It will occur over thousand years. But I have no doubt it will.
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I think they have a bunch of upgrades for SN15, reflying the older prototypes might not have as much value opposed to just flying the new ones
It's pretty crazy they already have 5 SNs better than what we just saw...
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> 1. One day we will need to leave Earth. Maybe sooner than later. Would you rather have a spacecraft or not when that becomes a need? I don’t equate visiting another planet or planets with saving the human species. We have vast existential problems, mostly imposed by ourselves, right now on Earth. Let’s say we had a copy of Earth that we could travel to right now in a safe solar system with a healthy star. Is the hu…
> I don’t equivocate visiting another planet or planets with saving the human species. All it takes is one big, unlucky rock hurlting through space hitting this singular planet of ours, and we're gone like the dinosaurs. Eggs in one basket, and all that.
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I'm sorry, a giant asteroid just hit the Earth and wiped out all life on the planet rendering your questions meaningless.
If you want to prepare for that eventuality, instead of wasting your time and money colonizing Mars, you should be spending your time and money on doing asteroid surveys, and working on deflection strategies. It's far cheaper, and will save billions of lives. Your ROI from doing so is going to be a hell of a lot better. In comparison to that, colonization is a science fiction fantasy, in search of a problem to solve.
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It was the Delta Clipper (DC-X) [0] and that was actually like the SpaceX, grasshopper. It stayed upright, translated hovered and came back to land. Starship has flaps, a low terminal velocity belly flop maneuver, and then a rotation up to landing only a few hundred meters up. They definitely build on each other, but this is more impressive. 0 - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/McDonnell_Douglas_DC-X
Here's flight 8 from 1995. Up, translate, suicide burn, stuck the landing. I feel we missed a serious opportunity with DC-X.
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Definitely looked like it landed a little hard and then looked like it was leaning a bit after.
There have been successful falcon 9 landings that looked like they hit the ground harder than that. I suppose either Starship will need to be more gentle when it sets down, or the legs will need to be more capable.
It just blew up! Landing legs didn't deploy so it landed on its body, and fire suppression kicked in, but I guess there was a leak.
Edit: This video shows six legs deploying, but two failing to latch.
Two of the three engines flaming out in the last few seconds, was that intentional? Something similar happened last time too, but at least this time it landed.
Yes. They need 1 to land - more than one means too much thrust. Last time they only lit one, it failed to light, and boom. This time they lit all three hoping at least one would work, then turned off the ones they didn’t need. I assume they had the idea independently of the guy who asked musk why they didn’t light more than one and shut down — musk replied “because we’re dumb”, but I guess that tweeter could claim to…
"The rocket company", https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rocket_Company , a great and quite realistic book, reminds about importance of knowing history; there, a company explicitly maintains a library of previous technical solutions to problems encountered.
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Can you share a link to the explosion? The Twitter video cut out with rocket intact.
https://twitter.com/spacex360/status/1367256299923247109