271–280 of 1001 posts
Any guess as to how big the debris field is and what risk there is to people on the ground? Does the flight plan just take it over largely uninhabited land?
Let’s not move the goalposts. This company develops differently than historical aerospace. Success was defined as blowing up any point beyond the launch pad. It made it well past max-q which is the point of highest atmospheric stress on the rocket.
Any guess as to how big the debris field is and what risk there is to people on the ground? Does the flight plan just take it over largely uninhabited land?
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Well said. On the other hand, the SLS — having a launch escape system and not requiring sophisticated acrobatics in order to reach land safely — is totally the ship I'd rather be on.
I suspect SpaceX will have to add something resembling an escape system before the thing gets "man-rated". That system could also be used to protect the passengers in case of a failed landing. It will add weight and thus lower the carrying capacity but they seem to have enough margin to allow for such an addition. They already have the header tanks in the top of Starship, adding a number of escape engines and some ex…
Success was defined as the rocket leaving the launchpad. Suggesting that this test “failed” is at best a mischaracterisation.
That's not what they said in their mission presentation though. It was supposed to launch, separate, return the booster back, then the rocket was supposed to orbit once around the Earth and then fall into the ocean.
I understand people have their feelings invested into this (for whatever reason), but objectively speaking that was not what "success was defined as".
Pity that the rocket did not separate. I wonder if spaceX has considered a scaled down, like half the capacity, which would still be huge
People want to see 100% success in all things. But that isn't very economical. Compare the SLS to Starship. SLS has had a 100% success rate. One launch, one success. But it costs $2B per launch (and climbing) and has taken 12 years to get here. Plus, it's stealing pieces of the Space Shuttle, which was developed in the 70s over a long period of time. Starship will launch a half a dozen "failures" before they achieve…
>> People want to see 100% success in all things. But that isn't very economical. That sounds logical, but isn't really a thing in aerospace/space. Complicated high-energy systems have thousands of failure points. So to have any chance of success each failure point needs to be engineered below, by way of example, a 0.0001% chance of failure. That costs lots of money. But say one decides to accept more risk for less c…
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SLS will never reach land, you'll be splashing down in the middle of the ocean, stuck inside a tin can getting battered by waves until NASA can scramble their limited resources to get you. The booster presumably like you will have been thrown into the ocean. Very wasteful system.
This is pretty hyperbolic. In the shuttle era, these contingencies were thought of and planned for. The amount of preparation NASA would do before shuttle launches was incredible, including flying medical and rescue teams to the chosen launch abort sites. From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_abort_modes#Tran... "Preparations of TAL sites took four to five days and began one week before launch, with the ma…
I have over 600 hours logged on KSP and 200 hours on KSP2. This is pretty normal in my experience.
As somebody who's never become good at KSP, I've debated whether or not to get KSP2. Does it have better training so that you have clues how to get some of the initial things done so you can build up in career mode better?
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Sure, but, nevertheless, I’d like to know why it exploded before declaring this a success!
It likely exploded because they blew it up (flight termination system). It looks like the stages failed to separate and it started to spin. In this case they don’t let an uncontrollable rocket just fly off and see where it comes down, they blow it up. The FTS is basically an explosive mounted to the rocket that can be remotely detonated exactly for situations like this.