421–430 of 1001 posts
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Part of SpaceX company culture. All their launches are cheer-heavy. Even mission control gets rowdy at times.
I remember I think it was when they first landed the booster successfully, there was a big "USA! USA! USA!" cheer from mission control. I thought that was a bit of an ugly look myself.
According to https://www.metaculus.com/questions/14270/spacex-starship-or... its chances to reach orbit in 2023 have just risen from 85% to 90%. Therefore generally I would call the launch a relative success.
It looks like it has dropped 4% over the last week, so while the monthly trend is upwards, I'm not sure this launch, or the scrub a few days ago, have improved things.
One interesting observation here is how long it took the ship to get off the pad from the T-0 mark. This is undoubtedly because some of the raptors on it apparently failed to ignite. I thought they were about to make a mess on the launch pad! I'm also curious about what technically finally got it off the ground - was there a sufficient, but low, level of acceleration, was it a matter of reducing the rocket's mass (by…
I'm really interested to see the hole it dug under the launch mount. The NASA SpaceFlight van took a direct hit from a fast moving chunk of concrete. https://twitter.com/JerryPikePhoto/status/164905272269878477... https://twitter.com/LabPadre/status/1649053476276797440 Edit: it really did dig a crater (this was flat concrete under the pad before): https://twitter.com/LabPadre/status/1649062784167030785
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gMbUeO4iGhY (Why SpaceX Cares about Concrete)
This probably explains why some of the engines didn't make it off the pad. That is some incredible damage.
Success was defined as the rocket leaving the launchpad. Suggesting that this test “failed” is at best a mischaracterisation.
The Soviet N1 moon rocket, which SpaceX shares a bit of design (30+ engines for example) failed 4 times before being scrapped. The Soviets had the 'launch often, fail fast, learn faster' view that SpaceX employs today. However, nobody viewed the N1 launches outside the Soviet Union as successes. I'm glad to see that 'fail fast, learn faster' is finally part of American aerospace engineering.
Instead of adopting the proven R-7 stacking scheme which was much easier to test piece by piece, Korolyov opted to a novel design which was too wide (17m!!), and static fires required a humongous and prohibitively expensive testing facility. The lack of static fires made the development too slow and expensive, as the only way to test it was in the actual flight. Combine this with other technical mistakes (the shape led to the extra weight while the modularity wasn't required, too much drag, etc) and Mishin's poor leadership after Korolyov's death, and you have a recipe for a failed project.
Starship is much narrower (9m), today's tech is much better, so the static fires are much cheaper; and unlike N-1, it's actually designed for fast iterations from the ground up.
It sounds like they achieved what they were officially hoping to achieve. Everyone was cheering but Musk didn't look super happy imo.
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That’s off topic and mods should remove. Let’s not go into twitter and trans rights when the topic is on spaceX and their launch.
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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…
They want to carry 100 people. An escape system for those many people is the same scale of a commercial airliner escape system, which is designed to be operated on a stationary plane, on land or water. Astronauts will be well trained to use it but I think that there must be a lot of openings to let 100 people get out quickly in mid air. Maybe they'll agree that Starship is its own escape system. There is a section ab…
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Not known, as SpaceX is a private company, and the rocket is still being developed. But I'd say a whole lot less than $2B per launch ;-)
You touch upon an interesting advantage that private space engineering has that, depending on one's attitude on the topic, may or may not be fair. NASA has to do everything in the public eye and their process reflects this. Private enterprise is allowed to hide information, which implies they are allowed to massage information. (... this probably says unfortunate things about the nature of governance by public sentim…