661–670 of 1001 posts
I continue to think that this is cool stuff, while being very, very dismayed by what he's doing with Twitter. I don't understand what the attraction of the latter is for someone with the wherewithal to work on spaceships.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
"makes as many mistakes as possible" is such a wonderful attitude! learn something, especially when you are in unexpected terrain.
Causally attributed mistakes as possible. Mistakes on their own aren't useful unless you can determine a causal relationship.
The key is to measure the value at the earliest possible time to reduce the amount of sunk costs.
And simulation doesn't buy you anything here either. Simulation will many times cost more than an actual test article and still may not simulate reality accurately.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I was under the impression that none of it was ever planned to be recovered. I.e. nothing was really lost here since it would have been destroyed either way.
Well, they were hoping to possibly get a chance at soft-landing the Super Heavy Booster in the ocean, which might have allowed them to recover some stuff from it, but that was always viewed as a potential bonus, never a guarantee or even a primary goal.
I am really surprised at the negativity, it makes me want to stop coming here. How many here are actual engineers by profession? The default state of any novel engineering project is “not working”. Rockets are very hard among engineering projects. Failure here would look like the rocket doing nothing visible, perhaps a little bit of smoke. Neutral is the rocket exploding. Success is the rocket moving at all. The rock…
Almost none, because "software engineers" aren't _actual_ Engineers! (ducks for cover)
But really, this was a huge step in the right direction on the cutting edge of propulsion science and spaceflight.
SpaceX will iterate and in a few months/years everyone here will be telling you how "they always knew it would work" and "starship succeeding was obvious"
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That might be overselling it. They should be happy with the result, and ready to attack the problems discovered so the next flight might be more successful. And sure, proud that they got it off the ground, though as a fairly mature rocket company I'd have figured that was table stakes. But an actual kick-ass display of engineering prowess in recent memory was launching and deploying the Webb telescope.
IMO both Webb's deployment and this Starship test can both be kick-ass displays of engineering prowess. Kick-assery doesn't have to be exclusive to fully-completed deep-space missions!
Just that this launch was awesome. Huge rocket. Cleared the pad. Did a bunch of flips and blew up. Wow!!!
Success was defined as the rocket leaving the launchpad. Suggesting that this test “failed” is at best a mischaracterisation.
So you're suggesting intent was to detonate the rocket in the air, despite that not having been stated anywhere? "I may have crashed the car into the neighbour's house and broken my arm, but I did get the milk from the store!"
- SpaceX will be sad if the rocket blows up on the pad.
- They’ll be very happy if the rocket clears the tower.
- They’ll be ecstatic if the rocket makes it around the world.
- They’ll use the flight termination system, which all rockets carry, if it veers off course.
Did you see the employees cheering during the webcast?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nah it's the nominal KSP launch trajectory. You forget to add first stage fins, launch up to the gravity turn, do the cartwheel, separate and continue to orbit. Seems like they forgot to check their staging though.
Imagine how magnificent it would have been if they managed stage separation after doing a 360 cartwheel, via some sick on-the-fly manual intervention. I was half hoping for it.
Anyone reading the headline could easily be misled: this was a massive success. Some context: - This was the first "integrated test" of the Starship space craft with its booster - The whole thing together was 120 meters tall - It will be one order of magnitude larger than the current largest rocket in terms of carrying capacity (~150 tonnes if it needs to return the booster, 250 if it doesn't) - There's 5 more of the…
I wonder how many folks have looked at the other details of Starship. One I find most impressive? Weight of Starship when fueled: 11 million pounds
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…
they said it would take ~6 seconds from engine ignition to takeoff in one of the streams. everything was working as planned at that point afaik
That's why on the live stream you see T0 and then T+0:06 you see "liftoff". The hover was planned.