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SpaceX discloses cause of Starship anomalies as it clears an FAA hurdle

arstechnica.com

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Re: SpaceX discloses cause of Starship anomalies as it clears an FAA hurdle

#71

Post by inglor_cz »

jillesvangurp wrote: post #37
martythemaniak wrote: post #2

This is good. Flight 1 had 63 corrective actions and it took 5 months to complete the report. This one took 3 months and had 17 corrective actions. They'll get to orbit this year for sure

With the Falcon 1 they also needed a several attempts before they started getting it right. The Falcon 9 went through a similar set of launches and also it took a while from successful launch to successful landing. The ambition level is really high with Starship but if there's any company that can get it done it's spacex. Basically what they are doing is a form of agile development where instead of speccing out the w…

Even here on HN plenty of people seem to misunderstood the fundamentals of "hardware-rich development" and assume that it must be fantastically expensive and/or reckless.

It is not exactly cheap to do it like SpaceX does, but the savings in time and increases in robustness may very well offset the cost of all the prototypes that undergo a RUD.

Re: SpaceX discloses cause of Starship anomalies as it clears an FAA hurdle

#72

Post by DinaCoder99 »

bradley13 wrote: post #66

I haven't watched launches since the space shuttle days. I have watched both of the Starship launches, and will watch all of them that I can. Excitement about space is back with a vengeance!

> Excitement about space

What does this even mean if we can't scrape together funding for NASA

Re: SpaceX discloses cause of Starship anomalies as it clears an FAA hurdle

#73

Post by bryanlarsen »

Casteil wrote: post #32
stoneman24 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suspect if test flight 3 makes orbit then flight 5 will be delivering starlink satellites and then testing on the way back down. If I remember correctly, a starship can deliver 440+ starlink satellites compared to around 60 for falcon 9.

Starlink V2 sats are bigger, so they definitely won't be sending 400+ up at a time with Starship - probably more like 100-200.. but I don't think they've had any official updates/figures on this in a while.

They just confirmed that 24 V2 minis are 17.5 tons. So ~200 v2 minis would be 150 tons. But v2's are probably bigger than v2 mini's...

Re: SpaceX discloses cause of Starship anomalies as it clears an FAA hurdle

#74

Post by rbanffy »

deprecative wrote: post #53
Sanzig wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am pretty skeptical of Starship ever getting used for suborbital transportation, other than maybe for ultra-elite VIP transport or something like a rapid deployment system for military special forces. It seems highly unlikely they will ever get the price down to where it can compete with commercial airliners, and Concorde's commercial failure showed us that people will happily choose cheap subsonic flight over fast…

Watch Elon call it something like Airship and have it be fit for tens to hundreds of people per launch with no need for a pilot (though one may be present). It'd take twenty years to get to market, sure, but hey that's progress.

Getting it to airline-level safety will take at least that much, unless they start flying multiple times a day without any anomalies whatsoever.

Re: SpaceX discloses cause of Starship anomalies as it clears an FAA hurdle

#75

Post by inglor_cz »

DinaCoder99 wrote: post #72
bradley13 wrote: post #66

I haven't watched launches since the space shuttle days. I have watched both of the Starship launches, and will watch all of them that I can. Excitement about space is back with a vengeance!

> Excitement about space What does this even mean if we can't scrape together funding for NASA

It means that the field has grown a lot, and is now more diverse than ever.

NASA is great in some tasks (interplanetary probes etc.), but not so great in others (getting people into orbit). That is quite normal in every quickly developing field: specialization.

As an analogy, Microsoft is quite good at Windows on desktop, but failed miserably with Windows Mobile, and other players are dominating that field.

Re: SpaceX discloses cause of Starship anomalies as it clears an FAA hurdle

#76

Post by Xirgil »

DinaCoder99 wrote: post #72
bradley13 wrote: post #66

I haven't watched launches since the space shuttle days. I have watched both of the Starship launches, and will watch all of them that I can. Excitement about space is back with a vengeance!

> Excitement about space What does this even mean if we can't scrape together funding for NASA

It means that private industry is doing a better job of allocating funding and meeting demand.

Re: SpaceX discloses cause of Starship anomalies as it clears an FAA hurdle

#77

Post by nordsieck »

rob74 wrote: post #46
cduzz wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's bonkers. What size nuts do they pass through their engine? Every engine before it goes to space has to have a nut passed through the system? Like a 12mm "go into space" grade nut or a little itty bitty nut like I might find holding down a heat sink assembly in a 1998 vintage motherboard? I'm off to the googles to find videos...

Actually I'd rather have such "bonkers" tests than the other extreme, like NASA not thinking about what could happen if pieces of foam from the external fuel tank impacted the Space Shuttle on launch until it was too late ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_Columbia_disaste... ).

The sad part about this issue is that this was an ongoing problem. NASA 100% knew about; they just ... didn't address it.

Here's an account of just one such incident:

https://spaceflightnow.com/shuttle/sts119/090327sts27/

Re: SpaceX discloses cause of Starship anomalies as it clears an FAA hurdle

#78

Post by elteto »

ceejayoz wrote: post #65
elteto wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can guarantee you that “ingesting a nut” through the engine is not part of the official engine qual program. Maybe it happened once and somehow the engine survived and they were able to ascertain what had happened. But this is not a common thing. Edit: I will say that what actually is a test commonly done (also in industry in general) is doing a “roll test”. They put the stages on these massive rollers and slowly t…

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/air-space-magazine/is-spacex-... > Part of the Merlin’s qualification testing involves feeding a stainless steel nut into the fuel and oxidizer lines while the engine is running—a test that would destroy most engines but leaves the Merlin running basically unhindered. They're not running it through the engine, they're verifying that the filter is installed and functional so it doesn't g…

2012 article so it predates my time by quite a bit. Not a thing anymore though.

Re: SpaceX discloses cause of Starship anomalies as it clears an FAA hurdle

#79

Post by Sanzig »

AlgorithmicTime wrote: post #64
Sanzig wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am pretty skeptical of Starship ever getting used for suborbital transportation, other than maybe for ultra-elite VIP transport or something like a rapid deployment system for military special forces. It seems highly unlikely they will ever get the price down to where it can compete with commercial airliners, and Concorde's commercial failure showed us that people will happily choose cheap subsonic flight over fast…

Half the point of special forces is to be covert, which is made hard when your transportation is a giant rocket streaking through the suborbital zone.

But imagine the PsyOps impact of the enemy looking up and seeing the US raining down literal ODSTs on them ;)

Realistically, they'd be dropping into an allied base in-theatre with a pad able to support a Starship landing, and then taking conventional means the rest of the way. Of course, I suspect that when it comes to "drop operators from space" vs. "train extra operators who can be forward deployed," the latter is probably going to be way more cost efficient. Would make for a cool movie though.

Re: SpaceX discloses cause of Starship anomalies as it clears an FAA hurdle

#80

Post by Mountain_Skies »

DinaCoder99 wrote: post #72
bradley13 wrote: post #66

I haven't watched launches since the space shuttle days. I have watched both of the Starship launches, and will watch all of them that I can. Excitement about space is back with a vengeance!

> Excitement about space What does this even mean if we can't scrape together funding for NASA

The Obama administration opened the doors for private companies to do what they're doing now. NASA is moving more to the roles of regulator, purchaser of services, and deep space science. Seems to be a better path now than the one we were on before opening spaceflight to commercial entities.
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