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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

#132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Excitement about space Genuinely, or just because the marketing for it is that good?

Starship is the most powerful rocket in history and should be the first ever orbital launch system that is fully reusable. I don't know what you consider to be "genuinely" exciting, but I would consider entirely new generations of rocket launch tech to be genuinely exciting.

Starship is expected to be 3x as powerful as the Saturn 5, once 'complete'.

The size+weight+frequency of payloads this enables will drastically alter the industry and how we interact with space.

Edit: Image for scale of other rockets: https://www.visualcapitalist.com/comparing-the-size-of-the-w...

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

#135

Elon bringing excitement to the human race. His way of pushing through is something that gives me hope in the capabilities of humanity.

Every time Elon says or does something cringey nowadays, I just keep repeating the same mantra to myself: "There's no way he can fuck up SpaceX with his antics now, it's too far advanced for his ego to ruin it all and plunge us back into another space exploration winter, stay calm".

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

#136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Even SpaceX's methods of fail fast (and often explosively) is relatively cheap. SLS is doing it the hard and expensive way.

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

#137
post #133

Rocket euphemisms are so silly, "one engine failed energetically"

That's why they're fun. I always got the impression they're making fun of the usual management euphemisms. No one is under any illusion about what an "energetic engine failure" or "rapid unscheduled disassembly" is.

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

#139
post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I think NASA also has higher public/pr standards they’re held to. A few spacex failures no one cares much about. If nasa fails a few times everyone (particularly more conservative leaning folk) starts complaining about their precious taxpayer money. Hence NASA likely sticks to project that are very low risk. I’m not saying this is good or bad per se, but public opinion is what it is. It’s also a bit of damned if you…

I think it is more that SpaceX has a fail fast engineering culture and was clear about that from the start. I mean they made a blooper real “How not to land an orbital rocket booster”.

Also SpaceX’s launch stream production quality and PR has been surprisingly good from the start as well.

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