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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

#221

Post by jwells89 »

whimsicalism wrote: post #206
jwells89 wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s so exciting to keep track of. Feels like everything I hoped to see happening in spaceflight back in the 90s and 00s is finally (maybe) becoming reality and absolutely shattering the stagnancy that had overcome the field, hopefully this time for good. If this pace can continue unabated, maybe it’s not too unrealistic to hope that my grandkids’ generation in a few decades has astronaut as one of their most aspired…

I am not sure if there is enough profitable space industry. Last I checked asteroid mining was not super feasible, but maybe some like space based solar.

In my mind the potential for profitable industry beyond earth orbit depends almost entirely on how low we can manage to bring cost of kg to orbit.

It doesn’t have to be cheap enough to make e.g. asteroid mining profitable on its own (which is an awfully high bar), just high enough to make construction of large, permanently spacebourne ships feasible.

Ships like that ease the bootstrapping problem and make it more feasible to mine asteroids in-place instead of having to move them to an orbit that’s not expensive to reach. Their flexible, multipurpose nature also helps pay for them over time; they can for example drop crew and cargo off at the moon and Mars en route to the asteroid belt.

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

#222

Post by croes »

ein0p wrote: post #185
croes wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Elon is busy tweeting cringy memes so it's not him doing the hard work.

Do tell, who’s doing the hard work, and why do they only succeed at anything “impossible” if Elon is there?

BTW Musk is the guy who thinks that if one man with a plough can't produce enough food in his field, we need more men with more ploughs instead of just one man with a tractor.

Or how do you explain his desire for a growing population?

The concept of increasing productivity seems to be foreign to him in this context.

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

#223

Post by gibolt »

inglor_cz wrote: post #71
jillesvangurp wrote: post #37

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.

The focus on making lots of prototypes reduces cost. They streamline the largest and most expensive manufacturing bottlenecks.

Each Starship has 30+ engines required per flight and tons of precision welding. All of it can now be made in a month. That means massive cost savings going forward, the faster each can be made

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

#224

Post by samatman »

johnsimer wrote: post #213
chpatrick wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wisdom of the crowds.

but also skin in the game and supply/demand Should be much more accurate than a simple poll, because people with the belief that the odds are undervalued will put money in the game to hopefully profit off their belief It's more like the Efficient Market Hypothesis

There's no skin in the game with Metaculus, it's a prediction aggregator, not a prediction market. Nothing is at stake.

This is why you see a somewhat absurd skew on AI doom/safety questions, using Metaculus is a hobby of the cult^H^H^H^H movement, and no one's swooping in to steal their money because there isn't any.

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

#225

Post by b112 »

lupusreal wrote: post #85
ortusdux wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or not thinking that an O-ring might experience temperatures below freezing in Florida https://priceonomics.com/the-space-shuttle-challenger-explos...

The really shitty thing is they knew early on the O-rings were slipping and partially extruding themselves, which wasn't part of the original design. They shrugged and ignored this, which then opened the door for disaster when the O-rings behaved differently (and still wrong) when cold. If they had pumped the brakes when the initial deviation from the design was discovered, it wouldn't have ended in disaster.

My memory saya that some engineers objected, but they were ignored.

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

#226

Post by hotstickyballs »

bumby wrote: post #215
evilduck wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

The downside is that rapid iteration doesn't always give the same insight in terms of scientific understanding. E.g., Design_A fails. We quickly pivot to Design_B, which works. However, we don't spend the time ultimately understanding why Design_A failed. This can be operationally great, but it can also risk conflating being lucky with being good. If you don't fundamentally understand why the thing failed the first t…

You can understand why design A failed. Just don’t need design B to be blocked on that with agile because the last iteration was working.

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

#227

Post by [deleted] »

BHSPitMonkey wrote: post #156
andrewflnr wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

"Engine-rich exhaust" is another one that gets a chuckle. For those wondering, it refers to when a rocket engine is literally burning itself into oblivion—so the exhaust plume is compromised less of fuel particles and more of, well... engine :)

[deleted]

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

#229

Post by codesnik »

Tuna-Fish wrote: post #11
Sebb767 wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do those rockets have a fuel filter at all? I get why we have them in cars; we refuel quite often, in dirty environments and with possibly low quality fuel. For space rockets, it seems that it would be (comparatively) easy to ensure that the tanks are clean and the fuel is of high quality. On the other hand, if there wasn't any dirt, the filters would not have clogged, so I guess it does make sense after all.

Most rockets don't have fuel filters, but this requires their tanks to be kept in a much more strict state of cleanliness, and any failure to do so would result in mission failures. SpaceX has long had a very different idea about FOD than most other rocket companies, famously Merlin engine qualification testing contains ingesting stainless steel nuts.

wow. Where I can read about those steel nuts? I wasn't able to google anything on the matter.

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

#230

Post by PBnFlash »

Sanzig wrote: post #50
misiti3780 wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also, wont it theoretically speed up and decrease international shipping + travel. We should be able to go from the US to Japan in an hour or two in the future.

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…

Worth noting that flying to the equator can provide a pretty significant increase of payload mass. Just a quick layover to orbit.
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