Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

arstechnica.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

311–320 of 420 posts

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

#311

Post by Geisterde »

gibolt wrote: post #223
inglor_cz wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Hmmm, from a manufacturing prespective this is probably the safest way too, because you have already scaled production, you arent suddenly trying out all these new manufacturing processes when starship enters production. All your processes have been continuously validated already.

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

#312

Post by Geisterde »

stoneman24 wrote: post #19
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

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.

Well Elon did say the "lack of load" that played a part in the last ships crash wont be a problem.

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

#313

Post by throwaway2037 »

Covzire wrote: post #113
somenameforme wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Atlas 5 is already completely obsoleted by the Falcon Heavy which costs about half as much, for a reusable launch, and carries about 3x as much. But for Starship, most people don't seem to realize what a potential game changer this is. The goal for Starship is to get costs down to about 15x less than Falcon Heavy. When you can start sending stuff to space for a few dollars per pound, we're not talking about just prob…

Mini-factories in space could become a thing, supposedly a lot of industrial processes are only difficult because of friction and gravity.

I hear this touted a lot, but I never hear any specific examples. Do you know any?

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

#314

Post by KiwiJohnno »

everyone wrote: post #203

Question: Who is the actual brain at SpaceX?? They must have at least one mega-genius level engineer / project manager with a lot of authority to have progressed so far.

Its Elon. He has obviously also hired some very, very smart dedicated people, but undoubtedly he is making all the key decisions and also driving the project forward.

If you don't believe me, believe Tom Mueller - Ex SpaceX Propulsion CTO - He was with SpaceX from the very start and the Merlin (Falcon 9 engine) and early work on the Raptor (Starship engine) was him. Tom has commented in various articles and on his twitter (I'm too lazy to find a link) that Elon was 100% involved in the technical issues and design of everything, and knew his stuff. He has said this after leaving SpaceX too, so it not just don't-badmouth-the-boss going on there.

Yep, it seems Elon has also become a hard-right asshole in recent years. Maybe he always was?

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

#315

Post by adastra22 »

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…

> However, we don't spend the time ultimately understanding why Design_A failed

Did you read TFA? It's about the release of an extensive report documenting why Design_A failed and what corrections are to be made regarding each specific failure.

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

#316

Post by adastra22 »

cduzz wrote: post #49
toss1 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let us know what you find. I find it not 'bonkers' but a great idea, and hope they are qualifying with the largest nuts found upstream, in 'go to space' grades. Robustness and anti-fragility may not be so critical for an expendable vehicle that operates once for something like 12 minutes, but seems a key attribute for a refuel-able and reusable spacecraft?

Oh I agree it's not bonkers from the perspective of "wait you want to put people on that bomb and then explode it?" You can make all sorts of rules about what's not allowed to happen, but often those things happen. I'm just ... astonished if they've got a little practice room somewhere in their factory where they give each of their new rockets a nut to process... "Okay kid here's your graduation test!". A "we need sc…

> I'm just ... astonished if they've got a little practice room somewhere in their factory where they give each of their new rockets a nut to process... "Okay kid here's your graduation test!". A "we need screens to cope with big things and filters to deal with small things" is probably smart for any anything that's going to be reused.

That's what their McGreggor test site in Texas is for. It's a long, boring, two hour drive from anywhere or anything.

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

#317

Post by BryanLegend »

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…

Falcon 9 reached orbit on it's first attempt, so it didn't have failed experimental flights unless you count Falcon 1 as being it's experiments.

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

#318

Post by timschmidt »

panick21_ wrote: post #269
Animats wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The asteroid Psyche is expected to have a lot of gold content. NASA sent a probe last year, but it's a long trip and will take until 2029 to get there. Even then it just orbits.

That's nonsense. Sure Psyche has a lot of valuable materials on it, but so do mountains on earth, doesn't mean its great way to make money. There are things far closer to earth that are far easier to get to, and those things are also far smaller then Psyche and thus far easier to mine. The most serious space mining company right now is targeting near earth asteroids for platinum group metals.

Heavy elements like gold and platinum sank to the center of the earth's core while the whole planet was molten and this is why they are rare near the crust. Asteroids have never been entirely molten, and as such have valuable heavy elements dispersed relatively evenly throughout. In other words, much higher concentrations of valuable elements are expected to be available much closer to the surface of asteroids than on Earth.

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

#319

Post by ranger207 »

foobarian wrote: post #101
s1artibartfast wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I posted upthread, but another concern is that stray particulate is an ignition source. Rocket fuel pumps are ~100,000 hp, and that energy is put into kinetic energy of the fluid flow. A stray particulate can cause the metal pump and fuel lines to burn in the presence of O2 at 300 atmospheres.

> Rocket fuel pumps are ~100,000 hp That is wild. I need to learn more about rocket fuel pumps :-) Thank you all for these comments.

Fuel pumps are one of the most important design considerations of a rocket. When people talk about a rocket's specs, it's often going to be in the approximate order of thrust, efficiency (called ISP), fuel, and then what kind of fuel pump it has, aka its cycle

https://everydayastronaut.com/rocket-engine-cycles/

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

#320

Post by philwelch »

lmm wrote: post #258
TMWNN wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Concorde's commercial failure I thought Concorde failed commercially because it couldn't get approval to fly over the US elsewhere over land because of sonic booms. I know reentering spacecraft cause sonic booms but thought that they occur high enough to not cause the same problems on the ground.

> I thought Concorde failed commercially because it couldn't get approval to fly over the US elsewhere over land because of sonic booms. Or, if you're more cynical, because the US' own supersonic airliner failed and they wouldn't let those Euros show them up.

The American SST was cancelled because of the sonic boom problem.
Post reply on HN