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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

#331

Post by Sanzig »

AtlasBarfed wrote: post #328
njarboe wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think there is a pretty large market for a trip to space and an hour flight from LA to New Zealand, New York-Sydney, London-Shanghai, etc. for $10-20k. What an amazing combination that would be.

Think of this market: The NFL wants to expand to Europe, Asia, South America badly. Problem is the logistics of Mach-1 air travel won't allow that. Same for the NBA, NHL, and MLB. A true world super league of futbol. We're talking 10s of billions of dollars in new annual revenue for these sports leagues ... if they could transport a whole team anywhere in the world in 4-5 hours. It costs a couple hundred thousand per…

A transcontinental flight ranges from low five figures for a long range business jet to upper five/lower six figures for a widebody jetliner. Those are machines purpose built for the job of moving people transcontinental distances. They benefit from decades of heritage building tens of thousands of units leading to extremely aggressive cost optimization. I just can't see Starship getting the cost per flight down into the hundreds of thousands of dollars range. Not to mention the boring (but important) constraint of trying to insure a team of valuable athletes flying around in a rocket with way less of a safety record than conventional air travel.

That said, having a sports team arrive in town by literally descending from the heavens on a burning rocket sounds badass. Unfortunately I can't really see it happening, but I'd be happy to be proven wrong.

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

#332

Post by lmm »

philwelch wrote: post #320
lmm wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

It was cancelled because Boeing were late and over budget; by the time they started work on a prototype, Concorde was already being shown at airshows, and the US Senate voted to stop throwing more money at them. Sonic booms were at most one contributing factor among many to that senate vote.

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

#333

Post by thinkcontext »

qiine wrote: post #144
kspacewalk2 wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

Considering how strategic SpaceX has become I wonder sometimes if the us gouv would just intervene if Elon did anything funny with it.

I'm sure when he said he decided not to allow the Ukrainians to use Starlink to do a sneak attack because of his conversation with the Russians that caught the national security establishment's attention.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/08/world/europe/elon-musk-uk...

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

#334

Post by thinkcontext »

sneak wrote: post #146
kspacewalk2 wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

If it weren’t for his extremism, none of this would be happening. Maybe stop looking for reasons to hate on him simply because it’s popular to do so? His works speak for themselves.

It is true his work speaks for itself. It is also his views speak for themselves which include a repugnant homophobic conspiracy theory about the attack on Paul Pelosi and a covid one about Lebron James' son.

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

#335

Post by philwelch »

lmm wrote: post #332
philwelch wrote: post #320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The American SST was cancelled because of the sonic boom problem.

It was cancelled because Boeing were late and over budget; by the time they started work on a prototype, Concorde was already being shown at airshows, and the US Senate voted to stop throwing more money at them. Sonic booms were at most one contributing factor among many to that senate vote.

Concorde was also late and over budget. And until Congress defunded the 2707, it had more pending orders from more airlines than Concorde did. Sonic booms weren’t the only reason for the cancellation but they were probably the single biggest reason.

Also, Concorde wasn’t even the first supersonic airliner—that was the Tupolev Tu-144.

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

#336

Post by jillesvangurp »

BryanLegend wrote: post #317
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…

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.

You are right. It was essentially a bigger Falcon 1 and not a complete redesign. So, the risk was not as high. It was an incremental upgrade. Not a small one but still.

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

#337

Post by jillesvangurp »

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

Failing fast also reduces cost. It cuts down on the time wasted on things that aren't going to work. With traditional design it can take years to find out if something will work or not. And when they don't, it leads to lengthy and expensive redesigns. You avoid all of that by iterating rapidly and building on and perfecting what works and scrapping/replacing what doesn't work before you sink a lot of time and resources in these things

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

#338

Post by imtringued »

rbanffy wrote: post #5
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 love that Superheavy/Starship can be profitable even if they are expendable.

It will be half the cost of SLS.

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

#340

Post by croes »

dotnet00 wrote: post #263
croes wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Without constant replacement it's gone pretty fast.

Which makes it sustainable... if it goes away shortly after you stop replacing it, it's not putting debris up there.

Needing constant rocket launches to provide a service isn't sustainable, Star Link is disposable
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