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

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

#351

Post by Geisterde »

TMWNN wrote: post #244
colechristensen wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Asteroid mining I think is one of the most interesting initial space industries. Something silly like a single asteroid having metals with current valuations of a million times the global GDP. Obviously you can't sell for that much but asteroid mining could make a lot of commodities become insanely cheap, and that would enable some pretty amazing things here at home, and in space. Like what if steel were cheaper than…

>Asteroid mining I think is one of the most interesting initial space industries. I hope to see in my lifetime a large asteroid brought to Earth orbit, for both mining and as a very large space station.

A large space station is an interesting idea, or a long range station!

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

#352

Post by lupusreal »

bumby wrote: post #286
panick21_ wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Name any private individual who has done more for the defense of Ukraine then Musk. Suggesting that a civil war will end in a cease fire along battle lines is a very common way for civil wars to end. Even if during those wars both sides absolutely are convinced that they will have total victory.

It’s not a foregone conclusion that it is a good thing. Some strategists like Peter Zeihan think if Ukraine “wins” it will prompt a defensive nuclear exchange from Russia. In that case, history might look at Musk differently.

The most likely "Ukraine wins" scenario is a frozen conflict (e.g. Korea) in which Ukrainians can feel relatively secure about their future albeit without regaining all of their prewar territory. In this scenario, a nuclear tantrum from Russia seems extremely unlikely. Rather, they would probably cope by claiming they won and the rest of Ukrainian territory was sour grapes anyway.

Ukraine actually managing to retake all of their prewar territory might plausibly cause Russia to go totally insane and start nuking, but the way things are going it seems like a pipe dream for Ukraine to make that much progress. Maybe if some serious changes to the balance of force occurred, like a surprise admission of Ukraine to NATO, but this isn't very realistic.

(Anything more than that, some sort of "Ukrainian forces in Moscow executing Putin for war crimes" is just pure fantasy. So no matter what happens, relative security is the best anybody can hope for.)

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

#353

Post by lupusreal »

croes wrote: post #340
dotnet00 wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

If we're talking about economic sustainability, that's not how it works. Many things in your daily life are disposable (remember this point for the next paragraph) and yet are economically sustainable for the companies making them because they bring in more money than they cost.

If you're talking about environmental sustainability.. get over it. Rocketry, even as SpaceX's scale, is a tiny drop in the ocean of throwaway consumer culture.

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

#354

Post by panick21_ »

bumby wrote: post #301
panick21_ wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is what Musk haters have to tell themselves I guess. Of course Shotwell was the sales person during the Falcon 1 days and only later took over more of a leadership roll. And even if she is 'the genius' then Musk is the guy who recruited her, promoted her multiple times and put her in the position she is in now. But its also just the reality that Shotwell job is made 10x easier because she has a reusable rocket t…

> But on the other hand we also no that leadership is incredibly important. I was with you until this part. The general common sense and MBA consensus is that leadership is important. And I suspect that it is more so with smaller companies. But the data seems mixed with large companies and some research seems to point out that high level leaders don’t have an appreciable impact.

Hard disagree. If you turn around the question, and ask how many amazingly successful companies that are at the very front of technology development and have strong growth, do it with bad leadership.

Also there is a difference between short term and longterm. Most companies don't have the same leadership for 20+ years. Musk has been leading SpaceX for 20+ years and SpaceX has been consistently growing and consistently amazing track record of execution and technology development.

I don't really think there are companies like that who have terrible leadership.

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

#355

Post by lupusreal »

rootusrootus wrote: post #151
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".

> Every time Elon says or does something I remind myself that the real genius at the head of SpaceX is Gwynne, and hope that Elon continues to let her be awesome.

If Starship works, then Gwynne did it. If Starship fails, then Elon did it. Amirite?

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

#356

Post by persolb »

bumby wrote: post #246
avmich wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Engineering, physical principles, I guess. Those who place bets or making predictions may know a thing or two on mechanics, rocket science and history of building launchers.

To put a finer point on it, those seem like rather blunt instruments for prediction compared to how risk is typically measured by aerospace reliability engineers.

Think of it like top down budget va bottom up budget.

RAMS engineers do a bottom up analysis. However, it is fairly typical for the to be subtlety biased in a way that changes the final answer. (Usually by ‘rounding up’ on individual hazards).

Top down takes an outside view and says ‘this looks like these other past projects. It should land in around the same place.’

I’ve found top down tends to be more accurate project wise. Bottom up more accurate for specific subsystems.

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

#357

Post by croes »

neverrroot wrote: post #344
croes wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>pushing through It's basically still the same technology as the first rockets, just bigger. We have more and cheaper satellite launches, but we're not really any closer to colonising space. That's Musk's trick, selling revolution, delivering evolution.

SpaceX is number one, you belittle incredible accomplishments across the board. If it’s so easy, why didn’t anyone else do it at this pace/scale? Why doesn’t anyone else do it at their scale today? The hardest thing to achieve is delivering when anyone has access to the same technologies, resources etc. He delivered, the others didn’t. Especially NASA, by comparison. Be fair and give the man the props where the props…

Because NASA could accord to pay one start up.

I belittle nothing but landing rockets wasn't a new idea and wasn't seen as impossible.

It was an evolutionary step and that's what I acknowledge.

But people treat Musk as if he single handedly built a Mars colony.

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

#358

Post by croes »

neverrroot wrote: post #348
croes wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>pushing through It's basically still the same technology as the first rockets, just bigger. We have more and cheaper satellite launches, but we're not really any closer to colonising space. That's Musk's trick, selling revolution, delivering evolution.

“Prototypes are easy, volume production is hard, positive cash flow is excruciating”.

That's valid for his evolutionary promises, for the revolutionary one even step one doesn't work.

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

#359

Post by markonen »

TMWNN wrote: post #239
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…

>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.

Not sure why you're getting downvoted, this was definitely a key factor that made Concorde into a niche product.

It's not that customers preferred slower and cheaper flights over Concorde—they didn't, Concorde had very healthy average occupancy rates and operating the flights was very profitable for BA and Air France (they got the planes for free, of course).

It's that you can't fly a 1960s plane forever and you also can't amortize the design and development cost of new models with the only addressable market being first class customers travelling between the East Coast and a couple of European capitals (and this was directly caused by the overland flight restrictions).

Flying Concorde is one of my fondest memories :/

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

#360

Post by hoseja »

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

We could have had dozens of James Webb Space Telescopes for the cost of, like, five.
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