Earlier quoted context omitted.
They also stream the launch live on the spacex.com website.
That’s a Twitter embed on the SpaceX website. It’s still streaming from Twitter.
but no Twit...er, X account required
Starship's Third Flight Test [video]
161–170 of 413 posts
Re: Starship's Third Flight Test [video]
#162I was surprised that during the initial ascent footage from the fin-cam, you can see that the grid fins are out. Do they not fold back on ascent? Or possibly drag on one side to arc over? Just seems weird to have your “drag device” deployed during ascent.
Grid fins aren't drag devices. They are control surfaces. As long as they are oriented so the fins are aligned with the airflow, they have no effect on orientation. The benefit of not folding them in is one less part that can fail. There might be a slight reduction in drag by folding them in, but not much and apparently not worth it.
Re: Starship's Third Flight Test [video]
#163Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's at 26000 km/h which sufficient for orbital velocity. It looks like it's in an elliptical orbit. I guess we'll see soon if they need to do a de-orbit burn, or if the orbit just intersects the atmosphere and they use atmospheric braking?
I did the math. So, the minimal orbit at 180 km, the one that grazes the earth's surface at its perigee, is about 7.75 km/s or 27,900 kph. The other commenters are right: it was never technically orbital. edit: (let* ((μ 398600.0) ;; km^3/s^2 (r 6371.0) ;; km (peri (+ r 0.0)) (apo (+ r 180.0)) (a (* 0.5 (+ peri apo)))) (sqrt (* μ (- (/ 2.0 apo) (/ 1.0 a))))) ;; 7.745844595118488
That is really cool. For those of us that are space nerds but don't have the depth of understanding, do you mind walking us through the calculation above?
Re: Starship's Third Flight Test [video]
#164Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's impressive revisionism. Where's the Soviet reusable launch vehicle that is half the price, is able to reuse even one stage and takes less than a month to refurbish?
Nevermind
Good thing that falcon 9 is already very much less than "half" the price.
And starship should be utilized fully will probably ven cheaper for the same mass-to-orbit
Re: Starship's Third Flight Test [video]
#165https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX_Starship_integrated_fli...
Mission summary including timestamps
Re: Starship's Third Flight Test [video]
#166Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's impressive revisionism. Where's the Soviet reusable launch vehicle that is half the price, is able to reuse even one stage and takes less than a month to refurbish?
Nevermind
Show me anyone that _ever_ got a cost per kg to leo cheaper than spacex
Re: Starship's Third Flight Test [video]
#167Earlier quoted context omitted.
That is a matter of the trajectory they chose on purpose for this test flight. A different flight profile would have given them a perigee above the atmosphere (rather than -50 km)
Parent's (correct) point is that it isn't a matter of the ascent trajectory. They can't leave the Starship up in orbit, and where it reenters needs to be controlled.
> They can't leave the Starship up in orbit, and where it reenters needs to be controlled.
Why? Plenty of boosters re-enter uncontrolled and burn up all the time.
Re: Starship's Third Flight Test [video]
#168Earlier quoted context omitted.
You weren't the only one, I clicked on it too, as did thousands of others, before finding a real stream
YouTube does a bad job of real time takedowns of spoofed live streams. You’d think for big events like this they would have somebody just standing by and monitoring social stuff so that things like this don’t happen. Then again you'd think one of Amazon's 1.5M employees would have the job of finding fake USB sticks for sale on the site, but apparently nobody has that title either.
> You’d think for big events like this they would have somebody just standing by
This implies that YT has humans that are not in sales. It feels like YT just has bots building more bots at this point.
Re: Starship's Third Flight Test [video]
#169Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's a fake SpaceX YouTube account that looks official because they included videos from the real channel in playlists to get verification ticks & have managed to harvest thousands of subscribers. YT's interface is a bit dumb for including the verification ticks in that use-case.
YT's interface fights negative feedback harder than a spoiled toddler. Hiding downvotes, squirreling the "block channel" feature into a dot menu, breaking it completely on recommended pages, and then breaking search pages... it's almost like they don't want to fight spam.
They get paid to serve that spam. Why would they reduce the avenues to serve the spam?
Re: Starship's Third Flight Test [video]
#170Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wouldn’t classify the re-entry survival problem as icing. But otherwise, I agree with you.
They can launch payloads that bring in revenue while working on that problem. There is a good chance they put a bunch of Starlinks on the next flight.
Exactly, they’ve reached feature parity with large expendable launch systems so they can piggyback paying customers with a high risk threshold (starlink) on flights they’d be doing anyways. Given their cadence this phase won’t last long, they’ll likely achieve at least one successful landing next flight.