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Starship's Third Flight Test [video]

spacex.com

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Re: Starship's Third Flight Test [video]

#351

Post by avmich »

mgiampapa wrote: post #345
avmich wrote: post #341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but HLS is just one example. In, say, ten years it may look very possible that Starships with people will fly on LEO. Is it beyond foreseeable future?.. I just don't understand why such a pessimistic estimate.

In my view, since I was the one that said it, anything more than 5 years away is perpetually 5 years away until it's been proven. Yes, eventually when Starship has enough launches and a track record it will get human rated by NASA to carry astronauts. This is the only actual certification for human space flight worth paying attention to right now. It's possible to get on a rocket otherwise, but the US government isn'…

I'll still take this as progress. With thermonuclear reactors it's perennial 20 years, similar for flying cars, in-house robots, manned flight to the Mars, so 5 years as a stand-in for "foreseeable future" sounds like a good step ahead.

Re: Starship's Third Flight Test [video]

#352

Post by Teever »

Retric wrote: post #304
93po wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

JWST would also be incredibly less expensive if it didn't have to do the very complex folding required by smaller rockets

JWST would still have been an extremely novel and therefore expensive on Spaceship. We just don't build anything that uses that kind of sun shield or those sensors etc and everything needs to work on one shot, thus serious engineering effort.

With Starship flights it should be the right combination of cheap enough, frequent enough, and big enough to enable whole new paradigms of construction in space.

We'll be able to design modular space telescopes that benefit from economies of scale, so that we'll be shipping up the sun shield in separate pieces anyways so if any particular one is lost that's okay we'll have an assembly line to produce more.

Re: Starship's Third Flight Test [video]

#354

Post by pclmulqdq »

jiggawatts wrote: post #350
pclmulqdq wrote: post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody has done anything revolutionary and nobody has gotten to space an order of magnitude cheaper. The best estimates of SpaceX's cost advantage per kilo put it at 30-50% better than a Soyuz. The Starship program so far has soaked up as much money as SLS, and hasn't even left orbit.

They did several revolutionary things with starship: Full-flow staged combustion metholox engines. Stainless steel construction. Biggest rocket to have ever flown. Highest thrust at launch of any rocket by a factor of two or so. Live streaming of reentry via a space Internet network. Etc…

Those all sound like incremental technology advances to me that have yet to deliver any real advances in capabilities. Which is nice - don't get me wrong - but not exactly worth rolling out the aircraft carrier for.

Re: Starship's Third Flight Test [video]

#355

Post by Retric »

Teever wrote: post #352
Retric wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

JWST would still have been an extremely novel and therefore expensive on Spaceship. We just don't build anything that uses that kind of sun shield or those sensors etc and everything needs to work on one shot, thus serious engineering effort.

With Starship flights it should be the right combination of cheap enough, frequent enough, and big enough to enable whole new paradigms of construction in space. We'll be able to design modular space telescopes that benefit from economies of scale, so that we'll be shipping up the sun shield in separate pieces anyways so if any particular one is lost that's okay we'll have an assembly line to produce more.

Launching several doesn't solve the issue of needing a design and construction that actually works. For something nobody has ever built before and we can't really test in zero g without launching etc.

Unfolding the heat shield was a relatively minor design issue compared to say the instruments, we just had less ability to actually test it on the ground.

Re: Starship's Third Flight Test [video]

#356

Post by jiggawatts »

pclmulqdq wrote: post #354
jiggawatts wrote: post #350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They did several revolutionary things with starship: Full-flow staged combustion metholox engines. Stainless steel construction. Biggest rocket to have ever flown. Highest thrust at launch of any rocket by a factor of two or so. Live streaming of reentry via a space Internet network. Etc…

Those all sound like incremental technology advances to me that have yet to deliver any real advances in capabilities. Which is nice - don't get me wrong - but not exactly worth rolling out the aircraft carrier for.

Someone else in this thread pointed out that Starship could get the ISS built in just 3 launches! It originally took dozens.

Quantity has a quality all of its own.

You should be familiar with this from IT: there’s nothing fundamentally different about the first computer that I’ve ever used to the one I have right now, other than the factor of a million difference in performance!

Re: Starship's Third Flight Test [video]

#357

Post by jordanb »

f-securus wrote: post #348
2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote: post #339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They haven't gotten to the revolutionary part yet (fuel tankers in orbit, raptor relight, reusable first stage, reentry).

Re-using rockets isn't revolutionary?

I think it might have been back when the shuttle did it in 1981.

Re: Starship's Third Flight Test [video]

#358

Post by jordanb »

bandyaboot wrote: post #338
pclmulqdq wrote: post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If your test case for left pad passes when it outputs a string of the right length, your boss is going to judge whether it's a good test case. Since this is all being done on federal grant money, it's legitimate to have higher expectations. This test was good, though - the previous two were disappointing.

The test flights have been right in line with how spacex does development and testing. I’m confident that everyone involved with granting them that money knew this going in.

It's fine that they've not yet completed any stated launch objectives in three tests and have, amongst them, 5 independent catastrophic vehicle loss events because that's what we expect out of SpaceX.

Re: Starship's Third Flight Test [video]

#359

Post by macintux »

pclmulqdq wrote: post #342
zer0c00ler wrote: post #335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think each test served exactly its purpose and it's incredible to see the rapid progress. Unclear why you believe the first two were not a success at all? Did you expect a novel vehicle like this would just work the first time?

I do. SLS, Vulcan, and most other rockets from reputable space companies have worked first time.

Those are also:

- More expensive than Starship, or

- Took longer to develop than Starship, or

- Are significantly less ambitious than Starship

(and those are definitely not exclusive ORs)

Re: Starship's Third Flight Test [video]

#360

Post by zardo »

DarmokJalad1701 wrote: post #267
gorkish wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes this would all be true, if it were true. It is likely to become true at IFT-4 but they are very demonstrably not quite where you say they are. This was still a suborbital flight and they cannot do much of anything that is commercially practical on suborbital flights (like launch satellites, even if they raise their apogee). They appear to have not had good control authority in coast and reentry. They did not do a…

> This was still a suborbital flight and they cannot do much of anything that is commercially practical on suborbital flights If they had flown a slightly steeper ascent and burned for a little longer (possibly a minute if not less), they would have ended in a stable orbit. Not doing that was intentional. They do not need engine relight capability to reach orbit - plenty of orbital rockets exist that cannot relight t…

> They do not need engine relight capability to reach orbit - plenty of orbital rockets exist that cannot relight their final stage.

I don't think SpaceX is interested in having uncontrolled Starship re-entries. It's large enough that (even without a heat shield) debris will very likely make it down to surface.

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