Earlier quoted context omitted.
How about the other 10K+ people who did the actual work to make this happen? Or is it all about that one guy? :)
It's not his work alone, but indeed it's all about one guy.
Gwynne Shotwell isn't a guy, though...
Super Heavy has splashed down in The Gulf of Mexico
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Re: Super Heavy has splashed down in The Gulf of Mexico
#112That's a nice big ladder for getting to the heavens and back.
Re: Super Heavy has splashed down in The Gulf of Mexico
#113So I'm excited to see this tech develop but I wonder how much of a market there really is for super-heavy lifters. I can't wait to see a future version where they land the various stages rather than just dumping them into the sea. The first Falcon Heavy launch was super impressive. SpaceX already has the Falcon Heavy and there have only been a handful of launches, primarily military. I guess the argument is it'll ope…
The vision is that the cost per unit of mass to orbit will come down massively with Starship, once it's launching like the Falcon. That will open up hitherto unimaginable missions and markets. And customers. It's all about the the cost!
Re: Super Heavy has splashed down in The Gulf of Mexico
#114Earlier quoted context omitted.
There’s lots of things that are just too big and heavy and need launch vehicles like that. It might be overkill for satellites, but space stations and habitats need the payload capacity of something like this to become anything resembling economical.
how many of those things are there?
There'll be a lot more once it is actually possible and economical to put it in space.
Re: Super Heavy has splashed down in The Gulf of Mexico
#115Some highlights:
Booster splashdown at about T+7:30, Ship engine cutoff at 151 km: https://x.com/NASASpaceflight/status/1798700946983358535
Starship splashdown in Indian Ocean, mostly intact, with landing burn just before splashdown; landing burn: https://x.com/DJSnM/status/1798715665916014715
Full flight profile: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX_Starship_integrated_fli...
Re: Super Heavy has splashed down in The Gulf of Mexico
#116Watching pieces of the ship melt off, but then seeing it make a relatively controlled landing, is perversely confidence building. If it can survive that kind of damage on a control surface maybe it's a quite robust craft.
Yeah, and what a useful recording for "where do we buff up the heat protection?"
Part of the build up said that they had deliberately weakened / thinned some of the tiles in order to test what the tolerance was. It seems that they must have gotten some incredible data about the mode of failure.
Re: Super Heavy has splashed down in The Gulf of Mexico
#117Earlier quoted context omitted.
It simulated a landing over the ocean, but there was nothing there to actually catch it.
Guess they didn't want to sacrifice "Of Course I Still Love You" for this test.
AFAIK the Superheavy booster can't land on it's own and was never designed to. It needs (currently) the launch gantry to catch it in all the preview footage.
It's always struck me as a very risky gamble on SpaceX's part to do that because you're risking your whole launch infrastructure if something goes wrong in those last seconds.
Re: Super Heavy has splashed down in The Gulf of Mexico
#118Watching pieces of the ship melt off, but then seeing it make a relatively controlled landing, is perversely confidence building. If it can survive that kind of damage on a control surface maybe it's a quite robust craft.
Yeah, and what a useful recording for "where do we buff up the heat protection?"
It looked like plasma got between the flap and the body. I wonder if that means something broke/melted to allow that, or if the design just allowed it accidentally.
Re: Super Heavy has splashed down in The Gulf of Mexico
#119Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, and what a useful recording for "where do we buff up the heat protection?"
Part of the build up said that they had deliberately weakened / thinned some of the tiles in order to test what the tolerance was. It seems that they must have gotten some incredible data about the mode of failure.
That was for the base of the ship, so that they could add more sensors.
Re: Super Heavy has splashed down in The Gulf of Mexico
#120Watching pieces of the ship melt off, but then seeing it make a relatively controlled landing, is perversely confidence building. If it can survive that kind of damage on a control surface maybe it's a quite robust craft.
I’ve said for a while that we won’t be ready for the real space age until you can have a rusty pickup in space.
What I mean by that is that we have it down well enough that the tech exceeds tolerances and can degrade gracefully.
You see this in some sci-fi where there are rust bucket old ships that work.