Earlier quoted context omitted.
It did not land. The plan was not to attempt a landing. But it maintained a controlled descent into the ocean and splashed down upright.
Hard to land if no land.
[deleted]
Super Heavy has splashed down in The Gulf of Mexico
171–180 of 899 posts
Re: Super Heavy has splashed down in The Gulf of Mexico
#172Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's mad how rocket landings are now more exciting than rocket launches.
When I was young, there were no rocket landings.
My grandfather recalls (what he later found out to be) a rocket landing in London's east end during his youth.
There were quite a lot of them at the time.
Re: Super Heavy has splashed down in The Gulf of Mexico
#173Earlier quoted context omitted.
Anything Mars is pure BS. Just anything and everything. The one way trip to mars is orders of magnitude more complicated than moon. Keeping people from being riddled with cancer in 6months trip is not trivial. Landing and then what you plan a flag and die?
> Landing and then what you plan a flag and die? Pretty much, why do you think columbus set off? And he didn't even know if he'd actually find anything. I don't understand your attitude and people like you, human beings have been explorers forever, and seem to value exploring even over survival potentially. I'd say it's pretty obviously evolutionarily coded into us. Maybe not you, but into many people.
Columbus very very much didn't plan to die (though he very much would have if he didn't get lucky that there was a whole new continent there). His plan was to land in India, which he thought he would reach around the time he actually reached the new continent, because he had a completely wrong idea of how large the globe actually was (he alone had this wrong idea; the actual circumference of the globe was pretty well understood by this point).
In general, human-based space exploration makes 0 sense. We have robots that can do everything a human in a life-support suit can, and don't need to carry 100 times their mass just to not day on the way there and back. Doing a few experiments with humans in space, like we do on the ISS, is indeed worth it for exploring the unknown unknowns of biology. Maybe some day, far in the future after we have explored Mars with many hundreds of robots, it will even make sense to send a human there. But until then, it's just a waste of everything.
Re: Super Heavy has splashed down in The Gulf of Mexico
#174So 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!
It's not only about cost per kg but also maximum payload mass. If you can build bigger satellites then you don't need to optimize for weight as hard and can use cheaper components/standardize. Which means both launch cost and sat costs will come down.
Re: Super Heavy has splashed down in The Gulf of Mexico
#175I am one of the people skeptical about Elon’s specific claims of Starships abilities specifically about his Mars ambitions. Today’s test, if the Starship reentry is as successful as the booster soft landing will be absolutely a great achievement and a 100% mission success. This demonstration keeps SpaceX on schedule for their part of the Artemis 3 mission. Keeping the mission parameters simpler (no “refueuling” or do…
Anything Mars is pure BS. Just anything and everything. The one way trip to mars is orders of magnitude more complicated than moon. Keeping people from being riddled with cancer in 6months trip is not trivial. Landing and then what you plan a flag and die?
"Keeping people from being riddled with cancer in 6months trip is not trivial."
It's pretty trivial. Put mass in between you and space. It's already been researched to death and we have many years worth of data about the subject.
Re: Super Heavy has splashed down in The Gulf of Mexico
#176It was such a well-done engineering drama! Everyone had already written off the main hero, but he returns from the dead.
Re: Super Heavy has splashed down in The Gulf of Mexico
#177Earlier quoted context omitted.
Has to be large to be reusable due to scaling factors. We can finally start sending useful amounts of things into space, millions of solar panels for one
How is putting solar in space more useful than putting it on Earth? You still have the problem of a capricious atmosphere between the source of the beams and the place where you need the electricity. Sure, you can slightly modulate and do a few things, but the extra energy is extraordinarily unlikely to make up the extra costs even if the transport costs were 0.
Works 24/7 with 0 atmospheric reduction.
You can send the power via microwaves so less interference, problem is the largish ground based capture device.
Apparently $200/kg makes it economic, Starship is aiming for more like $2/kg
Re: Super Heavy has splashed down in The Gulf of Mexico
#178Earlier quoted context omitted.
How is putting solar in space more useful than putting it on Earth? You still have the problem of a capricious atmosphere between the source of the beams and the place where you need the electricity. Sure, you can slightly modulate and do a few things, but the extra energy is extraordinarily unlikely to make up the extra costs even if the transport costs were 0.
It means you can have abundant power in space to run all kinds of hardware.
Then what is this hardware that you'd want to run in space, that needs more power than it can generate on its own?
Re: Super Heavy has splashed down in The Gulf of Mexico
#179Earlier quoted context omitted.
Payloads are designed according to available spacecraft capabilities. When this thing flies, market will form around it in no time.
I'm skeptical because satellites, like pretty much any technology, tend to get smaller over time. I remember reading about how it was profitable for someone to buy up 4 geostationary slots and replace 4 satellites with 1 that was probably smaller than any of the 4 (because geostationary slots can be incredibly valuable). There are large bespoke payloads (eg JWST) but these are inherently so expensive anyway the launc…
> There are large bespoke payloads (eg JWST) but these are inherently so expensive anyway the launch vehicle costs almost don't matter.
If launch costs are going to be $250M, you need a budget of that order of magnitude to make a mission viable. At that point, you might was well spend anywhere from $50M to $1B on the payload because that's where your budget is. Or, to put it another way, only payloads with a $50M to $1B budget can afford to exist if the launch costs are of the order of $250M.
However, if launch costs are of the order of $5M, then missions with much smaller budgets suddenly become economically viable. And there are a lot more potential missions out there with $10M budgets than there are missions with $500M budgets.
Satellites get smaller not only because the tech gets smaller, but because launch costs/kg are so expensive, or so limited. Currently it's worth spending $10M to reduce your mass by 10%, if doing so means you can reduce your launch costs by $25M. Or, if doing so means you can double your onboard station-keeping fuel, and double the lifespan of the satellite.
If launch costs are less and available upmass is higher, your budget for engineering to reduce your payload mass is less, and so is the reason to do so.
Re: Super Heavy has splashed down in The Gulf of Mexico
#180The rate of descent is absolutely astonishing, 8km -> 1km in 20 seconds, then just hovers above the water. Absolutely incredible work by the SpaceX team. Living in central Florida I cannot wait for the new launch facility to come online. We're going to have lines of spectators into the space coast like we did for the shuttle. If any of you are heading to Disney World you should stop by the NASA Kennedy Visitor Comple…
Hello from Gainesville! Thanks for recommending the NASA Kennedy Visitor Complex. We will have to visit next time we make a trip to Orlando.