Super Heavy has splashed down in The Gulf of Mexico

Post by ryandvm » Thu, Jun 06, 2024, 3:11 PM UTC

api wrote: post #120

delichon wrote: post #81

Watching 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.

Post by creshal » Thu, Jun 06, 2024, 3:14 PM UTC

rtkwe wrote: post #220

creshal wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The door design isn't final yet, there's no point in whining about it. They need tankers and landers for NASA contracts short term (neither of which require payload deployment), anything else is a nice to have that can be tinkered with on the side until it works.

The door is a major issue to using super heavy to deliver other payloads which is a goal long term and the need for a heat shield on the bottom makes it hard to make it fully open towards the front. Kind of need to have this fairly well sorted from the beginning because new designs mean new testing and certification which are expensive.

Post by ceejayoz » Thu, Jun 06, 2024, 3:17 PM UTC

ryandvm wrote: post #221

api wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You have to be careful how much wisdom you glean from fiction. The sheer hostility of space kind of precludes the "she's a good ol' ship" trope. When your door doesn't shut on your pickup, you can bang on it a bit. When your door doesn't shut on your spacecraft, you've got a ship full of corpses that look like a blob fish brought up from the Marianas Trench.

Post by _glass » Thu, Jun 06, 2024, 3:19 PM UTC

simiones wrote: post #173

zpeti wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Post by yalue » Thu, Jun 06, 2024, 3:23 PM UTC

notact wrote: post #217

pixl97 wrote: post #68

What the hell, half melted starship actually did the landing flip and hit the ocean slow!!! That was amazing!

Can someone explain why reentry must be so hellish? The energy gained during the rocket burn into orbit must be bled off during reentry, and that energy is enormous. However, why must reentry occur so quickly? It seems if the descent into the atmosphere was slower, the heat shield would be able to radiate the heat energy away more effectively, thus lowering skin temperatures, and significantly reducing the engineerin…