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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

#271

> SpaceX won a multibillion-dollar contract from the agency to use Starship as a crewed lunar lander as part of NASA's Artemis moon program So four people would arrive at Lunar orbit in an Orion, board a huge prepositioned Starship, and fly that down to the surface?

> So four people would arrive at Lunar orbit in an Orion, board a huge prepositioned Starship, and fly that down to the surface?

That's the idea, yes. [1]

1. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/1/13/20...

Re: Super Heavy has splashed down in The Gulf of Mexico

#272
post #250
post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They use the atmosphere to help slow the ship down. It takes most of the tank of fuel to get up there and moving so fast. It would take most a tank to slow down. So, they would need about double the fuel plus some for landing. P.S. I have not done any of the math (I might be able to figure it out but it might take a week or two to figure it out). P.S.S : Maybe if they could refuel in space efficiently (asteroid minin…

I understand the atmosphere is used to slow the vehicle - it's basically free brakes that you don't have to carry with you. I never suggested using rockets in reverse to slow the vehicle down. What I am asking is, instead of effectively standing on the breaks and generating enormous amounts of friction in a short period of time, why can't the vehicle ease onto the breaks and spread the friction out over time so it ca…

See lift to drag ratio. To get enough lift to maintain altitude you need a certain amount of drag. At those speeds the drag causes the heating while still not producing enough lift to stay up.

Re: Super Heavy has splashed down in The Gulf of Mexico

#273
post #127

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.

Agree, a successful mission needn't be a perfect mission

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Re: Super Heavy has splashed down in The Gulf of Mexico

#274
post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Falcon 9 first stage goes past the Karman line and does a reentry burn. It’s not reentering from orbit , but it is from space .

So does New Shepard. If crossing the Karman line is your definition of re-entry then the Falcon 9 isn’t unique. What Starship is doing is completely different from what Falcon 9 is doing. Falcon 9 is not the only other sub-orbital booster to propulsively land. Starship isn’t the only other spacecraft to survive hypersonic re-entry. It’s not even unique in being reusable. Starship and Falcon 9 are incredible achieveme…

I guess the Space Shuttle did have main engines (and orbital maneuvering engines) but it's notable that they weren't expected to relight afterwards.

Re: Super Heavy has splashed down in The Gulf of Mexico

#275
post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder what happens to it now. Does the USN scoop it up or do they wait for some other navy's submarine to start prying at that sweet ITAR hardware?

There isn't much to be gained from mangled, corroded remains of what used to be ITAR hardware at some point, so nobody really tried it before. All the Apollo engines e.g. are still where they were dropped (unless recovered by the US), because you'd really need to abduct a few of the designers or engineers involved to gain useful insights.

I think you're definitely wrong about that. It's generally believed that the US Navy puts a lot of effort into picking scraps of foreign missile tests up off the ocean floor, to see what they can learn. Hard to confirm from unclassified sources, but I believe it.

Re: Super Heavy has splashed down in The Gulf of Mexico

#276
The difference in presentation between the launch of Starliner yesterday vs Starship today was stark.

For most of the Starliner launch, all we got to see was a Windows desktop showing some basic animations that look like they're from the late 90s and unexplained telemetry with about a 1Hz update rate. Perhaps interesting to hardcore space nerds but not very exciting for John and Jane Public. Also, the "timeline" at the bottom of the webcast looked broken most of the time since it only updated when a couple major milestones occurred. Boeing even tried to address some of this in the press conference stating that video of the crew riding up to the station will be available after they download it post-flight (which, at that point, hardly anyone will care about).

Meanwhile, Starship had nearly-continuous live HD-quality feeds of video from multiple cameras from both the booster and spacecraft including all the way through reentry, producing some absolutely incredible views, some of which have probably never been seen before. Also, SpaceX puts very user-friendly telemetry displays on the bottom of their webcast that are easy to understand and seemingly have high update rates.

Maybe in the end it doesn't matter. On the other hand, if you were a potential future aerospace engineer, I think the Starship launch this week was the one that would have created most of the interest and enthusiasm. SpaceX is winning in the public-relations battle and a lot of that is because they've put focus and attention into their webcasts for a long time. Old space needs to learn a thing or 2 from them.

Re: Super Heavy has splashed down in The Gulf of Mexico

#277
post #276

The difference in presentation between the launch of Starliner yesterday vs Starship today was stark. For most of the Starliner launch, all we got to see was a Windows desktop showing some basic animations that look like they're from the late 90s and unexplained telemetry with about a 1Hz update rate. Perhaps interesting to hardcore space nerds but not very exciting for John and Jane Public. Also, the "timeline" at t…

[deleted]

Re: Super Heavy has splashed down in The Gulf of Mexico

#278
post #276

The difference in presentation between the launch of Starliner yesterday vs Starship today was stark. For most of the Starliner launch, all we got to see was a Windows desktop showing some basic animations that look like they're from the late 90s and unexplained telemetry with about a 1Hz update rate. Perhaps interesting to hardcore space nerds but not very exciting for John and Jane Public. Also, the "timeline" at t…

We did get a lot of those Starlink views on flight 3 before the ship was destroyed, but yes -- definitely first time we've ever gotten to visualize re-entry live. Crazy stuff.

They are so far ahead if you're paying attention it's not even funny.

Re: Super Heavy has splashed down in The Gulf of Mexico

#279

> SpaceX won a multibillion-dollar contract from the agency to use Starship as a crewed lunar lander as part of NASA's Artemis moon program So four people would arrive at Lunar orbit in an Orion, board a huge prepositioned Starship, and fly that down to the surface?

> So four people would arrive at Lunar orbit in an Orion, board a huge prepositioned Starship, and fly that down to the surface? That's the idea, yes. [1] 1. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/1/13/20...

Because the SLS can't do anything close to what the Saturn V did, yup.

Re: Super Heavy has splashed down in The Gulf of Mexico

#280
post #276

The difference in presentation between the launch of Starliner yesterday vs Starship today was stark. For most of the Starliner launch, all we got to see was a Windows desktop showing some basic animations that look like they're from the late 90s and unexplained telemetry with about a 1Hz update rate. Perhaps interesting to hardcore space nerds but not very exciting for John and Jane Public. Also, the "timeline" at t…

> hardcore space nerds

Can confirm. My coworkers are hardcore space nerds and datavis nerds, and they took over our #random slack channel yesterday really digging the Starliner visuals.

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