Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Super Heavy has splashed down in The Gulf of Mexico

twitter.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

321–330 of 899 posts

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

#321

Post by rtkwe »

phkahler wrote: post #282
me_me_me wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's pretty trivial. Put mass in between you and space. Seems like you quite confident. So go on. Expand on that a bit... its trivial after all. You will teleport all that mass to ELO? Or use tracker beam to capture asteroid and space mine it to smelt shielding. I am super curious how you solve it trivially. edit: You downvote but dont explain this trivial solution. Am I asking too much? Calling someone out to expl…

We've had people in space for close to a year, so the trip to Mars shouldn't kill them. Once on mars they'll still need shielding. One option for shelter might be to bore some underground tunnels. A smallish electric tunnel boring machine that could fit in a starship might just be the ticket to building sheltered habitats on Mars. Funny that Elon already has another company that makes these.

The ISS is situated safely deep inside the Earth's magnetic sheath which protects you from a lot of high energy radiation though. You can use mass for shielding but you also desperately need that mass for cargo too and most cargo isn't going to be as dense as water which makes good shielding. The ISS has some fancier lightweight shielding but has issues with secondary radiation from particles hitting the metal skin of the modules which we'd expect to see on Starship too but higher since it'd be in interplanetary space instead of nicely close to Earth like the ISS.

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

#322

Post by solarkraft »

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.

No, that's the point: It's a significant technological advancement for some unreliability/imprecision to not mean critical failure.

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

#323

Post by function_seven »

BurningFrog wrote: post #187
gadders wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's mad how rocket landings are now more exciting than rocket launches.

Same thing with airplanes. The landing is much more important than the takeoff.

Real quote from my grandmother, years ago: "I'm not scared of flying so much. I just wish the plane didn't have to get so close to the ground before landing!"

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

#324

Post by rtkwe »

zpeti wrote: post #161
me_me_me wrote: post #156

Earlier 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.

You're misremember the actual history of Columbus which makes sense it's been mistaught and mythologized for a very long time. Columbus thought he would reach Asia, both because there were reports from Marco Polo that Asia was much larger than it turned out to be and some mistakes about the size of the Earth. He didn't think he was sailing off into nothingness hoping to find land, he was hoping to find a better trade route to Asia than going around the Horn of Africa or overland.

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

#325

Post by toephu2 »

yayitswei wrote: post #290

Booster executed a successful landing burn and had a soft splashdown. Starship survived reentry, did the flip and landing burn, and splashed down. There was visible damage to the flaps.

How do they recover the booster? After the soft splashdown isn't it going to sink to the bottom of the sea? Or they have nets or something?

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

#326

Post by toephu2 »

ironyman wrote: post #115

Some 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...

How do they recover the booster? It doesn't sink to the bottom of the sea?

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

#327

Post by gadders »

steve1977 wrote: post #80
gadders wrote: post #54

Earlier 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.

Nor for me, but I'm old enough to have seen re-runs of things like Flash Gordon in black and white which I'm sure had rockets landing vertically. (This could be the Mandela effect though).

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

#328

Post by avmich »

93po wrote: post #232
yalue wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The velocity of a spacecraft in low earth orbit is over 15,000 miles per hour. Smashing into the atmosphere is perhaps the most fuel- and cost-efficient way to slow down to a speed at which landing is possible.

It doesn't really answer the question though. Why not descend slower so that the 15k MPH isn't meeting so much air? And bleed it off much slower so there is less heat

Ellipse, circle, parabola, hyperbola - all so called conic sections - are orbital trajectories; when you entering the atmosphere (which means you're technically not on a strictly circular orbit), you're initially following the part of that curve which is closest to the planet.

The curve is such that if you don't lose enough speed, you're going to start moving way from the planet.

If you're still on parabola (technically you never are, it's infinitely thin case between ellipse and hyperbola, physically not really possible) or hyperbola, you're not comping back - so if you need to get to the planet, you have to be on elliptical trajectory.

Even if you're on ellipse, you don't want that ellipse to be too elongated - e.g. the elliptical trajectory from the Earth to the Moon, which is rather close to parabolic one, takes about 4 days one way. You don't want to spend that much time when you're landing, so you need to lose enough of speed in the atmosphere. Which means you need to brake relatively aggressively.

This means there's a "reentry corridor" - not too steep, not too shallow, and the spacecraft needs to survive the reentry, and going from the Moon is harder than going from LEO because coming from the Moon the spacecraft has higher initial speed entering the atmosphere. It's still possible to balance various approaches, but you can't have (correction: it must be particularly hard to have...) zero fuel use, relatively fast landing (without long ellipses between reentries), speedy planet approach and low heating at the same time.

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

#329

Post by unethical_ban »

mannykannot wrote: post #246
GJim wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

"Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down? That's not my department" says Wernher von Braun. - Tom Lehrer. https://genius.com/Tom-lehrer-wernher-von-braun-lyrics

In German, or Englisch, I know how to count down... und I'm learning Chinese, says Werner von Braun.

Written in 1961. Wild.

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

#330

Post by bufferoverflow »

datameta wrote: post #107
pixl97 wrote: post #68

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

Absolutely beautiful! The hypersonic plasma flow was like no footage I've seen!

Their older fairing reentry plasma also looked really cool

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ke_QI7_UtA8

Post reply on HN