As an ex-army guy who never misses a launch, I was both surprised and delighted to choke up and almost cry while witnessing today's historical launch. Thank you SpaceX for reconnecting me with my inner child.
Thank you Flap Norris.
Super Heavy has splashed down in The Gulf of Mexico
331–340 of 899 posts
Re: Super Heavy has splashed down in The Gulf of Mexico
#332Seeing the Starship's flap visibly burning in the reentry heat and still survive well enough to move around and get to a splashdown was just incredible. Amazing progress in just four test flights.
That flap is already a legend, kept at it even mangled by hot plasma, crazy accelerations and pressures, spitting molten steel at the camera. What a role model, the little flap that could.
Someone on the Everyday Astronaut live stream named it "Flap Norris".
Re: Super Heavy has splashed down in The Gulf of Mexico
#333Seeing Live HD video of the outside of the ship on reentry is just incredible. Here's a link to the timestamp: https://youtu.be/8VESowgMbjA?t=35093
Wow I actually got served the Elon crypto deepfake scam as an ad on that video.
Re: Super Heavy has splashed down in The Gulf of Mexico
#334Earlier quoted context omitted.
We will probably perform a human mission and return samples before a robot goes and picks up the Perseverance samples. We’ve been mars-capable since Apollo. It’s a matter of will, which is a political function of cost, which is falling rapidly.
> We’ve been mars-capable since Apollo. serious citation needed! you cant make shit up. Apollo and saturn5 were nowhere near getting humans to mars. Not even close. It got us to moon with bare minimum. A weekend trip vs 6 months trip. The scale up of needed resources is mind boggling. At every step. I mean pick any step and explain how Apollo could achieve it.
If you used multiple Saturn V rockets to launch and dock a multipart craft we could maybe have made it at least to orbit around Mars but landing would be a massively different story.
Re: Super Heavy has splashed down in The Gulf of Mexico
#335What 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…
To get a gentler reentry, you need a greater lift-to-drag ratio.
To have a better hypersonic lift-to-drag ratio you need significantly more wing area, which is dead weight (and drag and a control problem) on the way up.
Re: Super Heavy has splashed down in The Gulf of Mexico
#336Earlier quoted context omitted.
Really wish the camera housing had held up to get a complete video of the fin being eaten away. I wonder if any of the other cameras got good footage too because they stayed on the camera with the obliterated lens for a long time which makes me think the others also fair pretty poorly. There wasn't much to see on the fin cam after the housing broke until right at touch down.
I'd really expect SpaceX to have more cameras, and to have some shielding - maybe so that cameras would get open shields at different points in flight, so they'd be protected before that. We only saw left-back flap, I suspect there's a camera looking also on right-back flap, maybe towards the engines section too. SpaceX is known to have rich telemetry, that would be awesome to see.
They had at least 3 (I think 4 but there were 3 visible at once) different camera's on the upper stage I think they also got destroyed though and the melting fin was the most interesting thing they could show so they just stayed with it.
As neat as the idea of different shields is that's a whole extra layer of weight and controls for a non critical thing so I'm not surprised it doesn't happen.
Re: Super Heavy has splashed down in The Gulf of Mexico
#337Earlier quoted context omitted.
Talked about this with my partner this week. Somebody is going to yeet their ashes into the regolith some day.
It has already been attempted. https://www.axios.com/2024/01/08/peregrine-moon-lander-launc...
And indeed has been done too!
"The human remains aboard the lander won't be the first on the moon, as ashes of Gene Shoemaker, the founder of astrogeology, were buried on the moon in the late 1990s by the Lunar Prospector."
Re: Super Heavy has splashed down in The Gulf of Mexico
#338Earlier quoted context omitted.
German V1 or V2, presumably.
Only the V2 is a rocket, the V1 is a flying bomb. They're both terror weapons, as actual products they have no direct military value, they exist solely in order to scare the shit out of enemy civilians, but liquid fuelled rockets are an invention with a whole lot of interesting practical applications - the V1 is just a bad idea (unless you have unlimited resources, which the Germans did not, and your goal is to terri…
V2 was of questionable legitimate military utility too. Sure you can hit a target the size of a city, but unlike carpet bombing, the payload isn't enough to guarantee that something specific is destroyed. So you can only use it to randomly harm civilians and maybe every once in a while hit a military target. Compare this with the Western Allies' approach where they also killed and maimed tons of civilians but at least stood some chance of also destroying the building-sized thing they were aiming at, given the stupefying tonnage of bombs involved.
"Once the rockets go up, who cares where they come down? 'That's not my department,' says Werner Von Braun." -- Tom Lehrer https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QEJ9HrZq7Ro
Re: Super Heavy has splashed down in The Gulf of Mexico
#339Earlier 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.
> When I was young, there were no rocket landings.
For all born after July 1969, you lived with rocket landings: Apollo lunar lander was a propulsive soft landing.