There is a full launch video on the SpaceX website: https://www.spacex.com/launches/mission/?missionId=starship-...
Super Heavy has splashed down in The Gulf of Mexico
361–370 of 899 posts
Re: Super Heavy has splashed down in The Gulf of Mexico
#362Earlier quoted context omitted.
That was seriously some of the most dramatic television I've ever watched. Video of Starship being melted/torn apart by supersonic plasma, the broadcast stream dying multiple times maybe due to ship destruction, then finally back online, peeking through the cracked camera to see the nearly destroyed grid fin STILL ACTUATING. The announcers laughing about the ship being "maybe held together by some nuts and bolts" and…
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 think the only other external camera was on the fin that disintegrated, so I wouldn't have high hopes.
They will have had internal cameras pointed at the structure looking for hot spots, and presumably those will have been fine
Re: Super Heavy has splashed down in The Gulf of Mexico
#363Re: Super Heavy has splashed down in The Gulf of Mexico
#364Booster 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?
Booster is designed to land directly on the launch mount, but that won't be attempted until they are confident it won't blow up the whole base.
Starship is designed to land on any flat surface (earth, moon, mars) but again they won't attempt ground landing until they feel confident in the design.
Re: Super Heavy has splashed down in The Gulf of Mexico
#365So 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…
> Won't someone make a fully reusable smaller launch vehicle that'll suit commercial needs?
Rocket Lab is doing that.
Re: Super Heavy has splashed down in The Gulf of Mexico
#366Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
If you want to do slow star-trek style landings, you need star-trek level tech. Namely, propulsion tech that doesn't exist. That doesn't mean that it's impossible, just means that it'd require things that don't exist yet. Worth mentioning that, additionally, reentry heating isn't a huge problem, and you're not going to create new propulsion tech to counter it, you're just going to make better heat tiles. What you nee…
A positive way of framing it is that atmospheric recently is free. If the Earth didn’t have an atmosphere it would take just as big a velocity change to land as it does to get into orbit and getting to be orbit would be as hard as an interplanetary flight. It's worse than it sounds because the rocket equation has a logarithm in it...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsiolkovsky_rocket_equation
double the Δv means you square the mass ratio. The space shuttle had a mass ratio of about 16, a mass ratio of 256 would be absolutely insane.
You get this velocity change at the cost of dealing with the heat and all but a tiny fraction of that heat ends up immediately in the atmosphere.
Re: Super Heavy has splashed down in The Gulf of Mexico
#367Earlier quoted context omitted.
That was seriously some of the most dramatic television I've ever watched. Video of Starship being melted/torn apart by supersonic plasma, the broadcast stream dying multiple times maybe due to ship destruction, then finally back online, peeking through the cracked camera to see the nearly destroyed grid fin STILL ACTUATING. The announcers laughing about the ship being "maybe held together by some nuts and bolts" and…
I have never rooted for a flap so hard, and likely never will. I am ready to buy flap merch. The energy of the SpaceX employees gave me goosebumps, this was great, it was hard not to get caught up in it- you know this is the culmination of years of hard work that is mostly theoretical until tests like these.
I think the camera deserves a medal too!
Re: Super Heavy has splashed down in The Gulf of Mexico
#368Earlier quoted context omitted.
Someone on the Everyday Astronaut live stream named it "Flap Norris".
I wonder what the odds are that some deep sea salvage group is moving to collect that this very instant (or being contracted for such). If Starship lives up to even a fraction of its potential, that [not so] little guy is going to have some serious historicity.
What makes you think it sank? If the hull is intact it might be floating. Given the flap damage, it's probably leaking though.
Re: Super Heavy has splashed down in The Gulf of Mexico
#369Earlier 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.
Everything's relative. People a century ago would probably have felt uncomfortable at the idea of DIYing a multi ton vehicle being accelerated by a extremely high power pistons pounding up and down thanks to creating a controlled explosion inside a tight little box, that you can then hop in and cruise around at 80MPH+. And indeed if something goes critically wrong, you're dead. We just work to reduce the number of ways that things can go critically wrong.
Re: Super Heavy has splashed down in The Gulf of Mexico
#370Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Yeah, but it's in your text/comment. The logical thing is that it makes 0 sense. Columbus to not take the real circumference makes 0 sense. Let's go to Mars, start a civilization there. It'll be a lot of change for us humans. And only if you live somewhere you can really solve problems. Maybe it's a good plan against a nuclear war, whatever.
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