381–390 of 899 posts
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.
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I'm just getting really irritated by the amount of concern trolling surrounding SpaceX. Everything they do "must" have a gotcha, because clearly they cannot be as far ahead of the competition as they daily prove to be.
Yeah, I agree with you. Healthy skepticism is generally a good thing but now SpaceX has clearly demonstrated an unprecedented ability to solve a large number of insanely difficult problems. At some point, it becomes unreasonable to "yeah, but..." less difficult things like cargo doors.
I'd add "again" into your sentence. They already did it before. Now they proved that they hadn't lost that ability yet.
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"Keeping people from being riddled with cancer in 6months trip is not trivial." It's pretty trivial. Put mass in between you and space. It's already been researched to death and we have many years worth of data about the subject.
> 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…
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Yeah, and what a useful recording for "where do we buff up the heat protection?"
It looked like plasma got between the flap and the body. I wonder if that means something broke/melted to allow that, or if the design just allowed it accidentally.
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Survivorship bias!
Hopefully the takeaway is something straightforward, like thicker shielding in one area and not a big redesign of the flaps
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> 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...
Is that in addition to taking a pit stop at the lunar gateway?
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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.
Like, your suggestion is a box attached to the ship that changes its aerodynamic profile, with an actuator that can be a point of failure/ fly off and hit other critical instruments?
They have lots of cameras. Were we watching the same video? The thing got absolutely melted and you’re complaining that you didn’t get a front row seat?
5 short years ago we would get a few frames from the camera on the barge where Falcon 9 landed and that seemed incredible.
Just because they’ve accomplished something hard (mostly reliable cameras), doesn’t mean it’s suddenly easy and saying “why didn’t you just put more cameras on it?” comes off as mind bendingly pedantic
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Has to be large to be reusable due to scaling factors. We can finally start sending useful amounts of things into space, millions of solar panels for one
How is putting solar in space more useful than putting it on Earth? You still have the problem of a capricious atmosphere between the source of the beams and the place where you need the electricity. Sure, you can slightly modulate and do a few things, but the extra energy is extraordinarily unlikely to make up the extra costs even if the transport costs were 0.
The rate of descent is absolutely astonishing, 8km -> 1km in 20 seconds, then just hovers above the water. Absolutely incredible work by the SpaceX team. Living in central Florida I cannot wait for the new launch facility to come online. We're going to have lines of spectators into the space coast like we did for the shuttle. If any of you are heading to Disney World you should stop by the NASA Kennedy Visitor Comple…
The 'worst' thing about watching space launches on streams is that you simply cannot grasp how ridiculously huge these things are. Even if, like in the stream today, you see a water tower for some scale, the size discrepancies just make it so hard to intuit. Starship is 121 meters high. That's something taller than a football field, jetting off into space! I've only gotten to see a decommissioned Space Shuttle in per…
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"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
The rocket performed perfectly. It just landed on the wrong planet.