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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

#431

Post by indoordin0saur »

rtkwe wrote: post #117
mannyv wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Guess they didn't want to sacrifice "Of Course I Still Love You" for this test.

AFAIK the Superheavy booster can't land on it's own and was never designed to. It needs (currently) the launch gantry to catch it in all the preview footage. It's always struck me as a very risky gamble on SpaceX's part to do that because you're risking your whole launch infrastructure if something goes wrong in those last seconds.

Yeah, it's mindblowing and seems reckless. Then again, they seem incredibly competent at everything they've done so far. It will certainly be a spectacle when/if they can pull it off!

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

#432

Post by inglor_cz »

Andrew_nenakhov wrote: post #410
hindsightbias wrote: post #368

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What makes you think it sank? If the hull is intact it might be floating. Given the flap damage, it's probably leaking though.

It looked like the booster exploded when it submerged after soft splashdown. There was some fire and the stream cut off. Maybe that's what happened to the ship too.

IIRC the intent was to sink it using explosives (Flight Termination System) in case it stays afloat after landing.

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

#433

Post by andruby »

idontwantthis wrote: post #363
adolph wrote: post #342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Elon crypto deepfake scam is the new rick-roll

Except Google is making money on it too by serving the ads.

It's crazy that Google doesn't prevent those videos. It can't be that hard to detect and block.

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

#434

Post by dylan604 »

bartread wrote: post #379
bearjaws wrote: post #3

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 way the booster comes down is nuts. 90km to 1km in 100 seconds, it reaches maximum velocity under gravity at a bit over 20km, then air resistance acts as a brake, and they only fire the engines to slow it down the rest of the way at 1km. Bonkers.

The thing that tickles me is that it has to slow down to reach terminal velocity rather than the normal way of thinking about objects speeding up to reach terminal velocity.

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

#435

Post by TMWNN »

pfdietz wrote: post #390
chgs wrote: post #353

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The rocket performed perfectly. It just landed on the wrong planet.

The 1960 von Braun biopic "I Aim at the Stars" had posters to which wags added "But Sometimes I Hit London".

That's a quote from the film itself.

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

#436

Post by fwip »

avmich wrote: post #380
simiones wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not saying it's impossible to send people to Mars and even bring them back. I'm saying there is no point whatsoever right now, at least no material or scientific purpose. Of course, building a "city" on Mars is well beyond our capabilities, so that will either not be attempted at all, or it will fail. Maybe by 2124, but more likely 2524.

> I'm saying there is no point whatsoever right now, at least no material or scientific purpose. "No point" here means "no reasonable goal". In this case reasonability is subjective - somebody sees obvious reasons why Mars colony could be useful for humanity, somebody doesn't. Pro arguments are science, learning how to live off another planet, certain insurance against planet-wide cataclysms, general progress in spac…

It's difficult to imagine any cataclysm that would result in the Earth being less habitable (even for us squishy humans) than Mars already is.

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

#437

Post by avmich »

cududa wrote: post #387
avmich wrote: post #320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Can you please explain how exactly you would heat shield a camera? 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…

No, I didn't complain about the front row seat :) calm down. And yes, SpaceX is the trend setter in the industry right now, there is no question that their approaches are more modern.

Having said that, cameras today can be really small. Not a big box. Lenses or their protectors can be rather, well, protective (I'm thinking about moissanite here, but may be better solutions are possible). And I didn't see lots of cameras when Starship was going through atmosphere back - how many did you see? Yes, flap melted - but if, say, the ship had cameras all over (figuratively), you could switch to the one which works at the moment.

All of that and more should be, and I'm sure is, rather obvious to SpaceX guys, just like some reasons why some of this can't or shouldn't be done - they are the professionals here most intricately familiar with the hardware and the landing conditions. We'll see how they choose to move forward soon.

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

#438

Post by fwip »

throw310822 wrote: post #215
Ajay-p wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it is the indelible human nature, to go the furthest we can because it's there. At first I didn't agree with going to Mars, but if you think of it as the furthest place we know we can land on, and explore, then it makes sense. If we can safely land, and return from Mars, then it makes going even further a possibility.

Yes indeed. But still, nobody is building residential neighborhoods on the top of the Everest or in the middle of Antarctica. Exploring for the sake of it is indeed a human instinct. The idea that we should build settlements for people who would live there permanently is plain silly. We have the obsession of repeating the Age of Discovery- but people should get the difference between discovering the Americas, with th…

And peoples.

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

#439

Post by inglor_cz »

flerchin wrote: post #429
HPsquared wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The oceans are very hostile to humans too, really not much less than space, and a lot of ocean-going vessels are rusty hulks.

A naked human can survive the ocean for 3 orders of magnitude longer than they can survive space.

Calm ocean, yes.

The real problem are the storms, as a naked human you won't survive in an ocean storm any longer than in vacuum.

At least you are going to space in a sophisticated vessel full of redundant life support systems. People sailed the high seas in old, barely seaworthy wooden ships dangerously overloaded with cargo, which didn't even have a reliable way of determining where precisely they were, because no one could tell longitude at sea before the mid-1700s or so.

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

#440

Post by TMWNN »

tialaramex wrote: post #219
SoftTalker wrote: post #186

Earlier 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 had no direct military value. V1 was a very cost-efficient weapon.
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