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

571–580 of 899 posts

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

#571

Post by adrian_b »

pdonis wrote: post #553
stctw wrote: post #406

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's easy to say that now. Have you lived through unrestricted, total warfare, where one side intends to conquer a continent or the world, invades without provocation, and won't stop until brought to submission through extreme force? The Allies did not initiate war and did not want war. How many of your country's people should you sacrifice to end a war of aggression started by the enemy? Should you not use the means…

> one side intends to conquer a continent or the world, invades without provocation, and won't stop until brought to submission through extreme force? The Allies did not initiate war and did not want war. "The Allies" included the Soviet Union, which did initiate war--against Finland, against Poland, against Japan (this in the 1930s, before historians say WW II started)--and wanted even more war, hoping that all of t…

Well said.

It is indeed very weird to claim that UK and France have won in WWII, when they had initially declared war in order to fulfil they alliance obligations toward Poland and Czechoslovakia, but the result of WWII was that both Poland and Czechoslovakia have lost large parts of their territories (like also others of the former allies of UK and France that happened to be neighbors of the Soviet Union).

UK did not won anything in WWII. They have just preserved their integrity like someone whose home was under attack by a gang of robbers and murderers, but they got rid of the attackers by paying another gang of robbers and murderers to do most of the work, and the payment was done not with their own money, but with money stolen from other assault victims (i.e. by giving to Stalin the Eastern Europe, which was not the property of Churchill, for him to have any right to give).

Poland was much luckier than all the other neighbors of the Soviet Union, because much of its territorial loss has been compensated with territories taken from Germany. Therefore, when one compares pre-WWII with post-WWII Europe maps, at the first glance Poland does not seem to have changed much in size. However, after a more thorough look, it becomes obvious that Poland has moved on the map from east to west.

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

#572

Post by stevage »

notact wrote: post #217
pixl97 wrote: post #68

What 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…

If you're reentering from say the moon, you don't really have a choice. If you reenter too slowly, you won't end up landing at all, and will skip out the other side. Or you would have to do multiple passes, which would take days to weeks.

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

#573

Post by stevage »

ActorNightly wrote: post #514
magicalhippo wrote: post #504

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I tried what you said in the most realistic simulator we have, Kerbal Space Program, assuming like you that a gentler approach would be better. And I learned that no, that most certainly is not better. What you need to protect is on the inside of the heat shield. Heat conduction is based on temperature difference and time[1] and the conduction of the material[2]. Since the heat shield tiles have a very low thermal co…

What happens if you do a geostationary deorbit? I.e straight down.

You mean use fuel to remove all horizontal velocity? Yes, that works fine and puts much less stress on the exterior, but it's a gigantic amount of fuel, almost as much as it took to get into orbit in the first place.

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

#574

Post by m463 »

UberFly wrote: post #550
tim333 wrote: post #371

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've got the black and white arty photo as my lockscreen which gives you an idea https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/E46BxzjjUkpthVBNE6k8mn-192...

Here's the full-sized pic: https://rare-gallery.com/mocahbig/1305111-SpaceX-Starship-Bl...

I was going to say... who took the picture

but nowadays it can be a drone.

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

#575

Post by m463 »

JackFr wrote: post #496
jaggederest wrote: post #389

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Standing next to the S-IC stage from the Saturn V at Kennedy really puts it into perspective. And the Starship full stack is larger and taller than the Saturn V!

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/51/Saturn_v... Saturn V slight larger than Statue of Liberty. I never realized that.

Makes it look like the statue of liberty is pointer her thruster the wrong way.

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

#576

Post by ggreer »

echoangle wrote: post #503
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.

I would compare it to Airplanes, and there are not a lot of rust-bucket airplanes, because just like in space, failures can lead to unavoidable death very quickly. That’s not comparable to a reliable pickup

It really depends on where you are in the world. Poorer countries often have older aircraft that are in worse states of repair. Most aren't exactly rust buckets, but they wouldn't be legally airworthy in places like the US or EU. This does result in worse safety records, but it's still safer than driving the same distance in most places.

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

#577

Post by pdonis »

FredPret wrote: post #559
pdonis wrote: post #556

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> they were the aggressor Only because the US froze all trade with Japan and intentionally refused all Japanese attempts at diplomacy to negotiate some kind of arrangement. The US did that knowing that the Japanese government would go to war, since the US had broken the Japanese codes and was reading all Japanese diplomatic traffic. In other words, the US intentionally provoked Japan into going to war.

Yes, they froze Japanese trade. But only to stop outrages being committed all over the area, including annexing Manchuria and invading China. The Japanese were doing all of this with imported US oil. Stopping the oil exports hardly places responsibility for Pearl Harbor on the US.

If those things the Japanese did were "outrages", so were the things the US, Britain, and other European countries did to build their empires. The Japanese viewed their actions as simply taking their rightful place as an imperial power alongside those other countries. Yes, by today's standards, or at least today's Western standards, such things are Not Done, but if we are going to judge WW II Japan by those standards, we should judge the WW II Allies by those standards too.

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

#578

Post by robbiep »

lupusreal wrote: post #527
czl wrote: post #507

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Allies did not initiate war and did not want war. An argument made that WW2 was continuation of WW1 and that WW1 was wanted by British leadership who were locked in an arms race with Germany that they could not sustain much longer and wanted a war with Germany while they were ahead so the assassination that triggered WW1 was the pretext tobstart WW1. If you disagree please try to answer why leaders are regularly as…

Listen, while I broadly agree with your grander point (Britain wanting a war with Germany and taking any excuse given for it) your argument for this is flatly moronic; the assassination of the archduke was not Britain's pretext for entering the war! That was Austria-Hungary's pretext for invading Serbia. Britain's pretext was the German invasion of Belgium. Read a fucking book.

The chamberlain government would like to disagree with wanting a war with Germany

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

#579

Post by NortySpock »

foota wrote: post #515
bombcar wrote: post #470

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a difference between getting to space and being in space. A true space age will involve many ships that never enter atmosphere or land.

Won't you still need to enter and exit gravity wells? I guess you never lose the energy from launch though if you stay moving, so maybe it's easier?

If you don't go very deep into the gravity well (said another way: high orbit of whatever planet you want to orbit) then the fuel cost is reduced compared to going down close to the surface.

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

#580

Post by dotnet00 »

aeternum wrote: post #500
Zigurd wrote: post #450

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That doesn't work IRL. Space is insanely unforgiving. While Starship has a vastly better chance than STS had of achieving rapid reusability, you really can't launch with a rocket that isn't up to spec because adding robustness adds weight. Unlike a multi-stage expendable rocket, Starship uses all its fuel to get to orbit. To go to the moon or beyond, it requires refueling by several other Starships that also just get…

The vast majority of the weight however is oxidizer which you could theoretically eliminate since the rocket is surrounded with various amounts of oxygen depending on launch trajectory. A scramjet power first stage for example could overcome the tyranny of the rocket equation (at least on earth).

Scramjets require the engine to already be going pretty fast, so they can't be a first stage engine. Then, with a rocket, most of the speed to get into orbit is built up after getting out to essentially vacuum, so, again, a scramjet is not that useful.

At an abstract level, it's the same issue as with aerospikes, the idea has too many caveats, too much expense and not enough benefit to justify the relatively small improvements in efficiency.

Post reply on HN