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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

#651

Post by positr0n »

somenameforme wrote: post #462
cletus wrote: post #52

So 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…

Here's where things get really counter-intuitive. If Starship lives up to even a fraction of its potential, it's likely Falcon 9 will be completely retired, because Starship will cost less to launch! The entire point of the Starship is complete and instantaneous reuse. The idea is to have it launching something up, landing right back into its launch pad slot, and then going again. The ridiculous cost saving potential…

What are some example applications that could change life overnight, besides planet-wide connectivity?

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

#652

Post by hahn-kev »

throwaway2037 wrote: post #642

About landing the Super Heavy booster, Wiki[1] says: > [S]hortly before landing,[67] it ignites its engines to slow sufficiently to be caught by two mechanical arms attached to the tower. Does anyone know the reason to choose "two mechanical arms", instead of landing like the Falcon 9? And has SpaceX announced any plans to test these arms? In my mind, it sounds more wild to try to "catch" the landing booster with arm…

IIRC the plan is for rapid reuse, the idea being that it can land on the launch pad.

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

#653

Post by hrnnnnnn »

cubefox wrote: post #591
sebzim4500 wrote: post #362

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

"will have had", "will have been" - amazing construction

Future perfect and future perfect continuous, respectively, if you're interested in the names.

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

#654

Post by behnamoh »

mensetmanusman wrote: post #615
amelius wrote: post #475

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The video isn't really live. The original may have had buffering problems, etc.

Nothing is live, not even conversations with people in the same room, 1 ns per ft delayed.

Not even conversations in our own minds, as the thought that was shaped in part of the brain needs time to be transferred to consciousness.

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

#655

Post by andrewflnr »

saati wrote: post #558
tialaramex wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The V1 is the ancestor of all cruise missiles, pretty far from no military value.

It was an ancestor of things with military value, but it had little to none itself. You need a guidance system for a useful cruise missile, and the V1 had essentially none. No points for "military utility" as a "research program" when you're actively launching them at civilians; whatever it is, that's not a research usage anymore.

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

#656

Post by philwelch »

czl wrote: post #622
lupusreal wrote: post #527

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

While Britain's decision to enter World War I was indeed triggered by Germany's invasion of Belgium, it's important to consider the broader context. In the years leading up to the war, Britain had engaged in a naval arms race with Germany, driven by fears of Germany's growing military and economic power. British leaders, including Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey and First Lord of the Admiralty Winston Churchill, vi…

There’s a much simpler theory of the war, which is that it was Germany that was worried about a foreign rival catching up to them—Russia—which is why Germany pushed for the war to start. It’s interesting to see this theory projected onto the British, but there’s a fatal flaw with this projection. The first declaration of war was by Austria-Hungary against Serbia. Britain was not in a position to manipulate the situation as to encourage that; Germany was. And Germany would have known that an Austro-Hungarian war on Serbia would draw in Russia, which is how they get the Russo-German war they actually wanted.

How, exactly, mechanistically, does Britain manipulate this crisis into an Anglo-German war? They didn’t make Austria-Hungary declare war. They didn’t even declare war alongside the French. And they certainly didn’t make Germany invade France by way of Belgium in order to give Britain a pretext. It sounds to me like Germany wanted war with Russia and was confident they could also afford war with France (having kicked their asses in 1870 already) but would have really preferred to keep Britain out of it.

If there is a criticism one can levy against the British, it might be that they simply weren’t forceful enough in making that consequence clear to the Germans ahead of time. The “alliances that would likely trigger a larger conflict” were in fact a consciously designed system of balances of power meant to deter exactly that type of large scale war, in the tradition that was established 99 years previously in the wake of the Napoleonic Wars. It’s easy to dismiss that system because it failed catastrophically in 1914, but the fact that it had mostly worked since 1815 was unprecedented in European history. The 99 years between the Napoleonic and First World Wars were the most peaceful 99 years of European history since at least the Roman Empire; check back in 2044 to see if we can break that record.

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

#657

Post by andrewflnr »

solarkraft wrote: post #322
ryandvm wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

No, that's the point: It's a significant technological advancement for some unreliability/imprecision to not mean critical failure.

So how can that work for air seals? Have a big robust air storage that can replenish losses from your half-broken door? How many other systems like that do we need? And all that extra weight somehow doesn't get you stranded in space when your badly maintained, low efficiency engine can't move it and your payload with the fuel that fits in the tanks? I get the principle, it just seems literally impossible to achieve (without, maybe, a radical step forward from chemical propulsion).

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

#658

Post by philwelch »

incompatible wrote: post #595
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…

WW2 became a world war when Britain and France declared war on Germany. Of course, they could have stood back and let the Nazi's carry out their plan of annexing Eastern Europe, but they drew the line at Poland.

No, that’s when WW2 became a pan-European war. It became a world war when Japan attacked the British and Americans, thus combining the Anglo-German and Sino-Japanese wars into a single conflict.

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

#659

Post by dotancohen »

foobarian wrote: post #478
schmidtleonard wrote: post #465

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep, those pumps have to push the propellant into the explosion harder than the explosion pushes back. That takes serious power!

So thinking where the leverage is - is it like hydraulics where the input cross-section is a lot smaller than the output cross-section? That's kinda what the nozzle looks like.

No, because the fuel is not a working fluid pushing a piston. All the "leverage" is at the turbopump impeller blade.

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

#660

Post by KennyBlanken »

schmidtleonard wrote: post #465
foobarian wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It blew my mind that just the fuel pump for just one engine has a power rated in the tens of thousands of horsepower/kW.

Yep, those pumps have to push the propellant into the explosion harder than the explosion pushes back. That takes serious power!

Not only that - spacex uses the highest chamber pressures, enormously high compared to almost any other engine.
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