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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

#821

Post by DiggyJohnson »

avmich wrote: post #554
jiggawatts wrote: post #538

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sapphire optical windows are cheaper than you think, but in this case the problem seemed to be that the lens was splashed by molten metal that then solidified.

This could be solved by replacing the protection (I think solutions like that are rather common, mechanically move the flat transparent screen) or by just switching to another camera.

Are you actually familiar with how reentry causes deposition from a melting fin onto the lens of a camera.

I'm genuinely shocked by how you are wording your comments, but that may just be your writing style. Anything of the form of "could be solved..." it kind of ridiculous because the circumstances just happened for the first time yesterday. This isn't like the motorsports cameras that spin the lens or transparent protection 360 degrees to wipe off buildup.

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

#822

Post by krisoft »

tim333 wrote: post #808
krisoft wrote: post #715

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The quality looks a bit high for a drone. There are drones which carry full DSLR cameras or even cinematography film cameras. I don't think you will be able to tell if the camera was hoisted by a crane or a drone based on image quality. > given the guys in the picture are on cherry picker type cranes, I'm guessing the photographer was on another of those I don't think so! That picture appears to be the fitment chec…

Dunno. I found a youtube of drone footage of flying around starship and I think the camera is pointing south west like this (time set to 6 seconds in) https://youtu.be/0sA9rGc80Y4?t=6 whereas from the tower it would be looking north east. Even if you can get the resolution from a drone camera, the shot looks like someone spent quite a while lining everything up to look nice and like the historic NY pic.

> Re image quality, beyond the resolution it looks like someone spent a while getting things lined up nicely?

I don't know. There are really good drone photographers. They have remote controls for all the settings, and remote viewing is also possible. They could have lined it up with the drone. Or made the photo with even higher resolution and cropped it to perfection. Or made hundreds of photos and selected the best.

Not saying it was a drone. But the "quality looks a bit high for a drone" is not convincing me.

> given you can see the beach with a car to the left of starship and land to the right it suggests the camera was looking south west whereas from the tower you'd be looking north west.

I think you are right. Now based on that I think it was probably not photographed from the integration tower.

There is a fourth place it could have been shot from: There is the crane holding up the starship. You can see it on this image of the same hoist operation: https://x.com/BocaChicaGal/status/1423629854877028355/photo/...

The reason I don't think it was shot from a fourth cherry-picker is because I can't see a fourth one in any of the photos. It seems they only had 3 up on that day and they were all in the frame.

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

#823

Post by skissane »

cubefox wrote: post #815
skissane wrote: post #646

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Getting it human rated for landing on Earth seems infeasible. Why? For NASA, human-rating - for either Earth launch or Earth re-entry - requires a very detailed engineering analysis of probability of loss-of-crew (LOC), and then NASA has some maximum LOC probability they allow (for NASA Commercial Crew, both launch and landing it is 1-in-500, which is 0.2%-for whole of mission it is 1-in-270). That analysis is base…

> However, they don’t actually have to land it 500 times - all they need is an engineering analysis That very analysis will include the fact that they have no launch abort system like normal capsule based systems and that the belly flop landing is much more dangerous than landing a capsule. Space Shuttle memories may come to mind. So the only realistic way to get the 1 in 500 confidence would probably be to really la…

> That very analysis will include the fact that they have no launch abort system like normal capsule based systems and that the belly flop landing is much more dangerous than landing a capsule. Space Shuttle memories may come to mind.

You are talking about this as if it is based on feelings as opposed to probability calculations. SpaceX will present a probability calculation to NASA, who then either accepts it or disagrees with it on engineering grounds, not "memories". There is no formal requirement for a launch abort system in NASA's safety standards – just a requirement that the probability of death be below a certain threshold. A launch abort system is one way to get that probability below the threshold, but if you don't have one, that's okay so long as you have some other way of getting there.

> So the only realistic way to get the 1 in 500 confidence would probably be to really land hundreds of times for unmanned missions and not mess up even once.

What they do is list every possible failure mode, give it a probability of happening and probability of a lethal outcome if it happens, multiply those two probabilities together, and then add them all up. If the result is above the threshold, they will fail certification. If the result is below it, they then have to convince NASA engineers that (1) their probability estimates are accurate and have sufficient evidence to justify them (2) there are no failure modes they've omitted in the analysis. For (1), actual flight experience is a valid source of evidence, but there are others as well – such as simulations and on-the-ground testing of components. There is no minimum number of flights required to gather sufficient evidence, it all depends on how much non-flight evidence is available and how NASA engineering evaluates that non-flight evidence (which is going to depend on the component or failure mode we are talking about).

You are looking at this from a "big picture" perspective, whereas NASA will be looking at it scenario by scenario, component by component

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

#824

Post by pdonis »

FredPret wrote: post #631
pdonis wrote: post #621

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Battle deaths - in absolute terms and per capita - dropped like a stone after 1945. After rising like a rocket when WW II started. If you leave out WW I and WW II, it's not clear that post-1945 was more peaceful than pre-1914.

My original and subsequent posts were that the nuke made the world safer. Post-1945 battle deaths dropped to near-zero by comparison to pre-1945. Even one battle death is too many but having them go down overall is very good.

> My original and subsequent posts were that the nuke made the world safer. Post-1945 battle deaths dropped to near-zero by comparison to pre-1945.

Post hoc ergo propter hoc is a well known logical fallacy. That is what you are doing here.

Also, the relevant comparison, as I said before, is not post-1945 vs. pre-1945. It is something like post-1945 vs. pre-1914, so that the comparison involves peacetime conditions on both sides.

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

#825

Post by pdonis »

themaninthedark wrote: post #820
pdonis wrote: post #561

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Even after the first nuke they didn't surrender. It took the emperor speaking up - for the first time ever - after the second nuke, and even then the military junta tried to stop it. All this is true, but it's also true that the nukes weren't the only factor involved. A good case can be made that it was actually the Soviet invasion of Manchuria, which started at midnight local time on the same morning that Nagasaki…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hirohito_surrender_broadcast The emperor directly mentions the atomic bomb in his address; "Moreover, the enemy has begun to employ a new and most cruel bomb, the power of which to do damage is, indeed, incalculable, taking the toll of many innocent lives. Should we continue to fight, not only would it result in an ultimate collapse and obliteration of the Japanese nation, but also it wo…

> The emperor directly mentions the atomic bomb in his address...He only tacitly mentions the battle situation

I know that. And I said why: to save face. He didn't want to tell the Japanese people that the Soviet invasion of Manchuria was the reason. The atomic bomb made a much better reason for public consumption. That doesn't mean it was the actual reason that drove the decision, which was made in private.

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

#826

Post by pdonis »

gmoot wrote: post #641
pdonis wrote: post #585

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is why it was necessary to beat the Germans first - so the Russians could invade or at least threaten Japan. That was the strategy that FDR and Churchill agreed to, but the primary person driving it was Stalin, because he didn't want the US and Britain to defeat Japan before he got a chance to attack them, and he knew he would not be able to attack them until Germany was defeated. (He wanted to attack them so…

> with different diplomatic choices they probably could have gotten Japan to surrender before the USSR attacked. Such as?

Clarifying the status of the Emperor if Japan surrendered. I have posted about that elsewhere in this discussion.

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

#827

Post by avmich »

DiggyJohnson wrote: post #821
avmich wrote: post #554

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This could be solved by replacing the protection (I think solutions like that are rather common, mechanically move the flat transparent screen) or by just switching to another camera.

Are you actually familiar with how reentry causes deposition from a melting fin onto the lens of a camera. I'm genuinely shocked by how you are wording your comments, but that may just be your writing style. Anything of the form of "could be solved..." it kind of ridiculous because the circumstances just happened for the first time yesterday. This isn't like the motorsports cameras that spin the lens or transparent p…

> but that may just be your writing style

No, that's more like an unfortunate choice of wording :( . Sorry.

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

#828

Post by pdonis »

FredPret wrote: post #630
pdonis wrote: post #618

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Point me to the rapes of Nanking the allies did. The Soviets were allies. Look up what they did in Germany at the end of WW II. And that's not even looking at all the other atrocities they had perpetrated before the war started, many of them on their own people. Also, the empire building I referred to on the part of the US, Britain, and other European countries took place well before WW II. That doesn't mean it can…

My point is that stopping all Axis aggression in WW2 was good for everyone. The West may have been imperfect but was orders of magnitude better. You don’t have to convince me that the Soviets were evil. They were part of the Allies purely because Hitler put them there. They then immediately started propagandizing the world to undermine the genuine contributions and general legitimacy of the West.

> stopping all Axis aggression in WW2 was good for everyone

Stopping Axis aggression against the US, Britain, France, and other Western countries was good for everyone.

Stopping Axis aggression against the USSR? I'm not so sure. Particularly not since the price of doing that was condemning Eastern Europe, China, and a good chunk of Southeast Asia to tyranny.

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

#829

Post by pdonis »

lupusreal wrote: post #699
pdonis wrote: post #553

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Is that meant to be an oblique reference to the meme that America "initiated war" with Japan by choosing not to literally fuel Japans imperial ambitions ? This reddit take is the most moronic of them all (and if this is what you're talking about, you got the decade wrong.) Japan was not entitled to foreign oil, nor the foreign land they intended to take by force using that oil, and America choosing not to give it to…

> Is that meant to be an oblique reference

No. I meant exactly what I said. I didn't say anything about Japan except that the USSR attacked them--more precisely, they attacked the Japanese troops in Manchuria. Not just in 1945--in the late 1930s.

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

#830

Post by skissane »

theptip wrote: post #788
skissane wrote: post #646

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Getting it human rated for landing on Earth seems infeasible. Why? For NASA, human-rating - for either Earth launch or Earth re-entry - requires a very detailed engineering analysis of probability of loss-of-crew (LOC), and then NASA has some maximum LOC probability they allow (for NASA Commercial Crew, both launch and landing it is 1-in-500, which is 0.2%-for whole of mission it is 1-in-270). That analysis is base…

But… why go to all that effort when you can just pop the capsule and land in a thing that is not full of highly explosive fuel? Elon had that idea of using rockets for passenger transport so I’m sure it’s in the plan, but for astronauts I don’t see why you’d rush.

> But… why go to all that effort when you can just pop the capsule and land in a thing that is not full of highly explosive fuel?

SpaceX wants NASA to human-rate Starship because their long-term plan is to retire Falcon 9 / Dragon.

How I expect it will happen: SpaceX will run their own internal analysis of loss-of-crew probability for launch and re-entry. No point going to NASA until they've convinced themselves they are going to meet the standards for human-rating. Once they believe they are, then they'll decide when is the right time to try to convince NASA of it too.

Obviously they are already doing this for lunar landing/launch. Some of that is going to be transferrable to Earth landing/launch. Other parts are unique – e.g. probability of surviving re-entry – but they need to estimate that anyway for non-crewed use cases.

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