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Starship's Sixth Flight Test
111–120 of 455 posts
Re: Starship's Sixth Flight Test
#112Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Detonating something in orbit could trigger Kessler's Syndrome Unlikely in general, no at LEO and definitely not at the suborbital velocities IFT-6 contemplates.
LEO is the exact place you need to be careful. Higher orbits have more space and have fewer satellites overall so it's less of a concern. Obviously not a problem for IFT6 since it's sub-orbital, but the original comment was about why we need a deorbit burn rather than just triggering the flight abort system.
> LEO is the exact place you need to be careful. Higher orbits have more space and have fewer satellites overall so it's less of a concern
No. In LEO orbits degrade in single-digit years at most. There is no known solution for rendering an orbit in LEO inaccessible with a Kessler cascade—the best you can do is blind an area with repeated ASAT fire.
In higher orbits debris last longer. That makes cascades possible, though again it only denies a limited area and requires almost active effort.
Re: Starship's Sixth Flight Test
#113Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Detonating something in orbit could trigger Kessler's Syndrome Unlikely in general, no at LEO and definitely not at the suborbital velocities IFT-6 contemplates.
LEO is the exact place you need to be careful. Higher orbits have more space and have fewer satellites overall so it's less of a concern. Obviously not a problem for IFT6 since it's sub-orbital, but the original comment was about why we need a deorbit burn rather than just triggering the flight abort system.
At least in LEO you need to keep expending DeltaV to keep stuff in orbit. Trace atmosphere slows everything down and would eventually clean LEO at 500km of relevant junk in about 25 years depending on altitude.
Re: Starship's Sixth Flight Test
#114Earlier quoted context omitted.
> go again the same day. That seems like a stretch. What is the actual turnaround time for Starship? fwiw the Shuttle had a lot of lofty promises of reusability that were technically true as long as you didn't consider how long the turnaround time was.
It's a good question. The hurdle to clear for same-day reuse will be the heat shield. SpaceX hasn't yet demonstrated that Starship can reenter the atmosphere and remain fully intact. Doing it while sustaining near zero wear on the heat shield will be even harder. But I think it is not impossible, and I don't know of any other obvious blockers for same day reuse.
Even if they can reuse the booster, it would be huge.
Re: Starship's Sixth Flight Test
#115I'm just going to choose peace today and say: the SpaceX engineers who've been at this forever and have shown that crazy stuff is actually possible are seriously amazing humans, and I do hope they are successful.
Re: Starship's Sixth Flight Test
#116I imagine SpaceX is on for some pretty juicy government contracts now!
Re: Starship's Sixth Flight Test
#117Earlier quoted context omitted.
> go again the same day. That seems like a stretch. What is the actual turnaround time for Starship? fwiw the Shuttle had a lot of lofty promises of reusability that were technically true as long as you didn't consider how long the turnaround time was.
It's a good question. The hurdle to clear for same-day reuse will be the heat shield. SpaceX hasn't yet demonstrated that Starship can reenter the atmosphere and remain fully intact. Doing it while sustaining near zero wear on the heat shield will be even harder. But I think it is not impossible, and I don't know of any other obvious blockers for same day reuse.
They'll likely reuse the booster on the same day well before the starship portion. No heat shield on the booster. Some starships will likely stay in space for a long time before returning.
Re: Starship's Sixth Flight Test
#118Earlier quoted context omitted.
> go again the same day. That seems like a stretch. What is the actual turnaround time for Starship? fwiw the Shuttle had a lot of lofty promises of reusability that were technically true as long as you didn't consider how long the turnaround time was.
The previous flight was October 13, 2024, so while I can't speak to every day, one month turnaround is a reality.
It's a completely different booster and ship that's flying.
Re: Starship's Sixth Flight Test
#119Note that there will not be an official livestream on Youtube. Every time there are some people who fall for scammers pretending to be one and end up listening to an AI impersonation of Elon Musk try to sell them cryptocoins, missing the real launch. If you must watch on youtube, NSF or Everyday Astronaut typically have good (unofficial) livestreams.
The Everyday Astronaut was ahead of the SpaceX curated one for Flight 5. It had the weird effect of showing the outcome before the sound of the cheering crowd going crazy when the booster got caught by the chopsticks (which was also audible in the same stream).
Each streamer adds a delay to their stream. This means that any stream forwarded to you by another streamer is going to be delayed.
The delay was between SpaceX recording and uploading an event and Everyday astronaut decoding it at their mixing desk. Their own feeds from their cameras and microphones had less delay than the SpaceX stream did. Everyday astronaut then had another delay between when they encoded this result and you saw it.
If you had opened up the SpaceX stream directly you would have found it was ahead of the stream shown inside Everyday Astronaut.
BTW I was also watching EA's stream.
Re: Starship's Sixth Flight Test
#120Thread devolved into petty politics quicker than expected.