141–150 of 455 posts
I imagine SpaceX is on for some pretty juicy government contracts now!
Cargo runs to ISS, bringing astronauts to and from ISS, NROL missions, scientific missions (like Europa Clipper recently).
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Totally reasonable question. This is the first rocket ever that will (assuming further success) land in its entirety back on the launch pad, refuel, and go back to orbit the same day. Imagine that every time an airliner landed its cockpit was destroyed and you had to build a new one. A fully reusable airplane would be a transformational improvement. That's the level of achievement we're talking about here.
> 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.
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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 re…
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>I'm just going to choose peace today As an alternative to what? I don't understand how the first part of the comment is connected to the rest.
I think they’re trying to maintain focus on the engineering rather than the politics surrounding Musk at the moment.
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> 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.
Some of SpaceX's first stages are getting close to the individual Shuttles' launch counts, with substantially less turnaround time and cost than Shuttle ever had. Starship has work to do, but it's hard to argue they're not at least on the right path.
I'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.
>I'm just going to choose peace today As an alternative to what? I don't understand how the first part of the comment is connected to the rest.
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I think they’re trying to maintain focus on the engineering rather than the politics surrounding Musk at the moment.
The news is about SpaceX sharing the launch date for the 6th Starship test flight. Musk is not even mentioned in the announcement.
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> 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.
When they manage to do the intended landing it should be pretty unharmed, but I'm sure it will take a while before same-day reuse is attempted.
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> because losing control of a Starship in low earth orbit would be catastrophic Why? Remote detonation wouldn't work in that case?
Remote termination is something they can do in the early boost phase, when there is a defined hazard zone over a depopulated patch of ocean. It doesn't cause the rocket to disappear; its effect is to disable the engines, end uncontrolled acceleration, and break the booster apart into small pieces—all of which will still fall to the ground (ocean) as debris. If you did this to a Starship in orbit, you'd likely have la…