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Starship's Sixth Flight Test

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Re: Starship's Sixth Flight Test

#381

Post by rbanffy »

shkkmo wrote: post #371
righthand wrote: post #356

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Okay, now you want to put more satellites in the sky, for weather and gps. Is there some evidence that what we have now is not enough or wouldn’t ever be replaced? I cannot find anything online about that. So I still do not see how this will necessarily improve my daily life as the weather information I have now is already good.

Weather prediction isn't just about "should I have a picnic today". Accurate weater information is important for innumerable economic activites, from farming to shipping to contruction to power generation planning. Providing better forecasts would allow us to save lives and money in these industries and this will reduce the costs you pay for goods. It might even save the life of someone you love. There are 3 new GPS…

> I'll also note that the 2024 US presidential election cost us more 50% more than that

It’ll get much worse when you factor in the next four years.

Re: Starship's Sixth Flight Test

#382

Post by joshmarlow »

righthand wrote: post #347
shkkmo wrote: post #340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> None of that listed technology comes from building reusable rockets. Lower launch costs are a force multiplier for all of those technologies and more. > This “boom” is all private for profit companies spending investment money. Not a “boom” in the sense that any man can get involved and benefit in the tangible future. It sounds like your issue is more with capitalism than space... But lower launch costs decrease th…

Please explain to me how lower launch costs will help weather prediction. Please give me the benefit of the doubt and help me understand what lower launch costs help with the average american today. I am asking an honest question to a different poster who originally indicated that the benefits were easily imaginable. > We can easily imagine the things it will make possible. I am trying to imagine how building reusabl…

The most exciting answer to your question about applications is that "We don't know yet, it's a platform."

The inventors of the internal combustion engines likely didn't imaging interstate systems and long distance freight shipping - and the economic boom they allow.

The original ARPANET engineers didn't imagine everything the internet could become - from this very site to youtube to Bittorrent.

No one at Apple thought of all of the things that would be built in the iPhone App store.

When prices become cheap enough, it unlocks other peoples creativity. By providing ever cheaper access to space, Space X (and hopefully soon competitors) is providing a new arena where entrepreneurs and engineers can invite entirely new things.

> ...but I do not see the actual details of what this will enable besides allowing Musk et al to hollow out planets for mining operations for their own gain.

Resources mined are useless if they aren't used for something; if asteroid mining makes money, it's because someone else is buying those resources so Musk isn't the only person benefiting. If there is large scale mining in space, there's probably broad economic benefit to that.

Re: Starship's Sixth Flight Test

#383

Post by DylanSp »

dmurray wrote: post #378
thinkcontext wrote: post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's necessary because the Starship upper stage is so heavy. With a non reusable upper stage Starship's capacity would be enormous.

Is that true? SpaceX [0] gives the capacity as 150t reusable or 250t expendable, which is significant, but not enough to make one "enormous". If you really got order-of-magnitude gains from an expendable upper stage, it wouldn't be that exciting to have reusable rockets (which are more complex and still only fly one order of magnitude more times) in the first place. [0] https://www.spacex.com/vehicles/starship/

If the upper stage wasn't designed to be reusable, it'd probably have a lot less structural dry mass - no heat shield, no fins, possibly different geometry (depending on how much volume they wanted). It might also be possible to drop the sea-level Raptor engines and just use the more efficient vacuum Raptors. I don't think you'd get an order-of-magnitude difference, but it'd be significant, especially for higher-energy trajectories than LEO.

Re: Starship's Sixth Flight Test

#384

Post by joshmarlow »

jmward01 wrote: post #366

I am a fan of space. I love the things that have happened with SpaceX and breaking the space industry out of a multi-decade rut, but is it possible to dsiconect the political ambitions of Musk from the technical achievements? Or, to put it more clearly, should the discussion be less about 'look how cool this tech is!' and more about 'This tech will be the gateway to space and Mars, shouldn't we be talking about the g…

There's no reason to assume that SpaceX/Musk will be the only launch providers long-term. They proved out reusability and are proving out the benefits of the Starship design and there are multiple startups working to emulate them.

EDIT: typo, removed redundant 'long-term'.

Re: Starship's Sixth Flight Test

#385

Post by tim333 »

adamm255 wrote: post #191

Can someone give me sources for how to debunk this? https://youtu.be/75a49S4RTRU?si=dcGFgcIWNz3nDwxw For me, it’s compelling but I’m no expert. Anyone got any background that can prove this guy is wrong?

It's more sarky and negative. eg the phrase

"musk wasting some $3 billion dollars of taxpayer money"

appears (2:49)

but that's not the deal. The actual deal, from Wikipedia:

>On 16 April 2021, NASA selected only Starship HLS for crewed lunar lander development plus two lunar demonstration flights – one uncrewed and one crewed – no earlier than 2024. The contract is valued at US$2.89 billion over a number of years.

and as far as I know they are still working on that. Compared to the last moon landings:

>According to The Planetary Society, The United States spent $25.8 billion on Project Apollo between 1960 and 1973. Converting 1965 dollars to 2024 dollars, that is $255 billion

it's a bargain. It was also a fraction of what Bezos and the other bidder quoted. Starship is not just a NASA funded project. SpaceX use their own funds and it will be used for things like Starlink commercially and maybe also Mars.

Thunderf00t on youtube goes on and on slagging Musk. I thought I'd count how many videos he's done slagging him but got bored counting at 37. There are better things to spend time on.

Re: Starship's Sixth Flight Test

#386

Post by DylanSp »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #255
adamm255 wrote: post #191

Can someone give me sources for how to debunk this? https://youtu.be/75a49S4RTRU?si=dcGFgcIWNz3nDwxw For me, it’s compelling but I’m no expert. Anyone got any background that can prove this guy is wrong?

I’ve liked some of his other videos and made it in twenty minutes. He has three arguments: SpaceX is late and over budget on HLS, booster recapture is the easiest part of Starship’s technical risks and Starship is bad value for money. On the first two he’s right. Starship was, per SpaceX’s proposal to NASA, supposed to be almost ready by now. It’s not. But neither is any other leg of Artemis, and there is no unforgiv…

Nitpick about history: the LM was definitely not one of the easiest parts of Apollo. It was the long pole in the schedule for a good while; part of why Apollo 8 was flown as a lunar orbit mission was because the LM wasn't going to be ready for testing in Earth orbit until at least early '69, and NASA wanted to test the CSM beyond LEO anyways.

Re: Starship's Sixth Flight Test

#387

Post by roflyear »

HideousKojima wrote: post #344
roflyear wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe. I don't see Elon saying that much. Mostly it's politically charged crap.

You should have seen his Lex Fridman interview then where he talks about exactly that and brings up things like the need to kidnap a seal (twice!), strap it to a board, and force it to listen to sonic boom noises to comply with braindeas government environmental regulations.

I can't watch every one of these interviews

Re: Starship's Sixth Flight Test

#388

Post by roflyear »

trompetenaccoun wrote: post #276
roflyear wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Really? Cape town has a homicide rate of: 63.00 per 100,000 Compared to Chicago: 29.60 And similar crime and violent crime rates.

To be fair, Cape Town has better climate and is extremely beautiful. Tourists generally like it, I can see why someone would have a nice impression without knowing much about what's behind the facade. It could be paradise if not for the politics and general state of things in SA. But yeah, comments like the above are bizarre. Moving to SA is relatively easy, I lived there myself. If it's so great as some foreigners o…

Yeah, most of the problem: we shape our opinions on how we feel and our environment.

My family for example is certain that crime is going up (or is at an all time high) because Home Depot is locking up more and more of its merchandise.

Re: Starship's Sixth Flight Test

#389

Post by sebazzz »

indoordin0saur wrote: post #293
jimnotgym wrote: post #116

I imagine SpaceX is on for some pretty juicy government contracts now!

You mean after the Boeing debacle?

I think they meant buying Trump.

As far as I understand the super heavy launch market doesn’t yet exist. Even if in payload mass capacity Starship can do it, we still need to see one with a payload door rather than a pez-satellite dispenser.

Re: Starship's Sixth Flight Test

#390

Post by ANewFormation »

paul7986 wrote: post #67
modeless wrote: post #38

SpaceX just posted this video of the last test. It's one of the most inspiring things I've ever seen. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hI9HQfCAw64

Not into space things and while this is cool i wonder what the great significance of this is? I see lots signaling how great this is and it's lost on me.

Cost. Ballparking from memory (because I'm on mobile) sending something to space on the Space Shuttle cost something like $40k/kg. The Falcon brought that down to 2500, and the Falcon Heavy down to just over $1k/kg.

So nearly two orders of magnitude cheaper, but you still can't really do anything too fun in space at $1k/kg. The goal with Starship (and its rapid reuse) is to bring costs down another couple of orders of magnitude to where we could eventually even see costs drop into the single digit per kg.

And at that point suddenly space becomes open to things that sound difficult to even fantasize about today, like colonizing Mars, taking suborbital flights to get from Texas to Hong Kong, or setting up industrial systems on the Moon, to say nothing of space tourism that doesn't start with the prerequisite of being a billionaire.

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