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Starship Flight 7

spacex.com

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Re: Starship Flight 7

#471
post #89

That "landing" (is it still considered a landing if it's chopsticked a few meters before it touches the ground?) is so unnatural it almost looks fake. So big and unimaginable that it feels like watching fx on a movie! The close-up camera right after was interesting, I thought it captured on the grid fins, but it looks like there are two small purpose-built knobs for that. The times we live in!

You have perfectly described the feeling I had regarding the first belly flop demo (at least I think it was the first one?) https://youtu.be/gA6ppby3JC8?si=wY7TQsbR_wxoud75&t=70 (ten seconds from the timestamp)

If cutting edge engineering with conventional physics looks fake to you folks imagine what a hard time you’re going to have with real videos of actual UFOs.

Re: Starship Flight 7

#472
post #461

First Shuttle orbited astronauts and successfully recovered all intended components. Every Saturn 5 was successful, the 3rd flight sent a crew to lunar orbit, and the 6th put a crew on the moon. To date a Starship has yet to be recovered after flight - and those launched are effectively boilerplate as they have carried no cargo (other than a banana) and have none of the systems in place to support a crew. Some people…

Apollo WAS an impressive achievement Starship IS an impressive achievement while they speed up development process with real-world hard data New Glenn IS an impressive achievement while taking their time to develop a vehicle that reached the orbit on first time Per wiki on Apollo > Landing humans on the Moon by the end of 1969 required the most sudden burst of technological creativity, and the largest commitment of r…

The Apollo program was inventing all of this technology, and using only extremely rudimentary computers, still doing many calculations with slide rulers.

SpaceX has all of the Apollo program's work to build on, and computers that could do all the computing work that the Apollo program ever made, in total, in probably a few minutes.

Re: Starship Flight 7

#473
post #461

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apollo WAS an impressive achievement Starship IS an impressive achievement while they speed up development process with real-world hard data New Glenn IS an impressive achievement while taking their time to develop a vehicle that reached the orbit on first time Per wiki on Apollo > Landing humans on the Moon by the end of 1969 required the most sudden burst of technological creativity, and the largest commitment of r…

The Apollo program was inventing all of this technology, and using only extremely rudimentary computers, still doing many calculations with slide rulers. SpaceX has all of the Apollo program's work to build on, and computers that could do all the computing work that the Apollo program ever made, in total, in probably a few minutes.

SpaceX is inventing quite a lot, there's more areas where they started greenfield than where they got help.

Re: Starship Flight 7

#474

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Space X has failed after 3 billion US tax payer dollars to take a banana into low earth orbit. Needless to say we aren't going to Mars last year watching a woman in a long dress floating in the cargo bay behind a curtain of glass windows playing a violin for entertaining the dozens of astronaut's which don't have space for food, water, belongings or life support.

> Space X has failed after 3 billion US tax payer dollars to take a banana into low earth orbit Literally just lofted some satellites.

*tried to, but lost them all

Re: Starship Flight 7

#475
post #461

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apollo WAS an impressive achievement Starship IS an impressive achievement while they speed up development process with real-world hard data New Glenn IS an impressive achievement while taking their time to develop a vehicle that reached the orbit on first time Per wiki on Apollo > Landing humans on the Moon by the end of 1969 required the most sudden burst of technological creativity, and the largest commitment of r…

The Apollo program was inventing all of this technology, and using only extremely rudimentary computers, still doing many calculations with slide rulers. SpaceX has all of the Apollo program's work to build on, and computers that could do all the computing work that the Apollo program ever made, in total, in probably a few minutes.

this doesn't even scratch the surface. Slow motion cameras and real time sensors for debugging hardware issues, computer simulations, 3d printing.

Apollo program directors would advocate to start a nuclear war with ussr if they could get hands on that kind of tech.

But also NASA landed two SUVs on mars first try, using skycrane, Full remote. they developed and built mars helicopter/drone (rip). First try. But spaceX gets the glory because... break things??

Re: Starship Flight 7

#476

First Shuttle orbited astronauts and successfully recovered all intended components. Every Saturn 5 was successful, the 3rd flight sent a crew to lunar orbit, and the 6th put a crew on the moon. To date a Starship has yet to be recovered after flight - and those launched are effectively boilerplate as they have carried no cargo (other than a banana) and have none of the systems in place to support a crew. Some people…

The shuttle programme was signed off in 1972, had it's first flight in 1977, and it's first crewed flight in 1981. Starship has been going for 5 years (albeit on the back of lots of other SpaceX work.) It's getting to orbit in the same time that Shuttle took to 'fly' on the back of a 747. A few lost ships is a pretty small price to pay for going twice as fast on delivery.

Oh wow a company in 2020s is compared to company in 70s. Wow nice benchmark. We are going to be good as guys from 50 years ago.

Imagine Mercedes said it, or Intel or anyone. They would be a laughing stock.

Re: Starship Flight 7

#477
post #280

Looks like second stage broke up over Caribbean, videos of the debris (as seen from ground): https://x.com/deankolson87/status/1880026759133032662?t=HdHF... https://x.com/realcamtem/status/1880026604472266800 https://x.com/adavenport354/status/1880026262254809115 Moment of the breakup: https://www.instagram.com/reel/DE52_hVSeQz/

Preliminary indication is that we had an oxygen/fuel leak in the cavity above the ship engine firewall that was large enough to build pressure in excess of the vent capacity. Apart from obviously double-checking for leaks, we will add fire suppression to that volume and probably increase vent area. Nothing so far suggests pushing next launch past next month. https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1880060983734858130

Would be unpleasant if there was crew. Of course this thing is pretty far from human eating.

Re: Starship Flight 7

#478

Every one of these are like right out of a sci-fi novel. It makes me truly excited for our future in a way little else out there does. Between this, AI (even in its current LLM form), and mounting evidence suggesting the entire solar system is teeming with at least microbial life, we are going to become an interplanetary species far sooner than many “skeptics” imagine. We are just one more lander / sample mission / w…

> Your kids will be traveling to space

I can 100% guarantee to you that the children of anyone born today will not travel to space in any significant number. There is nothing in space to travel to until we build extremely complex habitats, and that can't be done with manual human labor, it requires mostly automatic drones and maybe a handful of human controllers living in the ship that brought them there.

And building habitats that any significant amount of people (say, 1000) could actually live in will take a loooong amount of time and a huge amount of resources. And the question of "why would anyone waste time and resources on trying to live in conditions more inhospitable than anything the Earth can ever become, even with a major asteroid crashing into it in the middle of a nuclear war and a global pandemic?" will crop up long before more than one or two of these are finished.

Re: Starship Flight 7

#479
post #367

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It sounds like he's talking to investors and not to general public. In my experience in corporate america you communicate efficiency by proclaiming a checklist of things to do - plausible, but not necessarily accurate things - and then let engineers figure it out. Nobody cares of the original checklist as long as the problem gets resolved. It's weird but it seems very hard to utter statement "I don't have specific an…

He's talking to the FAA, because this will trigger an investigation and would usually mean months of no launches.

Fortunately (for him) he'll be President on Monday and can then order the FAA to let him do whatever he wants.

Re: Starship Flight 7

#480

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Test flights. My tests keep failing until I fix all of my code, then we deploy to production. If code fails in production than that's a problem. We could say that rockets are not code. A test run of a Spaceship surely cost much more than a test run of any software on my laptop but tests are still tests. They are very likely to fail and there are things to learn from their failures.

Running a code test doesn't require firing a rocket. How would you test a rocket?

You test components in isolation, you test integration of components, you run simulations of the entire rocket, and finally you test the rocket launch.

You’ll catch issues along the way, but you can’t catch all of them before a full launch test. That’s why there are launch tests.

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