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Starship Flight 7

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Re: Starship Flight 7

#491

Post by ricardobeat »

eps wrote: post #402
logifail wrote: post #390

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the debris was likely closer to around ~100km in altitude. Commercial airliners fly around ~10km in altitude (Not wishing to ask the obvious, and depending on the size of the pieces) debris at 100km altitude pretty much always ends up being debris falling through 10km ... right?

Apparently quite a bit of debris made it to the ground - > The locals here are pissed in Turks and Cacos. Huge dabris rained down everywhere It's from the pilot at the reddit link above. https://old.reddit.com/r/aviation/comments/1i34dki/starship_...

No pictures or reports of anything falling in the Caribbean. People just love adding to the drama, they will later backtrack and explain that by “rain down” they meant the light show.

It would be extremely unlikely due to the laws of physics, last time I checked they were still in effect.

Re: Starship Flight 7

#492

Post by jbgt »

me_me_me wrote: post #490
saberience wrote: post #487

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This seems like a fairly disingenuous comment. SpaceX gets credit and rightly so because they have achieved things which no national space agency nor private company has ever done before, and done it faster and at a lower budget than anyone has done before. Every other national space agency and private company had both infinitely more money, time, and engineers than SpaceX did (when founded) yet they were making zero…

> SpaceX gets credit and rightly so because they have achieved things which no national space agency nor private company has ever done before Such as?

Landing boosters, reducing costs etc etc

Re: Starship Flight 7

#493

Post by tsimionescu »

saberience wrote: post #487
me_me_me wrote: post #475

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This seems like a fairly disingenuous comment. SpaceX gets credit and rightly so because they have achieved things which no national space agency nor private company has ever done before, and done it faster and at a lower budget than anyone has done before. Every other national space agency and private company had both infinitely more money, time, and engineers than SpaceX did (when founded) yet they were making zero…

The achievements you quote are highly overblown. SpaceX sells capacity to orbit somewhat cheaper than anyone else on the market, but not by some huge margin - half the cost or so, at best.

They also don't have any fully reusable rockets today, and Starship is still probably a year or more from being production-ready. It remains to be seen how reusable Starship will actually be, how long it will take to refurbish and get ready for spaceflight, and how many reentries it can actually take. And it still remains to be seen how much Starship will actually gain from being fully reusable, by the way - landing a rocket costs lots of extra fuel, so it's not a no-brainer that a fully reusable rocket would have a much better cost/kg-to-orbit than a non reusable one. Especially for anything higher than LEO, Starship can't actually carry enough fuel, so it depends on expensive additional launches to refuel in orbit - a maneoveur that will probably take another year or more to finalize, and that greatly increases the cost of a Starship mission beyond LEO.

Finally, Starlink is nice, but it's extremely expensive for most users outside very rich areas of the world, and has in no way had the impact you are claiming. Laying out cable internet is FAR cheaper than satellite internet can ever be, especially in rural areas, so beyond cases where cables and even wireless are completely impossible (ocean, war-torn areas), it doesn't and won't ever have any major impact. I'm also very curious where you got the idea that it "saved countless lives".

Re: Starship Flight 7

#494

Post by zqna »

Kostic wrote: post #430
zqna wrote: post #403

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's the opposite of the survival. When locust consumes everything around, it dies out.

On a long-enough scale, this planet will die anyways. Let's first try to expand life and unlock the secrets of the Universe, as much as possible.

At this point in time the humanity has nothing to offer to any other intelligence (if there is any) out there, nor it doesn't have a need itself to go outside of its own planet, and the big mess that it made out of it. It's akin of letting a toddler walk out of the door and roam into a busy street merely for a satisfaction of its curiousity. What is more likely to happen is that the valuable resources that we still have will be gone (it won't take long, as consumption is growing at exponential rate), without ability to recover - a one way ticket to stone age. It's nice to dream and look at the stars, but can we please sort the shit here first?

Re: Starship Flight 7

#495

Post by brianwawok »

TypingOutBugs wrote: post #480
notorandit wrote: post #440

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This is the programmer fallacy if you have a bunch of code passing unit tests, it’s going to work when combined.

Re: Starship Flight 7

#496

Post by littlestymaar »

varjag wrote: post #411
raverbashing wrote: post #370

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure there's fire suppression effective enough for this type of leak (especially given rocket constraints)

If you can displace the oxidizer/air remaining in the volume why not.

The initial tweet says:

> we had an oxygen/fuel leak

If that's correct, then you can't just remove air. The only option would be to cool things down so it stops burning.

Re: Starship Flight 7

#497

Post by pkphilip »

It is amazing to see the number of fairly significant changes they tested in this launch. I guess that is the advantage of private space flights and rocket launches where the speed of development is must faster than in a place like Nasa or any government run space program.

I am not surprised that stage 2 failed because they were testing with a lot of the thermal tiles removed.

Re: Starship Flight 7

#498

Post by me_me_me »

jbgt wrote: post #492
me_me_me wrote: post #490

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> SpaceX gets credit and rightly so because they have achieved things which no national space agency nor private company has ever done before Such as?

Landing boosters, reducing costs etc etc

Is that it? Landing boosters is not saving money as of now. Because a rocket engine is not a rental bike.

Hmmm I wonder if there was a tech that recovered a spacecraft and tried to reuse it to cut costs... hmmm... no, nothing comes to mind

Also SpaceX is charging Nasa more than russians did when they had monopoly over space flights.

Re: Starship Flight 7

#499

Post by floating-io »

dbspin wrote: post #436
floating-io wrote: post #408

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What makes you think this didn't happen in other industries? See the first iteration of the de Havilland Comet for a great example. The Space Industry to date has killed many fewer people than planes, trains, or automobiles.

> The Space Industry to date has killed many fewer people than planes, trains, or automobiles. Except as a proportion of passengers. In which case it's killed several of orders of magnitude more.

Because people rarely go to space, and it was much more dangerous when the last person died than it is today. The vast majority of flights are unmanned, just like this test was.

If you want to continue playing apples to oranges though, nobody has died on a spaceflight in the last twenty years. How many have died on airplanes in that timeframe?

[correction: there was one additional fatal flight in 2014 with the destruction of SpaceShipTwo. I would argue that one doesn't count, though, as it was more akin to a relatively mundane aircraft accident than anything else.]

Re: Starship Flight 7

#500

Post by askl »

pmontra wrote: post #409
coldtea wrote: post #358

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

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.

Thank god you're not building rockets.
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