Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Starship Flight 7

spacex.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

501–510 of 772 posts

Re: Starship Flight 7

#501

Post by perilunar »

TMWNN wrote: post #350
mrandish wrote: post #342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed. The one that still flips a bit in my brain is the two Falcon rockets landing in unison side by side. I'd say it was high-end CGI except no director would approve an effects shot of orbital rockets landing in such a perfect, cinematically choreographed way. It would just be sent back to ILM marked "Good effort, but too obviously fake. Rework to be more realistic and resubmit."

Seeing a rocket land vertically goes against almost 70 years of what we "know" about rockets. Falcon 9 rockets landing on legs seem unnatural enough; now we have a rocket, the size of a 20-story building, landing on chopsticks. There are lots of vertical-landing rockets ... in science fiction, and only before Sputnik in 1957. Once actual space programs came about and lots of engineers understood just how difficult la…

SpaceX landing and catching boosters is amazing, but landing rockets is not new: all the Apollo LMs, indeed everything ever landed on the Moon was done with "vertical-landing" rockets.

Re: Starship Flight 7

#502

Post by thrwthsnw »

rob74 wrote: post #431
14 wrote: post #371

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even NASA years into their existence has suffered catastrophic fatal failures. Even with the best and most knowledgeable experts working on it we are ultimately still in the infancy of space flight. Just like airlines every incident we try and understand the cause and prevent it from happening again. Lastly what they are doing is incredibly difficult with probably thousands of things that could go wrong. I think they…

I you are referring to the two Space Shuttle accidents, both of them could have been avoided with just a little bit more care - not launching in freezing temperatures for Challenger, and making sure insulation foam doesn't fall off the tank for Columbia.

The history of rocketry goes much further back than the space shuttle. The shuttle was supposed to be a step towards reusability but didn’t succeed or progress the way they thought it would. Starship is continuing that dream of full reusability and their approach is working. You can’t plan everything on paper when it comes to hardware especially when attempting things that have never been done before, you just don’t have the data in that case. You have to build prototypes and test them to destruction. All manufacturers do this.

Re: Starship Flight 7

#503

Post by make_it_sure »

EncomLab wrote: post #447

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…

you are quite stupid or purposely ignore Falcon 9

Re: Starship Flight 7

#504

Post by askl »

coldtea wrote: post #358
dpifke wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

[flagged]

It's just taxpayer money they're blowing up, so it doesn't really matter.

Re: Starship Flight 7

#505

Post by zarzavat »

input_sh wrote: post #391
razemio wrote: post #372

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you name a space company with less failures? Also I think it is unfair to even compare SpaceX to anything else, because of the insane amount of starts / tests combined unparalleled creativity. According to this website their current success rate is 99,18%. That's a good number I guess? Considering other companies did not even land their stages for years. https://spaceinsider.tech/2024/07/31/ula-vs-spacex/#:~:text…

It says right there in your source that that figure refers to Falcon in particular. For comparison, Starship's current track record is 3/7 launch failures (+1 landing failure). There's an order of magnitude difference between them. If they were cars, it'd be like comparing the smallest car you can think of vs one of the biggest tanks ever made.

The usual definition of success for a rocket is getting the payload to the intended orbit. Since Starship doesn't have a payload yet, at least not a real one, its "success rate" is not measuring the same thing.

I'd say that only the 7th mission was legitimately a failure, because there was some rerouting of flights outside the exclusion zone. The other six missions were successful tests since nothing other than the rocket itself was affected.

Re: Starship Flight 7

#506

Post by jve »

tsimionescu wrote: post #467
jve wrote: post #465

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Decreasing price of a launch by multiple orders of magnitude and increased cadence is also an achievement that hasn't been achieved previously.

Increased launch cadence is an operational achievement, not an engineering one. And I'm not so sure that they actually decreased price to launch all that much. First of all, it's definitely not "several orders of magnitude", the best numbers quoted are maybe half price or so for a Falcon 9 compared to another contemporary rocket. And by my understanding, the US government at least is paying about as much for Falcon 9…

I was comparing to the achievements of 60 years ago when they put people on the moon :) They are working towards that in a sustainable manner.

Re: Starship Flight 7

#507

Post by r0m4n0 »

terramex wrote: post #76

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/

Does anyone know the timing of when the breakup actually occurred?

I’m curious because I was on a flight to Puerto Rico from Florida at 3pm ET they diverted our flight. They didn’t really give us many details but said the “landing strips were closed”. Our friends on a slightly early flight diverted to ST Thomas. We were going to divert to a nearby airport in Puerto Rico (we were going to land in Aguadilla instead of San Juan) so I feel like these diversions wouldn’t be related but the timing seems pretty odd.

Re: Starship Flight 7

#508

Post by pclmulqdq »

orwin wrote: post #469
nicky0 wrote: post #454

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Test code by running it. Test a rocket by launching it.

In production? I don't disagree that tests 'in production' are sometimes necessary (canary tests), but most of the quirks are often fixed by then. Honestly I thought they would be live testing fuel exchange in orbit by now. Seems pretty far from it sadly.

They had that on the timeline for 2023, so it's reasonable to assume they would do it.

Re: Starship Flight 7

#509

Post by jve »

tsimionescu wrote: post #493
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…

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…

Feels weird to read such comments on HN.

10 years ago people were talking that landing rockets is impossible. Then whether they can be reused. Then whether there is any economical gain doing so.

As for starlink - they have explosive revenue growth. Alot of businesses want one. Planes, ships, trains, military, rural areas, they are actually profiting from the operations and not loosing money and I still have to read comments like that.

Btw ULA reasonable launch price of today is because of SpaceX competition

> ULA was awarded a DoD contract in December 2013 to provide 36 rocket cores for up to 28 launches. The award drew protest from SpaceX, which said the cost of ULA's launches were approximately US$460 million each and proposed a price of US$90 million to provide similar launches.[16] In response, Gass said ULA's average launch price was US$225 million, with future launches as low as US$100 million.

I suspect SpaceX margins are very high and they can fund the starship development. Margins/prices may change as BO reaches reusability.

Re: Starship Flight 7

#510

Post by kla-s »

enragedcacti wrote: post #230
Kye wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does SpaceX bother with NOTAM for its launches? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NOTAM It seems like the flights should have been planned around it so no diversion would be needed.

They do but its not clear to me whether the area where it broke up was actually included in the original NOTAM. The NOTMAR definitely does not according to the graphic shown on the NASASpaceflight stream. They are still live so I can't link a time code but something like -4:56 in this stream as of posting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3nM3vGdanpw

Since i couldn't find the time code in the video, i put a map together with both NOTAM and NOTMAR.

map: https://github.com/kla-s/Space/blob/main/Map_NOTMAR_NOTAM_Sp... description: https://github.com/kla-s/Space/tree/main

Lets hope this is the year of Linux desktop and i didn't violate any licenses or made big errors ;)

Post reply on HN