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Starship Flight 7

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Re: Starship Flight 7

#521

Post by Cipater »

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]

He just means MORE checking for leaks.

They already implemented a whole host of changes to the vehicles after the first test back in 2023. There's a list of corrective actions here.

https://imgur.com/a/Y9dd43o

Re: Starship Flight 7

#522

Post by me_me_me »

jve wrote: post #513
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?

Maybe this will help you see it: https://x.com/dpoddolphinpro/status/1874191808751972447 The whole world combined VS SpaceX has less mass to orbit. Either whole nations are not interested in that much mass to orbit or they don't have the capability. Or financial means/incentive to compete against that commercial entity. But they do and at least in China they start to work on reusable rockets and ULA is for sale becau…

I guess that's an 'achievement'?

Re: Starship Flight 7

#523

Post by pms »

hooli_gan wrote: post #459
bboygravity wrote: post #452

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So what does a rocket company need to do to be imrpessive in your eyes?

A Mars cargo mission, according to the timeline spacex set for themselves. https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-F2HFqsVkiZc/YT9bPpXSKDI/AAAAAAAAG...

Thank you. This needs to be emphasized more.

Re: Starship Flight 7

#524

Post by cma »

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…

> They have the first rocket ever made which can take payloads to orbit and then be reused.

The space shuttle did this over 40 years ago. You can argue SpaceX have the first economical one 40 years later, but the second stage isn't reusable. Once they get starship working they might have it.

Their finances aren't public but there is some stuff to go on where we can say Falcon is probably economical despite not recovering the second stage.

This TED talk from Gwynne Shotwell says they will have reuse of starship so dialed in that in 3 years (from now) they will be competitive with commercial airliners and be operating for consumers in production:

https://www.ted.com/talks/gwynne_shotwell_spacex_s_plan_to_f...

To be safe enough for that I would have expected thousands of flawless flights by now. They said in 2020 it was still on track for 2028 but the Dear Moon project was canceled since that last update.

Re: Starship Flight 7

#526

Post by skirge »

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…

practically infinite resources and "classified" failures

Re: Starship Flight 7

#527

Post by tsimionescu »

ceejayoz wrote: post #516
tsimionescu wrote: post #474

Earlier quoted context omitted.

*tried to, but lost them all

No, they successfully sent two to the Moon on Weds. https://www.cnn.com/2025/01/14/science/nasa-launch-firefly-i...

The point was about Starship - it has never successfully flown with any amount of cargo. The 3 billion number from the poster before makes it clear they were only referring to Starship, not all of SpaceX.

SpaceX is an extremely successful space launch company, and Falcon 9 is the best we've ever had. It's just Starship that seems to be going much worse.

Re: Starship Flight 7

#528

Post by skirge »

me_me_me wrote: post #476
onion2k wrote: post #464

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

compare the cost

Re: Starship Flight 7

#529

Post by GiorgioG »

ruivil7 wrote: post #423

Back a few years ago. This was the starship that in 2024 would reach Mars with humans, with so much space taken by crew and materials, and almost no fuel, and "10 times cheaper". And currently is an empty shell. Nice fireworks and show, but no meaningful payload yet. Not even LO. And this will be ready for 2026 artemis mission?

I’m not a big fan of Elon Musk, but this is just the typical executive talking up their product and to some extent being overly optimistic about timelines. You’d think with the quantity of software engineers in HN this would be obvious, but the (rightful IMO) disdain for Elon Musk is resetting people’s brains.

Re: Starship Flight 7

#530

Post by tsimionescu »

jve wrote: post #509
tsimionescu wrote: post #493

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 c…

> 10 years ago people were talking that landing rockets is impossible.

Maybe some. Others had been working on this in the 90s already. Not to mention Spaceshuttle, which achieved these milestones (with a vastly different design) in production.

> Then whether they can be reused. Then whether there is any economical gain doing so.

Reuse is currently partial. The economic advantages have largely failed to materialize, at least to the extent that they were promised.

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

Why compare to ULA? Look at Ariane 6, or Soyuz-2 - they have similar numbers to Falcon 9. Falcon 9 is 22 800 kg to LEO for $70M. Ariane 6 is 21 500 kg to LEO for $115M. Soyuz-2 is 8600kg to LEO for $35-48M (so about $92-129M for a Falcon 9's worth of cargo). More expensive, but not by some huge margin.

> 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.

This is a completely different take than the previous comment. Sure, it's successful in the developped world in certain industries. This is nothing like "saving countless lives" or "helping stimulate economies across the world", which is what I was responding to.

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