531–540 of 772 posts
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SpaceX is inventing quite a lot, there's more areas where they started greenfield than where they got help.
They are inventing a little, but the basics of rocket flight are now well understood. You can get a university (probably post grad) course on it. And nothing that they are doing is all that revolutionary, definitely not compared to what Apollo did (going from airplanes and ballistic missiles to orbital space flight and then Moon missions). Consider that even reusable self-landings boosters were being worked on in the…
That doesn't resonate as true to me.
The first Ariane 5 flight blew up [0]. That Europe's current heavy-lift workhorse with 112 successful launches (including JWST), but the first one blew up.
The first PSLV blew up [1]. That's India's current workhorse with 58 successes, but flight #1 was not successful. Their GSLV did not reach its correct orbit on its first flight either [2], though it didn't blow up.
The first Delta IV Heavy did not blow up, but it failed to reach its correct orbit [3]. That was US' largest launch vehicle for most of the 21st century.
The first Long March 5 failed to reach its correct orbit, and the second one blew up [4]. That's China's current heavy-lift launch vehicle, since 2016.
South Korea's first orbital rocket RUD'd both its first flights, in 2009 and 2010 [5].
Japan's newest orbital rocket was launched in 2023, and that blew up [6].
Rocket Labs' Electron has a current >90% success rate, but the first one blew up [7].
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ariane_5#Launch_history
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_PSLV_launches#Statisti...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_GSLV_launches#Statisti...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delta_IV_Heavy#Launch_history
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_March_5
[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naro-1#Launch_history
[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H3_(rocket)#Launch_history
[7] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rocket_Lab_Electron#Launch_sta...
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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.
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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.
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…
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.
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A lot of flights seem to be diverting to avoid it... https://bsky.app/profile/flightradar24.com/post/3lfvhpgmqqc2...
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.
If my understanding is correct, it seems sensible at least in a hand-wavy way: you have a few places where things are more likely to come down either unplanned or planned (immediately around the launch site and at the planned deorbit area), but then you have a wide swath of the world where, in a relatively localized area, you -might- have something come down with some warning that it will (just because the time it takes to get from altitude to where aircraft are). You close the priority areas, but you don't close the less likely areas pro-actively, but only do so reactively, it seems you'd achieve a balance between aircraft safety and air service disruptions.
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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.
SpaceX is charging NASA less. Even Boeing is charging NASA less than Russia.
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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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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…