541–550 of 772 posts
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?
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
- "And for expandable rockets, virtually all rockets designed and launched in the last few decades have successfully accomplished their first ever flight," 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 su…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
- "And for expandable rockets, virtually all rockets designed and launched in the last few decades have successfully accomplished their first ever flight," 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 su…
Still, many of these are more successful than Starship:
The first GSLV was still able to deploy a satellite, just in a lower orbit than intended.
The first Delta IV had the same problem, satellite deployed, but in a lower orbit than planned.
The first Long March 5 is classed as a full success on Wikipedia, I couldn't find info there about a failure (the second one did blow up).
The Rocket Labs' Electron did get destroyed. However it was later found that nothing at all was wrong with the vehicle, it was a failure in the ground software, and an identical vehicle successfully carried out its mission 7 months later.
In contrast, the first two Starships blew up completely due to engine issues, and no Starship has deployed even a test payload of some kind to orbit. In fact, until today, none even carried a payload of any kind, they have all been flying empty.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's just taxpayer money they're blowing up, so it doesn't really matter.
They're blowing up their own money, unless you still count it as being the taxpayer's after the government pays them for launch services.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's just taxpayer money they're blowing up, so it doesn't really matter.
They're blowing up their own money, unless you still count it as being the taxpayer's after the government pays them for launch services.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
If it was really an oxygen/fuel mix burning I don't think you can do much of anything to stop that.
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…
How would I distinquish between the two, esp wrt rocketry?
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…
>Some people are really fetishizing iterative failure - but just because you are wandering in the desert does not mean there is a promised land. i guess you didn't follow the falcon 9 failures right? here's two minutes of failures https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bvim4rsNHkQ and guess what? they finally got it right and now falcon 9 is not only extremely reliable but quite cheap for everyone. NASA (with the shuttle an…
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…