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Starship Flight 7

spacex.com

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Re: Starship Flight 7

#551

Post by pclmulqdq »

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...

A lot of people have been shitting on SLS for being too expensive over the last 5 years, but it's worth noting that the Artemis program has been completely fucked due to SpaceX massively missing its milestones on Starship. So many people believe that Elon Musk is going to bring humanity back to the Moon, but he is largely the reason that humanity is not back on the moon already.

The GAO put out a report on this a few months ago, pointing out the failures of SpaceX here (including massive cost overruns) much more than the supposed cost overruns of SLS. Incidentally, after this GAO report came out, Elon Musk became very interested in being in charge of managing "government waste."

Re: Starship Flight 7

#552

Post by modeless »

hinkley wrote: post #387
modeless wrote: post #346

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, on the first stage.

Oh! Second stage. Misread. No, second stage has 3 vacuum engines and 3 atmospheric engines, so they'll have to be able to throttle for the cutover.

The engines are able to throttle but they run all of them at 100% throttle for most of the second stage's first burn, I expect. For efficiency. The telemetry showed all of them firing at the same time. The vacuum engines will be used by themselves for on orbit maneuvers and the sea level engines will be used by themselves for landing, but for the first burn to reach orbit they need all the thrust they can get.

Re: Starship Flight 7

#553

Post by philipwhiuk »

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…

Congratulations for neatly excluding Apollo 1, Columbia and Challenger's crews, may their memories rest heavy on your conscience.

Your supposed excellent programs killed people.

Re: Starship Flight 7

#554

Post by helpfulContrib »

onion2k wrote: post #486
api wrote: post #477

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would be unpleasant if there was crew. Of course this thing is pretty far from human eating.

Would be unpleasant if there was crew. 19 people have died in the 391 crewed space missions humans have done so far. The risk of dying is very high. Starship is unlikely to change that, although the commoditization of space flight could have reduce the risk simply by making problems easier to spot because there's more flights.

[dead]

Re: Starship Flight 7

#555

Post by [deleted] »

drillsteps5 wrote: post #545
ericd wrote: post #531

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Starship program is funded in part by NASA as part of Artemis program. So some of this money is ours.

[deleted]

Re: Starship Flight 7

#556

Post by computerex »

GiorgioG wrote: post #529
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.

Guy is a serial liar and you are making excuses on his behalf.

Re: Starship Flight 7

#557

Post by philipwhiuk »

pkphilip wrote: post #497

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.

It didn't get to the point of testing the thermal protection system.

Re: Starship Flight 7

#558

Post by philipwhiuk »

echoangle wrote: post #44
ceejayoz wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They may have lost the second stage, though.

Yes, very much looks like it. I wonder how much of the second stage flight is autonomous and if they need to continually need to give it a go to continue, or if it aborts automatically after some time of lost telemetry. But maybe it already exploded anyways.

The automated FTS is triggered if it leaves a pre-defined corridor (which is wider than the flight plan - substantially so in some places).

The AFTS has independent, hardened, validated inertial measurement systems.

Re: Starship Flight 7

#559

Post by ericd »

pclmulqdq wrote: post #546
ericd wrote: post #531

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

R&D for starship has a several-billion-dollar NASA grant. Something like 30-50% of the money being blown up on this program is taxpayer money.

Fair. I think that was for HLS rather than the launch systems, but I guess if it’s already been disbursed, it’s probably all commingled.

But that still means it’s not just taxpayer money, it’s mostly theirs. They’ve been raising equity rounds this whole time.

Re: Starship Flight 7

#560

Post by perihelions »

tsimionescu wrote: post #544
perihelions wrote: post #532

Earlier quoted context omitted.

- "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…

You're right that I exaggerated, sorry about that. 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 di…

- "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 Wikipedia entry describes it as "suboptimal but workable initial orbit", which I interpret as a partial failure (coming from a military entity that's universally opaque about its failings). They're not inclined for language like "partial failure" that we get out of transparent countries—contrast that first Delta IV-H, which also reached a "workable" orbit—just not the intended one.

- "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."

Also true of the Ariane 5 explosion: that was a software bug (unhandled integer overflow) in the flight control unit. The important part isn't whether it's hardware or software, but whether they got it right or not, before launch.

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