561–570 of 772 posts
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Running a code test doesn't require firing a rocket. How would you test a rocket?
Test code by running it. Test a rocket by launching it.
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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…
NASA pays both Boeing and SpaceX less than Soyuz was.
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The Apollo program was inventing all of this technology, and using only extremely rudimentary computers, still doing many calculations with slide rulers. SpaceX has all of the Apollo program's work to build on, and computers that could do all the computing work that the Apollo program ever made, in total, in probably a few minutes.
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…
(Which of course is only possible if you have the Founding Father with a few billion $$ just laying around)
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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…
NASA pays both Boeing and SpaceX less than Soyuz was.
So, NASA today is paying Boeing more than the monopoly prices Russia charged (up to 2016 or so), and paying both of them more than Russia was charging back when they were competing with the Space Shuttle. And it's paying SpaceX about half of the top price it payed Russia per seat, still nowhere close to an order of magnitude in cost savings.
[0] https://www.businessinsider.com/astronaut-cost-per-soyuz-sea...
[1] https://www.reuters.com/science/boeing-sending-first-astrona...
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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…
> ...operational achievement, not an engineering one. How would I distinquish between the two, esp wrt rocketry?
An engineering achievement means excellence in designing a new vehicle, or updating an existing one, or inventing a new procedure, and finding the right tolerances that allow that to be replicated over and over without excess cost.
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It's just taxpayer money they're blowing up, so it doesn't really matter.
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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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w6hIXB62bUE
It's ATC audio captured during the event.
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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.
SpaceX also has a simplification streak: the Raptor engines being the canonical example. Lower complexity generally means less unexpected failure modes.
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You test components in isolation, you test integration of components, you run simulations of the entire rocket, and finally you test the rocket launch. You’ll catch issues along the way, but you can’t catch all of them before a full launch test. That’s why there are launch tests.
This is the programmer fallacy if you have a bunch of code passing unit tests, it’s going to work when combined.
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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.