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Starship Flight 7

spacex.com

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Re: Starship Flight 7

#581

Post by thsName »

tsimionescu wrote: post #530
jve wrote: post #509

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, a…

It's so convenient for you to live in an imaginary world where spaceX is deceiving everyone and hasn't really achieved anything and it's all just empty hype, right?

Re: Starship Flight 7

#582

Post by api »

gr3ml1n wrote: post #568
onion2k wrote: post #486

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The higher frequency of launches seems likely to have a big impact on reliability. It's no different than deploying once per day vs once per month. The more you do it, the more edge cases you hit and the more reliable you can make it. SpaceX also has a simplification streak: the Raptor engines being the canonical example. Lower complexity generally means less unexpected failure modes.

My #1 rule for all engineering: simplicity is harder than complexity.

I truly wish more software engineers thought this way. I see a lot of mentality in software where people are even impressed by complexity, like "wow what a complex system!" like it's a good thing. It's not. It's a sign that no effort has been put into understanding the problem domain conceptually, or that no discipline has been followed around reducing the number of systems or restraint over adding new ones.

I've seen incredibly good software engineers join teams and have net negative lines of code contributed for some time.

If we ever encountered, say, an alien race millions of years ahead of us on this kind of technology curve, I think one of the things that would strike us would be the simplicity of their technology. It would be like everything is a direct response and fit to the laws of physics with nothing extraneous. Their software -- assuming they still use computers as we understand them -- would be functional bliss that directly represented the problem domain, with every state a pure function of previous state.

We might get to this kind of software eventually. This is still a young field. Simplicity, being harder than complexity, often takes time and iteration to achieve. Often there's a complexity bloat followed by a shake out, then repeat, over many cycles.

Re: Starship Flight 7

#585

Post by esotericimpl »

skirge wrote: post #528
me_me_me wrote: post #476

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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Re: Starship Flight 7

#586

Post by ceejayoz »

me_me_me wrote: post #475
tsimionescu wrote: post #472

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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 gets the glory because... break things??

NASA lost a good number of probes in the process of getting the expertise to do that.

And likely quite a few test devices in building out the skycrane.

Re: Starship Flight 7

#587

Post by esotericimpl »

make_it_sure wrote: post #503
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…

you are quite stupid or purposely ignore Falcon 9

[dead]

Re: Starship Flight 7

#588

Post by __MatrixMan__ »

cmsj wrote: post #479
the_duke wrote: post #383

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He's talking to the FAA, because this will trigger an investigation and would usually mean months of no launches.

Fortunately (for him) he'll be President on Monday and can then order the FAA to let him do whatever he wants.

King. Presidents are elected.

Re: Starship Flight 7

#589

Post by ceejayoz »

pclmulqdq wrote: post #551
hooli_gan wrote: post #459

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This is a very partial telling of the current situation.

Orion is delayed due to a heat shield issue: https://www.nasa.gov/missions/artemis/nasa-identifies-cause-...

The first SLS launch was six years behind and massively over budget.

Lunar Gateway is almost certainly getting delayed.

None of these programs rely on SpaceX in any way thus far.

Re: Starship Flight 7

#590

Post by vessenes »

metalman wrote: post #520
raverbashing wrote: post #370

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure there's fire suppression effective enough for this type of leak (especially given rocket constraints)

just increased venting to keep any vapor concentrations of fuel and oxidiser below that capable of igniting, even simple baffling could suffice as the leaks may be trasitory and flowing out of blowoff valves, so possibly a known risk. Space x is also forgoeing much of the full system vibriatory tests, done on traditiinal 1 shot launches, and failure in presurised systems due to unknown resonance is common. Big questi…

There’s no way that was anything but the automated abort — it was a comprehensive instantaneous rapid event. Or I guess I’d say, however it started, the automated abort kicked in and worked.
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