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Starship Flight 7

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Re: Starship Flight 7

#591

Post by wolf550e »

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…

NASA put people on the first flight of the shuttle to space, which turned out after the fact to have 1 in 12 chance of killing the crew. Can't do that in 2025.

https://x.com/eager_space/status/1879291376418120184

Re: Starship Flight 7

#592

Post by TrapLord_Rhodo »

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…

Your using how much they charge, not how much it costs... You seem to not understand any kind of sales strategy or atleast basic game theory here.

>More expensive, but not by some huge margin.

Obviously no matter what it costs them, they are going to price themselves slightly under the going rate to fill their launch manifest. Also, they get to CHARGE THIS ~20 TIMES PER VEHICLE.

Reuse is cheaper... the fact that you can even begin to contemplate that makes no sense. They lose the upstage with only one engine and they even recover the fairing. The combined cost for RP-1 and LOX is approximately $300,000–$500,000. Relative to total launch cost the fuel cost makes up a tiny fraction (~0.5–1%), which is about $67 million for a Falcon 9 commercial launch.

Also with your calculations you conveniently leave of the super heavy which has a ~$1,500KG per dolar with a ~$97 million price tag carrying ~63,800 kg. Which is a 1/10th of the cost of KG to LEO than their competitors.

The loss of the upper stage is around $10–15 million. This includes the engine, structure, and integration. So by saving that in starship and boosting the payload to 150k KG you get a KG/LEO of 10, where the next nearest competitor is the Proton-M by Khrunichev at 4300. Which puts them in a completely different league of the space shuttles Cost Per kg to LEO of $18,000 to $54,000.

Re: Starship Flight 7

#593

Post by drillsteps5 »

ericcumbee wrote: post #185
sneak wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

...which has nothing to do with NASA the US government organization, or the NSF (FYI). It's just some independent streamers who apparently know you can't get trademark claims against you by the federal government.

NASA allows them to place cameras as media on nasa property some are even permanent. and are credentialed media for launches. so I am guessing NASA is okay with it.

If you're referring to NSF streams from Starbase (Starship program), all of the cameras are installed on public land. There's no law prohibiting you setting up a Web cam (with autonomous power supply) in the middle of the forest, or on a riverbank, or on a dune 1400 feet from the OLM.

They started doing it when SpaceX was launching their first fuel tanks literally in the middle of nowhere, you can just sit on a side of the road a few hundred feet away and record (or even stream) everything from a basic Webcam. Eventually more and more people liked it and started contributing, then came branded T-Shirts, etc.

Now there's whole cottage industry in Boca with people spending weeks and months there, setting up and streaming from the cameras, they have trailers/control rooms, high quality equipment, daily and weekly updates, 24x7 streams, etc. NSF is a big player, Tim Dodd is another one, there's quite a few smaller players too.

NSF DOES seem to have some sort of agreement with SpaceX on streaming some of SpaceX's livestreams (ie when Ship goes out of visible range and SpaceX is the only place you can get video and of course telemetry). They didn't use to that until shortly after SpaceX streams moved to X (and immediately got replaced on YT by AI generated Elon peddling bitcoins).

Re: Starship Flight 7

#594

Post by snakeyjake »

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…

>Every Saturn 5 was successful

>Some people are really fetishizing iterative failure

Subassemblies that made up Saturn V went through several hundred (inflation adjusted) billion dollars' worth of iterative failure before the Apollo program was announced.

The only reason it WAS announced was all of the iterative failure that had been paying off.

The day JFK uttered "shall go to the moon in this deck-aid", the F-1 engine had already been exploding and failing for three years.

My memory is hazy, from a brown bag I went to at work 15 years ago, but they blew up around 50 F-1s before one worked right.

And while the Saturn isn't an upgraded Jupiter it is EXTREMELY closely related to Jupiter and Jupiter had a shit-ton of failures before they got it right, turned around, and used all of that knowledge to build Saturn.

Re: Starship Flight 7

#595

Post by inglor_cz »

askl wrote: post #500
pmontra wrote: post #409

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Why precisely? Can you elaborate?

Re: Starship Flight 7

#596

Post by SJC_Hacker »

brianwawok wrote: post #495
TypingOutBugs wrote: post #480

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Thats not what he said. Unit tests are the first stage, and are very useful at isolating the problem.

Integration tests are the next where multiple units are combined.

Then there is staging.

Re: Starship Flight 7

#597

Post by pfannkuchen »

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…

It’s pretty weird to get any engineering thing right on the first test, no? The entire development strategy would have to be based around that goal. I think the standard engineering strategy would be to test early and often.

I hadn’t thought about it before, but, especially during the Cold War, the US government had a big incentive to appear infallible that SpaceX doesn’t have. Are we sure there weren’t more tests in secret? USG also has access to huge tracts of land that is off limits, and rocket tests are easily ‘national security issue’ enough to justify being conducted in secret. Just a thought.

Re: Starship Flight 7

#598

Post by inglor_cz »

input_sh wrote: post #391
razemio wrote: post #372

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you name a space company with less failures? Also I think it is unfair to even compare SpaceX to anything else, because of the insane amount of starts / tests combined unparalleled creativity. According to this website their current success rate is 99,18%. That's a good number I guess? Considering other companies did not even land their stages for years. https://spaceinsider.tech/2024/07/31/ula-vs-spacex/#:~:text…

It says right there in your source that that figure refers to Falcon in particular. For comparison, Starship's current track record is 3/7 launch failures (+1 landing failure). There's an order of magnitude difference between them. If they were cars, it'd be like comparing the smallest car you can think of vs one of the biggest tanks ever made.

You cannot compare a mature product to something that is still under initial development.

That would be like comparing a 1-y.o.'s ability to run to a 10-y.o.'s. Of course the younger kid doesn't yet control their legs, but that doesn't mean it's going to stumble and fall forever.

Re: Starship Flight 7

#599

Post by echelon »

raverbashing wrote: post #370
dpifke wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Preliminary indication is that we had an oxygen/fuel leak in the cavity above the ship engine firewall that was large enough to build pressure in excess of the vent capacity. Apart from obviously double-checking for leaks, we will add fire suppression to that volume and probably increase vent area. Nothing so far suggests pushing next launch past next month. https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1880060983734858130

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

Replying to this comment so people can see the incredible video of the breakup taken from a diverting aircraft:

https://www.reddit.com/r/aviation/comments/1i34dki/starship_...

Re: Starship Flight 7

#600

Post by pieix »

computerex wrote: post #549
fernandotakai wrote: post #457

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

SpaceX’s track record is too fetishized by the Musk fanboys. Falcon 9 has some weird Demi god status even though the launch vehicle is no different than the competitor like Soyuz.

I might have missed it, but I’ve never seen a Soyuz booster fly twice, let alone 25 times.
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