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Starship Flight 7

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Re: Starship Flight 7

#601

Post by drillsteps5 »

Can someone please please PLEASE tell SpaceX PR/Streaming team that the speed (per SI system) is measured in meters per second, not kilometers per hour? The speed of sound is approx 300 m/s, orbital velocity is approx 8,0000 m/s (depending on altitude), free fall acceleration on Earth is 9.81m/s, 1.63m/s on the Moon, the speed of light is apporx 300,000,000 m/s, people learn these numbers in middle school. It's not 1000 km/h, or 28,000 km/h, it just looks so weird.

Edit: ok, acceleration is meters per second per second, but my point stands.

Re: Starship Flight 7

#602

Post by pyrale »

eecc wrote: post #489
pyrale wrote: post #395

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not to rain too much on your harping, but the DC-X program did vertical landing 30 years ago.

Nice, what happened of it?

It happened at about the time budgetary winter happened for the us space budget, so there was no follow-up on the demonstrator.

Re: Starship Flight 7

#603

Post by inglor_cz »

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.

"though the launch vehicle is no different than the competitor like Soyuz"

That is ... so obviously and blatantly untrue. That is like saying that an old wooden biplane from 1917 is not different from Boeing 777.

Re: Starship Flight 7

#604

Post by psunavy03 »

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)

Aerospace fire suppression is generally Halon, which would purge the cavity with inert gas.

Re: Starship Flight 7

#605

Post by saberience »

cma wrote: post #524
saberience wrote: post #487

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> They have the first rocket ever made which can take payloads to orbit and then be reused. The space shuttle did this over 40 years ago. You can argue SpaceX have the first economical one 40 years later, but the second stage isn't reusable. Once they get starship working they might have it. Their finances aren't public but there is some stuff to go on where we can say Falcon is probably economical despite not recove…

The space shuttle lol?

Are you not considering the fact that the huge external tank and the two SRBs were destroyed every time? Not to mention the insane costs of refurbishing each space shuttle, not the mention the insanely bad safety of the shuttle and the 14 astronauts who died in it!

Space shuttle, while cool, was really, really bad design, bad safety, and totally uneconomical. It was definitely cooler than Soyuz, but Soyuz was cheaper and more safe.

There's a reason the US abandoned space shuttle and had to beg the Russians to use Soyuz to send their astronauts to the space station.

Re: Starship Flight 7

#606

Post by psunavy03 »

api wrote: post #582
gr3ml1n wrote: post #568

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 redu…

"Perfection is achieved not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away."

-Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

Re: Starship Flight 7

#607

Post by xhkkffbf »

drillsteps5 wrote: post #601

Can someone please please PLEASE tell SpaceX PR/Streaming team that the speed (per SI system) is measured in meters per second, not kilometers per hour? The speed of sound is approx 300 m/s, orbital velocity is approx 8,0000 m/s (depending on altitude), free fall acceleration on Earth is 9.81m/s, 1.63m/s on the Moon, the speed of light is apporx 300,000,000 m/s, people learn these numbers in middle school. It's not 1…

I understand the appeal of using the same combinations everywhere, but I thought the great thing about the metric system was that it was easy to convert. So 8000 m/s is 8 km/s.

Re: Starship Flight 7

#608

Post by pyrale »

dotancohen wrote: post #414
pyrale wrote: post #395

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not to rain too much on your harping, but the DC-X program did vertical landing 30 years ago.

Yes, and that was all the experimental program did. No humans on board, no payloads, no orbit, not even suborbital as they stayed close to the ground. The Falcon 9 puts humans into orbit then turns around and lands not far from the launch tower. It's then brought in for maintenance and a few weeks later launching again - some of them have done 20 flights.

You’re comparing an experimental program that lasted 6 years with a company founded 22 years ago. How many payload flights did space-x do 6 years into its existence?

Re: Starship Flight 7

#609

Post by thomasfl »

Clever product placement of iPhone and Starlink and excellent storytelling. Space age technology used to connect astronauts to their loved ones on earth. Can’t be done any better.

Re: Starship Flight 7

#610

Post by perihelions »

dpifke wrote: post #280
terramex wrote: post #76

Looks like second stage broke up over Caribbean, videos of the debris (as seen from ground): https://x.com/deankolson87/status/1880026759133032662?t=HdHF... https://x.com/realcamtem/status/1880026604472266800 https://x.com/adavenport354/status/1880026262254809115 Moment of the breakup: https://www.instagram.com/reel/DE52_hVSeQz/

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

Reminds me of one of NASA's reckless ideas, abandoned after Challenger in 1986, to put a liquid hydrogen stage inside the cargo bay of the Shuttle orbiter [0]. That would have likely leaked inside that confined volume, and could plausibly have exploded in a similar way as Starship.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shuttle-Centaur

- "The astronauts considered the Shuttle-Centaur missions to be riskiest Space Shuttle missions yet,[85] referring to Centaur as the "Death Star".[86]"

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