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Starship Flight 7

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Re: Starship Flight 7

#611

Post by cma »

saberience wrote: post #605
cma wrote: post #524

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

The SRBs could land in the ocean with parachutes and be recovered and refurbished. Shuttle wasn't economical as I mentioned, and definitely the space shuttle wasn't safe.

What you claimed was: "They have the first rocket ever made which can take payloads to orbit and then be reused." That was known as the space shuttle.

The ~$40 million tank was expendable so you are right it wasn't full reuse either. Starship jettisons parts too, I believe the hot staging ring? And the Falcon series throws away the whole upper stage.

Re: Starship Flight 7

#612

Post by tsimionescu »

TrapLord_Rhodo wrote: post #592
tsimionescu wrote: post #530

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> 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.

I'm using the only public information about this that we have. The Ariane 6 and Soyuz-2 numbers are also prices and not costs, by the way. We don't know how much Russia or the ESA actually spend per launch, we only know what they are asking others to pay for it.

> Also, they get to CHARGE THIS ~20 TIMES PER VEHICLE.

Don't forget refurbishment costs and fuel costs and R&D amortization.

> 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.

You mean Falcon Heavy here (SuperHeavy is the first stage of Starship, it doesn't carry payload). I left Falcon Heavy out for two reasons.

First and most importantly, it is very rarely used in comparison to Falcon 9 (it was only flown twice in 2024, for example). SpaceX themselves are not using it for their Starlink sattelites, even though that should be the perfect use case for it.

Second, it was never flown with anything close to the nominal payload, at least according to Wikipedia. The highest payload ever flown was ~10k kg to GTO, where it's supposed to support up to 26 700 kg. Note also that the 63 800 kg figure is for an expendable Falcon Heavy - if you want to recover it, it's less than 50 000 kg. Also, the price per launch seems highly optimistic, given that launches in 2024 were actually $152M and $178M, each flying with ~5000 kg, giving a MUCH worse number than what we were looking at.

> 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

These numbers are very likely pure fantasy. Starship development got $3B just from NASA, that you seem to not amortize in any way. If you just look at the costs of the actual rocket construction itself plus fuel, without R&D, the numbers go WAY down for many other rockets as well (including Falcon 9).

Re: Starship Flight 7

#613

Post by drillsteps5 »

xhkkffbf wrote: post #607
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.

The problem is with the "hours" part. Which, not accidentally, is not even part of the SI.

Re: Starship Flight 7

#614

Post by ChrisClark »

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.

I truly hope that if you ever design a rocket yourself, that you will test it. I have no idea why you'd think testing is a terrible thing to do if it has to do with rockets.

Re: Starship Flight 7

#615

Post by keepamovin »

elicksaur wrote: post #534
keepamovin wrote: post #471

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If cutting edge engineering with conventional physics looks fake to you folks imagine what a hard time you’re going to have with real videos of actual UFOs.

They’re being rhetorical for emphasis. No need to twist it into an ad hominem.

It's not twisted and not ad hominem. No attack on a person, just a statement of the relative difficulty of appreciating something truly new when cutting edge looks fake.

Re: Starship Flight 7

#616

Post by TrapLord_Rhodo »

tsimionescu wrote: post #612
TrapLord_Rhodo wrote: post #592

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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. I'm using the only public information about this that we have. The Ariane 6 and Soyuz-2 numbers are also prices and not costs, by the way. We don't know how much Russia or the ESA actually spend per launch, we only know what they are asking others to pay for it. > Also,…

so, what your saying is that you admit SpaceX is a world class provider of launch services, but you don't like it cause it's not THAT much better than everything else?

Re: Starship Flight 7

#617

Post by stouset »

aredox wrote: post #426
mrandish wrote: post #347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While the video post does mention "Right in front of us", and it may have appeared that way to the pilots, it wasn't. Gauging relative distance and altitude between aircraft in flight can be notoriously deceptive even to experts, especially in the case of intensely bright, massive, unfamiliar objects at very high speed and great distance. The RUD was in orbit over 146 kilometers up and >13,000 mph. I'm sure using the…

Stupid comment. Several flights had to be diverted because of the break-up, and anyone in flight at that time would be rightly concerned about barely-visible high-speed shrapnel showering a much larger area than where the visible debris are - especially when you are responsible for keeping your hundreds of passengers safe in a very unexpected situation with no rehearsed procedure to follow.

Nobody is saying it wasn’t prudent to divert.

It would have been impossible for the pilot to know if that debris was shortly in front of them and at co-altitude or extremely far in front of them and at a significantly higher altitude.

In this case it was almost certainly the latter. But the uncertainty alone was enough to warrant diverting.

> Stupid comment.

Aim higher on HN.

Re: Starship Flight 7

#618

Post by exe34 »

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…

> 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.

I love that this is also a model of reality. Everything is made of differential equations.

Re: Starship Flight 7

#619

Post by hooli_gan »

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.

The taxpayer is paying for these lies
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