Starship Flight 7 • Hacker News Board

Re: Starship Flight 7

#631

Post by ben_w » Fri, Jan 17, 2025, 5:07 PM UTC

littlestymaar wrote: post #547

shellfishgene wrote: post #533

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it was really an oxygen/fuel mix burning I don't think you can do much of anything to stop that.

If you cooled the mixture at low enough temperature, you'd stop it from burning (like when you pour water on top of a camp fire), but it's not clear how you're supposed to do that in a spaceship where you can't carry a few tons of water for your sprinklers.

> If you cooled the mixture at low enough temperature, you'd stop it from burning (like when you pour water on top of a camp fire), but it's not clear how you're supposed to do that in a spaceship where you can't carry a few tons of water for your sprinklers.

Also water would make it hotter, given this is liquid oxygen.

Re: Starship Flight 7

#632

Post by Alive-in-2025 » Fri, Jan 17, 2025, 5:08 PM UTC

m4rtink wrote: post #422

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)

Actually the Super Heavy (first stage) already uses heavy CO2 based fire suppression. Hopefully not that necessary in the long term, but should make it possible to get on with the testing in the short term.

What is a long term solution for this? Is there something more than "build tanks that don't leak"? I'm sure spaceX has top design and materials experts, now what ;-).

Re: Starship Flight 7

#633

Post by avereveard » Fri, Jan 17, 2025, 5:08 PM UTC

tsimionescu wrote: post #460

bboygravity wrote: post #452

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So what does a rocket company need to do to be imrpessive in your eyes?

Maybe match some achievements from 60 years ago, like having a rocket that can put someone on the moon, back when the largest supercomputer in the space program had less FLOPS than my watch.

That's a 60billion government program I guess to match the program you need to match that as well, starship is doing what it's doing at a tenth of a cost so far.

Re: Starship Flight 7

#634

Post by sbuttgereit » Fri, Jan 17, 2025, 5:09 PM UTC

Kye wrote: post #575

sbuttgereit wrote: post #567

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually, this video is a good indication for exactly what transpired: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w6hIXB62bUE It's ATC audio captured during the event.

This video, the map elsewhere in this subthread, and the stream recording give a nicely detailed view into what went down. It seems like everything went like it was supposed to in terms of pre-warning, but based on the video the information didn't make it to pilots with coinciding flight plans until after the fact. As far as I understand airline pilots have a high level of authority and diverting probably was the rig…

Yeah... and ATC for a good while didn't have any estimate for time to resolution. So, do you run the airplane's fuel down to a minimal reserve level in hopes that the restrictions might lift... or just call it done and divert?

I think it's an absolutely reasonable choice to just say comfortably divert rather than try to linger in hopes of it not lasting too long and possibly ending up diverting anyway... but on minimums.

Re: Starship Flight 7

#635

Post by schiffern » Fri, Jan 17, 2025, 5:10 PM UTC

drillsteps5 wrote: post #613

xhkkffbf wrote: post #607

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

In the official BIPM brochure, hours are technically classified as "Non-SI units accepted for use with SI." This puts them in the same category as liters, hectares, tonnes, decibels, etc.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-SI_units_mentioned_in_the_...

Re: Starship Flight 7

#636

Post by GiorgioG » Fri, Jan 17, 2025, 5:10 PM UTC

hooli_gan wrote: post #619

GiorgioG wrote: post #529

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

The taxpayer pays for all the lies.

Re: Starship Flight 7

#637

Post by pclmulqdq » Fri, Jan 17, 2025, 5:10 PM UTC

Workaccount2 wrote: post #574

pclmulqdq wrote: post #546

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The savings Spacex has promise of delivering to NASA make every dollar given to them probably an easy 2x-3x ROI. Without Spacex, the typical cohort of gov contractors would have been happy bleeding NASA dry with one time use rockets that have 10x the launch cost and carry 1/4 the cargo.

Sorry, Artemis carried more than one banana and actually made it to orbit. SpaceX has not provided any ROI yet. You can't compare the (very optimistic) promises of SpaceX against the actual returns of the rest of the industry.

Re: Starship Flight 7

#638

Post by GiorgioG » Fri, Jan 17, 2025, 5:11 PM UTC

computerex wrote: post #556

GiorgioG wrote: post #529

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Guy is a serial liar and you are making excuses on his behalf.

I hope you’re as vocal about your higher ups.

Re: Starship Flight 7

#639

Post by pclmulqdq » Fri, Jan 17, 2025, 5:13 PM UTC

ceejayoz wrote: post #589

pclmulqdq wrote: post #551

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There was no heat shield issue, it was investigated and the resolved: https://www.space.com/space-exploration/artemis/nasa-delays-...

There is an issue with another dependency for Artemis 2 and 3, though - Starship is nowhere near where it needs to be.

Re: Starship Flight 7

#640

Post by prerok » Fri, Jan 17, 2025, 5:17 PM UTC

ChrisClark wrote: post #614

askl wrote: post #500

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think we all agree that you need to test eventually. I do think most of us would already be double checking for leaks. It just seems one of the obvious things that may go wrong when putting it all together.