Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Starship Flight 7

spacex.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

691–700 of 772 posts

Re: Starship Flight 7

#691

Post by pclmulqdq »

vardump wrote: post #669
pclmulqdq wrote: post #637

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Zero ROI? Isn’t SpaceX the largest launch provider in the world and for the U.S. government? Many times than the rest of the U.S. space industry combined.

*Starship has zero ROI and has sucked up a lot of federal funds.

Falcon 9 has had plenty of "ROI" but it wasn't really federally funded. Let's not get carried away though about "more than the entire US space industry combined," though.

Re: Starship Flight 7

#692

Post by jiggawatts »

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…

As others have pointed out: Compare the budgets.

That “first success” was actually on the back of a long series of related rockets with technology and engines inherited from a huge missile program. Those NASA eggheads didn’t start from zero on a shoestring budget and make things work on the first try! The Saturn V was just a stretched version of the Saturn series of rockets. These all cost hundreds of billions in today’s money to develop!

Second, they’re not “the same thing”. A single-use piece of technology has very different design constraints and engineering considerations as a reusable piece of technology.

A single-use weapon is a bomb. A reusable weapon is a sword. Just because you can shove a fuse into some explosives doesn’t mean you can forge a sword that won’t shatter on first use.

An equivalent example from space technology are explosive bolts. NASA uses them extensively, SpaceX never does… because they’re not reusable and not up-front testable. They’re expensive too. So instead they iterated (and iterated!) on vacuum-rated actuators that can serve the same role. This is a non-trivial exercise that resulted in a few RUDs. This is why NASA didn’t even try! It’s harder and not needed if reusability was a non-goal.

Re: Starship Flight 7

#693

Post by EncomLab »

bradgessler wrote: post #681
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 Do you not count the Saturn 1B rocket capsule that caught on fire on the pad and burnt the Apollo 1 astronauts alive? What about Apollo 13? > but just because you are wandering in the desert does not mean there is a promised land The "promise land" in this analogy is visible past the desert. What's not known is what route to get there. In your tortured analogy, the people who "are real…

The command module fire had zero to do with the Saturn V. Apollo 13 again was the command and service module, and in that case the crew was "returned safely to the Earth".

Re: Starship Flight 7

#694

Post by littlestymaar »

ben_w wrote: post #631
littlestymaar wrote: post #547

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 .

It's not liquid at the point of ignition, that's the thing: if you mixed liquid oxygen and fuel nothing would happen expect the fuel would freeze. For a fire to take place the temperature must reach the fire point temperature, and if you manage to get your fire below this temperature then the fire stops. I don't know how low this temperature can be when the oxidizer is pure oxygen and maybe it's so low water wouldn't be enough, but then you can imagine using other fluids. The problem being the mass burden it adds to a spacecraft, I'm not it'd make any sense given that such q leak should happen in the first place.

Re: Starship Flight 7

#695

Post by littlestymaar »

m4rtink wrote: post #645
varjag wrote: post #626

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are other methods too, e.g. fire inhibitors (like Halon or whatever is allowed now) or shockwave to disrupt fire boundary. But I doubt they are very practical on a spaceship.

First stage (Super Heavy) is flushing the engine bay with massive ammounts of CO2.

Unless I'm misunderstanding you, it's not the same thing at all: in the case you're talking about you're shielding against nominal heat, which is not the same thing as contingency planning to extinguish a fire that shouldn't be there in the first place.

Re: Starship Flight 7

#696

Post by littlestymaar »

varjag wrote: post #626
littlestymaar wrote: post #547

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There are other methods too, e.g. fire inhibitors (like Halon or whatever is allowed now) or shockwave to disrupt fire boundary. But I doubt they are very practical on a spaceship.

Not an expert but I'm not too sure about shockwave in a confined space.

How does Halon works?

Re: Starship Flight 7

#697

Post by nomel »

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

I don't think that's a useful framing.

If not SpaceX, it would be all NASA. NASA lies about their budget all the time, with massive overruns. For example, the Artemis overrun exceeds the entire cost of Starship development so far [1].

[1] https://www.space.com/nasa-sls-megarocket-cost-delays-report

Re: Starship Flight 7

#698

Post by nomel »

mjevans wrote: post #35

I miss the time before X broke so many things, like official streams being on Twitch where I've already paid for ad free viewing.

For future reference, you can stream SpaceX launches from the SpaceX website. They tend to be higher quality. I've never seen an ad there.

Re: Starship Flight 7

#699

Post by nomel »

drillsteps5 wrote: post #641
schiffern wrote: post #635

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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_...

I can read Wikipedia too. All the calculations are done in m, s, g, etc. if you want to dumb it down to the public you might as well go in miles per hour, leagues per day, etc., spaceflight is not the place where it is appropriate.

> spaceflight is not the place where it is appropriate.

But, a video stream meant for the public consumption is. SI are standardized for the context of calculations, not necessarily for human consumption, which happens to be why nobody gives the weather in degrees kelvin.

Re: Starship Flight 7

#700

Post by The5thElephant »

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.

He is a serial liar, but we can also actually see the engineering progress which is remarkable regardless of his overinflated timelines.

His lying doesn't change the incredible work by those engineers and other employees of SpaceX.

Post reply on HN