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Starship Flight 7

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Re: Starship Flight 7

#731

Post by ricardobeat »

me_me_me wrote: post #726
ricardobeat wrote: post #717

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> wtf does that have to do with Curiosity program? All of these are 2+ decades old. That’s 20 years of learning how to design and land things on mars. They wouldn’t have been able to build Curiosity without the past experiences. The Curiosity program itself started in 2002, just a couple years after the missions above. What people say is that knowledge in the field is extremely hard to transfer, and easily lost. As a…

> What people say is that knowledge in the field is extremely hard to transfer, and easily lost. So you are saying that Curiosity team had probably not learned anything from those 20 years old programs? You are literally strengthening my point...

No, that’s about “SpaceX learning from NASA’s past mistakes”. You also don’t seem to get the point that they were 2-year old programs when Curiosity started, so I’ll just leave it here.

Re: Starship Flight 7

#732

Post by majkinetor »

TimTheTinker wrote: post #690
tsimionescu wrote: post #544

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're right that I exaggerated, sorry about that. Still, many of these are more successful than Starship: The first GSLV was still able to deploy a satellite, just in a lower orbit than intended. The first Delta IV had the same problem, satellite deployed, but in a lower orbit than planned. The first Long March 5 is classed as a full success on Wikipedia, I couldn't find info there about a failure (the second one di…

> Still, many of these are more successful than Starship: Your definition of success doesn't leave room for anomalies. Your mindset seems to be "if you try and it's doesn't turn out perfectly, it's a failure" -- which results in spending tons of time and money iterating behind closed doors (or even worse, trying to model/calculate the whole thing without many test runs), and only unveiling the result when it's "perfe…

Amazing. Ty.

Re: Starship Flight 7

#733

Post by yokoprime »

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…

You have to look past "failures" and rather look at development time. SpaceX has a radically different approach to development, more alike to software. While somewhat wasteful with regards to material, it seems to be working rather well. Also f*k Elon.

Re: Starship Flight 7

#734

Post by WalterBright »

wat10000 wrote: post #715
WalterBright wrote: post #703

Earlier quoted context omitted.

High reliability of airliners is achieved by having redundancy of all critical parts. The idea is no single failure can cause a crash. For example, if system A has a failure probability of 10%, if A is redundant with another A', the combined failure probability is 1%. That of course presumes that A and A' are not connected.

Yes for systems, not always for structure. A failed wing spar means everybody dies. For real-world examples, there were two 747 crashes caused by improper repairs to a rear pressure bulkhead or aircraft skin. When the repairs eventually failed, the explosive decompression caused catastrophic damage to the tail in one instance, and total structural failure resulting in a mid-air breakup in the other. The response to t…

The wing spar is dual, too.

The idea is to design the airplane to survive an explosive decompression failure, not pretend that explosive decompression doesn't happen. For example, on the DC-10, the floor collapsed from explosive decompression, jamming the control cables and causing a horrendous crash.

The fix was not preventing explosive decompression. The fix (on the 757) was to locate the redundant set of control cables along the ceiling. Also, blowout panels were put in the floor so the floor wouldn't collapse.

It's not always practical to fix an older design like the 747. When it isn't practical, a stepped-up inspection protocol is added.

P.S. The 747 was designed to survive a decompression. The oversight was nobody realized that a failure of the rear bulkhead could destroy the tail section. Things like that happen in complex systems, and an airliner is incredibly complicated.

P.P.S. When I was a newbie at Boeing, I asked about the wing spar, too. That's how I know it is dual!

Re: Starship Flight 7

#735

Post by templeOSdotcom »

me_me_me wrote: post #475
tsimionescu wrote: post #472

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Apollo program was inventing all of this technology, and using only extremely rudimentary computers, still doing many calculations with slide rulers. SpaceX has all of the Apollo program's work to build on, and computers that could do all the computing work that the Apollo program ever made, in total, in probably a few minutes.

this doesn't even scratch the surface. Slow motion cameras and real time sensors for debugging hardware issues, computer simulations, 3d printing. Apollo program directors would advocate to start a nuclear war with ussr if they could get hands on that kind of tech. But also NASA landed two SUVs on mars first try, using skycrane, Full remote. they developed and built mars helicopter/drone (rip). First try. But spaceX…

SpaceX is a boon to NASA. NASA does great work but as they are a government entity they move at a slower pace.

Re: Starship Flight 7

#736

Post by templeOSdotcom »

tsimionescu wrote: post #493
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…

The achievements you quote are highly overblown. SpaceX sells capacity to orbit somewhat cheaper than anyone else on the market, but not by some huge margin - half the cost or so, at best. They also don't have any fully reusable rockets today, and Starship is still probably a year or more from being production-ready. It remains to be seen how reusable Starship will actually be, how long it will take to refurbish and…

>Laying out cable internet is FAR cheaper than satellite internet can ever be, especially in rural areas

considering the US has earmarked hundred of millions of dollars to expand rural internet with nothing to show for it-- I don't know how true this is.

Re: Starship Flight 7

#737

Post by mrandish »

thombat wrote: post #708
mrandish wrote: post #420

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are people on HN far better qualified than I to discuss both orbital mechanics and spacecraft safety assessments but I'll give it a layman's stab based purely on the high-level concepts (which is all I know). They know there's little to no risk to aircraft or people hundreds or thousands of miles to the East of a Starship RUD in orbit because they know exactly what's inside Starship and how it's built. They mod…

That description of heavy lead shielding of a power plant on Mir surprises me since photos show it as having solar arrays. Wikipedia also gives the power source as solar with no mention of lead components. Can you add further details of this?

It was just my off-hand recollection. I could be mistaken or possibly conflating Mir with some other space craft that was de-orbited in the past. I'm fairly confident that the Mir de-orbit was notable both because of its size and that it was expected to have an unusual degree of debris surviving re-entry and reaching the surface.

Re: Starship Flight 7

#738

Post by ufmace »

tsimionescu wrote: post #493
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…

The achievements you quote are highly overblown. SpaceX sells capacity to orbit somewhat cheaper than anyone else on the market, but not by some huge margin - half the cost or so, at best. They also don't have any fully reusable rockets today, and Starship is still probably a year or more from being production-ready. It remains to be seen how reusable Starship will actually be, how long it will take to refurbish and…

> cheaper than anyone else on the market, but not by some huge margin - half the cost or so, at best.

I feel we should point out that none of us know what it actually costs SpaceX to run these rockets. Given that they have very ambitious goals, if their actual costs were much lower, the obvious move for them would be to price their launches only somewhat lower than their competitors anyways, take that extra money, and invest it right back into Starship development.

Indeed, one would think that if there wasn't actually that big of a gap between their costs and the prices they're charging, they'd never have enough money to even think about developing Starship. I don't see any other sources of big consistent $$$ for them, and surely they wouldn't bother trying if they weren't highly confident they'd have sufficiently reliable income to take the Starship all the way through development to a successful commercial version.

Re: Starship Flight 7

#739

Post by mempko »

WorkerBee28474 wrote: post #728
mempko wrote: post #674

SpaceX started Starship development in 2012. Despite 12 years of work, its best test flight reached space but not orbit, sending a banana to the Indian Ocean. While NASA's SLS began in 2011 and successfully flew around the Moon in 2022. Blue Origin's New Glenn also started development in 2012 and reached orbit on it's first flight with an actual payload. When they say SpaceX is fast, what do they mean exactly?

The last SLS launch was in November 2022. The next one is in April 2026. That is 42 months between launches. Starship may not go 42 days before the next launch. SpaceX's Falcon 9 + Heavy has launched on average once every 12 days since 2010. And while Starship was "in development" since 2012, that doesn't mean it was prioritized. The first prototypes were only made in 2018.

Productivity is waste. A lot of us here build software and have this perverse idea that refactoring is value instead of waste.

There is an old saying "Redo in design creates value, redo in production creates waste". SpaceX is deciding to just YOLO in production instead of doing good design.

Re: Starship Flight 7

#740

Post by cma »

saberience wrote: post #680
EncomLab wrote: post #624

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Shuttle program only failed to recover 4 SRB's out of 270 launched - and 2 of those were on Challenger. Why should we care what you think if you can't get something that basic right?

Recovering parts that landed in the literal salty ocean and need massive refurbishment to work again isn't really reusable in the same way that Falcon is though really is it? Trying to compare the two is honestly disingenuous. Calling Space Shuttle to what SpaceX have done really is like comparing chalk and cheese. Space shuttle cost (inflation adjusted) about 700M per launch(!!). Compared to Falcon 9 (10-20M). Super…

Falcons upper stage isn't recovered or refurbished at all. And sometimes it launches the whole thing in expendible configuration more like SLS's use of shuttle engines than shuttle's.

30-40 years after shuttle yes we have improvements, but that doesn't make it first to reuse the rocket.

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