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Starship's Twelfth Flight Test

spacex.com

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Re: Starship's Twelfth Flight Test

#51

There is a lot riding on V3. SpaceX cannot afford to take too many launches to get V3 solid. If 2026 is another 2025 (3 V2 failures in a row followed by 2 V3 successes), then they can forget about landing on the moon before 2030. My hope is that Flight 12 goes nearly flawlessly (at least gets to soft splashdown) and they can start testing in-space refueling in July/August. If they can demonstrate in-space refueling b…

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Re: Starship's Twelfth Flight Test

#53
post #47
post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you met hardware guys? This is not how they operate, in my experience.

Are you trying to say that "hardware guys" don't care if they're working to advance the agenda from a Nazi?

I mean, rocket guys have a long history of not minding advancing the agenda of a Nazi.

Re: Starship's Twelfth Flight Test

#54

This is the first flight of the new engines. They look so much sleeker and simpler than the previous two generations: https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcQGMtnP... * And supposedly with a 20% power increase to boot!

SN1 was a test engine, the flight engines are even cleaner https://fixupx.com/interstellargw/status/2057165036196409820

Re: Starship's Twelfth Flight Test

#55

I am watching Elon give a long speech about the launch, scarily delivered at high speed, without pause. Including a Bitcoin marathon promotional informercial complete with an on-screen scan code. "That QR code is your boarding pass." He just repeated several paragraphs verbatim from a few minutes ago. He occasionally mentions the aspirational 100x reduction in launch costs. AI slop. Yuck, Youtube. Surely Google could…

The incredible thing to me is that I've reported one of these videos to YouTube and got an answer back via email saying "we checked the video and it's fine for us". This should be enough to sue Google on the basis that they made an active choice to keep it up.

Re: Starship's Twelfth Flight Test

#56

There is a lot riding on V3. SpaceX cannot afford to take too many launches to get V3 solid. If 2026 is another 2025 (3 V2 failures in a row followed by 2 V3 successes), then they can forget about landing on the moon before 2030. My hope is that Flight 12 goes nearly flawlessly (at least gets to soft splashdown) and they can start testing in-space refueling in July/August. If they can demonstrate in-space refueling b…

Small edit, 2 V2 (not V3) successes (flights 10 and 11).

Re: Starship's Twelfth Flight Test

#57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

question: what will happen if orbit refuelling goes wrong? Won't it destroy everything in orbit?

Liquid handling in microgravity has always been weird. Big gas bubbles in the fluid, surface tension effects causing liquid to float in balls in the ullage, stuff like that. Turbopumps break if they ingest a larger bubble. There could be some odd failure modes I would think. Failure to pump the liquid, broken pumps, who really knows? My guess would be that a failure mode would be a big spill, a failure to pump, only…

Seems like you could use peristaltic pumps

Re: Starship's Twelfth Flight Test

#58

This is the first flight of the new engines. They look so much sleeker and simpler than the previous two generations: https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcQGMtnP... * And supposedly with a 20% power increase to boot!

Booster dry mass savings of around one ton per engine iirc.

Re: Starship's Twelfth Flight Test

#59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Liquid handling in microgravity has always been weird. Big gas bubbles in the fluid, surface tension effects causing liquid to float in balls in the ullage, stuff like that. Turbopumps break if they ingest a larger bubble. There could be some odd failure modes I would think. Failure to pump the liquid, broken pumps, who really knows? My guess would be that a failure mode would be a big spill, a failure to pump, only…

Seems like you could use peristaltic pumps

That would take ages!

Re: Starship's Twelfth Flight Test

#60

There is a lot riding on V3. SpaceX cannot afford to take too many launches to get V3 solid. If 2026 is another 2025 (3 V2 failures in a row followed by 2 V3 successes), then they can forget about landing on the moon before 2030. My hope is that Flight 12 goes nearly flawlessly (at least gets to soft splashdown) and they can start testing in-space refueling in July/August. If they can demonstrate in-space refueling b…

question: what will happen if orbit refuelling goes wrong? Won't it destroy everything in orbit?

Presumably the effect of any explosion would decrease proportional to the volume as it expands. Is there much volume in space?
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