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You might have it backwards. Trump 2 has been way more pro-SpaceX than Biden or Trump 1.
SpaceX launches Starship v3 rocket
71–80 of 326 posts
Re: SpaceX launches Starship v3 rocket
#72Summary from my watch: - Launch roughly on time, after a scrub yesterday. (Sounds like the scrub was due to ground equipment, most notably the water system.) - Initial ascent was good, but then one engine on the booster went out. - Relight of the booster's engines after stage separation for the boost back burn failed. Engines did light again for a landing burn, but seems to have hit the water harder than expected and…
> The amazing views of the plasma during re-entry, something never seen live before starship, are now routine.
The word "live" is doing a lot of work here. Astronauts used to film the plasma going past the windows of Shuttle.
I remember as a kid my science textbook had a still of it to illustrate plasma.
Re: SpaceX launches Starship v3 rocket
#73Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm concerned about the cracking clearly visible on the heat shield tiles. It doesn't bode well for rapid reusability.
The tiles ablate. The shuttle returned from every mission with missing tiles.
The shuttle required long expensive refurbishment after each flight.
Re: SpaceX launches Starship v3 rocket
#74Summary from my watch: - Launch roughly on time, after a scrub yesterday. (Sounds like the scrub was due to ground equipment, most notably the water system.) - Initial ascent was good, but then one engine on the booster went out. - Relight of the booster's engines after stage separation for the boost back burn failed. Engines did light again for a landing burn, but seems to have hit the water harder than expected and…
The takeoff looked almost normal but I noticed a slight drift from vertical, likely because one of the engines was dead or dying. Overall the V3 is supposed to be an upgrade but actual progress is more or less stalling compared V2.
The payload (100t) is at least double that of previous flights. It’s largest spacecraft ever flew. That’s some stalling
Re: SpaceX launches Starship v3 rocket
#75Summary from my watch: - Launch roughly on time, after a scrub yesterday. (Sounds like the scrub was due to ground equipment, most notably the water system.) - Initial ascent was good, but then one engine on the booster went out. - Relight of the booster's engines after stage separation for the boost back burn failed. Engines did light again for a landing burn, but seems to have hit the water harder than expected and…
The final issue that led to the scrub was that a pin that held back the QD arm got bound and would not release.
Re: SpaceX launches Starship v3 rocket
#76Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm concerned about the cracking clearly visible on the heat shield tiles. It doesn't bode well for rapid reusability.
The tiles ablate. The shuttle returned from every mission with missing tiles.
Shuttle's tiles not being durable as hoped is what killed it's turnaround time.
The problem was never solved and turned what was supposed to be a few days into weeks or months. Every mission the shuttle had to go back into the assembly building and have all tiles inspected and potentially replaced.
Re: SpaceX launches Starship v3 rocket
#77It's worth remembering that, according to SpaceX's own filings, they've spent >$15 billion on the Starship program thus far with more to come. And SpaceX is burning cash still, particularly because Elon Musk bailed out his own bad decisions with Twitter and xAI with SpaceX stock, basically. Flight 12 was a relative success. Some engines failed to light but that's an unintended good test. Rockets are typically designe…
> At this point, the entire SpaceX project is a bet on telecommunications services, specifically direct-to-satellite handheld Internet. That's the only market that will recoup the program costs.
There's also a military angle here. I'll leave it as an exercise for the reader to look into Musk's history with Michael D. Griffin from the Reagan SDI/'Star Wars' program.
Re: SpaceX launches Starship v3 rocket
#78This incremental progress, far smaller improvements than planned, has put them so far behind schedule I'm not confident this design is any good. Still haven't done orbit. This launch was not a smooth launch. SLS by contrast seems to work. Why did nasa contract SpaceX for the lander. The whole plan is bad.
Re: SpaceX launches Starship v3 rocket
#79It's worth remembering that, according to SpaceX's own filings, they've spent >$15 billion on the Starship program thus far with more to come. And SpaceX is burning cash still, particularly because Elon Musk bailed out his own bad decisions with Twitter and xAI with SpaceX stock, basically. Flight 12 was a relative success. Some engines failed to light but that's an unintended good test. Rockets are typically designe…
> At this point, the entire SpaceX project is a bet on telecommunications services, specifically direct-to-satellite handheld Internet. That's the only market that will recoup the program costs.
I seriously doubt that. Just for example, mining a single asteroid has the potential to flood the market for any number of metals. I don't pretend to know how expensive it would be to achieve that in practice; my point is that there are quite a few different ways to recoup program costs at some handwavey point in the future.
Re: SpaceX launches Starship v3 rocket
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
> If it's just unreliability then it might be a hard problem to solve. It might, but it certainly helps having a ton of them around. Given that they used 42 of them today and 2 failed in some fashion, we'll call that a 1:21 failure rate. On a more typical rocket with say 10 engines (eg falcon 9), there's a good chance they wouldn't have seen the same failure till flight 3.
> Given that they used 42 of them today 20+10+3=33 on the booster, 3+3=6 on the Ship, total 39. I remember Elon said they want to add 2 engines to the first stage, but that still would be 41. Where's the 42th supposed to be?
I messed up, for some reason I had it in my head that there were 9 on starship, so 33 + 9 = 42.