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Starship's Twelfth Flight Test

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Re: Starship's Twelfth Flight Test

#101

Post by GMoromisato »

laughing_man wrote: post #92
GMoromisato wrote: post #32

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…

>SpaceX cannot afford to take too many launches to get V3 solid. Why do you say that? I'm sure they'd love to have everything go right, but I doubt they're going to go out of business if it doesn't.

That's a fair point. I'm just projecting my own hopes. If it takes them too long to get V3 reliable they will not be able to land on the moon by 2028. I don't think SpaceX wants to feel responsible for China beating the US to the moon.

Re: Starship's Twelfth Flight Test

#102

Post by dylan604 »

sfjailbird wrote: post #11

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!

Raptor1 looks like the steampunk or mad max version

Re: Starship's Twelfth Flight Test

#103

Post by robhlt »

PyWoody wrote: post #84
Recurecur wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AccuWeather has it at the infamous 51% probability level for thunderstorms at 5 CST, so there’s still a decent chance for success tomorrow. Time will tell!

The percentage isn't the percent of it occurring but the area affected. So 51% of thunderstorms means 51% of that town/county/etc. will experience thunderstorms.

That's not how it works. Probability of precipitation means exactly what it sounds like: the probability that precipitation will fall in a specific forecast area.

Here's the definition from the NWS: https://forecast.weather.gov/glossary.php?word=probability%2...

Re: Starship's Twelfth Flight Test

#104

Post by stinkbeetle »

The new rocket engines mounted up to the first stage look like this:

https://cdn.xcancel.com/pic/orig/B4150BF393BC9/media%2FHIyEI...

What is incredible is that rocket engines traditionally looked like this:

https://www.l3harris.com/sites/default/files/styles/896_x_50...

https://i.ytimg.com/vi/SXEOVufxOyY/sddefault.jpg

These new Space X engines look so minimalist that the CEO of another orbital rocket company mistook them for being incomplete. This is despite them being the most technologically advanced rocket engines ever made.

It's probably not that other companies necessarily would be incapable of doing similar (previous iterations of this same Space X engine architecture looked similar to the "traditional" engine category). But I think the cost structure for other rocket engines never supported a significant push to optimize for manufacturing and unit costs, hard tooling, cost optimization, etc.

Re: Starship's Twelfth Flight Test

#105

Post by stinkbeetle »

dreamcompiler wrote: post #98
GMoromisato wrote: post #32

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…

There's not going to be a moon landing any time soon, regardless. Nobody knows how to do in-space refueling; it's a research project. And they're damn well not going to do it a dozen times in the next year. Furthermore they don't have a lander. Landing on the moon is hard . So hard that almost everybody who tries it fails, especially if the lander is top-heavy. And the SpaceX lander idea is very top-heavy. Finally, t…

I suspect Space X has a pretty strong inkling about how to do in-space refueling. They know how to dock in orbit, they have conducted internal propellant transfer tests, they know how to offload payload from ship in orbit and keep control of it, they know how to make autonomous quick connect/disconnect couplings for propellant transfer.

They haven't strung everything together yet and it's clearly much more complex than that. Still, pieces are coming together. Why couldn't they do it a dozen times in the next year? They could have an orbital ship launched in Q3 (flight 14), test a tanker and refueling in Q4, and start fueling in the next 3 months.

That implies all the test flights go well which is a pretty long shot, but not out of the realm of possibility. Although I think it will ship reuse that will be the problem keeping them from that within a year, rather than in-orbit refueling which I suspect won't take them more than a couple of tries to get right. Reentry still looks like a beast of a problem. It's one thing to have enough of your vehicle hanging together to land it, quite another thing again to have it back in a condition you'd be able to start fueling it up again ready for the next launch and reentry to do it all again, even in days or weeks instead of hours like Space X are aiming for.

Re: Starship's Twelfth Flight Test

#106

Post by tristanj »

GMoromisato wrote: post #81
brynnbee wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Were any of them actually failures? My understanding is they push limits and create intentional weak points to see where it fails, and something failing isn't a mission failure but rather part of the research process.

The goals of the V2 flights were to test the improved heat shield and to test satellite deployment. The first three V2 flights did not make it far enough to test either of those goals. It wasn't until Flight 10 that they could actually test that, and that was 9 months later. Effectively, SpaceX lost 9 months due to problems with V2. Sure, one could argue that it's still research (no customer was affected), and there…

Your standards of success are unrealistic and don't reflect the history of spaceflight. Designing and building rockets is incredibly difficult and has always been marred by a high failure rate. The early years of the US space program had an abysmal mission failure rate. Vanguard (1957-1959) was a disaster with 9 failures out of 12 attempts. A 25% success rate. Ranger (1961–1965) had 6 failures in a row out of 9 missions. By Apollo the US cleaned up its act, but had multiple high-profile failures (Apollo 1, 6, and 13).

The Soviets were not better, the Luna program failed 11 missions in a row out of 12 missions. The N1 rocket went 0 for 4 and its failure ended the Soviet lunar program.

SpaceX Falcon 1 failed three of its first five launches, which nearly bankrupt the company. The rocket's successor, the Falcon 9, ended up becoming the most reliable rocket ever produced.

The fact that Starship even functions with so few test flights is an engineering marvel.

Re: Starship's Twelfth Flight Test

#107

Post by tristanj »

ggreer wrote: post #22
amarant wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh hey, you're right! Somehow I read "water landing" and interpreted it as landing on one of the barges (ocisly or jrti) any clue why that isn't the case? Is super heavy just too big for the barges maybe?

They won't use barges because the booster has no landing legs (to save weight), and because the booster is massive compared to Falcon 9. Also Starship is meant for rapid reusability, and it can take days to return a barge to port and unload the booster. Getting barge landings to work would be a distraction from the goal of Starship, and SpaceX already has Falcon 9 for current payloads. And they won't attempt a catch…

I agree with everything but nitpick: SpaceX currently has two launch/catch towers in Texas, and they are building a third in Florida.

Re: Starship's Twelfth Flight Test

#108

Post by ggreer »

tristanj wrote: post #107
ggreer wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They won't use barges because the booster has no landing legs (to save weight), and because the booster is massive compared to Falcon 9. Also Starship is meant for rapid reusability, and it can take days to return a barge to port and unload the booster. Getting barge landings to work would be a distraction from the goal of Starship, and SpaceX already has Falcon 9 for current payloads. And they won't attempt a catch…

I agree with everything but nitpick: SpaceX currently has two launch/catch towers in Texas, and they are building a third in Florida.

Only one of them is working right now. Their original tower needs to be overhauled to support Starship V3.

Re: Starship's Twelfth Flight Test

#109

Post by imtringued »

Nevermark wrote: post #23
jiggawatts wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It probably is AI generated. My very first exposure to "AI spam" was trying to watch one of the Starship test launches, the second one if I remember correctly. That was around the time that Elon bought Twitter, so he removed all publicity video streams from third-party platforms like YouTube and moved them to Twitter's streaming service. I wanted to watch this on my big TV, so I was hunting through YouTube for the st…

> Ironically this meant that the only remaining matches were 100% scams. I am wondering if some of this is unmarked paid advertising. I can't imagine any other incentive for Youtube to effectively align its brand with Ick. Ads, as one of the prophets said, are the Devil.

The problem with ads is that practically 90% of the cost of a scam is user acquisition costs and the remaining 10% are the labor needed to execute the scam.

When you consider how lucrative scams are, you will realise that the advertising budget of scams is high enough to outbid legitimate ads and since the ad platform only cares about money, they'll deliver said to you.

Re: Starship's Twelfth Flight Test

#110

Post by roryirvine »

rpmisms wrote: post #66
malfist wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Historically, that has been true about rockets.

But SpaceX went out of their way to define themselves against the old school defence-focussed companies.

So some rocket engineers might very well have made a positive choice to "work at SpaceX to get humans to Mars" rather than to "work at Lockheed to build missiles".

Anyone in that group is likely feeling rather disillusioned right now, which will inevitably lead into demotivation.

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