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SpaceX launches and nearly lands starship on its first suborbital flight

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Re: SpaceX launches and nearly lands starship on its first suborbital flight

#111

Post by aardvarkr »

ctdonath wrote: post #105
mhh__ wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fact that SpaceX's President and COO is a woman seems to get surprisingly little publicity, especially given that she seems like the more qualified engineer out of Musk and herself as well.

I thought gender wasn’t supposed to matter. She’s the best for the job; sexist to dwell on “she’s a she”.

That’s a very male oriented statement to make. Somehow it’s sexist to applaud the fact that she’s a role model for women everywhere. It’s really hard to express how incredible for the chief executive at one of the most ambitious and innovative company of our time is a woman. I’ve met her personally and she is an incredibly inspirational person that I hope will inspire more women to become engineers.

Re: SpaceX launches and nearly lands starship on its first suborbital flight

#112

Post by XorNot »

areoform wrote: post #83
XorNot wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a lot of words to basically project a motivation onto the reporting about a thing which actually happened that isn't there. You're getting downvoted because this reads as "concern trolling". Let everyone else manage their own feelings.

This scenario has played out before, with Faster, Better, Cheaper from the 90s, and kind-of/loosely with STS. > Missions marked with an asterisk were considered failures (5 spacecraft failed in space; 1 project was canceled), putting the overall FBC success rate at a paltry 63%. This low success rate—and the fact that 4 of them occurred in one year, 1999—are what linger in the space community’s memory. > For example,…

NASA is a public institution and has been beholden to the Senate's irrational whims for it's entire life.

SpaceX is a private company. They receive public grants, sure, but they have a profitable launch business with the Falcon 9. Their requirement is that they can sustain themselves, not that they can keep their own internal project from being cancelled by directive of the US government.

On some level what the public (and really, it's space nerds like us) think doesn't really matter. The public would in fact be hard pressed to stop them getting contracts from the US government provided they can underbid Boeing at this point.

Re: SpaceX launches and nearly lands starship on its first suborbital flight

#113

Post by crystalmeph »

ffggvv wrote: post #11

i know they got the data they needed/wanted but can you really call it a success with that ending? on a side note: how much money do they lose whenever they have a crash landing like that?

“Fail early, fail often” may actually be cheaper in the long run than never running actual tests until you’ve run enough simulations and analysis to satisfy yourself the test will not fail. If you accept that premise, this test can definitely be viewed as a complete success, since they got telemetry from every phase of operation and know exactly what to improve for the next test.

Re: SpaceX launches and nearly lands starship on its first suborbital flight

#114

Post by simonh »

klmadfejno wrote: post #93
bob33212 wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Huge Success. This is a prototype. It was going to be thrown away next week regardless. Obviously long term the landing is very important. Just not today.

Would they actually throw it away if it worked flawlessly? Why not try another test?

SN 9 is ready for testing in the next few weeks and has more design changes they need to test, so SN 8 is no longer needed. On the other hand the loss of the engines is a shame. They are by far the most expensive part of the vehicle and could have been used in later vehicles.

Re: SpaceX launches and nearly lands starship on its first suborbital flight

#115

Post by oska »

dwaltrip wrote: post #67
pmayrgundter wrote: post #7

Swing and a miss.. but not by much! Congrats to the SpaceX team on the amazing and fast progress. What an incredible step forward.

Apparently they achieved all 3 main objectives. Landing was a secondary objective which was almost achieved! Very exciting stuff.

Yes, those 3 objectives being:

1. launch and fly to altitude

2. cut off engines and move to horizontal belly-flop profile, controlled using electric-motor powered flaps

3. relight engines to flip to vertical again for landing

Re: SpaceX launches and nearly lands starship on its first suborbital flight

#116

Post by aardvarkr »

thelittleone wrote: post #81
gt565k wrote: post #75

Lmao at all the people hating on a test launch. If this was even 10 years ago, you wouldn't even get a live stream of the launch and attempted landing. Perhaps Elon shouldn't even live stream this, so negative trolls wouldn't be able to assert and express their chair philosopher opinions. The fact that there are another 8-9 SN vehicles being readied at this time for testing tells you exactly what is happening. Slow p…

Except that the progress is not at all slow. It's the opposite, particularly when compared to the usual development speeds the worlds space program and aerospace contractors. Someone asked a question on one of the live feeds. Would SpaceX learn more from a successful landing or from a failure. I can't answer that, but it seems they proved the concept.

Failures point out flaws to be fixed but also stop you from gathering more data through the rest of the experiment. The earlier SN5 had a huge list of failures but at least landed in one piece which meant they could extract data from their equipment, tear down systems to understand how they handled the stresses and strains of the launch, and then they could launch it again to see how their fixes worked.

Thankfully this failure was at the very end instead of, say, twenty seconds into flight or exploding on the launchpad. This way they got to test every subsystem which is phenomenal and about as good of a result as they could have expected. However, the landing system didn’t trigger and they’ll never know exactly why. The engines ate themselves alive and it would have been great to study how it performed in that scenario but now they’re in pieces. The header tank failed to provide enough pressure and it would have been great to test it further. Now they have to comb through the pieces and piece things together like a detective. They learned A TON but it’s definitely better to get it home in one piece.

Re: SpaceX launches and nearly lands starship on its first suborbital flight

#117

Post by aardvarkr »

errantspark wrote: post #35
asdfadsfgfdda wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it was purging leftover hypergolic fuel, which is used to ignite the engines. Or, maybe the engine sensed the engine was abnormal (because of low fuel), so it tried to re-ignite. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triethylborane

Yo what's going on here? Is this some sort of misinformation campaign? To what end?? There's been a number of comments making this claim even though there's no reason to suggest this was the case.

Definitely not misinformation, just misinformed armchair enthusiasts. SpaceX did the hard thing using spark ignition which goes against the industry norms. Even the everyday astronaut YouTube guy said tea tab on his stream and he’s a space nerd.

Re: SpaceX launches and nearly lands starship on its first suborbital flight

#118

Post by baryphonic »

This was incredible to see. My wife was fairly concerned about the fast descent at the very end, but I explained how this was merely the first test of this scheme, and that the rocket came extremely close to actually landing. The entire SpaceX team should feel proud of this, from Elon on down. Hell, I'm proud of them.

Re: SpaceX launches and nearly lands starship on its first suborbital flight

#119

Post by tristy »

aardvarkr wrote: post #111
ctdonath wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought gender wasn’t supposed to matter. She’s the best for the job; sexist to dwell on “she’s a she”.

That’s a very male oriented statement to make. Somehow it’s sexist to applaud the fact that she’s a role model for women everywhere. It’s really hard to express how incredible for the chief executive at one of the most ambitious and innovative company of our time is a woman. I’ve met her personally and she is an incredibly inspirational person that I hope will inspire more women to become engineers.

She is not the chief executive; she reports to musk who is the CEO.

Re: SpaceX launches and nearly lands starship on its first suborbital flight

#120

Post by mLuby »

lmm wrote: post #49
mLuby wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also "you can only ever tie the altitude record for lowest flight."

That one's not actually true though, e.g. the lowest-altitude formation-flight record currently stands at -422m (over the dead sea).

In AGL, or above ground level, it's still 0.
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