Jarring to see the Gulf of America in print.
Starship's Twelfth Flight Test
111–120 of 124 posts
Re: Starship's Twelfth Flight Test
#112I 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.
I do think it is "criminal", in the social sense.
I find it hard to identify the incentives. It isn't simply playing anything for pay.
There are blurred lines or hidden effects between the situation they see vs. the apparent situation we see.
Re: Starship's Twelfth Flight Test
#113There is a rather large storm over south Texas, so not likely to launch today unless it blows through quickly
https://weather.ndc.nasa.gov/goes/abi/goesEastfullDiskband13...
Re: Starship's Twelfth Flight Test
#114There 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
#115I am a big space and tech fan, I have a crazy amount of hours in KSP and realism overhaul. I used to follow starship very closely, finally a rocket that's actually better than Saturn 5!
But I cant separate space-x from elon. He is, for want of a better word, evil; supporting trump, supporting extreme right party in Germany, DOGE illegally and irresponsibly causing chaos, flouting the law at every turn. He is a tech-fascist. If we want democracy and egality its imperative that people like him are stopped.
I want everything elon does to fail more than I want starship to succeed. It's fine, the rocket tech genie is out of the bottle now, someone else will make a good rocket.
Re: Starship's Twelfth Flight Test
#116Sergei Korolev's ghost is looking at those 33 raptor engines and crying.
Because his ideas for the N1 were not good.
The engine was designed to fire once, so they couldn’t test every engine. They tested samples in batches, to the terrible results of the N1 rocket.
Every engine at SpaceX is thoroughly vetted.
Re: Starship's Twelfth Flight Test
#117Sergei Korolev's ghost is looking at those 33 raptor engines and crying.
Because his ideas for the N1 were not good. The engine was designed to fire once, so they couldn’t test every engine. They tested samples in batches, to the terrible results of the N1 rocket. Every engine at SpaceX is thoroughly vetted.
Korolev built the N1 in a cave, with a box of scraps. In the '60s.
Re: Starship's Twelfth Flight Test
#118Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well, it's powered by bleeding exhaust from a very big rocket.
One of my favorite clips to give a sense of scale for rockets is this one. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=70u748VALt4 I show someone and then I tell them, that's not the rocket exhaust. That's the exhaust for the engine that runs the fuel pump for the rocket.
To me the coolest thing about rocket engines from an engineering perspective is the tyranny of efficiency that the physics mandate.
Because weight is so critical, there's no luxury of "another component". If something can be repurposed, it is!
And the power opportunities afforded by continually dumping that much fuel through are mind boggling. Even regenerative cooling with combustive fuel blows my mind.
Re: Starship's Twelfth Flight Test
#119Earlier quoted context omitted.
So 200-280 tons. A standard barge can support 1500-3000 tons of cargo. Even with the added weight of a catch tower and a healthy factor of safety thrust isn't gonna sink the barge. Far more likely the major hurdle would be stability issues with how tall it is.
It's not 280 tons... it's a falling object with kinetic energy so that rocket thrust is going to be very problematic for that boat especially if it' hitting unevenly. That and there's no way for it to stand without a catch tower.
Hypothetically, what's the effect of that much thrust close to a water surface?
I.e. if they cut a hole in the middle of a barge and it was burning at touchdown "against" the ocean
I imagine water doesn't have the kinetic problems that chunks of concrete do, but also that's a LOT of energy for even water, so maybe there'd be steam issues?
Re: Starship's Twelfth Flight Test
#120Earlier quoted context omitted.
I am pretty sure that at least some SpaceX engineers are reading HackerNews. But I don't think I ever seen any insiders comments here, even anonymously.
I assume they'd be covered by a ludicrous NDA.
Assumption not required. US ITAR regulations mean you're federally "encouraged" to be tight lipped. Add in the fact SpaceX is ahead of pretty much everyone else...