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Starship Integrated Flight Test 2 at 7 Am Central Time

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Re: Starship Integrated Flight Test 2 at 7 Am Central Time

#171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fantastic, much better quality. Thank you. For those who almost never use VLC (like me), don't download and then open the file. Instead open VLC, Update it from its ancient version, and then File, Open Network Stream, paste in https://prod-ec-us-west-2.video.pscp.tv/Transcoding/v1/hls/O... then click Play. Enjoy.

It’ll open natively in Safari too.

My iPhone 14 Pro with iOS 17 shows a Play button crossed with a line in gray over a black background instead of loading, on Safari. Is there something else I need to do for it to work there?

Re: Starship Integrated Flight Test 2 at 7 Am Central Time

#172
post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yea, I've not seen up close shots of the launch facility yet, but it looks like it's all still there without massive amounts of destruction either.

Everyday Astronaut was able to reconnect to their robo-cam and pan over the launch area. No damage visible. Not only did the cameras at the launch pad survive, they didn't even get their tripods knocked over.

There does appear to be a large dent in one of the large tanks (LOX?) near the launchpad.

Re: Starship Integrated Flight Test 2 at 7 Am Central Time

#173
post #90

What is the benfit of hot staging?

To expand on KennyBlanken's answer:

Rockets generally want their fuel to be sitting on the bottom of the tank, where the engines are. That's easy enough when the rocket is sitting on the ground and when the engines are firing, but once the rocket starts coasting/decelerating (e.g., when the engines turn off due to reaching the end of their burn) the fuel may drift away from the fuel intakes, resulting in the engines ingesting vapor/gas the next time the engines turn on. Rocket engines are designed with a pretty specific operating environment in mind, so ingesting vapor/gas instead of fuel usually leads to the engines expressing their displeasure in a very vocal fashion.

This poses a challenge for staging. The naive way to stage is to turn off the previous stage's engines then ignite the next stage's, but the time between the first set of engines turning off and the second set of engines reaching a sufficient thrust level to keep the fuel at the bottom of the tanks may be enough for the fuel to drift away from the fuel intakes, especially if staging occurs lower in the atmosphere or after an extended coast period.

One way of addressing this issue is to use "ullage thrusters" - small rockets that maintain a small amount of forwards acceleration during staging to keep the fuel at the bottom of the tanks. This is what the Saturn rocket did between the first/second stages.

Another way is to "hot stage" - ignite the new set of engines before the old ones cut out. This is what the Soyuz does (and is why its stages are connected with a lattice - to let the exhaust out), and is what Starship was trying out this time. This can be simpler than using ullage motors since there are fewer pieces, but also poses some additional challenges in that the first stage needs to survive the second stage's exhaust for long enough.

The last way is to use RCS thrusters for a period to settle the fuel. This was used by the Saturn third stage before trans-lunar injection, but can really only be used once you're in orbit.

Re: Starship Integrated Flight Test 2 at 7 Am Central Time

#174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tell me about this new era while I am sitting homeless in my minivan…

There were people suffering when Sputnik launched, or when Apollo 11 landed on the moon. It doesn't reduce the magnitude of the event. Sorry for whatever you are going through, though. Hope you get through it.

The moon landings are historically seen through an almost exclusively middle class, white eye. The "magnitude" was definitely reduced if you were poor and/or black.

The "magnitude" of the US Space Shuttle program was definitely reduced for me even as a white kid; I got to watch the shuttle launch on a TV rolled into the classroom, and then go right back to reading my mangled, outdated science textbook, watching my teacher write on a chalkboard with chalk he had to purchase himself because our school district apparently couldn't afford to buy enough, because it was more important that we have more, and better, nuclear bombs and missiles to transport them than Russia.

We went to the moon. The rest of the world did things like set up universal healthcare for its citizens, build housing, non-punitive criminal justice systems, public transit, etc.

Re: Starship Integrated Flight Test 2 at 7 Am Central Time

#175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Both the booster and ship have been destroyed. SpaceX can keep claiming these RUDs are 'fine' and 'we're getting data', but the rest of the industry does not consider it normal or a "success." Hotstaging didn't "work" until they can demonstrate the Starship vehicle survives orbital insertion, re-entry, and landing without damage or malfunction caused by the hotstaging.

The “rest of the industry” isn’t doing anything at all.

IMO this is the coolest thing the rest of the industry is doing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VzqhZLgpiv0

Re: Starship Integrated Flight Test 2 at 7 Am Central Time

#176

It’s astounding that until very recently it was standard practice to put humans on top of untested, first-of-kind rockets.

Well, to be fair, NASA is much more risk-averse than SpaceX.

That’s why everything takes so much longer, the “classic” way.

But the way SpaceX does things, gets seriously good results, quite quickly (and gives us some great videos of stuff getting blowed up).

Re: Starship Integrated Flight Test 2 at 7 Am Central Time

#177
post #83

Can't wait to see if the pad survived! If it did, they might make another attempt sooner than expected.

It appears to have fared much better at least in terms of the metric that the various streaming cameras near the site that were damaged last time are fine this time.

Re: Starship Integrated Flight Test 2 at 7 Am Central Time

#178
post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Providing Central European Time but not UTC/GMT is really weird

Exactly my thought. But the real issue is why don't have browsers an integrated way of doing these computations by reading some HTML tags and also providing input widgets to make sure that it is universally readable by machines. Like (if the event's timezone is Europe/Amsterdam, only for informational purposes)

JavaScript language and browsers have tons of facilities for dealing with date times in sensible ways, including displaying a `Date` object in the local time zone and local preferred formatting.

SpaceX designed their page to display specific time zones for whatever reason.

Re: Starship Integrated Flight Test 2 at 7 Am Central Time

#179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you ever worked in Research & Development? Failing to meet every objective is normal and not viewed as “failure”

It’s not seen as a success to be cheered about either.

By you, perhaps. There are certainly times where a round of high fives happen at my employer when we see the first test data from our subsystem of a new product and it meets spec
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