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Starship Flight 5: Launch and booster catch [video]
171–180 of 1001 posts
Re: Starship Flight 5: Launch and booster catch [video]
#172[deleted]
Re: Starship Flight 5: Launch and booster catch [video]
#173Very inspiring, glad I woke up to watch it. Congratulations to the SpaceX team. This is what competition looks like. It’s funny how last decade SpaceX had to sue the government to get more launches.
The FAA needs more funding at this point. They're not staffed for the rate of launch requests which commercial space has grown too.
Need to remove regulations instead and fast track SpaceX.
Every fucking time we don't need to increase the size of the Government. It only gets bigger. Never smaller.
Re: Starship Flight 5: Launch and booster catch [video]
#174Earlier quoted context omitted.
So, reusable is supposed to reduce the cost. But the space shuttle was reusable and it has been shutdown because it was too expensive. What is the differences between the two?
Manufacture and maintenance contracts for the Shuttle were deliberately spread out across many companies and states, especially in key congressional districts. It was a jobs programme; waste was a feature not a bug. Same thing for SLS.
More fundamentally, there were contracts. SpaceX does things itself; there's no legal friction internally. This gets back to the "Theory of the Firm" for why firms exist in the first place (transaction costs).
The need to codify what work is to be done in contacts is antithetical to SpaceX's rapid development processes.
Re: Starship Flight 5: Launch and booster catch [video]
#175It's difficult to overstate how important the milestone of catching the booster is. Now we have a reusable rocket an order of magnitude larger than anything we've had before, and the cost of kg to orbit just nosedived.
I'm not sure how critical "catching" the booster is to reusability, but it does save weight by not needing legs for landing, and perhaps the booster suffers less stress this way? Note that the booster is not really being "caught" although this is the word it seems we're stuck with. It's really more like landing on the arms, since it throttles to a hover at that point.
> I'm not sure how critical "catching" the booster is to reusability
Not necessarily for reusability, but it helps significantly for rapid reusability: it eliminates the need to transport the booster from the landing site to the launch site. Given that it's 9m x 70m and weighs 270 tonnes, that's not an easy process.
Re: Starship Flight 5: Launch and booster catch [video]
#176[stub for offtopicness]
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You’re repeating a flagged comment [1] that’s already been rebutted [2].
Re: Starship Flight 5: Launch and booster catch [video]
#177My wife asked "Why is this a big deal?", so I gave her a link to Handmer's 2021 explanation: https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2021/10/28/starship-is-st...
She's not an enthusiast; she's got an impression from SciFi that going to mars shouldn't be that hard.
Re: Starship Flight 5: Launch and booster catch [video]
#178Earlier quoted context omitted.
Methane is about 900-1500$ / ton. About 1000 tons is used for the launch in addition to 3600 tons of lox. That should be a bit cheaper than methane per ton. Ballpark, the propellant might cost around 2M$. A modern airliner on a long flight might burn around 80 tons of kerosene. It's slightly cheaper than methane. Call it 75-80K$.
That's $7 of fuel per pound of payload, that is not bad at all.
Indeed. You sometime see an argument that launch to space is expensive because of the propellant and therefore energy required. And as you note this argument is utterly wrong.
Re: Starship Flight 5: Launch and booster catch [video]
#179Video of the catch > Mechazilla has caught the Super Heavy booster! https://x.com/spacex/status/1845442658397049011
I wonder what will happen when they get to 99% reliability? They clean up and rebuild the Mechazilla every once a hundred catches, on that occasion that one fails?
The plan is to have many, many Mechazillas.
Re: Starship Flight 5: Launch and booster catch [video]
#180And here I thought nothing would top the double landing view from Falcon Heavy...
That was such a magical moment