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Starship’s second flight test

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Re: Starship’s second flight test

#181

Post by avmich »

Xenoamorphous wrote: post #78
happytiger wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s bonkers. It’s absolutely bonkers. I feel like I’m witnessing the creation of the wheel. Non-space nerds don’t quite understand why it’s so exciting. But I can’t imagine how much this is going to change the world, and civilization. It’s kind of the equivalent of going from local freighters to the Seawise Giant in one iteration.

Any hints on how this is going to change civilisation, for non-space nerds?

My feeling is we're going to have a change similar to what aviation had in 1930-s. Before that we had everything on the ground and sea, and both land and sea transportation were quite developed. The 1930-s, roughly, had a visible birth of the industry of air transportation - more people flew because they needed to get there, not for the thrill of the novelty, and more people worked in the industry - making airplanes, airports, operating them.

Similarly, here we so far have less than 1000 people - or so - who flew to space in their lifetime, over last 60+ years. We're going to see it changing in a few years, less than 10, and to see the growth of a whole new industry, which routinely builds stuff for space - be it spaceport-specific equipment, or some hardware for spacecrafts, or hardware intended to work in space. Also we're going to have more professional occupations - hardware designers and hardware manufacturers on Earth, operators of space assets, like fueling stations, orbital stations, constellations, scientific laboratories - manned and automatic - and some orbital manufacturing facilities. And also we'll see professions related closely to the Moon in a few years - since it's going to be cheaper to fly to the Moon, more people are going to go there working on exploration and resource utilization, for lunar and orbital infrastructure.

So in our minds today we have "everything anybody does is of course on Earth" with some quite small exceptions for those who flies to orbital stations, or for short tourist flights above the atmosphere (so far, I believe, we never had even 25 people at the same time above 100 km) - and there are, of course, many people on Earth who work exclusively to support such space-bound activities, but it's still more of exception. We'll soon get to the state "some remarkable number of people are working in space, in many different locations and on many different projects", and on Earth a rather large industry supports their activities, just like we have industries supporting sea transportation or automotive industry. We'll get used to add this new dimension into our considerations, our plans, we'll see more opportunities pursued in this area, more attention paid to space - significantly more.

Space will become another (much more) routine part of life.

Re: Starship’s second flight test

#182

Post by maxlin »

kcplate wrote: post #172
maxlin wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Twitter has never been non-free. You just need to register. Premium is nice, but not that critical. I have one account with and one without, mostly just the 280 char limit annoys without premium but that's how twitter was before anyway

“Free” in the holistic meaning, not so much as paid monetarily, but requiring you to trade something (registration and login) for access. It’s not necessarily unreasonable in my opinion to expect login to view content or use the site.

There's no strong authentication requirement. As long as you have an extra gmail account or similar or are able to create one that is not connected to your person, you should be able to create a reasonably anonymous twitter account.

(No I don't know how to create google accounts without using your residential VPN or avoid the phone auth if it ends up forcing that)

Re: Starship’s second flight test

#183

Post by avmich »

mrep wrote: post #175
chrischapman wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe move all data centers into geostationary orbit. They would be solar powered with direct communication between each orbiting center and transmitters/receiver stations on the planet surface. With that sort of lifting capacity, it wouldn't take too long to move most data center servers into orbit. Would it be cost effective? Maybe not. But I reckon there would be some climate change benefit by moving all that heat…

Definitely not. Cooling datacenters is a major cost component and that gets way harder in space as you have to radiate it away and cannot use air/water as a heat sink. Add in repairing components that break and that'll likely never happen.

I'd be more concerned about space radiation. As for cooling, in space you have a lot of space, and each computation unit may get equipped with its own radiator tailored for its heat production, and you may spread datacenters across large areas, so they have enough cooling capacity.

Each solar panel produces a shade, which can be used to put a radiator into, and between the solar panel and the radiator we can put some specific amount of heat-producing computation units.

Re: Starship’s second flight test

#184

Post by avmich »

Shawnj2 wrote: post #178
rich_sasha wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed it would be absolutely seismic. How well does that look, from a cold, objective, non-Elon-hype point of view? I mean, he might happen to be 100% correct in his optimism but by now I learned to trust nothing that man says.

In order to send HLS to the moon they need something like 20 regular starship launches which is a bit insane. I think it will be great for putting people and things in LEO but past that point I’m not sure.

Maybe not so many. Assuming 1200 tons of fuel for Starship on LEO ( from here - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX_Starship_(spacecraft) ) and 100-150 tons of payload, it's 8-12 Starship launches to fuel up the orbital stage which can fly to the Moon.

Re: Starship’s second flight test

#185

Post by philistine »

modeless wrote: post #16

If Starship meets its reusability goals it's going to be absolutely nuts. Flying to orbit and back multiple times in a day like an airliner or something, carrying more than the entire habitable volume of ISS every time. It's impossible to overstate how much that would change access to space, and how much of an advantage it would give SpaceX over its competitors (even other nations).

The big caveat are the heat tiles. They were not a part of the very early design of what was then the BFR. They went with tiles when the liquid heat shield proved impossible, and they will probably need to be inspected after every flight.

The shuttle's tiles had to be manually removed and inspected. It took months to do. I don't know if Starship can escape that requirement.

Re: Starship’s second flight test

#186

Post by Shawnj2 »

avmich wrote: post #184
Shawnj2 wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In order to send HLS to the moon they need something like 20 regular starship launches which is a bit insane. I think it will be great for putting people and things in LEO but past that point I’m not sure.

Maybe not so many. Assuming 1200 tons of fuel for Starship on LEO ( from here - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX_Starship_(spacecraft) ) and 100-150 tons of payload, it's 8-12 Starship launches to fuel up the orbital stage which can fly to the Moon.

Either way it’s a huge number of launches

Re: Starship’s second flight test

#187

Post by avmich »

modeless wrote: post #106
rich_sasha wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed it would be absolutely seismic. How well does that look, from a cold, objective, non-Elon-hype point of view? I mean, he might happen to be 100% correct in his optimism but by now I learned to trust nothing that man says.

Personally? I think it's quite likely they will get it to work. I don't know about the timeline though. Explosions at the launch/landing pads could delay them a lot. I think reliability is likely to be an issue for a long time, and I don't see commercial Earth-to-Earth passenger service happening for that and other reasons. They will have trouble getting customers who can actually use the capabilities Starship has. S…

When George W. Bush announced "return to the Moon" program in the wake of Columbia disaster, some related companies (I remember reading about e.g. Caterpillar) started to figure out plans to participate with activities on the surface of the Moon.

Maybe it's wrong information :) and maybe a lot has changed since then. But by now I'd be really surprised if some of heavy industrial manufacture companies wouldn't have some plans for equipment to supply to the possible Moon base, as the chances of that happening in some not so distant future look plausible.

Re: Starship’s second flight test

#188

Post by avmich »

93po wrote: post #159
jiggawatts wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Navy submarines regularly deafen all sorts of animals with their sonars and are implicated in whales beaching themselves to escape the noise. But let’s make Elon Musk put headphones on seals (plural) because it’s funny to make the billionaire jump through hoops. If I was in Musk’s position I would simply threaten to pack up everything and take all Starship development over to China. I bet a lot of the “essential” pap…

He legally wouldn’t be allowed to and would go to prison for the rest of his life if he did. He would also not be able to use the vast majority of his team because they’d also personally risk prison and also losing security clearance which means their careers are over in the US.

For all the drawbacks of the USA, today it's the best place on Earth to build projects like SpaceX, period. That's the main reason to stay.

Notably the founding father of Chinese space industry worked under von Karman in Caltech and left the USA in disappointment. However that was just one scientist in a rather different time. Today, neither Europe, nor China, nor Russia, nor India or Japan offer opportunities to develop things similar to SpaceX; I'd be quite interested in Chinese development, but would still bet against them.

Re: Starship’s second flight test

#189

Post by avmich »

Shawnj2 wrote: post #186
avmich wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe not so many. Assuming 1200 tons of fuel for Starship on LEO ( from here - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX_Starship_(spacecraft) ) and 100-150 tons of payload, it's 8-12 Starship launches to fuel up the orbital stage which can fly to the Moon.

Either way it’s a huge number of launches

But it's also a huge payload to surface, in one piece.

As for proportionality, it's up to Starship Isp - which isn't hydrogen, but rather good in comparison with kerosene (well... some Russian vacuum kerosene engines are quite good by Isp...) - and construction mass ratio, which, usually favoring large stages, is rather good for Starship. So, for those 8-12 refueling launches you get payload on the surface of the Moon which dwarfs the one sent by Saturn-Vs, by an order of magnitude or quite likely more. And - important part - all of that is much cheaper, because the main thing being expended is fuel, not rocket stage hardware.

Re: Starship’s second flight test

#190

Post by nvm0n2 »

ric2b wrote: post #135
ekianjo wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember ignorant folks commenting on HN a while ago that Twitter would not last 3 months after the massive layoffs. Proven wrong over and over again.

It didn't, and they had to implement very severe rate limiting just to keep it from falling over again. Now when I open a tweet without being logged in I can't even see any replies.

What rate limiting? The login requirement change is policy, not a rate limit.
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