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SpaceX's giant Starship Mars rocket nails critical 10th test flight

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Re: SpaceX's giant Starship Mars rocket nails critical 10th test flight

#181

Post by anthem2025 »

bethekidyouwant wrote: post #46
nerdjon wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is something I am finding myself wrestling with a lot right now. On the one hand I am a major space nerd and I see the value of what SpaceX is doing. Especially with it really seeming like no one is anywhere near their level. What kind of scientific advancements will be possible once this thing can be used normally and launches like this become commonplace. But at the same time it is impossible to ignore the Elo…

“a satellite that monitors climate change” - really you think Elon Musk is not gonna fly satellites with instruments on them that point downwards?

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Re: SpaceX's giant Starship Mars rocket nails critical 10th test flight

#182

Post by twirlip »

mempko wrote: post #132
bzzzt wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not as expensive as it looks, Starship plus booster costs around 100 million. A Saturn V Apollo mission cost 185 million in 1969 which, according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saturn_V#Cost , would now be a bit less than a billion dollars. Also, SpaceX is not building rockets, they are building a rocket factory. If they succeed they will have lowered the cost of putting stuff into space by an order of magnitu…

Yes but at this point the upper stage is barely a spaceship. Mostly an empty shell. And they have spent $10 billion so far on something that barely flies.

R&D and prototyping is an up-front expense. Amortization over many units spreads out the costs to long term profitability. Does SpaceX have that kind of time, though? A prospective global depression would dry up the capital for funding Starship development.

Re: SpaceX's giant Starship Mars rocket nails critical 10th test flight

#183

Post by aDyslecticCrow »

Zigurd wrote: post #124

Too many things don't add up, for example: SpaceX, and friendly commentators, have framed this as a highly experimental test flight. The most visible aspect of that are the heatshield test tiles on various parts of the upper stage. That kind of testing is understandable to a certain extent. But it doesn't make sense to ditch the rocket in the Indian Ocean once you've run those experiments, instead of catching it, and…

The tower is more expensive than the rocket. The old tower is sketchy and quite flawed, and the new tower is not complete yet.

Re: SpaceX's giant Starship Mars rocket nails critical 10th test flight

#184

Post by terminalshort »

megaman821 wrote: post #130
m4rtink wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think there was just one unexpected engine out on the booster during launch. Starship engines worked without any issues on this flight AFAIK. :)

The flight looked good, but I was wondering if the ship splashdown burn was the ideal one or an alternate one from a damaged engine. To me it looked like they were working around a damaged engine.

The splashdown burn was specifically set up that way to test the fallback scenario for a failure of one of the inner ring engines. The fact that the ship landed almost on top of the target buoy shows it was a success.

Re: SpaceX's giant Starship Mars rocket nails critical 10th test flight

#185

Post by ActorNightly »

bilsbie wrote: post #68
nerdjon wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is something I am finding myself wrestling with a lot right now. On the one hand I am a major space nerd and I see the value of what SpaceX is doing. Especially with it really seeming like no one is anywhere near their level. What kind of scientific advancements will be possible once this thing can be used normally and launches like this become commonplace. But at the same time it is impossible to ignore the Elo…

What if the guy who built the world’s best rocket from scratch, who popularized EVs and brought self-driving tech to the masses, who built brain computer interfaces, dug tunnels, started OpenAI and PayPal… What if he’s not an idiot? What if we should actually be listening to what this guy says and considering it? What if he has the same ability to see what nobody else can see early on in politics… As he’s shown acros…

>What if he’s not an idiot?

Lets evaluate that claim, by first defining what an idiot is, and then looking at his history, all the things he said, and all the things he has done.

Ill skip you the trouble of going through that process - he is very much an idiot.

Don't confuse the ability to throw money at something and make it work through sheer cash burn with actual intelligence.

Re: SpaceX's giant Starship Mars rocket nails critical 10th test flight

#186

Post by 0xffff2 »

yoz-y wrote: post #105
enraged_camel wrote: post #20

Incredible achievement, but what is more incredible is how many people (including almost all of my friends circle) have started rooting for SpaceX to fail due to the shenanigans of its founder. I think as a culture we've lost the ability to compartmentalize. We should be able to criticize and even despise the head of a company, and at the same time celebrate when the intelligence and hard work of the countless smart…

I mostly hope that Blue Origin will be a worthy competitor. For me what this shows that the most important thing for a CEO to be successful is to have money, a vison (no matter how unrealistic or unnecessary) and a cult personality. Nothing else matters. Also it shows that with enough virtual money (I.e.: massively overblown Tesla stock) you can do just about anything.

Fun trivia fact of the day: BO was founded 2 years _before_ SpaceX. 25 years later, SpaceX has revolutionized the launch industry. Meanwhile, BO has only just had their first (and only) orbital launch at the beginning of this year. It's unclear to me what, if anything BO could do to really catch up at this point.

It's clear that money isn't the defining factor at least. When BO was founded Bezos was the richest man in the world. It has floundered for so long that Musk was able to build up a cult of personality around SpaceX and parlay that into even more money than Bezos.

Re: SpaceX's giant Starship Mars rocket nails critical 10th test flight

#187

Post by anthem2025 »

bilsbie wrote: post #68
nerdjon wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is something I am finding myself wrestling with a lot right now. On the one hand I am a major space nerd and I see the value of what SpaceX is doing. Especially with it really seeming like no one is anywhere near their level. What kind of scientific advancements will be possible once this thing can be used normally and launches like this become commonplace. But at the same time it is impossible to ignore the Elo…

What if the guy who built the world’s best rocket from scratch, who popularized EVs and brought self-driving tech to the masses, who built brain computer interfaces, dug tunnels, started OpenAI and PayPal… What if he’s not an idiot? What if we should actually be listening to what this guy says and considering it? What if he has the same ability to see what nobody else can see early on in politics… As he’s shown acros…

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Re: SpaceX's giant Starship Mars rocket nails critical 10th test flight

#188

Post by anonymars »

dylan604 wrote: post #152
fluoridation wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Starship is 75% of the way to 13 launches. That's just mathematically correct.

And is absolutely useless. Apollo 9-17 went to the moon with human occupants. All but one put men on the surface of the moon. They all returned to Earth with zero fatally exploding ships. Not one of these triumphant 75% achievement in launch numbers would have had a surviving human. Apollo had 0 practice runs. Starship is nothing but practice runs. To equate the number of launches to something so drastically differen…

> Starship is already 75% of the way there and hasn't orbited once

Read it as "Starship is already 75% of the way to that cost and hasn't orbited once" (you seem to be in agreement)

Re: SpaceX's giant Starship Mars rocket nails critical 10th test flight

#189

Post by techterrier »

GMoromisato wrote: post #169

Starship is like AI/LLMs in that success would revolutionize the world, but technological failure is very possible. And despite the confident predictions on the internets, we don't know which it's going to be. After the Shuttle program ended in failure, work on reusable launch systems stopped for decades. A similar thing would happen if Starship fails. Space would remain the province of the military and large governm…

oh good, Wall-E levels of space polution

Re: SpaceX's giant Starship Mars rocket nails critical 10th test flight

#190

Post by anthem2025 »

jaysonelliot wrote: post #103
bilsbie wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What if the guy who built the world’s best rocket from scratch, who popularized EVs and brought self-driving tech to the masses, who built brain computer interfaces, dug tunnels, started OpenAI and PayPal… What if he’s not an idiot? What if we should actually be listening to what this guy says and considering it? What if he has the same ability to see what nobody else can see early on in politics… As he’s shown acros…

"Dug tunnels" - one of the most ridiculous boondoggles of any modern industrialist. The Boring Company is a machine for overpromising to get government contracts and underdelivering at exponential scale. He didn't start PayPal, he joined it and ended up getting fired, albeit with a golden parachute that gave him the chance to make more bets. The "accomplishments" you're listing are mostly just investments that he man…

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