Summary from my watch: - Launch roughly on time, after a scrub yesterday. (Sounds like the scrub was due to ground equipment, most notably the water system.) - Initial ascent was good, but then one engine on the booster went out. - Relight of the booster's engines after stage separation for the boost back burn failed. Engines did light again for a landing burn, but seems to have hit the water harder than expected and…
Fantastic summary. Thank you!
They've made great progress but have a bit left. It's always the last mile, isn't it?
It's so cool seeing progress in this space (sorry).
The videos are great!, but the rest of it is never going to work lol, just never. Even without a rethink about how to get heavy payloads to another planet this is still good entertainment.
why won't it ever work?
The hardest problem in the entire design had yet to be solved. Having a robust human rated tile system that can be rapidly turned around is a huge engineering challenge that kind of breaks the whole point of the design if it doesn't work. I wouldn't be surprised if they eventually give up and go back to a cheaper throw away second stage, or throw out the tile design completely and try for some evaporative cooling approach, again.
Even if it landed perfectly how is it going to be rapidly reusable with all those tiles breaking and needing repair? Then if that problem was magically engineered-away through some sort of materials science breakthrough, it still makes more sense to me to keep your big ships in a space staging area and your smaller ones as atmospheric gophers.
All what tiles breaking and needing repair? There was remarkably little visible damage this time around compared with previous flights. There's no materials science breakthrough needed -- the shuttle used ceramic tiles successfully its entire service life. What's needed is engineering work, and that's what SpaceX has been doing.
You know a whole the size of a quarter can wreck the entire spacecraft and make it effectively throw away? Also, you'd want to use this many times. Making a system robust while not requiring months of refurbishment is really really hard.
Summary from my watch: - Launch roughly on time, after a scrub yesterday. (Sounds like the scrub was due to ground equipment, most notably the water system.) - Initial ascent was good, but then one engine on the booster went out. - Relight of the booster's engines after stage separation for the boost back burn failed. Engines did light again for a landing burn, but seems to have hit the water harder than expected and…
Thank you for your service! You nailed every single detail.
This was as good, if not better, than the livestream itself!
Even if it landed perfectly how is it going to be rapidly reusable with all those tiles breaking and needing repair? Then if that problem was magically engineered-away through some sort of materials science breakthrough, it still makes more sense to me to keep your big ships in a space staging area and your smaller ones as atmospheric gophers.
All what tiles breaking and needing repair? There was remarkably little visible damage this time around compared with previous flights. There's no materials science breakthrough needed -- the shuttle used ceramic tiles successfully its entire service life. What's needed is engineering work, and that's what SpaceX has been doing.
Weren't the tiles one of the worst obstacles to quick turnaround times for the shuttle? It was something like 18 months before one could be launched again, and that's if they were in a hurry.
Could you tell me more? I suppose a heavy two-stage rocket is not optimized from the point of view of the rocket equation, but I know nothing about this field.
In short, the more stages the better to discard mass once it isnt necessary, and the larger to the better to improve the ratio of (ship+payload) to fuel. Here is a decent summary. https://gemini.google.com/share/121466b300c1
This is only true to an extent. Yes, a larger rocket means a better mass:payload ratio, but a larger rocket also means more mass in absolute terms, and more mass means more fuel, and more fuel means more mass, and more mass means more fuel, and more fuel means more mass, and so on. This is "the tyranny of the rocket equation", and it places an upper bound on the size of rockets that need to carry their own fuel for a given gravity well. And because the larger absolute mass of a larger rocket means more fuel, which means more cost, it relies on actually being able to find enough paying customers to fill out that payload capacity every single time. This is why, for example, despite the existence of jumbo jets (which have a better mass:payload ration than smaller planes), most passenger flights are not on jumbo jets, because there's just not enough demand on most routes.
All what tiles breaking and needing repair? There was remarkably little visible damage this time around compared with previous flights. There's no materials science breakthrough needed -- the shuttle used ceramic tiles successfully its entire service life. What's needed is engineering work, and that's what SpaceX has been doing.
Weren't the tiles one of the worst obstacles to quick turnaround times for the shuttle? It was something like 18 months before one could be launched again, and that's if they were in a hurry.
By the end they could turn a shuttle around in ten weeks.
I am just delighted that SpaceX continues with the "good enough" pace of development here, at least at these phases. Rapid iteration of build, test, learn, and improve rather than wait for perfection. They are willing to have "negative outcome learning experiences" to gather data quickly. and, of course, data, data, data. I like it because I know what insane amount of red tape has built up to do anything similar in a…
Shame they're risking that ability with the IPO. We've seen how irrational and ignorant stock traders are from other publicly traded space companies. Even scrubbed launches cause the price to dip.
All what tiles breaking and needing repair? There was remarkably little visible damage this time around compared with previous flights. There's no materials science breakthrough needed -- the shuttle used ceramic tiles successfully its entire service life. What's needed is engineering work, and that's what SpaceX has been doing.
You know a whole the size of a quarter can wreck the entire spacecraft and make it effectively throw away? Also, you'd want to use this many times. Making a system robust while not requiring months of refurbishment is really really hard.
The Space Shuttle had that problem because it was aluminum with a much lower melting point. It’s one of the reasons they’re using steel.
We’ve seen much larger holes than that in previous tests. Some of the control fins burned completely through.
Agreed and specifically in the case of the Gripen the “test condition” was “Needs to be serviceable by a few conscripts working under the direction of one person who knows what they are doing”. It’s an extremely different design goal, the US doesn’t mind exotic weapons that require exquisite (and expensive) methods of servicing, they have the budget and the assumption that a well equipped air field will be immaculate…
That's a reason the Mig-29 is no longer in production. Point defense fights are obsolete. The F-35 was just in a war, in Iran. It performed as expected and was able to roll back Iran's air defense network in days.
>It performed as expected and was able to roll back Iran's air defense network in days.
"Rolling back" Iran's air defense seems like very fuzzy phrasing. Certainly, Iran was not able to close its own airspace, nor prevent ongoing airstrikes on many American and Israeli targets. At the same time, my armchair observation is that a great many US and Israeli airstrikes were accomplished using stand-off weapons [1], which would not have been needed if the United States and Israel had achieved 'air supremacy'[2] as has been the case in America's conflicts in recent history.
The observed trend in USAF readiness has been downward for some time [3][4]. Air war is more than single sorties. If you have anything resembling an accurate summary of sorties flown, targets successfully hit, and number of combat-ready aircraft throughout the (currently on hold) war, and so on, please share. Absent such detailed information, all we have are various degrees of speculation.