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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

#191

Post by stetrain »

dmbche wrote: post #180
DarmokJalad1701 wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Can you imagine if to make a sightseeing trip to another city you had to stop in the middle of the highway and then make 14 round-trips with a second car to fill your first car back up? If the alternative was throwing away and building/buying a new car for every trip? Absolutely. They said the same about landing a first stage booster - impossible and pointless to attempt. And it just happened for the 400th time yes…

False dichotomy - the mission profile dictates the refuelling station and all that, but it never was the only option. Somehow we've decided we needed to be able to do lots of trips to the moon for Artemis, but it's not clear to me that it's such a precious golden oportunity and warrants this spending/impact on the environnenent. We didn't get to the moon with a refuelling station did we? How come we need one now? We'…

The Apollo missions landed two crew members in a tin can with extreme limits on what weight they could bring with them in either direction.

A single trip launch will always be constrained like this due to the tyranny of the rocket equation.

A modular mission system with multiple launches is the best way to expand capabilities and enable things like landing larger payloads for more advanced or long-term missions.

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

#192

Post by terminalshort »

jmyeet wrote: post #133
grapesodaaaaa wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My personal estimates are similar. For anyone that followed Falcon 9 development (from the first Falcon 1 launches), it’s really similar. I remember boom after boom until one day they cracked the problem and reusable boosters became the status quo. I got tingles when the first booster landed on the drone ship, because I knew access to space had just changed in a fundamental way.

Comparing Falcon 9 to Starship is a dangerous mistake. First, the time frames are way off. Development of the Falcon 9 took ~5 years (2005 to 2010). The first reused booster came much later (2017?). Second, Starship is much more expensive for each launch attempt than Falcon 9 ever was. Third, Starship is significantly more complicated technology-wise, being methane based. There are reasons to do this but it then requ…

> Second, Starship is much more expensive for each launch attempt than Falcon 9 ever was

They are already reusing boosters, so it might already be cheaper than F9 before booster reuse. Once they start reusing the ships, it will be cheaper than F9 with booster reuse because F9 has to build a new second stage each launch.

> Fifth, the market for Starship is unproven

The market for Starship is proven by SpaceX itself. The Starship can add 20x the Starlink network capacity per launch as F9. There are currently around 100 Starlink launches per year, so the market couldn't be more proven.

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

#193

Post by lordofgibbons »

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…

> After the Shuttle program ended in failure, work on reusable launch systems stopped for decades

Did it really stop for decades? I think SpaceX and Blue Origin were both already working on re-usable launch systems around that time

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

#194

Post by avmich »

ActorNightly wrote: post #146
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…

[flagged]

> Starship is such a fantastically dumb idea

I'm sure there could be better rocket configurations than Starship - but so far Starship is better than other existing schemas. Starship is really good comparing to others - getting the cheapest kilogram to orbit cost in perspective.

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

#195

Post by FireBeyond »

mchusma wrote: post #174

Love it, great job SpaceX! I watched the Martian again the other day and I marveled about how much has changed. With Starship progress, almost none of the plot really makes sense (bespoke vehicles and payloads etc). The first mars expeditions will probably be stocked with a thousand tons of gear, enough to easily last a guy 5 years. And if some dude were stranded on Mars, SpaceX could start lobbing things in his dire…

> The first mars expeditions will probably be stocked with a thousand tons of gear, enough to easily last a guy 5 years.

> The Martian is a vision for a 2035 mission from 2011. We seem likely to beat that!

What, exactly, is that guy doing for those five years? We don't know how to terraform Mars, and it's questionable what having someone on the surface will add to the knowledge we have of surface composition. And then what? That equipment is still on earth - after it's built.

Oh, and how's he planning to get off Mars?

I would comfortably make a $100 bet that there is no chance that we have sent a manned mission to even orbit Mars by 2035, let alone are "settling" it.

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

#196

Post by dmix »

Culonavirus wrote: post #142
NitpickLawyer wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They only have one more shipv2 right now. The next ones are shipv3. So my guess is that a ship catch doesn't make sense, since they're changing the architecture on the next ones. Would make sense to continue with limit finding (it's a disposable launch anyway, old gear) on things that carry over (i.e. thermal protection, ablative materials, crazy angles, etc) One interesting point is if they actually go for orbit. It…

Like you said, flight 11 has the last V2 and since V3 is not compatible with the existing pad A (only the new pad B that is being finished atm), it would be a nice opportunity to try the ship catch because cratering the old pad A and/or its tower wouldn't be that much of a deal. The entire Pad A has to be replaced anyways.

What did they change about the pad between 2 and 3?

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

#197

Post by potato3732842 »

foobarian wrote: post #51
ge96 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The deployment system was interesting, how the last one in the layer would go back then forward before releasing.

It looked like something one would cobble together from a garage opener and weld together a bunch of rebar

I wonder how many potential designs they considered. You've got the mass of the doors and structure of the ship to consider, the mass of the cargo, actuators for both, the arrangement of cargo in the ship, all of which have interconnected tradeoffs.

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

#198

Post by terminalshort »

dylan604 wrote: post #22
anonymars wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No need to be condescending when communication is ambiguous. Your question can be better phrased as, "How much did it cost for Saturn V to reach the point where it could successfully orbit?" which I assume means "how much did it cost up to and including Apollo 4?"

Wouldn't the cost of all of Mercury and Gemini missions need to be included in this as they could not have Apollo without the others first.

And then we also need to add the costs of the V2, because surely we wouldn't have had Mercury and Gemini without the V2 first... and of course we wouldn't have that if the Chinese hadn't developed the first rockets in the 13th century, so we need to figure out their development costs. Where does it stop?

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

#199

Post by fluoridation »

stetrain wrote: post #191
dmbche wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

False dichotomy - the mission profile dictates the refuelling station and all that, but it never was the only option. Somehow we've decided we needed to be able to do lots of trips to the moon for Artemis, but it's not clear to me that it's such a precious golden oportunity and warrants this spending/impact on the environnenent. We didn't get to the moon with a refuelling station did we? How come we need one now? We'…

The Apollo missions landed two crew members in a tin can with extreme limits on what weight they could bring with them in either direction. A single trip launch will always be constrained like this due to the tyranny of the rocket equation. A modular mission system with multiple launches is the best way to expand capabilities and enable things like landing larger payloads for more advanced or long-term missions.

There's never going to be long-term crewed missions to the Moon. It has no scientific value. Even the little exploration we did in the '60s and '70s were a dubious proposition. There's not that much we could do by sending people that we couldn't do by sending robots.

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

#200

Post by terminalshort »

fluoridation wrote: post #82
anonymars wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think as phrased this is going to get way too pedantic. But I think it raises a larger point which is worthy to consider. Presumably what we're trying to get at is, in broad strokes, "is Starship more cost-effective to develop than Saturn V" (and I assume the follow-on for that will be to compare the "NASA approach" vs the "SpaceX approach") But you raise a good point in that the baseline playing field is completel…

>but I don't think it's possible for them to say anything meaningful for comparison on their own. It depends on how different they are. Saturn V was launched 13 times in total. Starship is already 75% of the way there and hasn't orbited once. Ignoring R&D and just going by launch costs alone, that's USD 4B (2025) to orbit 1 Saturn V, vs USD x to orbit 1 Starship, where x >= 1B.

But who will get to 100 launches first? 1000? Saturn V was in one way a great success that will be remembered for all of history. But in another it was a failure due to your exact statement. It only launched 13 times due to being so expensive as to just not be feasible.
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