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SpaceX launches Starship v3 rocket

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Re: SpaceX launches Starship v3 rocket

#231

Post by fooblaster »

ceejayoz wrote: post #220
fooblaster wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

coming back in one piece, and being good enough to use for 5 more missions are two very different things. For example, all existing reentry vehicles come back "fine" but they need to be completely remade to go up again.

I remember this being the same argument used against the Falcon 9 when it first stuck its landings. "Oh, they'll need to do it 10x to be profitable!" Now they do, as a matter of course.

Just because you defeat popular consensus of what is possible in one place doesn't mean you can continue to do it again and again. This stuff is hard.

Re: SpaceX launches Starship v3 rocket

#232

Post by BuyMyBitcoins »

jmyeet wrote: post #88
fc417fc802 wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> At this point, the entire SpaceX project is a bet on telecommunications services, specifically direct-to-satellite handheld Internet. That's the only market that will recoup the program costs. I seriously doubt that. Just for example, mining a single asteroid has the potential to flood the market for any number of metals. I don't pretend to know how expensive it would be to achieve that in practice; my point is tha…

If there were infinite gold bars just sitting on the surface of the moon, it wouldn't be economical to go collect them and bring them back to Earth. No matter how expensive you think any metals are here on Earth, the cost of launching vehicles, rendezvousing with said metals and bringing them back to Earth makes it uneconomical. An asteroid is much, much further than that but more important than distance is the delta…

If we ever mine for gold in space, I suspect it would be more economical to leave the gold there than to bring it down to earth. Most gold ownership never results in delivery, people just own receipts for gold stored elsewhere.

I’ve always found it amusing that so much effort goes into extracting gold from the Earth when such a substantial amount of it goes right back underground into some vault.

Re: SpaceX launches Starship v3 rocket

#233

Post by fragmede »

robocat wrote: post #229
xiphias2 wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Elon negotiated with Nasdaq to automatically accept it in Nasdaq 100 index after 15 days, so the stock traders don't really matter.

Can you point me to a source that actually says that Elon influenced the Nasdaq? The whole thing stinks, and we can create stories since some incentives are obvious. Stock traders do matter since 30% of stock is aimed at retail (very unusual % - what is the norm?) More info here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-X6YzlY_8tM (sorry, video)

> SpaceX has successfully lobbied the Nasdaq stock exchange to loosen rules governing how and when it adds companies to its Nasdaq 100 index – a group of large-cap companies that it bills as “fundamentally sound and innovative.”

https://techcrunch.com/2026/05/21/how-elon-musk-will-increas...

Re: SpaceX launches Starship v3 rocket

#234

Post by ggreer »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #208
Gagarin1917 wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Landing on two engines was the plan. V3 Raptors are too powerful, they no longer need three engines to land. They are only going with two from here on out. So I think it’s unlikely that they altered any aspect of the landing test due to lighting only two engines… as they was the plan anyway.

Hmm, I've seen data that landing the booster on 2 engines was the plan, but hadn't seem similar things about Starship. The difference is the chamber pressure you need in the individual engines. Lower chamber pressure has, in the past, been easier to modulate for precise control. Do you know if they've done any white papers or patents on V3's flow aeronautics?

Rocket engines can’t throttle down very much. Raptor can go down to 40% of its rated thrust, which for V3 would be 100 tons. The ship’s mass is maybe 150 tons with remaining propellant at the start of the landing burn, and probably around 100 tons at the end of the burn. Even at the lowest throttle, three engines would give it a thrust to weight ratio of 2, making hovering impossible and a suicide burn tricky. Two engines gives them redundancy, roll control, and a lower thrust to weight ratio to help with landing precision.

I’m surprised they went down to one engine at the end, because that means they lose most of their roll control. The only way to roll with one engine is to use the cold gas thrusters, which aren’t nearly as powerful.

Re: SpaceX launches Starship v3 rocket

#235

Post by AviationAtom »

maxlin wrote: post #191
LorenDB wrote: post #34

My favorite part of this launch that others haven't already mentioned: during reentry, the dummy payload satellites were visible burning up behind the ship!

Curious! Got a timecode?

I do believe it appears at 35:00 into flight

Re: SpaceX launches Starship v3 rocket

#236

Post by Schiendelman »

GMoromisato wrote: post #107

This was good forward progress (V3 mostly worked, clear improvements on heat-shield, near-final Starlink deployment system). Is this enough progress to keep a 2028 crewed landing? Don't know. I'm curious whether they are going to try to recover a Starship before trying for in-space refueling (or the reverse). Either way, I think both have to work before they can try for an uncrewed lunar landing (presumably in 2027).…

IIRC, I think they're off the hook for a 2028 crewed landing because the spacesuits won't be ready until 2030, but if I'm wrong let me know!

Re: SpaceX launches Starship v3 rocket

#238

Post by peebee67 »

fooblaster wrote: post #183
laughing_man wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Deliberately testing its survivability with that failure mode over different parts of the vehicle has been one of the major foci throughout the entire test campaign, and it has proven remarkably resilient. That generalisation pretty much does not hold for starship.

Re: SpaceX launches Starship v3 rocket

#239

Post by vessenes »

LandoCalrissian wrote: post #237

12 crashes in 5 years to get 1/5th the capacity of a Saturn V. Good job Elon!

?

Starship capacity is 150 (reusable) to 250-300 (non-reusable).

Saturn V non-reusable capacity was like 140 metric tons or so.

Saturn V cost in today’s dollars roughly $1.5bn per launch. Current Falcon heavy launch from SpaceX is in the $20mm cost (to SX) range, for 64 metric tons. So that’s 1,500:40 = slightly less than 40x cost improvement over Saturn V.

Starship’s target costs would be $10mm per reusable launch or roughly another 4x cost improvement over Falcon Heavy.

Also, the SX team is huge, including some critical operators like Gwynne Shotwell, it’s not just Elon driving this 160:1 improvement in lift and cost capacity.

Re: SpaceX launches Starship v3 rocket

#240

Post by le-mark »

amluto wrote: post #171
mullingitover wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don’t need very many kg delivered to target if it’s plutonium. The SDI program had the idea was that if you parked enough defensive weaponry in orbit then maybe mutually assured destruction wasn’t something you had to worry about. The only problem was that getting all that mass into orbit was prohibitively expensive. Then the deputy director of the program met a young man named Elon Musk, and the rest is history.

I don’t think plutonium is the right comparison. Plutonium is expensive, and nuclear bombs are neither cheap nor particularly useful for doing things like attacking 10k different targets in some foreign country. I’m imagining a launcher in a spacecraft that kicks out a bunch of payloads, one at a time, out the back, into orbits with perigee on or before the ground. (An LLM calculates the needed delta-V at under 200m/…

Near real time fpv drones anywhere on the planet, free of jamming due to starlink is the real game changing capability. What would any military pay for that? Plenty I wager.
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