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SpaceX Starship rocket explodes minutes after launch from Texas

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Re: SpaceX Starship rocket explodes minutes after launch from Texas

#241
post #189

Let’s not move the goalposts. This company develops differently than historical aerospace. Success was defined as blowing up any point beyond the launch pad. It made it well past max-q which is the point of highest atmospheric stress on the rocket.

So yeah OK by that metric if a rocket lifted to a height of 1m above the launch pad, so technically being beyond it, before spontaneously disassembling, it's technically a success. Not 'moving goalposts'.

Re: SpaceX Starship rocket explodes minutes after launch from Texas

#242
post #61

People want to see 100% success in all things. But that isn't very economical. Compare the SLS to Starship. SLS has had a 100% success rate. One launch, one success. But it costs $2B per launch (and climbing) and has taken 12 years to get here. Plus, it's stealing pieces of the Space Shuttle, which was developed in the 70s over a long period of time. Starship will launch a half a dozen "failures" before they achieve…

>> People want to see 100% success in all things. But that isn't very economical. That sounds logical, but isn't really a thing in aerospace/space. Complicated high-energy systems have thousands of failure points. So to have any chance of success each failure point needs to be engineered below, by way of example, a 0.0001% chance of failure. That costs lots of money. But say one decides to accept more risk for less c…

SpaceX is doing the classic statistic thing[0], making spacecraft stronger where they explode until they don't. It's more like a hyperparameter search and less like QA for individual parts.

[0] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b2/Survivor... :)

Re: SpaceX Starship rocket explodes minutes after launch from Texas

#243
post #61

People want to see 100% success in all things. But that isn't very economical. Compare the SLS to Starship. SLS has had a 100% success rate. One launch, one success. But it costs $2B per launch (and climbing) and has taken 12 years to get here. Plus, it's stealing pieces of the Space Shuttle, which was developed in the 70s over a long period of time. Starship will launch a half a dozen "failures" before they achieve…

Interesting thought: Starship just expended more engines on a *test* (39?) than I believe the entire SLS program has budgeted through the end of the 2020's (16 from shuttle + 18 new = 34?). edit: Never mind, it's slightly less – see the comment below correcting me. The SLS program has 40, not 34, RS-25's.

It's 16 + 6 (part of the restart contract) + 18 = 40.

And that doesn't count the 2nd stage which, for 10 flights, should be 3 * 1 + 7 * 4 = 31 RL-10s.

But yeah - a very different architecture.

Re: SpaceX Starship rocket explodes minutes after launch from Texas

#244
post #157

Anyone reading the headline could easily be misled: this was a massive success. Some context: - This was the first "integrated test" of the Starship space craft with its booster - The whole thing together was 120 meters tall - It will be one order of magnitude larger than the current largest rocket in terms of carrying capacity (~150 tonnes if it needs to return the booster, 250 if it doesn't) - There's 5 more of the…

Saturn V was 110m tall and 140t in the 1960s.

Re: SpaceX Starship rocket explodes minutes after launch from Texas

#245
post #189

Let’s not move the goalposts. This company develops differently than historical aerospace. Success was defined as blowing up any point beyond the launch pad. It made it well past max-q which is the point of highest atmospheric stress on the rocket.

What provoked this response? The headline makes no assertions about success or failure. It is extremely literally a description of what occurred. It’s one thing to feel defensive about a misleading headline. This is just fanboyism.

It invites unreasonable expectations. That's not a theoretical problem, you can see examples all over this thread.

Re: SpaceX Starship rocket explodes minutes after launch from Texas

#246
post #189

Let’s not move the goalposts. This company develops differently than historical aerospace. Success was defined as blowing up any point beyond the launch pad. It made it well past max-q which is the point of highest atmospheric stress on the rocket.

I'm wondering what the environmental impact of all of these exploding rockets is though. Surely they won't be able to fish every piece of the rocket out of the ocean, along with all of the fuel.

The fuel is just methane (which mainly burned?) and oxygen, although I suppose this version did also use hydraulic fluid.

Re: SpaceX Starship rocket explodes minutes after launch from Texas

#247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sorry to be pulled into commenting on a Great Culture War issue in a space thread, but this is really unfair framing. When someone, or a group refuses to ban something, that doesn't mean they support it. Just because the United States allows literal Nazis to speak about anything they want does not mean the United States supports Nazis, or is anti-Semitic. The exact same principle is true of Twitter. If you allow…

The last paragraph of the article shows how it is an outlier in terms of which groups can be targeted with harassment: "Twitter hasn’t completely pulled protections for trans users, however. Its Hateful Conduct Policy still explicitly prohibits attacking others based on “race, ethnicity, national origin, caste, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, religious affiliation, age, disability, or serious disease,” b…

Referring to a male as 'he' isn't really in the same ballpark as throwing around racial slurs and so on.

When applied to a male who calls himself a woman, it's merely a philosophical disagreement over whether said male can transform himself to female simply by decree.

Re: SpaceX Starship rocket explodes minutes after launch from Texas

#248

Better headline: SpaceX successfully launches the biggest rocket in history.

LOL they are still salty about the 'publicly funded' tag

As they ahould be. SpaceX and Tesla have received substantially more taxpayer money than NPR.

Also, they weren't labeled as "publically funded". They were labeled as "U.S. state-affiliated media". That is untrue and is a political hit at the behest of Musk.

Re: SpaceX Starship rocket explodes minutes after launch from Texas

#250

Better headline: SpaceX successfully launches the biggest rocket in history.

LOL they are still salty about the 'publicly funded' tag

I'm seeing a lot of people salty about "Starship explodes". Isn't that also an accurate description of what happened?
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