Starship's Tenth Flight Test • Hacker News Board

Re: Starship's Tenth Flight Test

#241

Post by dotancohen » Sat, Aug 30, 2025, 9:17 PM UTC

ralfd wrote: post #218

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Shuttle tiles were technically reusable Would note that Shuttle tiles were never mass manufactured. The Shuttle’s shape meant lots of unique tiles. And its lack of mass production meant each tile was basically an artisanal object. SpaceX aims to reüse tiles over many flights. But even if some tiles need replacing after each launch, that doesn’t tank Starship per se .

Maybe even throwing a used ship away as scrap metal away would work as a business case. The expensive part are the rocket engines, if they can be reused much would be won.

I'm not mistaken, the Raptor's target price is half a million dollars each. That makes Starship unique in that the engines are not actually a significant price of the rocket as a whole.

Re: Starship's Tenth Flight Test

#242

Post by dotancohen » Sat, Aug 30, 2025, 9:19 PM UTC

ericcumbee wrote: post #71

floating-io wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Remains to be seen. That's what they want, but it's never been done before. (edit: clarity: they do NOT want to replace them after each flight.) They're currently experimenting with things such as actively cooled tiles (which I presume were installed on this ship, since they were on the last two). I personally think the likely best case is that they'll have to go over the ship and replace some here and there before l…

Even if they don't get to a no replacement....they still already have a massive improvement over Space Shuttle. The Space Shuttle basically every tile was unique, and and the pattern was different between the different orbiters. A good bit of the months of refurbishment of the Orbiter between flights was heat shield repairs. SpaceX has already shown from when they completely retiled one of the ships. they have cut do…

  > the pattern was different between the different orbiters.

I had never heard this before. Do you have anything to back this up? Asking as a huge space shuttle fan.

Re: Starship's Tenth Flight Test

#243

Post by dotancohen » Sat, Aug 30, 2025, 9:47 PM UTC

rubzah wrote: post #189

mrandish wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They announced before the flight that they intentionally removed tiles from some areas around the lower flaps specifically to get data on what happens when tiles fail, such as how much burn occurs, how quickly and what type. It appears it was successful in showing varying amounts of burn through and damage in the areas that were intentionally left under-protected.

The part that burned was damaged from early on, likely at, or right after, separation. So the integrity of that flap was already very compromised. I actually thought the flap would disintegrate on re-entry with that kind of damage. But no, they even put full stress on it, unfolding it while supersonic through the atmosphere, like a champ.

At what T+ do you see the damage occurring? Thank you.

Re: Starship's Tenth Flight Test

#244

Post by foxglacier » Mon, Sep 01, 2025, 5:16 PM UTC

oska wrote: post #165

foxglacier wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thunderfoot is a long-time Musk project hater for some reason. That's now his specialty which probably appeals to his audience. There are plenty of equally uninformed youtubers with glowing praise for SpaceX. Just like the real news, people divide themselves into bubbles of whatever reinforces their beliefs.

> There are plenty of equally uninformed youtubers with glowing praise for SpaceX Definitely true > Just like the real news, people divide themselves into bubbles of whatever reinforces their beliefs Hopefully HN can be better than that and be a place for informed criticism or informed praise from whatever provenance

Provenance kind of matters though because we can't work out all the details of every piece of information and have to put a bit of trust in the source. A way I like it to cite a source with the opposite bias of what you're trying to say. If even the opponents of the general idea agree with some part of it, that's stronger support than it's supporters agreeing.

Re: Starship's Tenth Flight Test

#245

Post by oska » Tue, Sep 09, 2025, 5:36 AM UTC

foxglacier wrote: post #244

oska wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There are plenty of equally uninformed youtubers with glowing praise for SpaceX Definitely true > Just like the real news, people divide themselves into bubbles of whatever reinforces their beliefs Hopefully HN can be better than that and be a place for informed criticism or informed praise from whatever provenance

Provenance kind of matters though because we can't work out all the details of every piece of information and have to put a bit of trust in the source. A way I like it to cite a source with the opposite bias of what you're trying to say. If even the opponents of the general idea agree with some part of it, that's stronger support than it's supporters agreeing.

I very much agree with your comment on an individual level (that of the individual judging the merit of information and opinion they are being presented with). I certainly take provenance into account.

However, I was talking about HN the site. I don't think news websites should (generally) discriminate against sources but the individual readers can (collectively, as with the case of HN and voting) make a judgement call and take provenance into account, including the example you give where an unlikely source makes concessions or gives validity to an argument that they would be usually opposed to.

But the main reason I raised provenance is that the internet has given small individual voices the chance to bring informed insight to the public that previously would have been without a platform. So in this particular case I don't necessarily discount some rando on Youtube making criticisms of SpaceX; they might hold at least some validity. (In this case they obviously didn't.)