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Starship is still not understood

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Re: Starship is still not understood

#261

Post by sailingparrot »

jonathankoren wrote: post #236
dflock wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think it's a very big stretch to think that Blue Origin might well sue NASA if they did this.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Everyone that loses a contract sues the government. Blue Origin already sued over losing a moon lander contract that didn't even meet the minimum requirements. Airbus sued the Air Force after losing the KC-X contract. I'm sure there are others, but those are just two that immediately popped into mind. Trying to a void a lawsuit is how you get nonsense like the LCS where the Navy first opened the bids for a…

> Airbus sued the Air Force after losing the KC-X contract

You have it backward. Airbus won the contract initially. Boeing sued and managed to get the bidding process restarted from scratch. Boeing won that second bid and Airbus decided to not protest, probably because they knew they had 0 chance against Boeing lobbying power in the US.

Re: Starship is still not understood

#262

Post by theshadowknows »

himinlomax wrote: post #71
ncallaway wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If we use the same logic, don’t we get a conclusion that we should spend nothing on basic research until we’ve solved world hunger, and every other problem? I agree that we should invest more into safe drinking water (though lead seems like much more of a problem than catching fire). But I don’t think it would be wise to dedicate 100% of our nation’s resources into the problem. Some amount of R&D seems like a worthwh…

> If we use the same logic, don’t we get a conclusion that we should spend nothing on basic research until we’ve solved world hunger, and every other problem? If I were to sum it up less charitably, I'd say that OP is arguing that if he can't walk and chew gum at the same time, humanity can't either.

lol ok little buddy

Re: Starship is still not understood

#263

Post by [deleted] »

JulianMorrison wrote: post #128
ARandumGuy wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Past success does not guarantee future success. And when you're dealing with space travel, which is inherently expensive and extremely dangerous, then you can't afford to buy into any hype.

If they were trying something genuinely new - like falling out of orbit and making a propulsive upright landing of a wingless booster - then some skepticism would be justified. But what's new in Starship?

[deleted]

Re: Starship is still not understood

#264

Post by ceejayoz »

ben_w wrote: post #254
ceejayoz wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think you’re underestimating both the mass of a comet and that the geopolitical implications of a private company being one industrial accident away from replicating something several orders of magnitude closer to Chicxulub than to Tsar Bomba would prevent them being allowed to even try it. Meh, you could regulate it fairly effectively. Changing the path of a comet is something that's gonna have to be done years…

Bet your life? If it was a naïve straight-line path with no funky orbital mechanics to make things even harder to get right, the difference between hitting the Earth at 90° and missing by the orbit of the moon is a sideways delta-v of 13 m/s one year in advance. The sideways Δv between a 45° impact and LEO, 7 days in advance, is 3.5 m/s. I’m curious: Even ignoring engine errors, given near-Earth solar orbital velocit…

> The sideways Δv between a 45° impact and LEO, 7 days in advance, is 3.5 m/s.

In other words, the larger the comet, the better.

You'd need a fairly obvious number of rockets to impart that sort of velocity change on a large one, right? And if you're doing it to a pebble, it doesn't matter too much?

Re: Starship is still not understood

#265

Post by deelowe »

ARandumGuy wrote: post #131
deelowe wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a bit naive to assume heavy industry doesn't already have solutions to most of environmental challenges in space. I'm constantly surprised by how dismissive high tech is of dinosaur industries.

Heavy industry does not specialize in the environmental and logistical challenges of space. You can't just slap in some oil drilling equipment into your rocket and expect it to perform to the degree you need. Every bit of equipment needs extensive testing, and likely extensive modification as well. That's not cheap, and it's often better to just design something purpose built for space, instead of trying to modify so…

Maybe not an entire drilling apparatus but what about the bits? What about bolts and nuts that won't cold weld? Bearings that work in a vacuum? I'm sure there are plenty examples. Going further, what about launch systems? Surely those can mostly be built out of off the shelf parts.

Re: Starship is still not understood

#267

Post by ben_w »

ceejayoz wrote: post #264
ben_w wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bet your life? If it was a naïve straight-line path with no funky orbital mechanics to make things even harder to get right, the difference between hitting the Earth at 90° and missing by the orbit of the moon is a sideways delta-v of 13 m/s one year in advance. The sideways Δv between a 45° impact and LEO, 7 days in advance, is 3.5 m/s. I’m curious: Even ignoring engine errors, given near-Earth solar orbital velocit…

> The sideways Δv between a 45° impact and LEO, 7 days in advance, is 3.5 m/s. In other words, the larger the comet, the better. You'd need a fairly obvious number of rockets to impart that sort of velocity change on a large one, right? And if you're doing it to a pebble, it doesn't matter too much?

> In other words, the larger the comet, the better.

I don’t think so? If you’re bringing in a big one you need more engines to push it into the right orbit to start with, so I think the risk is always things that scale up directly with the comet’s mass, e.g. “the engines are misaligned by $foo degrees”.

Also, a pebble in space terms is still a potential city-killer, and no nation in their right mind is going to want to let a private company — not one of their own, let alone a private company in another nation if they have even the slightest say in the matter — wield that kind of potential: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meteor_Crater

Re: Starship is still not understood

#268

Post by ceejayoz »

ben_w wrote: post #267
ceejayoz wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The sideways Δv between a 45° impact and LEO, 7 days in advance, is 3.5 m/s. In other words, the larger the comet, the better. You'd need a fairly obvious number of rockets to impart that sort of velocity change on a large one, right? And if you're doing it to a pebble, it doesn't matter too much?

> In other words, the larger the comet, the better. I don’t think so? If you’re bringing in a big one you need more engines to push it into the right orbit to start with, so I think the risk is always things that scale up directly with the comet’s mass, e.g. “the engines are misaligned by $foo degrees”. Also, a pebble in space terms is still a potential city-killer, and no nation in their right mind is going to want…

In the "whoops" scenario (i.e. non-malicious), an engine misalignment would be apparent with enough time to correct. You're a year out.

We watch asteroids zing by regularly. The ones we know about have their chances of hitting calculated years or decades out.

Re: Starship is still not understood

#269

Post by dane-pgp »

jonathankoren wrote: post #240
itsoktocry wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think the risk to NASA of assuming the benefits of Starship before it’s proven are just too high. This seems to be a theme of many of Elon Musk's ideas: assume they will work and talk about what a difference it will make. Just look at the media coverage surrounding the Tesla Robot. So, this stuff is cool and I'm glad it's happening, but there's a ton of capability to prove before any sort of external organization…

I think Shotwell keeps Elon away from SpaceX, and that's secret to SpaceX's success compared to Elon's other ventures.

Or maybe SpaceX is more successful because improvements in that industry are easier to achieve and the technology of the competition is relatively primitive. I mean, it's not exactly brain surgery.

Re: Starship is still not understood

#270

Post by kitsunesoba »

giantrobot wrote: post #259
shalmanese wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GP isn't advocating that NASA throw away everything and bet the farm on Starship. They're saying that there needs to institutional acknowledgement that what's possibly coming is a qualitative, not quantitative shift and open up the intellectual space to explore what that means. What happens when launch costs are $10,000/kg, $1000/kg, $100/kg? What things that we're doing still make sense, what doesn't? Who could be a…

Launch costs are not the end-all be-all of space exploration/exploitation. There are a large number of extremely difficult problems to solve beyond just throwing shit into space. 1. None of the current public Starship designs include payload doors. So none of these are in any way useful as launch vehicles for orbital payloads. Payload doors a huge structural weakness and requires a lot of engineering effort. None of…

> SpaceX is likely going to need to construct hundreds of Starships to maintain anywhere close to the promised cadence of launches.

That's always been the plan. Even in the original 2016 presentation featuring the considerably larger Interplanetary Transport System that got scaled down to become what's now known as Starship and Superheavy, the plan was to churn them out en masse to make it possible to make the most of each Earth-Mars transit window.

Starships and all the parts that comprise them are designed to be mass produced and treated as cattle rather than pets.

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