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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

#261

Post by m4rtink »

potato3732842 wrote: post #197
foobarian wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Also add pressure management, warping of the dispenser and ship hull & thermal expansion.

And fornlong duration missions also lubricant evaporation, possibility of vacuum welding & atomic oxygen reactions if you spend long in low Earth orbit. :)

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

#262

Post by slipperydippery »

stetrain wrote: post #239
slipperydippery wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IIRC, the expected return payload for this is lighter than Apollo. In no small part because they're dropping all their return fuel and their entire return vehicle into the Moon's gravity well, rather than leaving it in orbit. Subjecting themselves to extra abuse from the good ol' rocket equation. One of many wacked-out things about the plan.

The vehicle that returns to Earth is Orion which stays in NRHO and does not bring its fuel to the lunar surface. Return payload constraints are probably from using Orion as the return vehicle. Mass to the surface is much higher than Apollo since that is launched separate from the crew.

I thought the return vehicle was a to-be-developed direct-return vehicle from both SpaceX and Blue Origin (both got contracts, and supposedly both's versions will fly)?

[EDIT] Apparently there are multiple plans involving even more spacecraft, because why not I guess? It's as you describe for Artemis III, but then gets way more complicated with Artemis IV, involving more spacecraft for some reason.

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

#263

Post by GMoromisato »

hiddencost wrote: post #237
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…

Why do people talk about data centers in space? Heat management is wayyy harder in space.

Lots of things are harder in space; maybe even everything. But it has some benefits, like abundant solar power, lots of room, and line-of-sight to large chunks of Earth.

Almost all the problems can be solved by cheaper access to space, whereas the benefits cannot be easily recreated on Earth.

Is it guaranteed to work? My point is that we don't know, despite confident assertions one way or the other. If it does work, the benefits are clear, and that's why it's worth trying.

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

#264

Post by GMoromisato »

WalterBright wrote: post #257
GMoromisato wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Great point! There were many reusable projects in that era, but Apollo budgets consumed everything else. I still think Shuttle could have worked, if it had been cheaper to evolve it. Elon's focus on Starship is to make each iteration as cheap as possible, which means they can radically evolve the design without fear. Think of the (recent) switch to hot-staging or the evolution of Raptor. If Shuttle had been able to e…

> I still think Shuttle could have worked, if it had been cheaper to evolve it. I doubt it. It's a gigantic kludge that isn't fixable. For example, the requirement that it land like an airplane meant it needed wings, landing gear, and a full set of flight control surfaces. None of that is useful apart from the landing, and yet it is necessary to push it all into space and re-enter it. I once emailed Homer Hickam abou…

Fair enough!

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

#265

Post by fluoridation »

DarmokJalad1701 wrote: post #220
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'…

> We didn't get to the moon with a refuelling station did we? No. We did it by throwing away ~98% of the vehicle on the way there. > How come we need one now? Because building a new gargantuan tower and tossing that majority of it into the ocean/deep space every time we need to go the moon is not sustainable. > We're really seeing 15 starship launches per moon trip as reasonable, rather than just building a single tr…

>The alternative (dictated by physics) is that we expend the whole thing.

We can also, you know, not. We could put that money to something here on Earth instead of burning it up.

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

#266

Post by GMoromisato »

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…

I'm rooting for SpaceX to succeed, and there are plenty of people like me.

This is not to condemn or argue with anyone who feels differently. But I think we need to be more visible.

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

#267

Post by btilly »

WalterBright wrote: post #257
GMoromisato wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Great point! There were many reusable projects in that era, but Apollo budgets consumed everything else. I still think Shuttle could have worked, if it had been cheaper to evolve it. Elon's focus on Starship is to make each iteration as cheap as possible, which means they can radically evolve the design without fear. Think of the (recent) switch to hot-staging or the evolution of Raptor. If Shuttle had been able to e…

> I still think Shuttle could have worked, if it had been cheaper to evolve it. I doubt it. It's a gigantic kludge that isn't fixable. For example, the requirement that it land like an airplane meant it needed wings, landing gear, and a full set of flight control surfaces. None of that is useful apart from the landing, and yet it is necessary to push it all into space and re-enter it. I once emailed Homer Hickam abou…

The shuttle is the only rocket system that put part of the rocket above the payload. Were it not for that fatal design flaw, both fatal flights would have been survivable. The first because the explosion would have done less damage. The second because there would have been nothing above the shuttle from which something could have fallen.

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

#268

Post by ashishuthama »

patall wrote: post #227
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…

> SpaceX could start lobbing things in his direction within maybe 30 days? If Earth and Mars are on opposite ends of the sun, nobody is going anywhere within 30 days. I do not see how anything will change from the one transfer window per ~2 years for the foreseeable future

'lobbing things' i.e launching things, OP didnt mean it would reach there in 30 days.

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

#269

Post by Ajedi32 »

thesmart wrote: post #148
Aeolun wrote: post #79

And maybe more interesting. How much did it cost them to get this far vs the sls?

You can't really compare them because SLS was a jobs program intended to spread out contracts across many states by reusing suppliers from shuttle programs. Cheap? No. Wasteful? also no. Most of that money went back into those economies.

That's not how it works. If you pay people to dig a giant hole in the ground and then fill it back in, that money "goes back into the economy" but that doesn't mean it's not wasteful.

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

#270

Post by stetrain »

slipperydippery wrote: post #262
stetrain wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The vehicle that returns to Earth is Orion which stays in NRHO and does not bring its fuel to the lunar surface. Return payload constraints are probably from using Orion as the return vehicle. Mass to the surface is much higher than Apollo since that is launched separate from the crew.

I thought the return vehicle was a to-be-developed direct-return vehicle from both SpaceX and Blue Origin (both got contracts, and supposedly both's versions will fly)? [EDIT] Apparently there are multiple plans involving even more spacecraft, because why not I guess? It's as you describe for Artemis III, but then gets way more complicated with Artemis IV, involving more spacecraft for some reason.

As far as I know all of the known Artemis mission profiles only use the lunar lander to shuttle from NRHO (lunar orbit / gateway station location) to the lunar surface and back. All crew return is planned to be done with Orion for now.

NASA has optioned an additional lander from Blue Origin but that would be taking the same role as SpaceX's lander, shuttling from lunar orbit to the surface and back to lunar orbit.

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