271–280 of 559 posts
There's a direct media stream that VLC can open (with network stream): https://prod-ec-us-west-2.video.pscp.tv/Transcoding/v1/hls/O... ---- Much better quality, slightly better latency. Seems like it comes from the Periscope transcoding infrastructure. Found it on reddit here: https://old.reddit.com/r/spacex/comments/17uyblj/rspacex_int...
Thanks! Watching with mpv.
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If people had more humanity, they would be focusing on getting universal healthcare housing, and a non-punitive justice system before we focus things like putting a few humans on a rock in space. Why is it that the most difficult things to do are the most caring things?
https://news.lettersofnote.com/p/why-explore-space
That letter was written over 50 years ago, and we still have homelessness. We still have poverty, people are still starving, we still have idiotic, ideological wars, and separation of wealth. So when’s the return on the investment going to actually happen?
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To be fair, Apollo also had government funding to the tune of approximately 2.5% of GDP. Starship would probably go a bit faster too with an annual budget of half a trillion.
I suspect Starship would also go a lot faster with the weight of the President directly behind it, helping to remove those pesky regulatory issues :)
When the government decided to build Kennedy Space Center in Florida wilderness, they just did. No lengthy environmental impact assessment process in the way.
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Surely the final Starship carrying passengers will not have auto flight termination?
Imagine explaining to the court that the passengers were blown up by your AI algorithm... I expect these things are only on test flights indeed.
Autonomous flight termination systems are not "AI". It uses an on-board GPS and INS to figure out where the rocket is. It applies a pre-defined set of rules to the state vector and if any one of the rules fail it terminates the flight. You can read more about them here: https://www.gps.gov/cgsic/meetings/2019/valencia.pdf
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> I wish we had the spirit of the Apollo Careful what you wish for. The Saturn test program peaked at 3 tests / year (unless you want to count the separately tested launch escape system for the crew capsule), and the fully stacked Saturn V was only tested twice (in 1967 and 1968) before crewed missions. For all its speed, Apollo was not a SpaceX-style rapid iteration program. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Apo…
Tortoise and hare, perhaps. Starship development started in 2012, and now 11 years later has had 2nd launch and failure to reach orbit. Apollo program started in 1961 and had men on the moon in 1969 - with 60's tech.
SpaceX simply didn't have the resource to fully invest in Starship until much later. Even by the early presentations around 2016 it was a tiny part of SpaceX and was prototyping with limited resources. Real ramp up of spending happened significantly later.
Your understanding of Apollo is also flawed. The F-1 engine started development as early as 1955, not 1961. So if anything your 2012 date would be more like 1955.
Starship is also twice as powerful as Saturn V and designed to be reusable in both stages. That's a significantly harder task. Had SpaceX just wanted to match Saturn V, that would have been significantly easier.
- Starship got just below orbit - Booster destroyed during hot staging - SpaceX reporting that destruct system fired on upper stage towards end of burn all in all a pretty good result: clean launch and separation, good performance on the booster during ascent (no engine mishaps this time)
Small correction, I think. The booster appeared to survive hot staging fine. It went through quite a bit of it's flip back maneuver. It was awesome to watch. There were some interesting activations of engines in the booster engine ring at that point. It's unclear to me if that was anticipated as an offset subset was what was desired for the off axis maneuver, or things were degrading at that point. And then it blowed…
Either way, it looks like the start of boostback was not quite norminal, and AFTS decided that wasn't close enough to the flight envelope and decided to exit status 1.
Some are speculating that the flip maneuver sloshed the fuel too much and resulted in vapor ingestion and/or complete fuel starvation. The fact the failures are clustered on the side the fuel would slosh away from adds weight to this idea.
Even Thunderfoot was impressed: https://www.youtube.com/live/BLlctxJnxy8?si=4NOk13foG-cIPbQL...
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> I wish we had the spirit of the Apollo Careful what you wish for. The Saturn test program peaked at 3 tests / year (unless you want to count the separately tested launch escape system for the crew capsule), and the fully stacked Saturn V was only tested twice (in 1967 and 1968) before crewed missions. For all its speed, Apollo was not a SpaceX-style rapid iteration program. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Apo…
Tortoise and hare, perhaps. Starship development started in 2012, and now 11 years later has had 2nd launch and failure to reach orbit. Apollo program started in 1961 and had men on the moon in 1969 - with 60's tech.
I have loved watching space x launches for years. And here I am, scrolling around on my phone and I can’t for the life of me find a stream that opens- this is just so sad