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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

#291

Post by anonymars »

terminalshort wrote: post #228
fluoridation wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Neither will. >It only launched 13 times due to being so expensive as to just not be feasible. "There aren't many uses for such a gigantic rocket. Let's make an even bigger one and hope it works out!"

Actually, "let's build a cheaper one and hope it works out" is the design philosophy here, and it's a very effective one across pretty much all domains. The fact that it's bigger too is mostly incidental to its economic case. You think we would have stopped at Apollo 17 if the same Saturn V was capable of flying Apollo 18 - 30?

Hadn't we already built the Saturn V for Apollo 18, 19, and 20?

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

#292

Post by ls612 »

rozab wrote: post #271
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…

The thing is, there is no demand to get that much stuff into space. Falcon 9 has massively brought down the cost per orbit, and even with the whole world as a captive market, every university in every country putting up cubesats, they still don't have nearly enough payloads to make the economies of scale kick in. Hence Starlink. The majority of SpaceX payload mass has been Starlink, something nobody was even asking f…

Starlink is both a successful commercial service making money hand over fist and a vital strategic asset for the United States. Put simply its one of the most transformative infrastructure projects of the 21st century. SpaceX found a winner and is doubling down on it I don't blame them.

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

#293

Post by inglor_cz »

Fischgericht wrote: post #141
Fischgericht wrote: post #137

[flagged]

[Even worse than someone ranting like this is someone who then on top also self-replies!] "But explosions aren't THAT bad"!! Yeah, it just means that up until now, the chance of any astronaut crew surviving any trip anywhere is 0%. But hey, if some of the next tests don't end in an explosion, this maybe can be improved to 50/50 chance of death. Yeah, astronauts will buy that. After all, people also still buy Telsa's…

"Yeah, it just means that up until now, the chance of any astronaut crew surviving any trip anywhere is 0%. But hey, if some of the next tests don't end in an explosion, this maybe can be improved to 50/50 chance of death. Yeah, astronauts will buy that. After all, people also still buy Telsa's "Full Self Killing"."

Uh, this is very unfair to SpaceX as a whole, which has had 0 fatalities so far on the ground and in the sky, after almost quarter of century of operation. This is a remarkably good record for spaceflight.

Contrast it to the Apollo project, which killed three astronauts even before the first flight (Grissom, White and Chaffee burnt to death during testing on land) and almost killed another three during mission 13.

Contrast it to the space shuttle with its 14 victims, and the first flight of the space shuttle was touch and go as well.

Contrast it to Boeing whose recent Starliner proved so problematic that they did not dare fly the astronauts back to Earth using the same ship and made them wait for a Dragon.

Contrast it to Scaled Composites, which never reached orbit, but three engineers were killed on the ground and one test pilot during a suborbital test flight.

Insinuating that SpaceX is a killing machine is absurd, when you look at their actual safety record and compare it to their competitors.

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

#294

Post by baq »

nilstycho wrote: post #173
jmyeet wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Comparing Falcon 9 to Starship is a dangerous mistake. First, the time frames are way off. Development of the Falcon 9 took ~5 years (2005 to 2010). The first reused booster came much later (2017?). Second, Starship is much more expensive for each launch attempt than Falcon 9 ever was. Third, Starship is significantly more complicated technology-wise, being methane based. There are reasons to do this but it then requ…

> Second, Starship is much more expensive for each launch attempt than Falcon 9 ever was. The launch cost of a Starship today is high, especially if you include development costs, but Musk's goal is a marginal launch cost of ~$1M. A Falcon 9's launch price is ~$70M; Musk claims a "best case" marginal Falcon 9 launch costs ~$15M.

Yeah if those numbers are even in the correct order of magnitude Starlink will become a literal money printer. Any commercial or government launch contracts will be cherries on top. Bezos will be our only hope for affordable satellite internet.

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

#295

Post by WalterBright »

GMoromisato wrote: post #282
btilly wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think @WalterBright is probably right and that the Shuttle design was too compromised to be fixable. Stacking the orbiter on top of the external tank is a non-starter, IMHO. Obviously you'd have to add engines at the bottom, but now your cost goes up unless you plan on recovering the external tank (and how do you do that?). And now you need another fuel tank for the orbiter, right? Do you extend the orbiter so it c…

The Shuttle cannot even fly straight. The engine thrust has to be tilted.

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

#296

Post by WalterBright »

mrguyorama wrote: post #280
WalterBright wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

None of that would have been a serious concern had the shuttle actually met any of it's re-usability claims. It doesn't matter that it costs a bit more in fuel and initial outlay for the orbiter if you actually could turn it around with little effort or cost in a couple weeks. Having to inspect each and every tile after every trip because they basically didn't work like initially designed was the primary failure of t…

That assessment massively underestimates the impact of all that machinery needed to fly it, in terms of design, cost, maintenance, etc. It cannot be wished away.

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

#297

Post by xnx »

yencabulator wrote: post #275
hiddencost wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Simple: VC money. The only thing surprising to me about that is that the pitch wasn't "AI in space". My take: The idea that heavy computing in LEO is better than sending data down to Earth sounds very naive. Starlink is great proof that the bandwidth is plentiful and the latency is good, once the equipment is modern. Definitely cheaper and easier than cooling a datacenter.

> The only thing surprising to me about that is that the pitch wasn't "AI in space".

"enabling the future of AI by deploying the largest training clusters on data centers in space."

https://www.starcloud.com/

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

#298

Post by chermi »

rozab wrote: post #271
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…

The thing is, there is no demand to get that much stuff into space. Falcon 9 has massively brought down the cost per orbit, and even with the whole world as a captive market, every university in every country putting up cubesats, they still don't have nearly enough payloads to make the economies of scale kick in. Hence Starlink. The majority of SpaceX payload mass has been Starlink, something nobody was even asking f…

Haven't the economies of scale already kicked in a little? Starlink is profitable. I'm not sure if spacex minus all starship costs is profitable. I'm pretty sure they're quite good at building them faster, better, and for less now. Please show me otherwise. I guess you could call that more learning curve, but that's a fuzzy line.

I guess overall I don't understand your point. What does it matter that the majority of their payload mass was their own? And nobody asking for something is certainly not the same thing as nobody wanting/needing it. See: cars, computers... Starlink now exists and I'm quite certain people love it and rely on it. Wouldn't exist without falcon 9. Starlink basically solved the last mile problem, surely you'd agree rural folks having access to Internet is a good thing?

They made their own demand for falcon 9, with that scale bringing down costs enough to raise demand for basically every research org needing satellites to contract with SpaceX.

I don't think we can definitively predict the demand either way for payload at $300/kg or whatever without first getting there, but Jevons might have some ideas.

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

#299

Post by Teever »

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…

That's sort of a fallacious argument though because you could say the same thing about every part of a spacecraft that is used only for the return phase of its mission.

It might be more accurate to say that the ratio of mass for re-entry equipment to the entire craft mass is too great.

But with that said I think that the ultimate failure of the shuttle was that the design wasn't amenable to low cost maintenance. A spacecraft could have a crappy payload to orbit as long as it's cheap to maintain and use with quick turnaround.

I have a feeling that should Starship succeed this will be the case with it and it will end up having a substantially lower payload than intended but will make up for it with a design that's cheap to build and maintain.

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

#300

Post by FireBeyond »

jjk166 wrote: post #286
FireBeyond wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The first mars expeditions will probably be stocked with a thousand tons of gear, enough to easily last a guy 5 years. > The Martian is a vision for a 2035 mission from 2011. We seem likely to beat that! What, exactly, is that guy doing for those five years? We don't know how to terraform Mars, and it's questionable what having someone on the surface will add to the knowledge we have of surface composition. And the…

> What, exactly, is that guy doing for those five years? Waiting to be rescued. We're not talking about sending one guy to mars for funsies, we're talking about one person left after an emergency. In the book he gets off mars by going to the launcher staged for the next mission, which again is a case of prepositioning extra hardware before sending someone to the planet. If you assume a team of 5 people with an intend…

> In the book he gets off mars by going to the launcher staged for the next mission, which again is a case of prepositioning extra hardware before sending someone to the planet.

There's a "world" of difference between the Eagle returning to Apollo 11 in low lunar orbit, and prepositioning a interplanetary vehicle capable of Mars-Earth (after getting from Earth to Mars), landing it (and without live feedback/guidance, because of roundtrip radio time, not to mention, this isn't some Rover, it's a really large rocket) well in advance of the manned mission (8 month flight time, IIRC, which means realistically it's going to be hanging out on Mars for a minimum of 6 years, even if you launch the manned mission within a couple of months of its arrival, which seems ... risky) and hoping that one solo astronaut is going to be capable of fixing any issues that arose during landing or during its ~year, untouched, and five years of his habitation.

Martian dust storms are a thing. "Smaller", continent-sized ones lasting weeks at a time, hit a few times a years. And then you have the planet-covering ones.

> Individual dust particles on Mars are very small and slightly electrostatic, so they stick to the surfaces they contact like Styrofoam packing peanuts.

So many issues. We're not solving these by 2035.

We are still at the point where unmanned, tiny craft with none of these challenges routinely fail. We're making progress, but we're not making that much progress, not that quickly.

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