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Starship Integrated Flight Test 2 at 7 Am Central Time

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Re: Starship Integrated Flight Test 2 at 7 Am Central Time

#301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Starship didn't really start in a meaningful way in 2012. In 2012 there were at best some vague concepts of a large rocket and some initial concept ideas for Raptor. But at that time for Raptor they were still thinking about Hydrolox. 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 li…

Well, whether you want to call it 8/9 years ('61-'69) or 14 ('55-'69), I don't think NASA looks too shabby landing men on the moon in that time frame without the decades of experience we have to draw on today, and with 1950's/60's technology, and so far no-one else has done it.

Re: Starship Integrated Flight Test 2 at 7 Am Central Time

#302
post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am watching it here: https://www.youtube.com/live/6na40SqzYnU?si=t8iwk8rO3lAtF6wj Everyday Astronaut on youtube.

Their commenting be like: Oh my god! Oh my god! Oh my god! Oh my god! Oh my god!

> Their commenting be like

Their commenting _is_ like.

Otherwise, I agree.

Re: Starship Integrated Flight Test 2 at 7 Am Central Time

#304
post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Im not interpreting their message as negative. Something obviously went wrong, the termination system was activated, and it blew up. Thats what it’s supposed to do when activated.

>Im not interpreting their message as negative. But shouldn't it be interpreted as negative? It blew up.

If your program crashes while you are developing it, is that a failure?

Re: Starship Integrated Flight Test 2 at 7 Am Central Time

#305
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does it requieres a X(exTwitter) account? I'm going to miss it. :(

I am watching without a Xitter account: https://www.spacex.com/launches/mission/?missionId=starship-...

In my head, the X is pronounced “sh”

Re: Starship Integrated Flight Test 2 at 7 Am Central Time

#306
Overall it looked like a good launch. But I think the world ended up with a bunch of space debris at around 150 km above earth, which will eventually come down (hopefully won't land on someone's head, or backyard), since it wasn't travelling at orbital velocity.

Re: Starship Integrated Flight Test 2 at 7 Am Central Time

#307
post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Perhaps, although not obvious that it's cash starved. NASA's slow but meticulous approach has had a few failures, but also incredible successes such as the sky crane martian rover landing - got to get it right first time, tough to move fast and break things when the test environment is 100 million miles away! Edit: Same goes for 1969's lunar lander - had to work first time.

Seems to be great for deep space missions but not launch vehicles.

Re: Starship Integrated Flight Test 2 at 7 Am Central Time

#308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To expand on KennyBlanken's answer: Rockets generally want their fuel to be sitting on the bottom of the tank, where the engines are. That's easy enough when the rocket is sitting on the ground and when the engines are firing, but once the rocket starts coasting/decelerating (e.g., when the engines turn off due to reaching the end of their burn) the fuel may drift away from the fuel intakes, resulting in the engines…

Given how successful our Saturn package was, it seems curious to me that we wouldn’t just follow the ullage motor method.

One needs to put success into perspective. Saturn V only launched a very small amount of times and had some near misses in that time. How successful it would have been if it had flown 100+ times is a question.

Also, If you are not reusable you have much more margin to play with. SpaceX is optimizing this thing to an incredible amount. Liftoff thrust is 2x as much as Saturn V and they are aiming at 3x as much. Total payload to orbit is 2-3x larger while being reusable.

SpaceX could have done what they did on Falcon 9 (200+ successful launches in a row) but Hot-Staging like the Soyuz is also successful.

SpaceX optimizes for long term performance and operational simplicity. Ironically that leads to more Soviet way. The N1 would also have used hot staging.

Re: Starship Integrated Flight Test 2 at 7 Am Central Time

#309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Start of the Apollo program literally precedes the Clean Air Act, establishment of EPA etc. When the government decided to build Kennedy Space Center in Florida wilderness, they just did. No lengthy environmental impact assessment process in the way.

Sure, but most of the (anyways rapid) turnaround time from Starship launch #1 to #2 was rebuilding and deluge system .. can't be more than a month or two max delay attributed to regulations.

The pad rebuild and deluge system install was in parallel with the other work. Give or take, it was complete by the end of July [0]

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GOtw3ucIKng

Re: Starship Integrated Flight Test 2 at 7 Am Central Time

#310
What is the sudden change in the exhaust plume at occurs here [1] at 149km / 17650 kph? I believe that's squarely in the thermosphere, and there aren't any step changes in temperature/pressure at that point that I'm aware of. It would make sense if that were near the mesopause, but that's around 100km.

Maybe it's something on SpaceX's side of things, a change in the burn profile? Perhaps it's related to losing the Starship about a minute later.

[1] https://youtu.be/w9OsSN2kJrk?t=446

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