301–310 of 1001 posts
That was crazy, 50% of me thought as it was coming in, especially as it pitched towards the tower, "they've overcompensated and are going to bring the whole tower down" but they absolutely nailed it.
At this point I am finding it hard to hate Elon Musk. For everything he does that has annoyed me (like Gloating at people being bombed in the middle east) — his business acumen has completely unlocked for people what they we thought was impossible.
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What is the object beside the rocket at 37:49 to 38:02 ? Is that debris ? It seems to be falling with, then away from the rocket. (it looks like a small glowing ring to the right)
It’s the hot staging spacing ring. They didn’t call it on the feed but it is an expendable part that ejects after separation.
Can I hijack this thread for an almost completely unrelated question that I have observed in nearly every simulation of movement in space, even from sources like NASA and SpaceX which “should know better”? And I’m mostly asking this out of scientific curiosity, not as a criticism. Why do they always portray movement in space by showing stars moving past the view at variable rates, or even at all? The opening screen o…
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I'd imagine a combination of inertial and GPS, combined with a Kalman filter. Inertial handles short term estimation; GPS correcting drift in the inertial system. But they could roll in other information sources at the end.
For the centimeterish precision needed to hover into the chopsticks, they also have the opportunity to use signals from the tower area for final alignment. I'm thinking riding a beam like aviation ILS. Just speculating but it would be easy to implement. Optical/camera alignment is probably out of the question due to fire and smoke.
Also, I doubt centimeter scale precision would be needed; the arms have some compliance in them, I'm sure, as well as the ability to control how far in they swing.
What does Starship reusability mean for $/kg to LEO? I know there are longer term targets of $10/kg but that supposes efficiencies that aren’t here yet. Would be helpful to understand before Starship reusability where the state of the art was in terms of $/kg to LEO and where we would be with impending Starship reusability.
I don't think we have a number for it yet. But it will definitely be the cheapest launch system at the time of launch. People say 200$/kg just with booster reuse, and 20$/kg with full reuse. Of course this might be too optimistic, but I truly believe we might reach under 50$ in this decade.
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MIMO and nonlinear control theories are probably some of the hardest topics in all of engineering. SpaceX control system also has to compensate for the fuel moving inside their rockets so the control algorithms probably involve some kind of fast numerical fluid simulation. Another interesting thing SpaceX is doing is to use consumer-grade chips in triple redundancy configurations instead of using $100,000+ radiation-…
Reminds me of the early days of Google File System. They used trios of regular consumer grade disks/servers etc as a cluster and it looked like a single node. They had to replace a LOT of hardware but this was still cheaper than big iron industrial grades servers.
Can I hijack this thread for an almost completely unrelated question that I have observed in nearly every simulation of movement in space, even from sources like NASA and SpaceX which “should know better”? And I’m mostly asking this out of scientific curiosity, not as a criticism. Why do they always portray movement in space by showing stars moving past the view at variable rates, or even at all? The opening screen o…
That said, “the expanse” is an exception here - they make it look as realistic as possible, including the battles where ships don’t even see each other. Stars barely move on it too