Video of the catch > Mechazilla has caught the Super Heavy booster! https://x.com/spacex/status/1845442658397049011
Naive question: I obviously expect there to be flames from the engines, but there were flames on the lower sides for quite a while after the catch – is that expected?
It looked to me like the fire was on the fuel intake valves and if you watch carefully that area was scoured by the nozzle output when it was first slowing down so it probably blew through the shutoff valves or something
When Musk first proposed this, I thought he was crazy. It seemed like something a school boy would draw up. Now I think this will become routine and forgettable after a few more successes. Is there a word for that - something out of fiction becoming mundane?
I thought it was plausible given the accuracy of F9 landings, though I still wonder how it will work at scale if one failure destroys the landing site. That could ruin the cost benefits. Where his vision hit a lot of speed bumps is second stage reusability. Starship is a beautiful second stage to throw in the ocean. They’ll probably get it landing but the heat tiles will require a lot of refurbishment between flights…
I really don’t think it will ruin the cost benefit as much as you suggest, especially when they have multiple sites and multiple locations. It wound be catastrophic, but they are presumably building Tower like the rest of their hardware, and every time they launch it represents a $100M saving compared to the competition.
Very inspiring, glad I woke up to watch it. Congratulations to the SpaceX team. This is what competition looks like. It’s funny how last decade SpaceX had to sue the government to get more launches.
The FAA needs more funding at this point. They're not staffed for the rate of launch requests which commercial space has grown too.
Why don't they mount moving video cameras? I mean, the second part of the fly is pretty boring. They shows us a view from 2 static cameras. Is it so difficult to make one camera moving? With 360 degrees view. Show us the shape of the earth the full circle, show us the moon. Is it so hard?
The FAA needs more funding at this point. They're not staffed for the rate of launch requests which commercial space has grown too.
Need to remove regulations instead and fast track SpaceX. Every fucking time we don't need to increase the size of the Government. It only gets bigger. Never smaller.
Isn’t this exactly what happened with Boeing, where the FAA delegated its authority, on the assumption that Boeing knew what it was doing?
My wife asked "Why is this a big deal?", so I gave her a link to Handmer's 2021 explanation: https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2021/10/28/starship-is-st... She's not an enthusiast; she's got an impression from SciFi that going to mars shouldn't be that hard.
Well I mean going to Mars isn't that hard per se, a fair few countries have done it... but carrying enough supplies and shielding to last people 2 years until the return trip and then actually getting back are way harder problems.
Seeing Starship get burnthrough on these suborbital launches really shows how hard it'll be to do Mars return entry with a fair few extra km/s.
Nothing could have prepared me for how that catch looked. I was sure the rocket was careening into the tower at the last second before it straightened out. The control algorithms must be incredible for the landing system to work within those small tolerances.
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-…
Just as a note, Space Engineers has a mod that accounts for fuel in the tanks and also various orbital mods. If one feels inclined to try it for themselves ;)
Watched several times, amazing stuff. Had flashbacks to playing Jupiter Landing on the C64! https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jupiter_Lander Edit: SpaceX should create a simple 'catch' the rocket game. Play in browser style. Just for kicks and marketing.
Shameless plug for my own project with a similar bent - write your own lunar lander autopilot in browser lunar.unnecessarymodification.com
so now managed to save 63% fuel, but score doesn't seem to take this into account (still 51)..
Improvements that make space flight more sustainable are welcome ... unless that means an order of magnitude more pollution in a less controllable form, like emissions. [Due to more frequent flights] Daily trips to space likely also mean more debris in space and falling to earth. I hope there is a balance that includes the lives of people near these sites and all of us sharing the same atmosphere.