Starship Integrated Flight Test 2 at 7 Am Central Time • Hacker News Board

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

#351

Post by ben_w » Sat, Nov 18, 2023, 5:16 PM UTC

Thorrez wrote: post #124

olig15 wrote: 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.

Which is worse: having to send SIGKILL, or a OS bug causing your app to perform potentially dangerous undefined behaviour for 30 seconds after being sent SIGKILL?

First launch had something analogous to latter, this launch had two counts analogous to the former.

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

#352

Post by sroussey » Sat, Nov 18, 2023, 5:17 PM UTC

krisoft wrote: post #275

t0mas88 wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Imagine explaining to the court that the passengers were blown up by your AI algorithm... 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

Hopefully no GPS jammers nearby.

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

#353

Post by dist-epoch » Sat, Nov 18, 2023, 5:19 PM UTC

dotancohen wrote: post #302

dist-epoch wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Normally I wouldn't do this, but since you were downvoted without explanation:

https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=be%20like

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

#354

Post by DarmokJalad1701 » Sat, Nov 18, 2023, 5:20 PM UTC

Podgajski wrote: post #272

DarmokJalad1701 wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://news.lettersofnote.com/p/why-explore-space

“Why everyone needs a vacuum”written by a vacuum cleaner salesman. 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?

> So when’s the return on the investment going to actually happen?

It already did many times over what it cost. And continues to deliver.

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

#355

Post by BurningFrog » Sat, Nov 18, 2023, 5:20 PM UTC

ByThyGrace wrote: post #227

cdash wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just want to add another comment in here that there is no manual termination, they are using a fully automatic flight termination system.

Surely the final Starship carrying passengers will not have auto flight termination?

If you pay the Non AFT Fee, yes.

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

#356

Post by cryptonector » Sat, Nov 18, 2023, 5:21 PM UTC

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #176

kaiwen1 wrote: post #160

It’s astounding that until very recently it was standard practice to put humans on top of untested, first-of-kind rockets.

Well, to be fair, NASA is much more risk-averse than SpaceX. That’s why everything takes so much longer, the “classic” way. But the way SpaceX does things, gets seriously good results, quite quickly (and gives us some great videos of stuff getting blowed up).

I think it's the other way around. NASA flew the shuttle 135 times and lost two of them, but they kept going after the first failure. And both failures followed NASA being advised of the root cause before the orbiters' destruction, and NASA management ignored the advice. Meanwhile the safety track record for Falcon 9 exceeds that of the shuttle, and it exceeded it before humans were put on top of Falcon 9. The Apollo program did very few launches and yet they put humans on top of it. No, I think what you might say is that NASA in the 60s cared a lot less about safety than SpaceX do today, though perhaps NASA today cares a lot more about safety than NASA 20 years ago (and definitely than 60 years ago).

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

#357

Post by avmich » Sat, Nov 18, 2023, 5:22 PM UTC

x86x87 wrote: post #336

honeybadger1 wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Naysayers offer a problem for every solution, can't stand these types. This is an enormous achievement for SpaceX.

Move fast and break things, amiright?

Quite reasonable incremental testing program.

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

#358

Post by x86x87 » Sat, Nov 18, 2023, 5:24 PM UTC

ceejayoz wrote: post #346

x86x87 wrote: post #336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Move fast and break things, amiright?

It's good enough for NASA. https://www.nasa.gov/centers-and-facilities/white-sands/dest... We've crashed production probes into Mars, we've burned astronauts alive, we've had the supposedly "safe" options like Boeing's Starliner have fundamental problems even making it to orbit. Space has always been this way. Starship's more akin to taking the Bell X-1 up for a spin than flying a 787 around, for the time being. Prob…

This is a false dichotomy.

On one side we are talking about how the "space industry" is most moving slowly and how spacex is doing great things.

On the other side we are saying that this is good enough for nasa (who is the establishment when it comes to space) and yolo bro.

On one side we are defending nasa because priorities, but on the other side we're cheering on spacex who is ultimately sucking at the big fat government tit.

i'm not sure anyone is aiming at burning people alive and just because it happened does not make it a justification moving forward.

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

#359

Post by lutorm » Sat, Nov 18, 2023, 5:26 PM UTC

x86x87 wrote: post #338

imetatroll wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The way you dismiss SpaceX's accomplishments is just hilarious. As if you are some "insider" in the space industry. ROLF. SpaceX is awesome and inspiring in what it is doing.

Are we reading the same comment? I don't see any dismissal of previous accomplishments. Why is calling this failure a failure bad? You need failures to learn and hopefully be successful eventually.

Do you mean this was a launch failure or a test failure? It was obviously a launch failure, but even the most optimistic wouldn't have expected anything else. As for whether the test was a failure: since it successfully did a bunch of things that didn't work the last time, why would you say it's a failure?

A failure would have been scattering the pad all over again, and not getting to stage sep. Or worse.

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

#360

Post by sbuttgereit » Sat, Nov 18, 2023, 5:27 PM UTC

fallingknife wrote: post #307

HarHarVeryFunny wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

More like it's better with little-noticed science programs which can get by with a minimal amount of politics involved... which to be fair includes the details of deep space missions. Big, flagship projects which attract more attention are where things fall to crap for the most part.