351–360 of 899 posts
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How do they recover the booster? It doesn't sink to the bottom of the sea?
They are not recovering it this time. Once they demonstrate that it can achieve a controlled "landing" at sea, then they will move on to trying to land it back at the launch site.
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The vision is that the cost per unit of mass to orbit will come down massively with Starship, once it's launching like the Falcon. That will open up hitherto unimaginable missions and markets. And customers. It's all about the the cost!
Like? What industry really needs things floating in space that are only constrained by cost to launch? I can see lots of science mission perhaps, but even that seems somewhat limited.
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My grandfather recalls (what he later found out to be) a rocket landing in London's east end during his youth. There were quite a lot of them at the time.
"Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down? That's not my department" says Wernher von Braun. - Tom Lehrer. https://genius.com/Tom-lehrer-wernher-von-braun-lyrics
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The vision is that the cost per unit of mass to orbit will come down massively with Starship, once it's launching like the Falcon. That will open up hitherto unimaginable missions and markets. And customers. It's all about the the cost!
Like? What industry really needs things floating in space that are only constrained by cost to launch? I can see lots of science mission perhaps, but even that seems somewhat limited.
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I understand the atmosphere is used to slow the vehicle - it's basically free brakes that you don't have to carry with you. I never suggested using rockets in reverse to slow the vehicle down. What I am asking is, instead of effectively standing on the breaks and generating enormous amounts of friction in a short period of time, why can't the vehicle ease onto the breaks and spread the friction out over time so it ca…
See lift to drag ratio. To get enough lift to maintain altitude you need a certain amount of drag. At those speeds the drag causes the heating while still not producing enough lift to stay up.
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Do we have Navy assets nearby to destroy it, or is it just going to bob around in the Indian ocean? Or will we trigger the abort system now?
I believe they said they would trigger the abort on splashdown.
I am one of the people skeptical about Elon’s specific claims of Starships abilities specifically about his Mars ambitions. Today’s test, if the Starship reentry is as successful as the booster soft landing will be absolutely a great achievement and a 100% mission success. This demonstration keeps SpaceX on schedule for their part of the Artemis 3 mission. Keeping the mission parameters simpler (no “refueuling” or do…
Anything Mars is pure BS. Just anything and everything. The one way trip to mars is orders of magnitude more complicated than moon. Keeping people from being riddled with cancer in 6months trip is not trivial. Landing and then what you plan a flag and die?
What the hell, half melted starship actually did the landing flip and hit the ocean slow!!! That was amazing!
Can someone explain why reentry must be so hellish? The energy gained during the rocket burn into orbit must be bled off during reentry, and that energy is enormous. However, why must reentry occur so quickly? It seems if the descent into the atmosphere was slower, the heat shield would be able to radiate the heat energy away more effectively, thus lowering skin temperatures, and significantly reducing the engineerin…
That doesn't mean that it's impossible, just means that it'd require things that don't exist yet.
Worth mentioning that, additionally, reentry heating isn't a huge problem, and you're not going to create new propulsion tech to counter it, you're just going to make better heat tiles. What you need new propulsion tech for is doing expanse type stuff, where you can accelerate for months at 1G so you essentially have artificial gravity and can get places extremely fast. If you're into sci-fi, the show/books "The Expanse" goes into what that looks like in practice fairly well.
The rate of descent is absolutely astonishing, 8km -> 1km in 20 seconds, then just hovers above the water. Absolutely incredible work by the SpaceX team. Living in central Florida I cannot wait for the new launch facility to come online. We're going to have lines of spectators into the space coast like we did for the shuttle. If any of you are heading to Disney World you should stop by the NASA Kennedy Visitor Comple…
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Exactly. Everyone was worried about reentry, but perhaps more concerning than the question of whether the headshield tiles work was the question how well the material below can handle failures. Now we know significant failures of tiles do not have to lead to mission loss.
Failure of the tanks would undoubtedly have been catastrophic. Partial failure of a flight control surface proved survivable.
They're gathering a ton of data to make it robust! Many of these engineers built Falcon 9, and I have a pretty high degree of confidence they'll shake out the issues. SpaceX operates very differently from traditional aerospace, so we'll likely see many more issues come up before Starship is human rated.