Starship Integrated Flight Test 2 at 7 Am Central Time

Post by pantalaimon » Sat, Nov 18, 2023, 5:54 PM UTC

kortex wrote: post #277

travisgriggs wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Small correction, I think. The booster appeared to survive hot staging fine. It went through quite a bit of it's flip back maneuver. It was awesome to watch. There were some interesting activations of engines in the booster engine ring at that point. It's unclear to me if that was anticipated as an offset subset was what was desired for the off axis maneuver, or things were degrading at that point. And then it blowed…

Watching the replay, it looks like some of the engines failed to light during boostback reignition. Then, either total flameout occurred, or AFTS started cutting fuel in preparation for termination (maybe there are settings for "terminate right tf now" and "try to shut down engines before popping off", idk just speculating). Either way, it looks like the start of boostback was not quite norminal, and AFTS decided tha…

Post by hparadiz » Sat, Nov 18, 2023, 5:58 PM UTC

x86x87 wrote: post #358

ceejayoz wrote: post #346

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 gov…

Post by electriclove » Sat, Nov 18, 2023, 5:59 PM UTC

HarHarVeryFunny wrote: post #301

panick21_ wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Post by pantalaimon » Sat, Nov 18, 2023, 6:04 PM UTC

troupe wrote: post #374

midasuni wrote: post #339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Absolute numbers don’t really mean much. More than 14 people have died since this test flight on American roads. Shuttle death rate was about 1 in 75, which is insanely high.

How does that compare with other rocket systems?

Post by candiddevmike » Sat, Nov 18, 2023, 6:08 PM UTC

dotancohen wrote: post #296

ceejayoz wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The real question here is what happens with a crewed second stage that has a problem with its engines/fuel. We’ve yet to see designs for the crewed interior beyond very conceptual stuff. Maybe something like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Escape_crew_capsule for launch abort.

This same question was asked in the early years of commercial aviation. In the end, the industry (mostly) settled on aircraft designs that could passively glide reasonably well enough to land (sometimes). But some aircraft, e.g. military jets and Cirrus, came up with different answers (parachutes for the crew and for the whole aircraft, mostly). We'll see how the commercial spacecraft industry deals with this, but I…