381–390 of 559 posts
A picture of the flight path https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi... (taken from this website: https://sattrackcam.blogspot.com/2023/11/new-starship-launch... ) ____ In animation form: https://twitter.com/spencertetik/status/1725769578544803975
So they are trying a boostback. Are they going to try to land it or? NVM they said they were just going to let it splash.
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As I understand it, on crewed flights of the Falcon 9 the AFTS is somehow integrated with the abort system so that it is impossible for it to detonate without the capsule having a few seconds to get to safety first. I don't see how this would work for Starship, since it won't have an abort system.
Couldn’t Starship detach and fire its engines to get away from the booster? Of course I guess if they are not hypergolic there is startup time.
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The industry laughed it up as Falcon 9 failed landing repeatedly. ( https://youtu.be/bvim4rsNHkQ ) Then they shifted to “ok but do it 10x”. They aren’t laughing now. They’ve lost as many Starships as NASA lost Space Shuttles so far, with no deaths. It’s a test program for now. Ask the “rest of the industry” about how Boeing’s Starliner is going. That’s what failure looks like.
This is not about laughing or not. This is about if it was objectfully a successful test or not. If you want to take the stance that any test is a success that's fine but remember this depends on what your definition of success is. The other thing to keep in mind is that past success is not always a good predictor of future success.
It was a resounding success.
- Starship got just below orbit - Booster destroyed during hot staging - SpaceX reporting that destruct system fired on upper stage towards end of burn all in all a pretty good result: clean launch and separation, good performance on the booster during ascent (no engine mishaps this time)
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Yes, this is my point. It’s marketing. I was taught not to wallow in my failures, but not to celebrate them either when I’m trying to reach a larger goal. There’s no success in failure, that’s an oxymoron,. You can learn things from failure, but it’s not a success never.
Of course there’s success in failure. If you need 10 things to work right, and you can't verify all 10 things at once (because they need to happen in sequence), but you make it step by step, then it's a success. If you can verify not one but multiple things in a single test, that'd be a big success. If all 10 things work then it's a total success. And if you can repeat the test 10 times, then you have a home run, esp…
“I don't know why you're celebrating their failure to stay standing.”
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I suspect Starship would also go a lot faster with the weight of the President directly behind it, helping to remove those pesky regulatory issues :)
Start of the Apollo program literally precedes the Clean Air Act, establishment of EPA etc. When the government decided to build Kennedy Space Center in Florida wilderness, they just did. No lengthy environmental impact assessment process in the way.
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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.
You have to define upfront what you want to get from a test. After that you go back and see if what you got is what you expected. Optimistic/Pessimistic does not really matter. By this criteria, I would say failure/partial failure or partial sucess. There is no way this was a success. Also, everyone can call this what they want. The thing that grinds my gears is not respecting that other people do have a different op…
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I'm sorry, what's that, something about failure? I can't hear you over the thunderous roar of cheers from the Spacex engineering team after stage separation. https://youtu.be/w9OsSN2kJrk?si=FZ30c9jmkMOmYo3n&t=180 Certainly doesn't sound like the folks who built the thing thought it was a failure.
Are the folks that build it the most objective observers? You can call a duck an eagle all day long but that does not make it an eagle.
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To expand on KennyBlanken's answer: Rockets generally want their fuel to be sitting on the bottom of the tank, where the engines are. That's easy enough when the rocket is sitting on the ground and when the engines are firing, but once the rocket starts coasting/decelerating (e.g., when the engines turn off due to reaching the end of their burn) the fuel may drift away from the fuel intakes, resulting in the engines…
Given how successful our Saturn package was, it seems curious to me that we wouldn’t just follow the ullage motor method.
A reusable approach would involve some form of gas thruster, so might as well just try hot staging.
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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.
How did Space Shuttle approach this problem?