441–450 of 1001 posts
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.
Do the control algorithms use AI?
The catch somehow absolutely demolished the amazing FH dual landing Holy shit. I almost had a heart attack when it looked like the booster was about to slowly careen into the tower
Same but it looks more dramatic on the feed we all got: on other vids the angle is different and although close it doesn't look it's going to crash into the tower.
Still: feels pretty close.
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> Another interesting thing SpaceX is doing is to use consumer-grade chips in triple redundancy configurations instead of using $100,000+ radiation-hardened aerospace/defense grade chips. This has been known in the high availability and safety systems industry for a while and a good book to learn these reliability engineering techniques is "Reliability Evaluation of Engineering Systems". The book is available on amaz…
One downside of using non-rad hard parts is degradation from TID (gamma) and latch up effects. You can have chips monitoring other chips to reset whenever they latch up but TID is mostly permanent. The good thing is that TID in LEO, where SpaceX mostly operates, is relatively lower than GEO so they can get by with mostly commercial parts. It's not like the big defense contractors haven't figured out the same thing, t…
"Hollman also found that creativity got him a long way. He discovered, for example, that changing the seals on some readily available car wash valves made them good enough to be used with rocket fuel."
"Elon Musk" by Vance pg 123
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> Other companies should have reusable boosters soon You're way too optimistic. Starship will deliver commercial payloads, with SpaceX phasing out Falcon 9 outside of ISS launches, before anyone has a reusable Falcon 9 equivalent. It pains me to say this, but SpaceX is in a class all its own.
The Chinese could have a reusable booster before then. One of their companies is doing 10 km hop tests.
Blue Origin plans to launch New Glenn in a month, with landing planned. They are a wild card.
I'm just so happy to see this level of progress. This another big step for opening up space. To think that one day this will be considered normal. 150 Metric tons sent on a fully reusable rocket. Thats like a 747 to space.
So, reusable is supposed to reduce the cost. But the space shuttle was reusable and it has been shutdown because it was too expensive. What is the differences between the two?
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I'm completely mind-blown that not only can they do this, but we get 1080p video for almost the whole time. What cameras do they have that can look at something 30 KM up in the air that well?
The thing that impresses me even more is the kinds of cameras they mount on the rocket. How do they shield it from all the heat and debris with a material that's optically clear?
Does that mean the landing burn was unsuccessful? Or was that just a glitch in the telemetry?
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Second stage reuse seems the far more challenging problem. Other companies should have reusable boosters soon but if significant amounts of Starship continue to ablate on the way down they could be faced with a disposable Starship competing with smaller and cheaper second stages that are well sized for typical payloads. We already knew boosters can be flown back to launch sites reliably with high accuracy. We don't k…
Didn’t they look at all kinds of ideas earlier like squirting some propellant or water out over the skin on the way down, and wasn’t steel chosen for its thermal robustness? Did they get into the problem and realize it’s a lot harder and abandon those things for tiles? Maybe they will have to sacrifice more payload mass for active or passive shielding or more fuel for powered deceleration. That would yield a less imp…