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Starship Integrated Flight Test 2 at 7 Am Central Time

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

#461

Post by grecy »

x86x87 wrote: post #340
kortex wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Are the folks that build it the most objective observers?

Even the Administrator of NASA is happy with the progress. [1]

Objectively, it was a success.

[1] https://twitter.com/SenBillNelson/status/1725875275769028836

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

#462

Post by ben_bai »

refulgentis wrote: post #394
ironyman wrote: post #89

- 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)

Interesting re: good result...I've sort of lost track because the program's timeline has been extended several times: what sort of results are they shooting for?

Gathering data and making orbit. Plan was to return the booster near the launchsite and make a water splash down. The ship should make a single suborbital flight with orbit velocity to simulate reentry and should have splashed down near hawaii.

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

#463

Post by ben_bai »

mjamesaustin wrote: post #317
dotnet00 wrote: post #106

Really surprised by how the Raptors performed! Genuinely didn't expect that they'd have them all lighting up properly already.

Yeah this is a huge positive. Perfect performance of all 33 engines, up until the boost back anyway.

I think the engines worked perfectly. The booster broke up in the middle, at least it looks like it on the everyday astronaut feed.

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

#464

Post by panick21_ »

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.

Nobody said it was 'shabby'.

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

#465

Post by tomaskafka »

candiddevmike wrote: post #379
dotancohen wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Wonder if we'll ever have commercial aircrafts with whole aircraft parachutes.

https://brsaerospace.com/cessna/

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

#466

Post by krisoft »

ben_w wrote: post #327
krisoft wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

GOFAI is still AI in my books. *old man shouts at The Cloud*

Okay, but then I assume you also call AI the model predictive controller flying and landing the rocket too?

An other question if you don’t mind: Did you ever used software which was not AI in your view?

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

#467

Post by jiggawatts »

cryptonector wrote: post #356
ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Lip-service to safety versus actual safety that looks unsafe.

I deal with bureaucracies a lot and this is how they do everything: it has to look good, but they don’t actually care to make things good.

E.g.: fill out a ton of paperwork about how secure the web application is against hacking, but nobody reviews the source code for vulnerabilities. Or they fill out the paperwork and report the app as “secure” even when third parties like me are listing vulnerability after vulnerability.

The report is what mattered, not reality.

OFFICIALLY, on paper, the Shuttle was very safe.

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

#468

Post by mathgeek »

jholman wrote: post #427
FeepingCreature wrote: post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wiki says Raptor development started in 2009-2012 with no predecessor, with first test firing in 2016.

Since this is a thread about pedantry (rocketry pedantry), I'll allow myself to be pedantic about words. "A wiki" is a type of software. But when you use "Wiki" as a proper noun, referring to one specific instance, that's the name of Ward's Wiki, the original wiki, also known as wikiwikiweb, available at wiki.c2.com . I'm guessing that you were not citing Ward's Wiki, but were rather citing some other site, in partic…

You should note the banner at the top of your reference:

> This is a humorous essay. It contains the advice or opinions of one or more Wikipedia contributors and is made to be humorous. This page is not one of Wikipedia's policies or guidelines, as it has not been thoroughly vetted by the community. Some essays represent widespread norms; others only represent minority viewpoints. This essay isn't meant to be taken seriously.

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

#469

Post by leoc »

panick21_ wrote: post #276
HarHarVeryFunny wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tortoise and hare, perhaps. Starship development started in 2012, and now 11 years later has had 2nd launch and failure to reach orbit. Apollo program started in 1961 and had men on the moon in 1969 - with 60's tech.

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…

It also seems that Saturn V's performance wasn't flawless, even on crewed missions (though some of the problems were down to external factors like lightning or debris from Skylab): https://www.wired.com/2012/03/great-balls-of-fire-apollo-roc... .

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

#470

Post by frederikvs »

refulgentis wrote: post #394
ironyman wrote: post #89

- 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)

Interesting re: good result...I've sort of lost track because the program's timeline has been extended several times: what sort of results are they shooting for?

I believe the primary goal was stage separation. Secondary goals were for the booster to make a controlled splashdown, and Starship to make almost a complete orbit, before splashing down near Hawaii.

So they achieved the primary goal, which is a good result.

It could even be argued that they got pretty close to one of the secondary goals. Starship was fairly close to shutting off its engines. If it would have completed that part of the flight, the next hour or so it would just be coasting. Physics alone would guarantee they'd end up near Hawaii.

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