491–500 of 559 posts
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There's no parachuting from 900km/h
There is at least one documented survival at the insane speed of Mach 3: https://theaviationgeekclub.com/bailing-out-at-mach-3-the-in...
http://www.chuckyeager.org/news/sr-71-disintegrated-pilot-fr...
I love the serendipitous detail of what happened on his next flight, though I'm sure it was not so amusing when it happened.
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The "50s tech" was not based around easily reusable systems. It was all based on explosive bolts, solid fueled ullage motors etc. On top of that the fuel was much easier to work with and did not involve needing to be able to handle pressurization and sloshing during flips. It's 50's tech only in the same way that a Ryzen CPU is 70's tech.
Just for a minute, then, let's think like engineers and not Starman Jones. Granted it was a test flight: so what were the objectives of the flight, how man y of them did it achieve, and how many were not? Get beyond calling it a success or failure and talk about what worked and what didn't. > the fuel was much easier to work with This is a technical detail where I hard disagree. The oxidizer was liquid oxygen, so tha…
I understand that having these prototype rockets blow up may be a cost-efficient way of improving the design. However, I still wonder how much of that was really expected, and what it says about the project progress. Also, how many successful launches will they consider enough before putting people's life at risk. I wouldn't feel super confident going into that rocket after having seen it blow up many times.
All of the crazy stuff they're planning, like returning and catching the booster, having the ship re-enter and land/get-caught, in-orbit refuelling, etc. will probably take a while to get right; but those are all "bonus features" that other rockets/companies don't bother with. I imagine it will be launching satellites pretty soon (next year?), at least in-house Starlinks, since refuelling, re-entering, landing, etc. can be done after the payload is safely deployed; and returning/catching the booster only takes place after safe separation (as we saw today, when the ship kept going after the booster's spectacular demise)
It will take a while to human-rate it. I imagine we'll start by seeing crews transferring to Starships that launch uncrewed (e.g. like the HLS for Nasa); eventually we'll probably see crew launch, once it's established a decent track record. I'm unsure if we'll ever see people in the landing flip; I'd rather eject beforehand and parachute down!
Really surprised by how the Raptors performed! Genuinely didn't expect that they'd have them all lighting up properly already.
Starship re-entering over Puerto Rico: https://twitter.com/eliassob/status/1725871782186381474
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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.
What are the units on 1 in 75? People? Missions? To compare with other launch methods, you'd need to use the same metric. IIRC, Soyuz is actually more deadly, but it's been some time since I've seen the stats. Both Soyuz and the Space Shuttle are by far the most deadly form of transportation.
Worryingly for the shuttle the second failure was well into its lifespan. 5 failures in 50 launches then no failures for 200 more launches is better than 1 failure every 60 launches despite the second being theoretically better from the numbers.
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How does that compare with other rocket systems?
Pretty poorly, Soyuz has 4 fatalities (Soyuz 1, Soyuz 11) during it's over 140 flights, Crew Dragon has none.
Crew dragon hasn’t had anywhere near enough launches to compare. F9 itself though has and its a great system.
Going to be a long time before it’s a trusty as a 737 max though.
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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 s…
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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.