521–530 of 1001 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'd never considered a 70m tall chunk of mostly metal "agile", but the way it's controlled into the arms so precisely is something to behold.
Do you know what the entire booster is hanging off of? It can't be the fins. How is the load transferred to the arms?
The catch looks amazing, but one thing I don't understand is why SpaceX needs the technology to catch a booster they've already demonstrated the ability to land boosters on barges. Is the arm more cost effective to scale compared to a barge?
On the other hand, I imagine you could wipe out any benefits to $/mass launched pretty quickly by blowing up the tower.
The catch looks amazing, but one thing I don't understand is why SpaceX needs the technology to catch a booster they've already demonstrated the ability to land boosters on barges. Is the arm more cost effective to scale compared to a barge?
Video of the catch > Mechazilla has caught the Super Heavy booster! https://x.com/spacex/status/1845442658397049011
Naive question: I obviously expect there to be flames from the engines, but there were flames on the lower sides for quite a while after the catch – is that expected?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There was an AI crypto scam channel. Musk is so scammy that it looked feasible and was shared widely by the looks.
[flagged]
Personal attacks in particular will get you banned here, so please don't post like this.
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
Pretty impressive. The engineering team at SpaceX is really something. Some thoughts; The 'chopsticks catch' was amazing to watch. Seems like it adds a lot of risk and clearly the booster needs additional fire suppression systems :-) perhaps the tower could mount something that sprays the booster like the barges have for the F9 boosters. The heatshield held out for a much longer time, the asymmetric heating on the fl…
It's possible that SpaceX programed the AFTS to trigger some time after the rocket touched down in the water. Just to make sure that it completely submerges quickly.
> I can easily imagine that flight 6 will be nominal end to end without any unintended damage.
I think it depends on what you mean by "nominal". SpaceX ultimately wants to catch the 2nd stage as well. I suspect that they are a ways off of that, since it would have to approach over land. The FAA is going to need to have very high confidence that it will do exactly what it's designed to do before they're going to allow that.
The catch looks amazing, but one thing I don't understand is why SpaceX needs the technology to catch a booster they've already demonstrated the ability to land boosters on barges. Is the arm more cost effective to scale compared to a barge?
Also landing on the launch pad means you don’t have to transport the rocket. Just have the arms set it down and you’re ready to launch again.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Manufacture and maintenance contracts for the Shuttle were deliberately spread out across many companies and states, especially in key congressional districts. It was a jobs programme; waste was a feature not a bug. Same thing for SLS.
More fundamentally, there were contracts. SpaceX does things itself; there's no legal friction internally. This gets back to the "Theory of the Firm" for why firms exist in the first place (transaction costs). The need to codify what work is to be done in contacts is antithetical to SpaceX's rapid development processes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_the_firm
Earlier quoted context omitted.
First off, the booster was going about 1250 km/h when it started its landing burn, it relied purely on drag to get it slowed down to that speed. Going by the telemetry of the seconds before the landing burn and noting the speed vs time, it seems drag was around 40 m/s^2 when it was going at around 3000 km/h. Since drag depends on velocity squared though, it had reduced to just above 10 m/s^2 just before the engines l…
"... Super Heavy[1] has 3400000 kg of fuel at launch ..." So, 34M kg of fuel has to be burned (in this booster alone) to facilitate a flight ... and I see that the propellant is CH4 / LOX[1]. Burning methane is much, much better than simply releasing methane but the release becomes CO2 instead ... What is the back-of-the-envelope conversion of 34M kg CH4 vs., for instance, 34M kg of kerosene/JP ? [1] https://en.wikip…
[1] https://www.engineeringtoolbox.com/co2-emission-fuels-d_1085... [2] https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1298426245991063554?lang=en
The catch looks amazing, but one thing I don't understand is why SpaceX needs the technology to catch a booster they've already demonstrated the ability to land boosters on barges. Is the arm more cost effective to scale compared to a barge?
In short, it would require such huge and heavy landing legs and landing barges that it probably wouldn't be feasible.