Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Starship Flight 5: Launch and booster catch [video]

twitter.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

551–560 of 1001 posts

Re: Starship Flight 5: Launch and booster catch [video]

#551

Post by lutorm »

foobarian wrote: post #235
autonomousErwin wrote: post #16

That was crazy, 50% of me thought as it was coming in, especially as it pitched towards the tower, "they've overcompensated and are going to bring the whole tower down" but they absolutely nailed it.

Even without the catch step, I always feel like their boosters are coming down way too fast way too late, with engines reigniting startlingly close to surface. Never ceases to surprise me.

Every moment your engines are burning at anything less than maximum thrust, you are wasting fuel. You want to relight as late as possible with as high thrust as possible for maximum efficiency. But that it actually works is nuts.

Re: Starship Flight 5: Launch and booster catch [video]

#552

Post by the8472 »

credit_guy wrote: post #109
flaburgan wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

The main difference is that this is built by a private corporation who can't afford to throw money away, while the Space Shuttle was build by the government, and moreover it had to fulfill a number of conflicting requirements, and commercial profit was not one of them. But on a more technical level. I think the vertical landing is the main difference. Vertical landing was obviously known and done by NASA, this is how…

> Methane is better than all other fuels

There are better fuels in terms of Isp and density. They have some downsides such as being corrosive or having highly toxic exhaust.

https://x.com/ToughSf/status/1453391050681327622

Re: Starship Flight 5: Launch and booster catch [video]

#553

Post by michaelt »

WalterBright wrote: post #432
arijo wrote: post #323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Aviation pioneered the use of redundancy in order to survive failures. The Fukushima and Deepwater Horizon disasters show that this knowledge has not penetrated other industries.

Plenty of industries know about redundancy.

But it turns out, it doesn't matter how many redundant backup diesel generators you've got if a 45-foot wave comes along and they're all left underwater.

Re: Starship Flight 5: Launch and booster catch [video]

#554

Post by creer »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #516

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…

They showed 4 streams at once during some of the reentry. One view of each control surface. They may have had still more views but just that 4 was a first.

Re: Starship Flight 5: Launch and booster catch [video]

#555

Post by iknowstuff »

nordsieck wrote: post #526
ChuckMcM wrote: post #516

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…

> The detonation at the end was pretty spectacular too, but I suspect that structurally the tanks failed as the rocket hit the water vs anything that was an engineering failure. 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…

correct me if I’m wrong but I don’t think the second stage is meant to be caught. It will have legs to land on Earth/Mars without any landing infrastructure.

Re: Starship Flight 5: Launch and booster catch [video]

#556

Post by VerminOctopus1 »

blackeyeblitzar wrote: post #245
ptek wrote: post #52

Very inspiring, glad I woke up to watch it. Congratulations to the SpaceX team. This is what competition looks like. It’s funny how last decade SpaceX had to sue the government to get more launches.

Well that may still continue to happen. The wonderful and competent state of California is literally trying to block SpaceX launches over Musk’s constitutionally protected political speech: https://www.politico.com/news/2024/10/10/california-reject-m... I cannot remember a more explicit case of authoritarian government abuse in a developed nation in recent memory, and it’s especially infuriating given SpaceX and Musk…

I don’t understand how this is a constitutional violation like you claim. Let’s pretend he posted something absurd on Twitter for arguments sake, like “I’m going to use my rockets to kill every endangered bird on every California beach”, do you think that should not be considered when evaluating the request for more launches?

Re: Starship Flight 5: Launch and booster catch [video]

#557

Post by creer »

eco wrote: post #546
317070 wrote: post #540

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Just to make sure that it completely submerges quickly. Why would they want to do that? (genuinly curious). I reckon there would be a lot of useful data left if they could recover or even just inspect the remains. The remains are one big tank, so it would have floated.

No doubt it would be very useful to recover. SpaceX isn't the only one who could pluck it out of the Indian ocean though. You don't want to leave a prototype for the most advanced Spacecraft ever made just sitting around for competitors to grab (most notably China which is currently speed running SpaceX-like designs).

It landed right next to their own camera-bearing buoy. You can bet their own recovery ship was right nearby. And with access to radio control too. Likely with a couple US military ships on hand too.

Re: Starship Flight 5: Launch and booster catch [video]

#558

Post by sebzim4500 »

iknowstuff wrote: post #555
nordsieck wrote: post #526

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The detonation at the end was pretty spectacular too, but I suspect that structurally the tanks failed as the rocket hit the water vs anything that was an engineering failure. 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…

correct me if I’m wrong but I don’t think the second stage is meant to be caught. It will have legs to land on Earth/Mars without any landing infrastructure.

It will have legs for Mars but they plan on catching it on Earth.

Re: Starship Flight 5: Launch and booster catch [video]

#560

Post by ordu »

jader201 wrote: post #298

Can I hijack this thread for an almost completely unrelated question that I have observed in nearly every simulation of movement in space, even from sources like NASA and SpaceX which “should know better”? And I’m mostly asking this out of scientific curiosity, not as a criticism. Why do they always portray movement in space by showing stars moving past the view at variable rates, or even at all? The opening screen o…

> Is there any explanation where this could actually be considered realistic that I’m not thinking of?

You could record the full trip, and then speed the record up. What the point to watch at thousand years of the record with slowly changing picture, if you can watch it in a few minutes.

Post reply on HN