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Starship V3

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Re: Starship V3

#561

Post by oskarkk »

Fordec wrote: post #123

The thing which is seemingly missing from this is their current largest hurdle emerging from the V2 testing. The heat shields keep failing. I guess the focus is going to be on getting stuff up, rather than back down. Thus the Starlink and data center plays, not human space exploration.

Starship V2 heat shield was good enough to allow the ship to perform a landing on the ocean in one piece, in a precise spot. But a safe landing is not enough, the ship needs to be in a good enough condition to be flown again, with low refurbishment costs. We still don't know what condition Starship is in after landing (they need to actually land it on land first). I wouldn't say the heat shield is failing, it didn't cause any failure of the ship, it protected it successfully to the sea level.

But the heat shield is just not mentioned in this article. They actually made significant changes to it in the new version. They added added new seals between the tiles, improved attachment points, and redesigned the shielding in specific areas.

A big problem with their work on the heat shield is that they lost the ship before reentry multiple times for various reasons. They were making changes to the heat shield on previous versions, but couldn't test them as they were repeatedly losing the ship before the heat shield was actually used.

Also, from their description of the planned launch of Starship V3:

> The Starship upper stage will target multiple in-space and reentry objectives, including the deployment of 22 Starlink simulators, similar in size to next-generation Starlink satellites. The last two satellites deployed will scan Starship’s heat shield and transmit imagery down to operators to test methods of analyzing Starship’s heat shield readiness for return to launch site on future missions. Several tiles on Starship have been painted white to simulate missing tiles and serve as imaging targets in the test.

> For Starship entry, a single heat shield tile has been intentionally removed to measure the aerodynamic load differences on adjacent tiles when there is a tile missing.

https://www.spacex.com/launches/starship-flight-12

So they're still working on the heat shield. Things like space data centers may be economical only if Starship is fully reusable, otherwise the idea is dead on arrival.

Re: Starship V3

#562

Post by Fordec »

inglor_cz wrote: post #229
Fordec wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I assume because the Mars goal is as good as dead with what they're finding out about the complexities of building Starship that they can barely get it back down to this planet, never mind back from a second one. This "space datacenters is more important than colonizing the universe" thing is just to deflect from what would be an inevitable failure because if they do this pivot, they can push out the timeline for tha…

"what they're finding out about the complexities of building Starship that they can barely get it back down to this planet, never mind back from a second one." I would argue that complexities of building Starship are already a solved problem. Boca Chica built a lot more test units than there were (test or production) Apollos and the "factory for rockets, churning them out in regular intervals" part seems to be master…

And if I didn't tolerate it from the government then I shouldn't tolerate it here either, for the sake of consistency.

Re: Starship V3

#563

Post by bigyabai »

IAmBroom wrote: post #545
rayiner wrote: post #500

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Raptor is a thing of beauty: https://sxcontent9668.azureedge.us/cms-assets/assets/Raptor_... . Look how polished it is. It looks like a fucking Apple product. The Russians were really good at aerospace. It's a testament to their engineering that it took this long to advance past where they were in the 1970s. I love this video describing the development from the Russian RD270 all the way to Raptor: https://x.com/Erday…

Is that why they never made it to the moon, and did their best to hide fatal failures? They beat the US exactly twice, on two very early records - first manmade object and first human in space. Then they fell behind.

That's a non-sequitur, the parent comment simply said they were really good at aerospace.

Re: Starship V3

#564

Post by nomel »

myrmidon wrote: post #493
AntiUSAbah wrote: post #477

Why was this flagged? Its clearly stating real numbers and I do make a clear point: Space is a 700 Billion dollar business split between building the stuff you want to send up, the 'sending up' part, and the operations part. Space-X 'magic' evaluation is between 800 Billion and 2 Trillion. snicker And this doesn't even calculate in, that if Space would really become interesting and profitable as another big disruptiv…

For reference: Starlink is Unless it manages to massively eat into mobile network market share (pretty unlikely in my view) growing past $100bn (yearly revenue) or so seems unrealistic to me. Even with cheaper launch costs, it is not clear to me that Starlink would ever be interested in offering service for like $80/year (=> price competitive with mobile carriers in low income nations).

> Unless it manages to massively eat into mobile network market share

Several mobile carriers are already using them for backend of remote towers.

Re: Starship V3

#565

Post by nomel »

halfmatthalfcat wrote: post #532
whamlastxmas wrote: post #508

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's the evidence? Tell us with real data why it's so stupid

Heat, maintenance...it's obvious if you think about it for 2 seconds.

> maintenance

I suspect it would be maintained at the same quantization that it's delivered: pods. Pod has some unresolvable issue (things would have to go real bad), then eject it.

What maintenance do you have in mind, specifically, in a modular system like this would necessarily be?

If the argument is that off the shelf systems, designed within a context where humans are a Jira ticket away, won't work well in space, then I can agree with that. But, I don't think anyone is attempting that. Datacenter in space doesn't necessarily mean "standard rack computer in space". Keep in mind that redundant and self-correcting systems already exist in modern GPUs, with active rerouting around dead cores, detected with a BIST, at boot! These kinds of things are standard in financial systems.

Re: Starship V3

#566

Post by nomel »

Schiendelman wrote: post #522
saalweachter wrote: post #512

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except you aren't leaving that heat in place. You're concentrating it into a very small area of compute. If you don't spread that heat back out, it's going to find a much higher thermal equilibrium than the solar panels themselves would find just absorbing the sunlight and radiating the energy back into space. It's like you've pointed a magnifying glass at your compute, except with electricity, which means you can re…

I guess I'm curious: all the comments I see about this act as if the people proposing putting data centers in space are complete idiots. Do you believe they are complete idiots?

This is a mostly a software developer forum, not an engineering forum. Expect expertise and viewpoints to match that.

Re: Starship V3

#568

Post by compsciphd »

philipallstar wrote: post #431
slumberlust wrote: post #396

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its a good read. I'd encourage you to read it and come to your own conclusion on your question. Personally, they earned my trust but other members of our book club did not agree. Space is very very unforgiving and they ultimately conclude humanity is better served focusing our resources here on earth first. But the Trekkies have a tough time with that answer because its a bit of a let down.

> Its a good read. I'd encourage you to read it and come to your own conclusion on your question. Personally, they earned my trust but other members of our book club did not agree. I'm not saying I'm dismissing the arguments for that reason, at all, to be clear! Thanks for the recommendation. > Space is very very unforgiving and they ultimately conclude humanity is better served focusing our resources here on earth f…

why do you assume we wouldn't have seen value in satellites if we didn't see value in going to the moon (or mars)?

There's clearly an extraordinary value in satellites from a military perspective, for instance to enable spying. Heck, Hubble directly benefited from the work that went into spy satellites and NASA was afterwards gifted 2 uneeded spy satellites to use for scientific exploration (1 is (was? as in finished) being converted to be used, the other AFAIK is still in storage).

GPS wasn't created to enable us to do anything in space, but to focus down here on earth. i.e. what was needed to fight wars better. One can argue if that was "necessary" but it was clearly earth focused.

Re: Starship V3

#570

Post by piloto_ciego »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #231
piloto_ciego wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, arguably from the get go an orbital datacenter would be better. If launch costs were low enough I would say that as much industry as possible should be moved off planet, and we should make earth into a garden?

We're still doing all the mining and manufacturing on Earth, and there's so much empty land. The final product of self-powered datacenter is among the lowest priority of things to get away from us, and not an effective place to spend environmental mitigation money. And then when they re-enter they pollute pretty badly.

Ok, this is not a reasoned argument anymore is it?
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