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Super Heavy has splashed down in The Gulf of Mexico

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Re: Super Heavy has splashed down in The Gulf of Mexico

#641

Post by gmoot »

pdonis wrote: post #585
FredPret wrote: post #568

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is an excellent point. This is why it was necessary to beat the Germans first - so the Russians could invade or at least threaten Japan. Even so, a land conquest of Japan would have cost vast numbers of lives - far more than the nukes. When people die one by one in war, the emotional impact is blunted. But when a million die in one bomb, it seems much worse, even if the overall body count is lower.

> This is why it was necessary to beat the Germans first - so the Russians could invade or at least threaten Japan. That was the strategy that FDR and Churchill agreed to, but the primary person driving it was Stalin, because he didn't want the US and Britain to defeat Japan before he got a chance to attack them, and he knew he would not be able to attack them until Germany was defeated. (He wanted to attack them so…

> with different diplomatic choices they probably could have gotten Japan to surrender before the USSR attacked.

Such as?

Re: Super Heavy has splashed down in The Gulf of Mexico

#642

Post by throwaway2037 »

About landing the Super Heavy booster, Wiki[1] says:

    > [S]hortly before landing,[67] it ignites its engines to slow sufficiently to be caught by two mechanical arms attached to the tower.
Does anyone know the reason to choose "two mechanical arms", instead of landing like the Falcon 9? And has SpaceX announced any plans to test these arms? In my mind, it sounds more wild to try to "catch" the landing booster with arms, rather than land on a pan. Anyone else?

Re: Super Heavy has splashed down in The Gulf of Mexico

#643

Post by soperj »

FredPret wrote: post #541
xcv123 wrote: post #511

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Japan was already trying to negotiate conditional surrender when Hiroshima and Nagasaki were nuked. The US demanded unconditional surrender, and they nuked hundreds of thousands of civilians to force that demand. The bombing of Dresden is arguably a war crime by todays standards. It was unnecessary. Remember that we were allied with the Soviet Union (Joseph Stalin was the "good guy" on our side). After WW2 he was giv…

Conditional surrender would have been completely unacceptable given that they were the aggressor and had a million troops in China, and wanted to hold on to their conquests after the war. Even after the first nuke they didn't surrender. It took the emperor speaking up - for the first time ever - after the second nuke, and even then the military junta tried to stop it. Your points about the Communists stand, but keep…

Literally the only condition was that the emperor was preserved.

Re: Super Heavy has splashed down in The Gulf of Mexico

#644

Post by mr_toad »

czl wrote: post #507
stctw wrote: post #406

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's easy to say that now. Have you lived through unrestricted, total warfare, where one side intends to conquer a continent or the world, invades without provocation, and won't stop until brought to submission through extreme force? The Allies did not initiate war and did not want war. How many of your country's people should you sacrifice to end a war of aggression started by the enemy? Should you not use the means…

> Allies did not initiate war and did not want war. An argument made that WW2 was continuation of WW1 and that WW1 was wanted by British leadership who were locked in an arms race with Germany that they could not sustain much longer and wanted a war with Germany while they were ahead so the assassination that triggered WW1 was the pretext tobstart WW1. If you disagree please try to answer why leaders are regularly as…

Britain was absolutely not prepared for war at the start of WWII. If they had lost the Battle of Britain it is unlikely they would have survived a land invasion.

Re: Super Heavy has splashed down in The Gulf of Mexico

#645

Post by mr_toad »

incompatible wrote: post #595
stctw wrote: post #406

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's easy to say that now. Have you lived through unrestricted, total warfare, where one side intends to conquer a continent or the world, invades without provocation, and won't stop until brought to submission through extreme force? The Allies did not initiate war and did not want war. How many of your country's people should you sacrifice to end a war of aggression started by the enemy? Should you not use the means…

WW2 became a world war when Britain and France declared war on Germany. Of course, they could have stood back and let the Nazi's carry out their plan of annexing Eastern Europe, but they drew the line at Poland.

Does anyone seriously think that the Nazis would have stopped at Eastern Europe?

Re: Super Heavy has splashed down in The Gulf of Mexico

#646

Post by skissane »

cryptonector wrote: post #636
cubefox wrote: post #587

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Getting it human rated is likely much harder than reusing the upper stage a couple of times. The difficulty is that Starship has 1) no launch abort system, and 2) the belly flop landing is much more dangerous than conventional and proven capsule based landing. To get the system human rated, they may have to fly tens or even hundreds of flawless cargo missions first.

Getting human rated for launching seems feasible. Getting it human rated for landing on Earth seems infeasible.

> Getting it human rated for landing on Earth seems infeasible.

Why? For NASA, human-rating - for either Earth launch or Earth re-entry - requires a very detailed engineering analysis of probability of loss-of-crew (LOC), and then NASA has some maximum LOC probability they allow (for NASA Commercial Crew, both launch and landing it is 1-in-500, which is 0.2%-for whole of mission it is 1-in-270). That analysis is based on engineering data, which can include simulations, data collected from actual flights, and data from ground-based testing. If SpaceX can demonstrate N successful uncrewed landings (with maximum G forces within acceptable limits for crew, etc), for sufficiently high N, logically the LOC probability will fall beneath NASA’s threshold, and then NASA will human-rate it. However, they don’t actually have to land it 500 times - all they need is an engineering analysis which calculates the LOC probability as being below threshold, and then NASA’s own engineers review it, and once NASA’s engineers are confident it is correct, the human-rating will be approved

Re: Super Heavy has splashed down in The Gulf of Mexico

#647

Post by bradgessler »

somenameforme wrote: post #344
bearjaws wrote: post #3

The rate of descent is absolutely astonishing, 8km -> 1km in 20 seconds, then just hovers above the water. Absolutely incredible work by the SpaceX team. Living in central Florida I cannot wait for the new launch facility to come online. We're going to have lines of spectators into the space coast like we did for the shuttle. If any of you are heading to Disney World you should stop by the NASA Kennedy Visitor Comple…

The 'worst' thing about watching space launches on streams is that you simply cannot grasp how ridiculously huge these things are. Even if, like in the stream today, you see a water tower for some scale, the size discrepancies just make it so hard to intuit. Starship is 121 meters high. That's something taller than a football field, jetting off into space! I've only gotten to see a decommissioned Space Shuttle in per…

It’s bonkers how quickly such a large steel object goes from 0kmh to 100kmh+ so shortly off the pad.

Re: Super Heavy has splashed down in The Gulf of Mexico

#648

Post by jfoster »

simiones wrote: post #236
zpeti wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok great, you’re definitely right, let’s not do it. What now? Will Elon stop? If Elon doesn’t stop, does that make you right?

I'm not saying it's impossible to send people to Mars and even bring them back. I'm saying there is no point whatsoever right now, at least no material or scientific purpose. Of course, building a "city" on Mars is well beyond our capabilities, so that will either not be attempted at all, or it will fail. Maybe by 2124, but more likely 2524.

If people think like this, it won't happen even by 2524.

Elon's job is to massively accelerate that timeline.

Re: Super Heavy has splashed down in The Gulf of Mexico

#649

Post by dragonsky67 »

simiones wrote: post #151
qsi wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The vision is that the cost per unit of mass to orbit will come down massively with Starship, once it's launching like the Falcon. That will open up hitherto unimaginable missions and markets. And customers. It's all about the the cost!

Like? What industry really needs things floating in space that are only constrained by cost to launch? I can see lots of science mission perhaps, but even that seems somewhat limited.

Like, pretty much 90% of any space based things from science fiction.

Imagine if what you put in orbit (or indeed into deep space) was limited by your imagination, not by the very limited capability of launch vehicles.

I would not be surprised that most revolutionary thing that this level of launch capacity will enable hasn't even been suggested yet.

Re: Super Heavy has splashed down in The Gulf of Mexico

#650

Post by elsonrodriguez »

me_me_me wrote: post #613
elsonrodriguez wrote: post #443

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can read up on Mars Direct for more info. The gist of it is that the Saturn V has enough delta v to get to Mars, on the count of Mars having an atmosphere, which can be used for aerobraking. Given the capability of reaching Mars with a Saturn V, the rest of the plan revolved around using Apollo hardware, with some modification, for both transport and habitats(re-use of empty stages featured prominently). Ultimate…

That is debatable at best, a crewed flight to mars is 8 months, crew of 3 You have roughly 40t at best for a craft that needs to land there. quick google. astronauts need around 1.7kg of food per day, x3 crew, x(8x30) days is: thats 1200 kg of food - one way - just to get there food. And then you are doing to do what exactly? > the rest of the plan revolved around using Apollo hardware, with some modification, for bo…

The Mars Direct plan is featured heavily in the book "The Case For Mars".

It's over 400 pages and contains some of the details you seem to be curious about.

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