Strategically this is huge for the US and NATO. Being able to put orders of magnitude more payload in orbit at a fraction of the cost of the competition is a huge advantage in controlling space. Starlink and starshield are already years ahead of what china and russia has, starship is going to widen that gap even further.
Starship Flight 5: Launch and booster catch [video]
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Re: Starship Flight 5: Launch and booster catch [video]
#642Earlier quoted context omitted.
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Both. A single person can be great in some areas and a malicious loon in others. In fact, great success in one field can provide the self-confidence and capital to be a catastrophe in others. But also keep in mind that Musk isn't personally designing and building everything SpaceX does. The staff at SpaceX deserve more credit than they get, especially Gwynne Shotwell.
Elon is into politics because it’s politics who stood in his way of progress first.
He’s imho afraid and rightfully so, Twitter was a clear example of why.
Re: Starship Flight 5: Launch and booster catch [video]
#643Earlier quoted context omitted.
We could have had this all along.
Eh, maybe. There’s a lot of computing and telemetry going on that benefits from the last twenty years of miniaturization and performance. The iPhone seemed impossible when announced to BlackBerry; tech has gone crazy fast.
It’s a lot easier to model and simulate too.
Re: Starship Flight 5: Launch and booster catch [video]
#644Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Spacex might be a private company, but this project is funded by NASA, meaning the American taxpayer. Approved by a person whose last act was this approval before leaving NASA and joining Spacex (effectively putting money in their own pocket). It is also yet to be seen how Starship will ever be profitable (outside of spending government money), who is going to pay for those launches and for what purpose. Other than S…
The federal government smartly invested in SpaceX after being sued by SpaceX to fix rigging (things what the system working looks like).
Now taxpayers have a 10x return on investment.
Re: Starship Flight 5: Launch and booster catch [video]
#645Earlier quoted context omitted.
Robert Zubrin's Mars Direct would have got "flags and footprints" on Mars without needing something like Starship. He worked on a version of SLS in 1989 in Martin Marietta that would have cost $1B and been ready in the second half of the 90s and would be retiring soon after many successful flight to Mars (and to the Moon), but instead we got SLS and Orion so we need Starship to get anything done.
Didn't Von Braun have a plan too? Nuclear rockets or something.
The difference is that Mars Direct was a conservative plan, wrt rocket technology. It just used existing Shuttle parts and was meant to fly from Shuttle pads in between Shuttle flights. It didn't require developing anything new, that's why they were sure it would be cheap and fast, and flight rate would make it possible for it to be reliable. SLS is that idea turned into a jobs program.
Re: Starship Flight 5: Launch and booster catch [video]
#646Earlier quoted context omitted.
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SpaceX is not Musk. It may be executing his vision, but it's a team of thousands of skilled and hard-working people, all eager to work on a Sunday for a chance to pull something like this off.
But he’s the catalyst for it all.
There are other billionaires in this game too, why can’t they replicate his success? Why can’t they hire his engineers? Why can’t they deliver the results?
Re: Starship Flight 5: Launch and booster catch [video]
#647The engineers at spaceX are amazing, and I'll admit I envy their tenacity and genius. The amount of progress we have seen in rocketry and space travel in the last decade is mind blowing, I never thought I would see this in my lifetime. Edit: Decided to give it a shot and applied for a backend software engineering position at SpaceX. I'm not sure if it will be noticed, but its worth a shot. I may not be a rocket scien…
We could have had this all along.
No. It all depends on cheap computation, reliable/free satellite location systems, and other stuff that weren't things in the (60s, 70s, 80s - pick your own starting point for "all along").
Re: Starship Flight 5: Launch and booster catch [video]
#648Re: Starship Flight 5: Launch and booster catch [video]
#649Re: Starship Flight 5: Launch and booster catch [video]
#650[deleted]