Starship Flight 5: Launch and booster catch [video] • Hacker News Board

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

#651

Post by Teever » Sun, Oct 13, 2024, 9:27 PM UTC

ceejayoz wrote: post #621

supportengineer wrote: post #597

Earlier 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.

You should take a look at what Von Braun was planning for the Saturn V by the mid 1970s.

IIRC they were talking about 100+ Apollo launches to get a real space station, moon base, and expedition missions to Mars by 1980 and with that would have come a real drive to innovate and improve on the Saturn V.

Without the computational power that we take for granted today they would have definitely brute forced their way to elegant solutions and got somewhere close to where we are by the mid 90s.

This would have lead to tremendous innovations in solar panels, batteries, and metallurgy much sooner than we ended up getting to them.

Instead we chose a different path and made ourselves completely dependent on oil.

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

#652

Post by boznz » Sun, Oct 13, 2024, 9:28 PM UTC

hnpolicestate wrote: post #518

wolf550e wrote: post #454

Earlier 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.

Regulations are hard enough just using methane, I wouldn't want to be the one filling out the paperwork if that was a nuclear rocket.

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

#653

Post by FrustratedMonky » Sun, Oct 13, 2024, 9:29 PM UTC

wannacboatmovie wrote: post #620

FrustratedMonky wrote: post #598

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

It's hard to understand why people care so much about someone's personal political opinions. This is especially prevalent when working in places like Seattle and SF. People ostracizing their coworkers because of wrongthink. MDS like TDS is real. It's extremely toxic and it needs to stop. People's political beliefs are their own and connecting that to work is a recipe for disaster.

He isn't a co-worker. He's a billionaire that can fund entire campaigns. It is a lot more like if my co-worker was really my boss, and he really cares about my political leanings during a performance review.. Thus I also care about his.

"Metastable deexcitation spectroscopy (MDS) and thermal desorption spectroscopy (TDS)"

I really don't know what you are talking about.

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

#654

Post by cpeterso » Sun, Oct 13, 2024, 9:29 PM UTC

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…

What’s the advantage of catching the booster over landing it in the ground? Catching it seems like an extra complication.

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

#655

Post by Teever » Sun, Oct 13, 2024, 9:32 PM UTC

wannacboatmovie wrote: post #620

FrustratedMonky wrote: post #598

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

It's hard to understand why people care so much about someone's personal political opinions. This is especially prevalent when working in places like Seattle and SF. People ostracizing their coworkers because of wrongthink. MDS like TDS is real. It's extremely toxic and it needs to stop. People's political beliefs are their own and connecting that to work is a recipe for disaster.

Is it so hard?

See if you can try and steelman the argument as to why people care about the political opinions and actions of the world's richest man.

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

#656

Post by asadotzler » Sun, Oct 13, 2024, 9:32 PM UTC

philistine wrote: post #352

shirro wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Second stage reuse seems the far more challenging problem. Other companies should have reusable boosters soon but if significant amounts of Starship continue to ablate on the way down they could be faced with a disposable Starship competing with smaller and cheaper second stages that are well sized for typical payloads. We already knew boosters can be flown back to launch sites reliably with high accuracy. We don't k…

> Other companies should have reusable boosters soon You're way too optimistic. Starship will deliver commercial payloads, with SpaceX phasing out Falcon 9 outside of ISS launches, before anyone has a reusable Falcon 9 equivalent. It pains me to say this, but SpaceX is in a class all its own.

Wildly incorrect. New Glenn is already here.

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

#657

Post by 3abiton » Sun, Oct 13, 2024, 9:34 PM UTC

dtquad wrote: post #183

ghc wrote: post #23

Nothing could have prepared me for how that catch looked. I was sure the rocket was careening into the tower at the last second before it straightened out. The control algorithms must be incredible for the landing system to work within those small tolerances.

MIMO and nonlinear control theories are probably some of the hardest topics in all of engineering. SpaceX control system also has to compensate for the fuel moving inside their rockets so the control algorithms probably involve some kind of fast numerical fluid simulation. Another interesting thing SpaceX is doing is to use consumer-grade chips in triple redundancy configurations instead of using $100,000+ radiation-…

> MIMO and nonlinear control theories are probably some of the hardest topics in all of engineering.

I am curious but clueless about these problems, can you expand more?

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

#658

Post by esskay » Sun, Oct 13, 2024, 9:36 PM UTC

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).

Yep this will be the reason. And lets not forget that Bezos was able to find and recover the Apollo 11 Saturn V engines from point nemo. If that was relatively simple you can bet plucking a freshly dropped entire starship from the indian ocean would be a doddle, especially when sat views likely show exactly where it landed.

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

#659

Post by asadotzler » Sun, Oct 13, 2024, 9:36 PM UTC

lquist wrote: post #200

What does Starship reusability mean for $/kg to LEO? I know there are longer term targets of $10/kg but that supposes efficiencies that aren’t here yet. Would be helpful to understand before Starship reusability where the state of the art was in terms of $/kg to LEO and where we would be with impending Starship reusability.

Everyone gets this wrong, cost is not price. SpaceX themselves launch Starlinks at about $1,200/kg but they charge customers closer to $12,000/kg. Do the math. Costs coming down are increases in SpaceX profits, not decreases in customer prices.

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

#660

Post by FrustratedMonky » Sun, Oct 13, 2024, 9:37 PM UTC

bluescrn wrote: post #627

FrustratedMonky wrote: post #598

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

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.

And Apple isn't Steve Jobs? Apple would have turned around on its own without Jobs?

I think we all know these big companies have thousands of people working for them, and a lot of them are pretty smart.

That doesn't change the influence the top guy has.