Code name: Danielsan.
Starship Flight 5: Launch and booster catch [video]
721–730 of 1001 posts
Re: Starship Flight 5: Launch and booster catch [video]
#722Why can only Elon do stuff like this and not BlueOrigin or the hundreds of other aerospace startups? Does he just have a 1/100000000 combination of intelligence, tenacity, and directionality that can't be matched by anyone, even those trying to emulate him as closely as possible?
Why do we think its Elon 'doing' this? Just curious, since it could just as well be that its the engineers and other leaders who could be the differentiator.
Re: Starship Flight 5: Launch and booster catch [video]
#723Earlier quoted context omitted.
Eventually it convinces everybody that "quantity in space" is possible. Moving to projects where you don't have to count every ounce. It opens the path to wild schemes, in amount of weight that could be moved. And why "eventually"? SpaceX should have already convinced people of that. Yeah it's not yet in production, but the momentum and progress have been amazing to witness. (The previous one was convincing everyone…
An interesting question (because all the others will probably be too slow) is what does that change for SpaceX itself (which can be fast)? It gets to complete and upgrade Starlink. Sure. And that keeps it busy for what? Two years? At most. Sure. Done. Just kidding, that provides some background launches as a guaranteed customer going forward. But nowhere near enough to make a dent in what will be the new SpaceX launc…
thankfully elon has hundreds of billions of dollars and presumably will spend most of that sending shit to mars, either before he dies or as part of a trust. most of what we need to send there isn't expensive - electronics and steel and composite materials. the limiting factor isn't going to be the cost of stuff we send there, it's only going to be how many starships we can get flying and how often they fly
Re: Starship Flight 5: Launch and booster catch [video]
#724Pretty 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…
Seems like it adds a lot of risk I'm actually wondering about that. If I understand correctly, the arms can move up and down, and pivot around the tower. This allows them to correct for some error in the rocket trajectory and also (presumably) "soften" the final contact. Between the nozzles and the arms, it gives SpaceX a lot of degrees of freedom in the final seconds (you can see how the booster kind of "hovered" ri…
To me, it's not risk reduction that they're after with that booster catching mechanism, but weight reduction. Those landing legs that we've seen before (and the mechanism related to them) are costly weight that is absolutely necessary only on the rocket itself, because that is expected to land on its own somewhere on a bare rock. For booster however, it makes sense to have as much of such launch and landing weights externalized, considering booster's reduced use-case of starting from a spaceport and very soon ending up back there too.
Re: Starship Flight 5: Launch and booster catch [video]
#725Earlier quoted context omitted.
What’s the advantage of catching the booster over landing it in the ground? Catching it seems like an extra complication.
I can speculate ... I think the primary reason would be that landing legs are heavy, and it wastes performance to carry them. If your landing mechanism is mostly on the ground, you get that performance back. Secondary reasons might include that it's simpler to get the booster right back to the pad. Once things have settled into an operational cadence, it's likely feasible to lower and lock the booster onto the stool,…
It's worth noting that at least 1 Falcon 9 core probably got trashed not from the landing, but from rough seas - so cutting out the ground logistics chain adds resiliency.
Re: Starship Flight 5: Launch and booster catch [video]
#726Strategically 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.
Well if US would deploy global kinetic bombardment system that would def. be a game changer.
To get an inert object through the atmostphere and do real damage it has to be very large. That's a very inefficient way to use mass that you've boosted to orbit, even if it's relatively cheap to get there. So any weaponary they put up there will likely look fairly conventional. The speed of deployment and difficult of intercept would be the game-changer.
Re: Starship Flight 5: Launch and booster catch [video]
#727Moon by 2030 and Mars by 2040 seems like a winning bet lately
The Delta-V is comparable since you can aerobrake on mars. It's only the difference between the time.
Earth to moon without Aerobraking is a delta v of around 13k/s, mars is 13.3
Re: Starship Flight 5: Launch and booster catch [video]
#728I grew up playing Halo, and this was purely fiction at that point.
Re: Starship Flight 5: Launch and booster catch [video]
#729Pretty 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…
Seems like it adds a lot of risk I'm actually wondering about that. If I understand correctly, the arms can move up and down, and pivot around the tower. This allows them to correct for some error in the rocket trajectory and also (presumably) "soften" the final contact. Between the nozzles and the arms, it gives SpaceX a lot of degrees of freedom in the final seconds (you can see how the booster kind of "hovered" ri…
The way the trajectory is designed is that it has to scoot over to the tower at the last second, and it only does that if it's really really sure it can make it, otherwise it crashes off to the side.
Re: Starship Flight 5: Launch and booster catch [video]
#730Giddy and crying. I turned 50 yesterday and it feels a bit like the future I dreamed of as a child.
I also cried watching this