761–770 of 1001 posts
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That seems like way too long an article for a non-enthusiast.
good point. we're geeks and do this kind of thing to each other. among normal people it might be rude. she got me a while back with ink solvents. Monks may have been more illuminated making those pretty manuscripts than we appreciated.
What is the advantage of catching the booster vs letting it touch down?
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I thought it was plausible given the accuracy of F9 landings, though I still wonder how it will work at scale if one failure destroys the landing site. That could ruin the cost benefits. Where his vision hit a lot of speed bumps is second stage reusability. Starship is a beautiful second stage to throw in the ocean. They’ll probably get it landing but the heat tiles will require a lot of refurbishment between flights…
It took months to more than a year to repair shuttle’s heatshield in some cases. SpaceX replaced the entirety of the heatshield with a new design and a new ablative underlayment in a matter of weeks. I suspect they will be able to do it even quicker with design and process improvements. Small scale repairs of the heatshield between flights probably wont be all that big of a deal.
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I know the control algorithms are the mind-blowing part here but, does anyone have any literature about how the Rocket localized itself with respect to the chopstick arms? It must've been some combination of GPS and Radar pings to the arms? And then the onboard IMU to make sure it hits it straight.
Great question! Could just be Real-Time Kinematic (RTK) GPS like someone mentioned. Essentially the landing arms know their position very precisely and they measure the tiny errors in GPS data, and send that correction data live to the rocket in real-time as it's landing. Once the rocket gets very very close it could also just be using vision systems to zero-in on exactly where the chopsticks are. To speculate more,…
In the wide open sky, I’m guessing it’s pretty reliable.
Vision systems would be pretty useless with the low visibility of the smoke and fire. So I thought maybe it was some kind of radar configuration.
Anyways, I’d pay a lot of money to pick the brain of the GNC team here.
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So, reusable is supposed to reduce the cost. But the space shuttle was reusable and it has been shutdown because it was too expensive. What is the differences between the two?
Reusability increases costs if you don't reuse often enough. The shuttle would have been much, much, cheaper per launch if it had flown more often. The expected costs for the shuttle included a range based on how often it flew which turned out to be reasonably accurate. They were much worse at predicting which end of the range they would be flying in. At the rate they ended up flying they had the extra costs of reusa…
What parts of this can be reused? I bet the engine is OK, but seems like the sides of the ... tube ... were pretty roughed up. I guess that's probably the cheapest part of the assembly though.
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…
I imagine that they will be their own first customer - putting Starlink satellites into orbit while they are gaining confidence in the reliability of the system for external customers. They have to prove out the landing of the second stage, either with another catch or with landing gear, which they need for the lunar lander anyway.
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My thought (admittedly not well developed) is that smashing into a landing pad of concrete can damage that pad but it can be quickly repaired without affecting the ability to launch future rockets. If you damage the launch tower significantly you're going to have to suspend launches from it until you fix it. So the "higher risk" is more critical assets offline in the event of a non-optimal return.
Understood, although weren't they out of commission for a really long time anyway the last time they damaged their launchpad?
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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.
A bit tricky to aim though - basically the moment you initiate the burn for re-entry, you give 15 minute warning.
Imagine the number of amazing space telescopes that we are going to get! When it's cheep to launch a 10m diameter object into space, so many possibilites open up.
For things like that, they could build special versions of the star ship which remain in orbit as the housing. They would need no flaps, no tiles, just the 6 engines and the fuel tank. The body of the starship itself would be the telescopes tube.