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Please don't perpetuate generic ideological tangents. They're repetitive and therefore boring, and usually turn nasty.
Starship Flight 5: Launch and booster catch [video]
781–790 of 1001 posts
Re: Starship Flight 5: Launch and booster catch [video]
#782Earlier quoted context omitted.
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Please don't perpetuate generic ideological tangents. They're repetitive and therefore boring, and usually turn nasty.
Re: Starship Flight 5: Launch and booster catch [video]
#783At this point I am finding it hard to hate Elon Musk. For everything he does that has annoyed me (like Gloating at people being bombed in the middle east) — his business acumen has completely unlocked for people what they we thought was impossible.
People are complex. This is nuance. There should be nothing wrong with recognizing that any individual is a mix of things you're going to like and things you're not. That could be judged all the way to a mix of things which are morally correct, amoral, or immoral... but the reality is probably a mix. It should be OK to praise the guy for those good traits and in turn to criticize the guy for what he does wrong: both…
Completely agree. But regardless of if we criticize or praise. He is gossip worthy. Going from being in a Marvel Movie as the architype of Iron Man, all the good things he has done, to recently jumping around at a rally of a madman, and kind of looking nuts himself.
It does beg comparison to the typical evil genius. He could literally be a villain from a Bond Movie, funding Specter. It's all fun and games. But just on surface, it is hard not to talk about him. He embodies too many sci-fi tropes.
On days like today, that was amazing to see. I'd like to think all the bad is overblown.
Re: Starship Flight 5: Launch and booster catch [video]
#784At this point I am finding it hard to hate Elon Musk. For everything he does that has annoyed me (like Gloating at people being bombed in the middle east) — his business acumen has completely unlocked for people what they we thought was impossible.
Yes he’s amazing and we’re lucky to live in a time and place where he can lead thousands of people that can do these things. He’s an example of what’s possible by a capitalist and how capitalism empowers individuals to shape the world and make it better for everyone. So naturally there’s a group of people trying to stop him due to envy and other copes.
Think you are confusing capitalism with variety of other political fields.
Capitalism does nothing to ensure personal/individual freedoms. There is no 'empowering'.
Technically slaves were also a valuable part of the capitalist system at the time. They were integral to the flow of capital, as they were an asset.
You can have Dictator/Authoritarian governments also be capitalist. Huge misunderstanding these days is thinking China is communist. They stopped being communist decades ago and are not as Capitalist as the US. But that doesn't help individuals that much.
Even today, Human Resources, is about 'humans' as capital, how to manage the human assets. Capitalism doesn't help the individual, the induvial is the resource to be mined.
Re: Starship Flight 5: Launch and booster catch [video]
#785Earlier quoted context omitted.
It helps enormously that unlike Falcon-9 this rocket can dial down the thrust of its engines low enough to be able to actually hover or to move arbitrarily slowly in the final meters before touchdown. It can arrive to the designated intermediate point with some already good accuracy, and then take some time to trim the remaining errors to the noise level more slowly, possibly with feedback from the ground sensors. Th…
The main takeaway from Scott's commentary is that the chopsticks allow the ommission of landing legs and all their subsequent systems and saves a ton of weight. The added risk to dial this technique in is likely worth it in the long run from a sustainability stand point.
Except that the landing legs allow you to land anywhere with a flat pad of concrete, whereas this requires comparatively enormous infrastructure investment.
Re: Starship Flight 5: Launch and booster catch [video]
#786Earlier quoted context omitted.
They previously threw around a number of around $1M per flight, as mostly fuel costs. Also, while 150t is the target payload capacity, the current test vehicles are closer to 50t in payload capacity, there are revisions in the pipeline based on data from these test flights which will bring it up to 150t.
None of the vehicles have demonstrated any payload capacity yet. 50 tons is the on-paper capacity only, and seems quite high given how little fuel is left when the bring an empty starship to orbital altitude. I assume that as the engines and launch procedures get more efficient, they will start being able to bring stuff to orbit (and quite a bit of stuff, too).
They've actually been having to dump propellant in order to more accurately test what a Starship in orbit would be like, given they're not flying with a payload that would consume that propellant on ascent, but that they still want to launch with a full tank.
The dumping of this excess propellant actually caused an explosion and loss of vehicle on the second test flight.
Re: Starship Flight 5: Launch and booster catch [video]
#787Earlier quoted context omitted.
It is common for Starship prototypes to have uncontrolled fires, but it is obviously not a good thing. For example, prototype number 10 exploded 8 minutes after landing [1] because of a seemingly insignificant fire at the bottom. After today's flight there was a long lasting fire in the engine section, with occasional flaming pieces of plumbing raining down from the rocket. Examining the aftermath should help SpaceX…
Scott Manley said it was a purposeful flare off of methane to prevent over pressureization.
Maybe the flare on the side started as purposeful. But there was also a fire inside, between the engines, with flaming pieces of some pipes or cables raining down from the rocket. You can see one example of this just after this timestamp: https://youtu.be/YC87WmFN_As?t=12928
Re: Starship Flight 5: Launch and booster catch [video]
#788I still think the Space Shuttle was more impressive.
Re: Starship Flight 5: Launch and booster catch [video]
#789I'm just so happy to see this level of progress. This another big step for opening up space. To think that one day this will be considered normal. 150 Metric tons sent on a fully reusable rocket. Thats like a 747 to space.
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?
Estimated costs of the fully loaded cost of the shuttle program ended up at $600 million to $1 billion per flight. The refurbishment costs per flight and man hours/staffing were astronomical.
It actually would have been a lot cheaper if they had gone for serialized, mass assembly line production of Saturn V class disposable rockets to launch piece of space stations, satellites and manned missions into low earth orbit.
Re: Starship Flight 5: Launch and booster catch [video]
#790[dead]