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Starship's Tenth Flight Test
81–90 of 245 posts
Re: Starship's Tenth Flight Test
#82Earlier quoted context omitted.
Next flight should be a mass simulator of at least 100 tons to orbit. This flight was around ~10 tons to almost orbit. The economics of Starlink basically require high cadence Starship launches with 50+ Starlink v3 satellites on each flight.
Isn't starlink a revenue generating endeavor already?
Yes; I think it would be more accurate to say that the economics of Starship basically require high cadence launches with lots of v3 Starlink satellites (because only the big internet constellations can financially justify launching so much payload to orbit right now).
Re: Starship's Tenth Flight Test
#83So the starlink simulators its deploying right now are empty platters that will burn up in the atmosphere from what I understand. Next missions they’ll be real statlink sats. Are these different than regular sats? It sounds like they’re able to handle more bandwidth but I don’t know.
Starship will be deploying the next gen v3 satellites, which weigh about 2 tons each. A single Starship launch with 60 of these deploys more capacity than 20 launches of a Falcon 9.
Wow, that really puts it into perspective
Re: Starship's Tenth Flight Test
#84Earlier quoted context omitted.
What exactly do you think is the “more technology development than the current flights actually show“ needed to get into and out of orbit? My impression is they just need to leave the engines on a little longer to get to orbit, then turn them on again with the ship pointed in another direction to get back to the suborbital trajectory they’ve already demonstrated deorbiting from. The hard part is reentering through th…
A little more longevity and one more engine restart, unless the suborbital is very suborbital, then it also means a lot more delta v. It doesn't seem that far away at all.
What's surprising is that people are still resorting to this silly complaint about not reaching orbit when there's a perfectly sensible complain they could be making instead: that SpaceX hasn't yet demonstrated that they can reach orbit and return safely. The safe return is important because I would expect a failure to return safely to be a big deal: it's not like this thing is going to completely burn up if they don't have control during a deorbit. The inadequate retry thermal protection is a large issue even if the Ship has managed to get to the landing areas on target and soft land in the right spot: the burn through on the control surfaces seems to mean that was as much luck as good engineering that the thing didn't crash somewhere less intended.
I appreciate none of that is as pithy as saying it simply didn't reach orbit, but it's a real concern versus something that is really irrelevant.
Re: Starship's Tenth Flight Test
#85Earlier quoted context omitted.
Remains to be seen. That's what they want, but it's never been done before. (edit: clarity: they do NOT want to replace them after each flight.) They're currently experimenting with things such as actively cooled tiles (which I presume were installed on this ship, since they were on the last two). I personally think the likely best case is that they'll have to go over the ship and replace some here and there before l…
Even if they don't get to a no replacement....they still already have a massive improvement over Space Shuttle. The Space Shuttle basically every tile was unique, and and the pattern was different between the different orbiters. A good bit of the months of refurbishment of the Orbiter between flights was heat shield repairs. SpaceX has already shown from when they completely retiled one of the ships. they have cut do…
Absolutely!
I think there are still a few unique tiles on Starship around joints and such IIRC, but either way, the number of tile types is much smaller for Starship.
To my thinking, the sane sequence will be launch; catch; survey and maintain (heat shield and other items); and then launch again 24 hours later if everything checks out.
And that will be an absolutely massive improvement over what we have today, let alone what we had with the Shuttle.
I'm keeping my fingers crossed...
Re: Starship's Tenth Flight Test
#86[flagged]
Pretty sure the DOGE intent was good, but real efforts were mostly sidelined for the Trump pony show. Thus the 'fighting' words that followed when the BBB tax cut showed up.
Re: Starship's Tenth Flight Test
#87Earlier quoted context omitted.
What Scott is missing is that the only reason "it did not get to orbit" is of interest at all is that SpaceX keeps claiming they got to orbit with starship. I believe that the trajectories have all been suborbital by design, but it still pisses me off that they keep claiming they got to orbit. The reason this matters is that if they get into an orbit in a short test, they need to exit that orbit with some sort of act…
Is it really a lot more technology? If they were landing 100 km away I'd agree, but aren't they basically reaching the required orbital speed and reentering and landing under retrorocket control? I'm no expert on orbital dynamics, so I might be missing something important.
They're never reaching orbital velocity on purpose. The reason is that they're still proving that they can fire rockets and deorbit under control; until they do that, any problem automatically puts the ship in the ocean no matter what while if they go to orbit and can't control the deorbit they end up possibly causing a disaster.
Now, they are getting it to pretty damn close to orbital velocity... which is why saying they still haven't reached orbit is a bit silly. They're clearly technically able to reach orbit if they really want to... that they haven't proved they can safely leave orbit is the problem.
Re: Starship's Tenth Flight Test
#88I'm amazed the thing landed right next to the Buoy, and was seen from the BuoyCam.
This has happened many times so far. Control to reach a specific landing point is quite good (when things don't go boom first)
Re: Starship's Tenth Flight Test
#89Earlier quoted context omitted.
They mentioned in the stream they were intentionally stressing the ship on reentry. But yes, “rapid reusability” is a ways off. I expect they’ll be spending weeks inspecting and repairing ship and booster before reflight for a few years, but they’ll drive it down over time. TBD how “rapid” the reusability ends up being in the end.
The push for rapid reusability seems somewhat at odds with the push for large scale production of ships. It seems like if they can get boosters to rapid reuse (a much easier goal), and churn out ships at sufficient scale, they can afford to take time inspecting/refurbing each ship as part of a pipelined approach.
Not at odds at all. It doesn't matter how fast you can make them if each one costs $5-10 million. Much better to amortize that over 100+ flights and not waste the booster.
Once the tanker version is needed, a ship ship could go up 5+ times a day. The logistics of backfilling a pad with a new ship is much more involved