This chopstick catch was really impressive. I had my money on them managing it the first time. I haven't been so excited since the dual landing of their Falcon 9 boosters.
Starship Flight 5: Launch and booster catch [video]
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Re: Starship Flight 5: Launch and booster catch [video]
#832Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well that may still continue to happen. The wonderful and competent state of California is literally trying to block SpaceX launches over Musk’s constitutionally protected political speech: https://www.politico.com/news/2024/10/10/california-reject-m... I cannot remember a more explicit case of authoritarian government abuse in a developed nation in recent memory, and it’s especially infuriating given SpaceX and Musk…
I don’t understand how this is a constitutional violation like you claim. Let’s pretend he posted something absurd on Twitter for arguments sake, like “I’m going to use my rockets to kill every endangered bird on every California beach”, do you think that should not be considered when evaluating the request for more launches?
It’s straight up unconstitutional. It doesn’t matter what the speech is, the government cannot make rules that discriminate on the content of the speech.
Re: Starship Flight 5: Launch and booster catch [video]
#833Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
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.
There are already 2 launch towers (2nd one not quite complete but getting there.)
Re: Starship Flight 5: Launch and booster catch [video]
#834An incredible achievement. I'm honored to be part of this moment in history.
Re: Starship Flight 5: Launch and booster catch [video]
#835Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
You could do that, you could also use it to transport pieces of massive telescope arrays that self assemble in space.
Sure, thats what they did with the JWST. But that ist complex and expensive. A custom Starship could be the cheapest way to get telescopes up to 9m mirror size into space as you can assemble everything on the ground and you don't need a separate housing.
Re: Starship Flight 5: Launch and booster catch [video]
#836Earlier quoted context omitted.
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-…
I know MPC takes a LOT of compute power. It's not like a finely tuned PID loop or even a cascade of PID loops, computationally. Does anyone know (or have educated speculation on) what kind of hardware is running these algorithms? Like, do they have a linux machine that's running the control loops? Are we talking megabytes, gigabytes of SRAM? I would think no -- you would definitely need hard real time for something l…
They have publicly discussed using Linux with RT kernel!
Re: Starship Flight 5: Launch and booster catch [video]
#837Why 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?
Isn't BlueOrigin going after at totally different market segment, I thought it was focused on things like space tourism and more "space base" type stuff? Also pretty sure BlueOrigin is almost all funded by Jeff B, SpaceX has a lot of external funding and focused on tangible markets vs just "people will want to do stuff in space" - I think it was only very recently they started to work with NASA.
> Isn't BlueOrigin going after at totally different market segment, I thought it was focused on things like space tourism
They have New Shepard, a crew-rated suborbital spacecraft, primarily targeted at tourism, but it has also done some science payloads for NASA, university and commercial clients.
But they also are doing a lot of non-tourism stuff: they designed and manufacture first stage engines for ULA’s new Vulcan launch vehicle; they have their own reusable orbital launch vehicle (New Glenn) due to launch soon (planned for next month, but might slip to early next year); they have a contract with NASA to build a lunar lander to compete with SpaceX’s; they are part of one of the teams NASA has chosen to compete for the contract to build a commercial ISS replacement.
And SpaceX is involved in space tourism too: both directly, and indirectly via resellers such as Axiom.
It is just that the most publicly noticeable thing Blue Origin has achieved is space tourism, which makes people think it is primarily a space tourism company; meanwhile, SpaceX has had numerous publicly visible achievements other than tourism, so people view tourism as just another thing they do, not their main thing.
Re: Starship Flight 5: Launch and booster catch [video]
#838Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
Because people are reflexively averse to government spending unless there's a billionaire making profits on the way through thanks to 100 years of academic capture by Austro-libertarian economists.
This is an anti-intellectual conspiracy theory. Mainstream economics no longer operate using schools of thought: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskEconomics/comments/quxwl5/how_is...
Re: Starship Flight 5: Launch and booster catch [video]
#839Amazing days ahead of us - if we can avoid blowing ourselves up over pathetic patches of land, we could have the entire solar system under our feet...
> pathetic patches of land It's always funny seeing people pretend they live in a world where small issues like land or food don't affect them, even though they only have that privilege because a larger military says they should.
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Re: Starship Flight 5: Launch and booster catch [video]
#840I'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.
Where is the progress if they're 2 years behind their schedule? In Q1 2025 they should already be launching the HLS according to the timeline.