861–870 of 1001 posts
Nothing could have prepared me for how that catch looked. I was sure the rocket was careening into the tower at the last second before it straightened out. The control algorithms must be incredible for the landing system to work within those small tolerances.
Here’s a video from a farther vantage point that gives a better perspective on the landing process: https://x.com/shaunmmaguire/status/1845444890764644694
Strategically 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.
Amen! If it turns out we can’t make humans a multiplanetary species in any reasonable timeframe, at least we can make the last few decades of livable earth climate a friendly atmosphere for US business interests.
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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...
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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?
Massive. The designers of Starship studiously avoided all the problems that made Space Shuttle expensive to refurbish: a. Cheaper, more durable material (stainless steel). b. Cheaper, easier to manufacture engines. c. Easier to use fuel (methane is much "tamer" than hydrogen). d. Standardized heat shield with much smaller requirements for manual work.
We'll have to see how it works out.
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Second stage reuse seems the far more challenging problem. Other companies should have reusable boosters soon but if significant amounts of Starship continue to ablate on the way down they could be faced with a disposable Starship competing with smaller and cheaper second stages that are well sized for typical payloads. We already knew boosters can be flown back to launch sites reliably with high accuracy. We don't k…
> Second stage reuse seems the far more challenging problem. Sure, SpaceX has been doing first stage reuse for a long time now. But they have demonstrated landing the second stage successfully at sea twice now with the same sort of smoothness that they demonstrated once for the booster before they then caught the booster on the first real try. A partial list of unbelievably hard things that SpaceX has so far made see…
I went to follow this on the SpaceX YouTube channel since it is usually closer to real time. It seems someone hijacked and played a video of the previous launch. Just as we got to launch time it cut to a fake badly dubbed speech by Elon Musk going on about Bitcoin, with a handy QR code. This was a bit confusing but since it was 10 minutes in advance I managed to switch to another channel. Still amazing, even if the v…
There is a real SpaceX channel: https://www.youtube.com/spacex
Note that it's just "spacex" and does have the verification mark. Also, SpaceX doesn't stream anything there (anymore): it's all just promotional videos... some of them are cool, but that's all they are. Nothing real-time. SpaceX only streams on X now, so I'd recommend one of the third party Youtube channels like https://www.youtube.com/@NASASpaceflight (which isn't NASA) if you'd prefer to stick to Youtube for such things.
Nothing could have prepared me for how that catch looked. I was sure the rocket was careening into the tower at the last second before it straightened out. The control algorithms must be incredible for the landing system to work within those small tolerances.
When Musk first proposed this, I thought he was crazy. It seemed like something a school boy would draw up. Now I think this will become routine and forgettable after a few more successes. Is there a word for that - something out of fiction becoming mundane?
But I lump both these together as the *"Wiseass Movable Feast"*
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>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. There's no reason to reinvent the airport firetruck.
> no reason to reinvent the airport firetruck. There is. The booster is high above, and is larger than basically any aircraft. There's no flat concrete airfield around either. I would suggest blowing CO2 or nitrogen through pipes positioned at the right height on the tower.
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Everyone gets this wrong, cost is not price. SpaceX themselves launch Starlinks at about $1,200/kg but they charge customers closer to $12,000/kg. Do the math. Costs coming down are increases in SpaceX profits, not decreases in customer prices.
Over the extremely long term in competitive industries, prices asymptote at ~costs. So it's still a generally useful measure, and in ~all cases, it's at least a directional indicator.