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Starship's Tenth Flight Test
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Re: Starship's Tenth Flight Test
#92Re: Starship's Tenth Flight Test
#93[flagged]
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Re: Starship's Tenth Flight Test
#94Earlier 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.
They tested that extra restart as part of today's flight. I think the only thing now missing is carrying the extra fuel.
Re: Starship's Tenth Flight Test
#95Re: Starship's Tenth Flight Test
#96Earlier 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.
If "rapid reusability" was a proxy goal for maintaining a given launch pace we wouldn't need any of this.
We could just construct 200 Space Shuttles and spend months refurbishing them after every flight, and still send one up every week.
The goal is to drive down launch costs, time is money, and a system that requires time consuming refurbishments is more expensive.
Re: Starship's Tenth Flight Test
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> fascists on the moon and private space industry? Yay Give me the Apollo era anytime.
The Apollo program was built in no small part by Nazis.
Re: Starship's Tenth Flight Test
#98Re: Starship's Tenth Flight Test
#99Are the tiles on Starship going to need replacing after flight like the Shuttle? There isn’t a permanent material that can handle all the heat yet? Serious question, my space expertise is only from KSP.
The intention is to need minimal to no replacement between flights. Part of the purpose of these tests is to figure out how to do that. The tiles themselves work fine, but how to best mount them? where do you need them? Can you make them thinner? do you need anything underneath? what kind of gap do you need between tiles? Those are the things they're hoping to understand in these tests. The Shuttle tiles were technic…
> every flight needed to have a perfect heat shield.
Which is a little easier to do when your craft is shaped like a plane and not a simple cylinder. The loading and positioning were easier to model and then achieve in flight.
The shuttle also flew with repair kits and glue that could be used in a vacuum. The astronauts could perform an EVA and work to replace damaged tiles and there were published plans on how to do so. NASA unfortunately figured out very late that using the Canadarm to image the bottom of the shuttle immediately on achieving orbit was extremely necessary given the icing problems of the external tank.