Small correction, I think. The booster appeared to survive hot staging fine. It went through quite a bit of it's flip back maneuver. It was awesome to watch. There were some interesting activations of engines in the booster engine ring at that point. It's unclear to me if that was anticipated as an offset subset was what was desired for the off axis maneuver, or things were degrading at that point. And then it blowed up, rather instantly. That something happened to the booster during the separation that led to its RUD ~20 seconds later is likely, but technically it was "long since separated" (in rocket launch time) when it was destroyed.
Watching the replay, it looks like some of the engines failed to light during boostback reignition. Then, either total flameout occurred, or AFTS started cutting fuel in preparation for termination (maybe there are settings for "terminate right tf now" and "try to shut down engines before popping off", idk just speculating).
Either way, it looks like the start of boostback was not quite norminal, and AFTS decided that wasn't close enough to the flight envelope and decided to exit status 1.
Some are speculating that the flip maneuver sloshed the fuel too much and resulted in vapor ingestion and/or complete fuel starvation. The fact the failures are clustered on the side the fuel would slosh away from adds weight to this idea.
All but one engine successfully relit (the outer engine ring has no re-light capability) but they started to fail quickly afterwards.
Scott Manley also has the theory that the maneuver caused a sloshing motion of the fuel and the water hammer ruptured piping on the engines, causing a cascading failure.
Is it a humoristic (sarcastic) style form, or just a very neutral, matter of fact, professional assessment? I can't tell, in part, I guess, due to esl.
It's not clear either way. But as a neutral, matter-of-fact, professional assessment it sounds really weird because "disassembly" generally implies an orderly process, and this was not that.
As I understand it, on crewed flights of the Falcon 9 the AFTS is somehow integrated with the abort system so that it is impossible for it to detonate without the capsule having a few seconds to get to safety first.
I don't see how this would work for Starship, since it won't have an abort system.
If the booster is still firing, then starship will have to have a greater acceleration than the super heavy booster in order to separate. On F9 Crew this is done by the abort system, which is able to accelerate the crew capsule away at a higher acceleration than the whole F9 stack is experiencing at the time.
The real question here is what happens with a crewed second stage that has a problem with its engines/fuel. We’ve yet to see designs for the crewed interior beyond very conceptual stuff.
This same question was asked in the early years of commercial aviation. In the end, the industry (mostly) settled on aircraft designs that could passively glide reasonably well enough to land (sometimes). But some aircraft, e.g. military jets and Cirrus, came up with different answers (parachutes for the crew and for the whole aircraft, mostly).
We'll see how the commercial spacecraft industry deals with this, but I do think that we are at far too early of a stage to start expecting progress in this area. The first few decades of commercial spaceflight will be dangerous just like the first few decades of commercial aviation, or for that matter the first few centuries of commercial shipping. The answers, varied or uniform, will be interesting and I hope that I'll be around to see them.
No. Those systems can't really scale up in size and speed. And it would be pointless anyway because the few commercial airliner crashes that do occur are mostly during take off or landing where parachutes aren't very effective.
There's been a number of successful supersonic ejections of military pilots over the years. It's extremely dangerous and very likely to fail, but it's better than the alternative. The basic idea is a drogue chute stabilizes and slows the pilot.
Whether the same idea could be adapted to a whole plane I don't know, but I would be skeptical of just on the basis that you probably wouldn't trigger such a thing unless the plane has had a substantial failure such that it could overpower any drogue chute.
Lol! I up-voted you (seriously, I did) because this is close to the platonic ideal of a HN comment: egregious pedantry, plus a nerd-flex.
For those out of the loop on the nerd-flex, "Habu" was an unofficial, insidery nickname for the SR-71. It's the name of a venomous snake from somewhere with an SR-71 base (was it Okinawa? I think it was Okinawa), that the locals applied to the plane, because it (like the snake) was black and dangerous-looking.
i'd be willing to believe it's an economics thing more-so than a physics thing.
one could envisage a '747-like' sized plane with many passenger escape-pods similar to the pod from an B-58 Hustler -- but who would pay the astronomic cost for such a ticket?
and similar to what the other person in this thread mentioned : those escape pods won't help during takeoff/landing phases.
I believe that the crewed version is way in the future when operations are much better understood. There’s no chance in hell they’re catching that 2028 window to march.
As ceejayoz said, "Death". The system WillPostForFood mentioned is indeed, as he said, extremely limited.
In the very first missions with only two astronauts, the shuttle had ejection seats. They were removed when more than two people flew at a time, because a) it is not possible to add more, and b) crew ride on two decks, not one.
After the loss of Challenger serious consideration was given to designing some sort of escape capsule for the entire crew, but it was decided that the weight and practicality considerations were not worth it.
The bottom line is that it is impossible to design any practical means of high-speed travel that can cover all eventualities. A century of extensive experience has led to air travel being the safest way to travel on average, but there are still fatalities. Maybe once we have a century of experience with Starship and its descendants we'll be able to say the same about space travel.
> The vehicle touches down at 214 to 226 miles per hour, back wheels first. The nose then touches down, the drag parachute is deployed, and the shuttle cruises to a stop.
> Space Shuttle didn't have an escape system either
To be pedantic, the early flights had ejector seats for the pilot and commander, and the post-Challenger orbiters had a 'fire-pole' bail-out system. These systems could only be used in a very limited set of circumstances.
To compare with other launch methods, you'd need to use the same metric.
IIRC, Soyuz is actually more deadly, but it's been some time since I've seen the stats. Both Soyuz and the Space Shuttle are by far the most deadly form of transportation.
Broadly the same - 7 seats a launch, about 2 failures in about 150 launches, or 14 seat failures in 1000 seat launches. The early launches didn’t have 7 people on but it’s not really relevant.
Worryingly for the shuttle the second failure was well into its lifespan. 5 failures in 50 launches then no failures for 200 more launches is better than 1 failure every 60 launches despite the second being theoretically better from the numbers.
You can either use 14/833 crew positions (individuals flew more than once), or 14/355 actual people who ever flew on the shuttle. You could also use 2/135 missions. I suppose an argument could be made for 2/269 as well if you want to count launch and reentry as separate risk events.
That's a unnormalized metric: shuttle had two failures in 135 flights and generally carried up way more people per flight and also did way more stuff per flight.
> Imagine explaining to the court that the passengers were blown up by your AI algorithm...
Autonomous flight termination systems are not "AI". It uses an on-board GPS and INS to figure out where the rocket is. It applies a pre-defined set of rules to the state vector and if any one of the rules fail it terminates the flight. You can read more about them here: https://www.gps.gov/cgsic/meetings/2019/valencia.pdf
It's not AI at all. It just has preset border conditions in terms of flight corridor and probably, predicted/calculated impact point if engines go out at that moment, and blows rocket up if they are violated. It's hard logic, comparison of some variables with set thresholds, not some "thinking".
Yes. I'm sure they apply all the mitigations possible.
Worth mentioning that the previous state of the art solution relied on a radio link too. Not sure if it was an implementation where jamming could led to flight termination, or where jamming could lead to failure to terminate a flight. But jamming, and resistance to it, was a concern even before autonomous flight termination.
I'm pretty sure Falcon 9 carrying crew has an AFTS. Challenger was destroyed by an FTS system as well despite having crew on board. I think it's just a risk you have to take to go on a rocket ride.
No. The shuttle broke up when the overall stack became unstable due to the right hand SRB separating because a strut that attached it to the external tank failed (due to a blowtorch effect from a failed O-ring). The Challenger orbiter ended up 'on top' and broke into several chunks - without involvement of any FTS - because of the aerodynamic stress (one of these chunks was the crew compartment). The SRBs were destroyed by their FTS systems, but this was more than 30 seconds after Challenger broke up. The ET simply disintegrated.
[Edit] added emphasis that the orbiter break-up (and destruction) was not due to any FTS.
Demonstrative Flight Termination System (if booster did FTS rather than RUD) might have been more desirable than a splashdown. For instance, FTS proven to operate effectively for FAA to see.
With we had another angle of the booster during engine relight. From the SpaceX feed maybe engines didn't start back up? Hard to tell. Could have been leaving the expected flight area maybe?
There is a brief view as the inner ring of engines relight (note that the 3 core engines don’t shut down). All but one come back online initially but begin shutting down again shortly thereafter. There are some pretty violent events happening near the engines during the time that they are being lost one by one. The more I look at it, the more it looks like an actual RUD. It seems like maybe those violent events around the engines compromised something in the mid section of the rocket, which is where the explosion originates from. Scott Manley speculated that the very fast flip manuever may have caused some issues with continuous fuel delivery into the plumbing which seems quite plausible given the erratic behavior of the engines after they first appear to relight without issue.
Everyday Astronaut was able to reconnect to their robo-cam and pan over the launch area. No damage visible. Not only did the cameras at the launch pad survive, they didn't even get their tripods knocked over.
I could believe that hot staging might've affected the booster, since it seemed to blow up right as it tried to light the engines again for boostback. But I don't think the ship would've made it so long if it were seriously damaged by the hotstaging.
Damage to the grid fins mechanism is a potential failure mode here. Even a small amount of damage to the flight control systems could make the procedure uncontrollable and eventually trigger the FTS.
At this altitude, the vehicle is pretty much in the vacuum and grid fins have absolutely no control authority. It could have resulted in failure later on but not at that point where the booster blew up.
Saw that Scott Manley video that came out right after that and it looks like fuel issues to engines probably caused it. All but one engine started up, but they started failing after that.
How could hot staging affect the engines of the booster? If it affected the tanks then the three engines still running through separation would also fail so no flip-around could be possible with no thrust to go with.
Also worth mentioning that all engines on the first stage successfully ran until separation of the second stage. On the first flight, a number of engines didn't light and more shut down early.
Interesting re: good result...I've sort of lost track because the program's timeline has been extended several times: what sort of results are they shooting for?
I believe the primary goal was stage separation. Secondary goals were for the booster to make a controlled splashdown, and Starship to make almost a complete orbit, before splashing down near Hawaii.
So they achieved the primary goal, which is a good result.
It could even be argued that they got pretty close to one of the secondary goals. Starship was fairly close to shutting off its engines. If it would have completed that part of the flight, the next hour or so it would just be coasting. Physics alone would guarantee they'd end up near Hawaii.
Gathering data and making orbit. Plan was to return the booster near the launchsite and make a water splash down. The ship should make a single suborbital flight with orbit velocity to simulate reentry and should have splashed down near hawaii.
Consider a more substantial contribution the next time, this reeks of some sort of internalized battle the rest of us don't know about, and projection of it onto others.
We spent the better part of 50 years pouring most of our launch funding (which was reduced compared to the Apollo years) into the Space Shuttle program, which was never as efficient as hoped. (In part because it is a jobs and corporate welfare program as well as a space program.)
Hell, aside from SpaceX and a few similar efforts, we're still pouring most of our launch funding into the Space Shuttle Program, via it's SLS successor - currently over $11 billion spent on a program that has had, to date, one launch.
SpaceX can reliably deliver payloads to orbit at much cheaper prices than anything before. The Moon program had its share of disasters, near-disasters and other failures (Apollo 1 burned with all its crew on the ground). Starship is a vehicle in development and will obviously have all sorts of bugs and edge cases to be worked out.
Don't post conspiracy theories that aren't even worth debunking here. In the same vein people are tired of debunking noahs ark, the young earth, the flat earth, and intelligent design. It's just tiresome at this juncture. It is a waste of everyone's time and if you insist on doing it you can do it on facebook instead.
The real trick would have been sending the astronauts on a rocket into Earth orbit for over a week without being detected by Soviet radar operators, who would have been more than eager to share the coordinates with the world, and then somehow sending radio signals back to Earth always from the direction of the moon. https://www.scienceandmediamuseum.org.uk/objects-and-stories...
Say I make up a conspiracy theory that wheelerof4te is secretly the alt account of Putin. This theory explodes into the public consciousness. Pretty soon the US and European press is talking about it. Putin goes on the record "Hacker news what?" Server logs show that the user is connecting from a ISP in the UK. Someone bribes your ISP for your physical address. The international press descends. You give a press conference where you admit you are the user in question. People show that the same pseudonym is used on other sites that all trace back to you. 1/3 of the planet now knows your name here and your real name. The evidence is obvious and conclusive.
Then for another 40 odd years people randomly spout off did you hear Putin posts as wheelerof4te on Hacker News.
The reason they don't get a strong refutation with evidence is that merely by opening their mouth metaphorically they have proved they have very little interest in reasonable argument. For the record you being literally Putin, crazy as it is, is actually a more reasonable theory than the moon landing being faked.
On a related note Russia due to its anti western propoganda is one of the few places this isn't a massively fringe theory.
You are unlikely to buy any of this I'm aware but have you ever found yourself arguing with a young earth creationist? It's the same feeling.
You are speaking from a position where the Moon landing is a proven, undisputed fact verified by everyone. In order for it to be that, it needs to be done again. Speaking plainly, it needs to be repeated in a reasonable enough timeframe, just like every other experiment done in history, in order for it to become a scientific fact.
Instead of admitting that logical conclusion, you are pulling a strawman on me. Our discussion is over.
Historical events are by definition not repeatable and facts don't need to be repeated. For instance we don't need to repeat WWII for it to have happened. It is sufficient to examine the historical record. The fact that you don't understand the difference between scientific fact and historical fact makes it hard communicate with you.
You yourself mentioned an experiment that can be repeated, bouncing light off those reflectors, its been done we went to the moon. A better question than "Did we go to the moon?" would be why do you want to believe we didn't?
Is it anti western propaganda that you've swallowed uncritically?
"Is it anti western propaganda that you've swallowed uncritically?"
No, just common sense after looking at the pictures from NASA's archive. And also, looking at all the hard evidence presented by this guy convinced me that there is ZERO chance any human ever went to the Moon:
https://centerforaninformedamerica.com/moondoggie-1/
As for the other "conspiracies", 9/11 being an inside job, and JFK being murdered for going after the FED and Isreali nuclear programme.
Apollo missions were done at incredible expense, and didn’t provide any longevity.
We’ve had humans in orbit on the ISS continuously for decades, sent probes to the edge of the solar system, landed multiple robots on Mars, and revolutionized our understanding of space and physics with space telescopes.
The biggest obstacle to space exploration was a contracting that didn’t bring down costs, and the thing that makes space so exciting now is high cadence low cost launches
The SpaceX flights are way more efficient and reproducible than the Apollo missions ever were. The only reason they aren't regularly going to the moon is that there isn't a strong incentive to do so.
Do you have any idea how many completely uneventful flights Falcon 9 vehicles have flown? The most recent version (the FT which had its first flight in 2015) has had precisely zero failures across 254 launches.
They have a better safety record than any other launch vehicle in history, including the Saturn V and the Shuttle.
The deaths stemming from those programs have held back interest in manned space exploration more than any failed test flight ever will.
Yes, wheelerof4te is trolling. He's a Moon landing denialist, but he likes to beat around the bush a lot (e.g. waste your time) before getting to that. Asking a lot of dumb questions like "if [whatever rocket] is so advanced then why hasn't it been to the Moon?" In his mind the answer to these questions is that we've never been to the Moon in the first place.
I remember him doing this routine in another thread earlier this week:
That’s easy. Give NASA 4-5% of the federal budget like it had in the 60s and we’ll go back in no time. This stuff is ridiculously expensive. It’s not the “how”, it’s the political “why” that doesn’t have an answer right now.
Elon Musk doesn’t have 4-5% of the federal budget and SpaceX is well on their way to doing it. I agree with the parent, there’s something else going on, either with society, or our government.
SpaceX is well in their way to doing it, but 50+ years later, relying on advances in material sciences and production capabilities to reduce the cost. None of this seems fishy to me. As a nation we decided to do something, damn the cost, and when we decided that was no longer important to do, it took decades of advances before advances brought the cost down to the realm that corporations could begin to attempt to do the same.
NASA doesn't have 4-5% of the federal budget but is about to do it again on the Artemis missions with one hand tied behind their backs on Congressionally-mandated designs.
The grandparent is actually arguing that the difficulty we are having now is proof that nasa faked the moon landing something not even worth debunking.
Are you really suggesting what I think you're suggesting?
Pretty sure we can land things on the moon if we needed to. We just placed the James Webb Telescope there. We just don't have the political will or necessity. Ho long was it between the first trip to the South Pole and the first permanent base? 1911 to 1944. And that was on Earth, where supplying that base is much easier than the humongous expenditure it was to go to the Moon or supply a lunar base there.
Sibling comment made a good point about how the hot stuff in science 60-70 years ago was rocketry and physics where now so much "talent" is in "computer science".
Another thing: we are trying to do things a lot better than we did 60 years ago - fully reusable craft that, I assume, practically flies itself.
Even if the physics is well established, I believe you need people who have spent their 10,000 hours learning and practicing with it in order to make the best use of it.
Careful what you wish for. The Saturn test program peaked at 3 tests / year (unless you want to count the separately tested launch escape system for the crew capsule), and the fully stacked Saturn V was only tested twice (in 1967 and 1968) before crewed missions.
For all its speed, Apollo was not a SpaceX-style rapid iteration program.
Apollo also killed three astronauts on the ground in the posthumously named Apollo 1, and almost killed at least three more with Apollo 13. Apollo 6 (the final uncrewed test) suffered from pogo oscillations and also had two engines go out in the second stage. Apollo 11 had problems with the LM guidance computer, but was saved by Neil Armstrong's piloting skill.
This is all to say, Apollo was an extremely risky program.
> Apollo 11 had problems with the LM guidance computer, but was saved by Neil Armstrong's piloting skill.
This is a common misconception but mixes up at least three things.
1) Yes, Eagle was long, but not because of a software bug. The exact reason is unclear and there may have been multiple factors.
2) Yes, there were unexpected computer alarms but these were caused by a hardware bug that manifested because a switch was in an unexpected position. The software handled this appropriately.
Margaret Hamilton said: “To blame the computer for the Apollo 11 problems is like blaming the person who spots a fire and calls the fire department. Actually, the computer was programmed to do more than recognize error conditions. A complete set of recovery programs was incorporated into the software. The software's action, in this case, was to eliminate lower priority tasks and re-establish the more important ones. The computer, rather than almost forcing an abort, prevented an abort. If the computer hadn't recognized this problem and taken recovery action, I doubt if Apollo 11 would have been the successful Moon landing it was.”
3) Neil Armstrong did adjust the landing point late in the descent after noticing rough terrain. He utilized semi-automatic control to do this. Essentially adjusting the target point for the autopilot. Eagle wasn’t directly flown like an aircraft.
Measuring Apollo's start point in 1961 can be very misleading. Apollo was the culmination of a more or less continuous development process stretching back to the early 50s with the start of the ICBM programs.
For example, the F-1 engines that powered Saturn V first stage actually began development in the late 50s, with the first static firing happening in 1959. The (in)famous combustion instability challenges of the engine were solved by 1961.
Apollo had a tremendous running start in many areas - to say nothing of having the resources and know-how of the entire US military-aerospace-industrial complex at it's disposal. This isn't to minimize what an accomplishment Apollo was. I just don't think you can meaningfully compare the timelines of what SpaceX is trying to do with Starship, and what Apollo accomplished.
True, but in same way SpaceX has also been in the rocket business for over 20 years, and building upon know how and organizational expertise gained from the Falcon 9.
Since this is a thread about pedantry (rocketry pedantry), I'll allow myself to be pedantic about words.
"A wiki" is a type of software. But when you use "Wiki" as a proper noun, referring to one specific instance, that's the name of Ward's Wiki, the original wiki, also known as wikiwikiweb, available at wiki.c2.com .
I'm guessing that you were not citing Ward's Wiki, but were rather citing some other site, in particular the site that contains this advice on citing it:
You should note the banner at the top of your reference:
> This is a humorous essay.
It contains the advice or opinions of one or more Wikipedia contributors and is made to be humorous. This page is not one of Wikipedia's policies or guidelines, as it has not been thoroughly vetted by the community. Some essays represent widespread norms; others only represent minority viewpoints. This essay isn't meant to be taken seriously.
The humor tag is there because the community is self-aware that it's mildly pedantic. The views of the essay are held by a strong majority of the community at least. Nobody ever abbreviates Wikipedia as "wiki"; we have far too many wikis floating around and it would be confusing.
It's entirely context dependent. For me and the people I deal with (which deal with various wikis in our lives for both work and play), "the wiki" refers to the specialized wiki on the topic we are speaking (for work it's the work wiki, for the game were playing it's the wiki for the game, etc), and Wikipedia is used to refer to Wikipedia, because it's not specific to anything. If someone just mentioned "the wiki" or "wiki says" in a conversation and was intending to imply Wikipedia, it would just confuse me by making me think there's some specific wiki they were referring to that I missed previously or they weren't clear in communicating, unless we were specifically referring to Wikipedia earlier.
To be fair, Apollo also had government funding to the tune of approximately 2.5% of GDP. Starship would probably go a bit faster too with an annual budget of half a trillion.
Start of the Apollo program literally precedes the Clean Air Act, establishment of EPA etc.
When the government decided to build Kennedy Space Center in Florida wilderness, they just did. No lengthy environmental impact assessment process in the way.
Well we have the Canaveral National Seashore to enjoy today, which was constituted from the undeveloped portion of the space program reservation. Otherwise, that area today might be a wall of hirise condos instead of a pristine coastal barrier island.
Sure, but most of the (anyways rapid) turnaround time from Starship launch #1 to #2 was rebuilding and deluge system .. can't be more than a month or two max delay attributed to regulations.
Perhaps, although not obvious that it's cash starved.
NASA's slow but meticulous approach has had a few failures, but also incredible successes such as the sky crane martian rover landing - got to get it right first time, tough to move fast and break things when the test environment is 100 million miles away!
Edit: Same goes for 1969's lunar lander - had to work first time.
And NASA can be fast too. If I recall the Genesis of the Voyager missions correctly, someone noticed the once in a lifetime opportunity where the planet would align properly for a probe to visit a lot of them in using clever gravity assists. And from there NASA acted quickly to get funding, design and launch 2 probes that are still active today!
More like it's better with little-noticed science programs which can get by with a minimal amount of politics involved... which to be fair includes the details of deep space missions. Big, flagship projects which attract more attention are where things fall to crap for the most part.
Starship didn't really start in a meaningful way in 2012. In 2012 there were at best some vague concepts of a large rocket and some initial concept ideas for Raptor. But at that time for Raptor they were still thinking about Hydrolox.
SpaceX simply didn't have the resource to fully invest in Starship until much later. Even by the early presentations around 2016 it was a tiny part of SpaceX and was prototyping with limited resources. Real ramp up of spending happened significantly later.
Your understanding of Apollo is also flawed. The F-1 engine started development as early as 1955, not 1961. So if anything your 2012 date would be more like 1955.
Starship is also twice as powerful as Saturn V and designed to be reusable in both stages. That's a significantly harder task. Had SpaceX just wanted to match Saturn V, that would have been significantly easier.
Well, whether you want to call it 8/9 years ('61-'69) or 14 ('55-'69), I don't think NASA looks too shabby landing men on the moon in that time frame without the decades of experience we have to draw on today, and with 1950's/60's technology, and so far no-one else has done it.
The Apollo missions were certainly an achievement worthy of getting memorialised.
I also think that, given the size of the Apollo landers, if SpaceX had actually wanted to they could've redone those missions years ago with a Falcon Heavy and a variant of the Crew Dragon design.
Yeah they did less than 20 launches, had 6 successful missions, and then had to kill the program because the costs were too high at a $500B equivalent annual budget. Apollo 1 also burnt up and killed 3 astronauts on the ground.
Modern day NASA could not redo the Saturn V missions again. They lost the talent that achieved those missions a long time ago.
Below orbit is a strange way to put it. Orbit is more speed then height. Google says it was going 1,400 mph when it was lost. Orbital speed is around 17,600 miles per hour.
The goal was something just under orbital speed.
Not that this wasn't totally amazing. Hopefully the launch pad wasn't damaged and they can crunch the data and have another test that gets further soon.
Technically correct but not really clear of it helps clear communication in this context. SI natives think of a "kilometre" as its own thing (in the same way one thinks about a "mile") rather than thinking about it as a thousandfold multiple of a metre.
I think you googled the April launch. Starship was going 24000+kmh, needed 27000, it was like 20-30 seconds away from successfully inserting itself into its target orbit.
I previously said that if the launch works through staging, SpaceX fans would declare it a success. Personally, that seems like a pretty low bar compared to things like Saturn V and even STS, both of which launched successfully to orbit the first time.
What you count as success depends on what your goal is. It's entirely possibly SpaceX could have thrown extra billions at it and had a higher chance of successful orbit, but that doesn't mean they deemed that the most efficient use of time and money to advance the project. Sometimes it's far less costly in time and effort to start it up and see where it fails rather than look it over another 20 times and wrack your brain for anything you've missed before.
When I think I've gotten pretty far in a program I'm writing and there's even a small chance of it partially functioning, I'll often fire it up to get feedback on the errors I wasn't aware of as early as possible. Some of those may indicate larger structural changes that are required in the worst case, and the earlier I can learn about those the better.
> What you count as success depends on what your goal is
Yes. My point is that the bar seems pretty low for Starship, and it's not clear why. Yes, some of the ways they are doing things are new, but overall, building large multi-stage rockets is 50s tech.
Just for a minute, then, let's think like engineers and not Starman Jones. Granted it was a test flight: so what were the objectives of the flight, how man y of them did it achieve, and how many were not? Get beyond calling it a success or failure and talk about what worked and what didn't.
> the fuel was much easier to work with
This is a technical detail where I hard disagree. The oxidizer was liquid oxygen, so that's the same. The fuels were either RP-1 or hydrogen. Methane is somewhere in between those two in difficulty. kept at -180 °C, compared to -253 °C for hydrogen, and LOX is LOX. In the Saturn V, sloshing of the RP-1 led to the Pogo Effect, but that was solved[1]. Granted it didn't involve the maneuvers of the Starship first stage, but in some ways it was worse, because it happened during full thrust at the end of the boost stage, not after separation. You can read a lot more about NASA's experience with pogo at [2], but it's worth noting that it continued to crop up as late as Apollo 13, when the 2nd stage center engine shut down early as a result.
Yes, SpaceX is doing some things new, but the engineering experience is definitely something from the 50s and 60s.
In terms of objectives, the stated primary objective was to get through staging without blowing up. That was a success. The secondary objective was getting to reentry for the Ship - testing the heat shield, which was a failure.
> the stated primary objective was to get through staging without blowing up.
So I was more or less correct at the top of the thread when I said, "if the launch works through staging, SpaceX fans would declare it a success", and I consider that a low bar.
There were no crew on the first two Saturn V flights, yet the engineers considered it worthwhile to build them with sufficient care that they didn't vaporize anything except fuel and oxidizer.
I'm confused by your stance here, because it's like you aren't aware that the Falcon 9 rocket by SpaceX has launched 80 times this year so far, and 60 times last year, and those are all commercial launches with payloads.
Thats hardly what I would barely sending an empty rocket to orbit. Just because some new version is being tested using different technologies and methodologies of building and isn't fully functional doesn't indicate that we can't or don't regularly exceed what you say we're barely accomplishing as a people.
Your analogy with carmaker companies doesn't communicate the illogic you believe it does as there are several instances where car companies produced inferior followups to successful models. Furthermore, the self-same manufacturers largely did improve their vehicles to high levels of reliability and performance.
I see you're back to peddling your moon landing denial as you come up with increasingly unfitting analogies while ignoring basic evidence for why such a conspiracy makes no sense.
I sometimes wonder if NASA has a dedicated team paid just to "debunk" people who claim that Moon landing is faked.
Nearly every comment I leave about it gets a (rather poorly constructed) reply.
EDIT:
After leaving a recent reply and getting negative karma on several other unrelated comments in like 5 minutes, I can confirm with high probability that my assertion above is correct. Thank you NASA!
Just explain to me how the USA managed to fund two large foreign wars and a bunch of expensive Moon landing missions at the same time, but now it's too expensive? You can't.
Again, the "conspiracy makes no sense" argument is that the Soviet Union had the complete technological means to verify the landing (after all, they did not need to send people there to verify it). They had full incentive to show any convincing evidence that it was a lie. Yet, they never did. They never even wrote anything down, else we all know current Russia would be doing its best to publicize it.
There were hundreds of thousands of people involved in the Apollo program. Yet, once again, not one person has actual physical evidence of any conspiracy to fake the landing.
The fact that the country which literally had thousands of nukes pointed at the US (and vice versa), and has never shied away from propaganda, did not and has not credibly denied the Moon landing, is the standard you need to beat. Not piss poor analogies and comparisons like the ones you keep giving.
> I sometimes wonder if NASA has a dedicated team paid just to "debunk" people who claim that Moon landing is faked.
> After leaving a recent reply and getting negative karma on several other unrelated comments in like 5 minutes, I can confirm with high probability that my assertion above is correct. Thank you NASA!
News at 11, person takes society's consistent interpretation of their crackpot conspiracy theories as ridiculius as further evidence of a conspiracy.
> Just explain to me how the USA managed to fund two large foreign wars and a bunch of expensive Moon landing missions at the same time, but now it's too expensive? You can't.
Sure I can. It's not too expensive as in "can't", it's too expensive as in "won't" because most the public doesn't care about it and it's not deemed a national security issues (which the space race was) which would cause the govt to push it anyways and also try to convince people with a concerted effort that it matters.
To me it feels like you don't understand how the social dynamics of representative governance works, but it's really fairly sinoke. Things people want are easy to fund or do, and things they don't are hard, but the government has various levers it can press to change that to larger or smaller degrees over time.
cratermoon, you strike me as a rocket enthusiast. Take a look at a little-known rocket called "Falcon 9". Had more test failures than most rockets had launches. You can use that to help strengthen your argument that they really don't know what they're doing over there
Good point. They've been very successful with the Falcon 9. You'd think they have things like structural integrity, boost-back maneuvering, and how not to blow up figured out by now, but apparently SpaceX has different engineers working on Starship. At least the Raptor engine seems to work well. If it doesn't get concrete and rebar in it, and the fuel and oxidizer don't leak from the tanks. Aside from that, I consider the Raptor pretty darn impressive.
- Booster destroyed during hot staging
- SpaceX reporting that destruct system fired on upper stage towards end of burn
all in all a pretty good result: clean launch and separation, good performance on the booster during ascent (no engine mishaps this time)