It's almost showtime for SpaceX's Starship rocket | Hacker News Reader

It's almost showtime for SpaceX's Starship rocket

arstechnica.com

43 pointsxoa7 comments

Did SpaceX grease the gears of Fish and Wildlife by letting Fish and Wildlife bring a school field trip to their facility?

> October 30th:

> The 2023 SpaceX Environmental Education Day at Starbase took place over the weekend. On board were the US Fish and Wildlife, Texas Parks & Wildlife, National Park Service and Sea Turtle, and over 150 high school students from the Brownsville ISD and Los Fresnos ISD. Pics in the thread!

https://nitter.net/SERobinsonJr/status/1719082540093354083

Maybe it was prescheduled, but it seems kind of weird. Tbh I'm jealous of those kids.

If that's the only greasing going on it's nothing compared to the SLS :)

You can actually walk very close to starbase. It is situated on open highways. You can also get few feet away from the actual rocket as one public road passes through starbase in the middle, which is still open to visitors.

People have come close enough to touch starship because sometimes it's within public reach

Super, super excited about this! I was far too young for Apollo or early days of the Shuttle, by the time I was really paying attention to rockets it felt like our bounds and ambitions had sadly shrunk a great deal. Falcon 9/Heavy has been incredible, but also not a true paradigm shift in capabilities so much as "the same capabilities made more accessible and demonstrating significant new potential paths" perhaps? F9 is perhaps "the end of the beginning", and Starship feels like it has the potential to mark a real inflection point of humanity and space. If we develop permanent presences on other celestial bodies, significant private permanent presence in space stations etc I think Starship looks likely to be where that begins. For now though the goals are probably something along the lines of:

1. As with the first flight, the absolute minimum target is probably clearing the tower, and this time without causing any significant damage below, suffering booster damage, and if another anomaly happens to have the AFTS function flawlessly. That wouldn't make them super happy but would be a real improvement and also avoid serious government review again, so they could do the third faster (remember it took quite a few hops to even progress this far).

2. MVP is for Starship to get to target orbit (or at least show it could have even with a ballistic test trajectory) and SH to be recovered. If they can get that far, then they could start using it for Starlink launches and have it start doing real work and generating real value as part of testing even if SS ends up "expended" for awhile as they figure out reentry.

3. Obviously final goal is full reuse. But then also having fast and cheap turn around, optimization, lots of reliability, they'll no doubt be iterating for a long while as with Falcon 9. Even full launch and recovery in some ways only marks the end of the beginning of Starship's life.

4. And then they'll need to figure out in-orbit refueling, and different models of Starships.

5. And then eventually deep space to Mars? Major private customers and partners for Starship's capabilities doing things SpaceX doesn't want to and providing further cadence and funding? If that does indeed end up being Starship vs using Starship as a stepping stone to something more. It's hard to really predict the kind of cascading effects of such a shift in economics. It'll have both business and political implications as people spot new classes of opportunities.

All really exciting to even be able to contemplate in such a concrete manner though. Probably other stuff I'm forgetting or am ignorant of, but it'll be a long and very cool process to watch unfold. As a Starlink deployer I'm also most directly excited to see what will happen when they can begin launching full size v2 en masse, and perhaps start experiments like making Starlink also accessible to satellites, space craft, moon communications and so on too vs purely terrestrial.

> MVP is for Starship to get to target orbit (or at least show it could have even with a ballistic test trajectory) and SH to be recovered.

And successful re-entry of Starship. That’s another significant milestone.

As I said that's more like #3. It's certainly very important to their overall plans particularly in terms of going beyond LEO in an economic manner: Starship's design requires refueling in-orbit for that, and expended tankers wouldn't make the numbers work. They'd be enough for an emergency or single critical trip, so for example reentry is actually not a blocker for SpaceX's portion of the planned NASA HLS program (because Lunar Starship is only for the moon, it's not coming back to Earth, and while it might destroy any profit margin SpaceX could fuel it up with expended tankers if they absolutely had to).

But it's not really MVP because a lot of the raw cost/limiting factors of cargo Starship will be in Super Heavy where the vast majority of the engines are. The numbers people have been playing with look pretty comfortably like expended SS+recovered Super Heavy might well end up cheaper in terms of $/kg then F9, and at any rate the raw increase in payload volume and weight means it can do stuff F9 just can't at all. SpaceX can self-bootstrap here and accept the risk thanks to Starlink, so once they can get SS reliably to orbit and recover SH, that's probably enough to make testing at least somewhat pay for itself while they work on recovering SS.

Of course, maybe they nail it on the first reentry attempt! But being able to make money doing launch and have recovery be a bonus while the kinks get worked out is exactly what they did with F9 and I think would be a pretty good place to be in.

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