Starship Integrated Flight Test 2 at 7 Am Central Time
spacex.com
spacex.com
- 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)
The primary purpose of the water here is not to dampen the sound/energy, but to cool the metal plate below the rocket.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Apollo_missions#Uncrew...
Starship development started in 2012, and now 11 years later has had 2nd launch and failure to reach orbit.
Apollo program started in 1961 and had men on the moon in 1969 - with 60's tech.
When the government decided to build Kennedy Space Center in Florida wilderness, they just did. No lengthy environmental impact assessment process in the way.
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.
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.
"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:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Don%27t_abbreviate_%...!
(Yes, I think Wikipedia's Don't Abbreviate... page is just wrong about this.)
> 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.
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.
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.
Modern day NASA could not redo the Saturn V missions again. They lost the talent that achieved those missions a long time ago.
This is all to say, Apollo was an extremely risky program.
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.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_11
A great video on the AGC and Apollo 11 landing: https://youtu.be/B1J2RMorJXM?si=Ypn6Gtp16_DEkpK9
I expect these things are only on test flights indeed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crew_Dragon_In-Flight_Abort_Te...
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.
The point is that rockets carrying crew do indeed have FTS systems - presence of a crew doesn't negate that need.
That doesn't sound very automatic.
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
*old man shouts at The Cloud*
An other question if you don’t mind: Did you ever used software which was not AI in your view?
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.
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.
Shuttle death rate was about 1 in 75, which is insanely high.
Crew dragon hasn’t had anywhere near enough launches to compare. F9 itself though has and its a great system.
Going to be a long time before it’s a trusty as a 737 max though.
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.
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.
Source: https://www.space.com/12376-nasa-space-shuttle-program-facts...
I don't see how this would work for Starship, since it won't have an abort system.
Maybe something like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Escape_crew_capsule for launch abort.
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.
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.
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.
http://www.chuckyeager.org/news/sr-71-disintegrated-pilot-fr...
I love the serendipitous detail of what happened on his next flight, though I'm sure it was not so amusing when it happened.
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.
https://airandspace.si.edu/collection-objects/crew-escape-sy...
I'd take my chances and stay with the orbiter
That's a lot of energy to bleed off.
But we were in a hurry, so it was just part of the project.
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.
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.
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.
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.
You might be looking at the first stage’s data.
Edit: 24,124 km/hr when telemetry stopped on the stream; 15k mph.
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.
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.
On top of that the fuel was much easier to work with and did not involve needing to be able to handle pressurization and sloshing during flips.
It's 50's tech only in the same way that a Ryzen CPU is 70's tech.
> 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.
1. https://www.nasa.gov/history/50-years-ago-solving-the-pogo-e...
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.
You might also not be able to build it with a room full of idealistic youths running on inspiration.
Isn't science great?
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.
SpaceX is cool, I really hope they get to the Moon one day.
It successfully builds Golf 2, one of the most versatile cars ever made. That car can do everything and go anywhere.
Now, say that NASA wanted to upgrade that car after 50+ years. And now, that car can't even go 50 miles before requiring a refill.
Are we supposed to believe how the new car is better? Are we even supposed to believe that Golf 2 worked as well as NASA said it did?
Hell no.
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!
Parroting how "conspiracy makes no sense" is dellusional at best: https://centerforaninformedamerica.com/moondoggie-1/
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
Neat phrase for the booster explosion in the mesosphere.
https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi...
(taken from this website: https://sattrackcam.blogspot.com/2023/11/new-starship-launch...)
____
In animation form:
NVM they said they were just going to let it splash.
Could be a guidance issue, but SpaceX should be pretty good at that by now. Could be engine underperformance, but we got nominal callouts and it would have to be pretty bad for AFTS to notice with minutes left, so that seems unlikely.
I'd guess engine control (due to damage during staging) is the main suspect. We say the thrusters fighting pretty hard there at the end, which supports that idea.
AFTS seems unlikely this late in the burn, I think they said it was in terminal guidance and it's very hard to laterally change the impact point in any meaningful way with that much velocity. But I agree, it definitely looked like something's venting near the end, too.
There's not much ambiguity for when to destruct. It's just: has it gone far enough off course that it could free-fall outside the predetermined borders where it's acceptable to crash? Then it's time to blow it up so it doesn't fly any farther.
Maybe it's something on SpaceX's side of things, a change in the burn profile? Perhaps it's related to losing the Starship about a minute later.
I hope they tell us.
Maybe this lack of oxygen led to the engines flaming out early, triggering the AFTS.
This is the old one: https://www.faa.gov/media/72816
For the second stage, my guess is they triggered the FTS due to the telemetry issues or just for safety's sake, i.e. they didn't want to take any risk with the lack of telemetry.
Most likely it was on board automatic FTS.
There is a trade off between data per flight, total timeline, and overall cost.
I dont think data per flight is the driving goal. There are lots of unknown, and if you stop completely for every problem, you are aren't learning about new problems.
As long as they get the ship up and make some progress, it isnt critical if these boosters blow up or sink the bottom of the ocean as planned
They have 4 boosters built and 3 more in production, and FAA license for 20 launches per year. My guess is that if the fix takes substantial time, they will work it into future production and keep going with what they have.
just look at Ariane 6...
Starship is a hardware rich program, the next version are there and nearly ready. Unless a major redesign is required (unlikely) it can happen much faster.
This time, after a vastly more successful and competent second test, you think it'll take even longer to refly?
SpaceX will likely be ready within a couple of months; then you add the regulatory approvals.
That’s why everything takes so much longer, the “classic” way.
But the way SpaceX does things, gets seriously good results, quite quickly (and gives us some great videos of stuff getting blowed up).
I deal with bureaucracies a lot and this is how they do everything: it has to look good, but they don’t actually care to make things good.
E.g.: fill out a ton of paperwork about how secure the web application is against hacking, but nobody reviews the source code for vulnerabilities. Or they fill out the paperwork and report the app as “secure” even when third parties like me are listing vulnerability after vulnerability.
The report is what mattered, not reality.
OFFICIALLY, on paper, the Shuttle was very safe.
https://curious-droid.com/393/nasa-filmed-apollo-shuttle-lau...
If it did, they might make another attempt sooner than expected.
Edit had the second sentence wrong
Hotstaging didn't "work" until they can demonstrate the Starship vehicle survives orbital insertion, re-entry, and landing without damage or malfunction caused by the hotstaging.
They’ve lost as many Starships as NASA lost Space Shuttles so far, with no deaths. It’s a test program for now.
Ask the “rest of the industry” about how Boeing’s Starliner is going. That’s what failure looks like.
I understand a lot of it is politics and government spending but it would be nice if NASA could get a case of go fever every once in awhile. So long as humans aren't involved.
I understand if there were more failures there'd be less money for big projects -but I think we should take the chance to see if that money would end up being spent on more smaller quicker projects.
We've crashed production probes into Mars, we've burned astronauts alive, we've had the supposedly "safe" options like Boeing's Starliner have fundamental problems even making it to orbit. Space has always been this way.
Starship's more akin to taking the Bell X-1 up for a spin than flying a 787 around, for the time being. Problems are expected at this point in the program, or we'd be sending people on them already.
On one side we are talking about how the "space industry" is most moving slowly and how spacex is doing great things.
On the other side we are saying that this is good enough for nasa (who is the establishment when it comes to space) and yolo bro.
On one side we are defending nasa because priorities, but on the other side we're cheering on spacex who is ultimately sucking at the big fat government tit.
i'm not sure anyone is aiming at burning people alive and just because it happened does not make it a justification moving forward.
Shuttle was 1.6 billion a launch. This is gonna be 100 million a lunch even if you let the booster blow up every time.
This test is in line with how every new rocket is developed. You really need to Google the 50s and 60s of space flight and see how many rockets were lost in those days.
Yet they still got to the moon.
If you want to take the stance that any test is a success that's fine but remember this depends on what your definition of success is.
The other thing to keep in mind is that past success is not always a good predictor of future success.
Objectively, this test successfully demonstrated the water deluge system, an intact launch pad, all engines on the first and second stage igniting and staying lit, stage separation, hot staging, and a long burn nearly to orbital speeds. That's a pretty good list of ticked boxes.
They very openly stated they didn't necessarily expect it to get all the way to splashdown. You can argue that's PR, but their history has objectively been one of incremental progress (again, see Falcon 9's landing attempts) via repeat testing.
Personally, I'd consider a mission failed if a) it carries a real payload it's supposed to get somewhere and doesn't, b) it breaks due to a previously known issue, or c) it breaks sooner than the last test. I'd also consider it entirely fine to have "reach goals" in a test.
They went longer, faster, further, and more successfully than the first test. I'm happy calling that a win, and I suspect SpaceX will as well.
It does not matter you call it a win if you are not respecting other opinions that this is a fail.
https://arstechnica.com/space/2023/11/what-nasa-wants-to-see...
> "Tomorrow is a test and we’re going to learn a lot either way," Lisa Watson-Morgan, who manages NASA's Human Landing System program, told Ars in an interview this week. "We’d love to see it go off perfectly, but frankly, if it doesn’t, it’s still going to be a great learning event, and it still will give us progression on the schedule for the different flight tests, and then we’ll know the areas we need to more deeply penetrate.”
Every launch where more is nominal for longer is new territory and an achievement.
It was a resounding success.
And if you go look at NASA during the Space Race era of the 60s, they blew up plenty of ships.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/67/USAF_ICB...
Blowing up lots of rockets to figure out how not to blow up rockets is traditional rocket development. The "get everything perfect the first time so it never blows up even once" tactic is forced on NASA because Congress is dumb.
Or just take a look at "How Not to Land an Orbital Rocket Booster".
I thought everyone here knew about this. Every software bug is a failure. Going through and squashing every one is the path to success.
What an odd thing to say. Are you suggesting that Starship is next-level when compared to Saturn V?
Hehe. I guess people nowadays lack any sort of historical perspective.
Starship is more then 2x as powerful as Saturn V. Starship is also designed for reusable.
So even if you consider it non-reusable its still much more powerful then Saturn V.
If 2x the size and major new features isn't 'next level' then what is?
It seems you are missing current perspective and glorifying the past.
True. The rest of the industry also can’t seem to muster a reusable orbital class first stage. So far evidence is with spacex. Their RUDy development seems to have born fruit before.
A failure would have been scattering the pad all over again, and not getting to stage sep. Or worse.
Optimistic/Pessimistic does not really matter.
By this criteria, I would say failure/partial failure or partial sucess. There is no way this was a success.
Also, everyone can call this what they want. The thing that grinds my gears is not respecting that other people do have a different opinion.
Years before Covid, my neighbor had an "opinion" that vaccines were unnecessary/dangerous, so she wouldn't get vaccinated. Just like you, she said "you have your opinion, and I have mine." In today's woke culture, that makes me the bad guy for not respecting her opinion, mansplaining, etc.
But opinions don't trump facts. At least, they shouldn't
also, as cool as "facts" are it really bothers me when people take their opinion and present it as fact or as truth. you see: the truth is something abstract and usually, not always, but usually there is a matter of interpretation and a gradient of the truth. I'm not speaking of well researched things that have mountains of evidence behind them. I'm speaking about people having really strong opinions without understanding the evidence behind it and without understanding the nuances of what applies when. It's really fashionable to shit all over other people when they don't agree to a T with what you are saying but IMHO it's the wrong thing to do - being curious and actually unpacking what they are trying to say if they can have a civilized discussion and logic actually works with them is the way to go.
Pretty similar to how a lot of NASA's missions have requirements like lasting 90 days on Mars. If that is reached, the mission was a success, even though they obviously don't just stop having objectives after that.
Not only it is not success, it is a massive failure when compared to the magic technology from the 60's.
Space industry is the only industry that is moving backwards, it seems.
https://youtu.be/w9OsSN2kJrk?si=FZ30c9jmkMOmYo3n&t=180
Certainly doesn't sound like the folks who built the thing thought it was a failure.
You can call a duck an eagle all day long but that does not make it an eagle.
Even the Administrator of NASA is happy with the progress. [1]
Objectively, it was a success.
[1] https://twitter.com/SenBillNelson/status/1725875275769028836
I took some screenshots: https://ibb.co/1GvddL5 https://ibb.co/28BSxwG https://ibb.co/KmccttG
Could be a bird, but doesn't really look like it to me.
Gosh this is exciting.
Oblig, I can't wait until these are happening every day!!
Rockets generally want their fuel to be sitting on the bottom of the tank, where the engines are. That's easy enough when the rocket is sitting on the ground and when the engines are firing, but once the rocket starts coasting/decelerating (e.g., when the engines turn off due to reaching the end of their burn) the fuel may drift away from the fuel intakes, resulting in the engines ingesting vapor/gas the next time the engines turn on. Rocket engines are designed with a pretty specific operating environment in mind, so ingesting vapor/gas instead of fuel usually leads to the engines expressing their displeasure in a very vocal fashion.
This poses a challenge for staging. The naive way to stage is to turn off the previous stage's engines then ignite the next stage's, but the time between the first set of engines turning off and the second set of engines reaching a sufficient thrust level to keep the fuel at the bottom of the tanks may be enough for the fuel to drift away from the fuel intakes, especially if staging occurs lower in the atmosphere or after an extended coast period.
One way of addressing this issue is to use "ullage thrusters" - small rockets that maintain a small amount of forwards acceleration during staging to keep the fuel at the bottom of the tanks. This is what the Saturn rocket did between the first/second stages.
Another way is to "hot stage" - ignite the new set of engines before the old ones cut out. This is what the Soyuz does (and is why its stages are connected with a lattice - to let the exhaust out), and is what Starship was trying out this time. This can be simpler than using ullage motors since there are fewer pieces, but also poses some additional challenges in that the first stage needs to survive the second stage's exhaust for long enough.
The last way is to use RCS thrusters for a period to settle the fuel. This was used by the Saturn third stage before trans-lunar injection, but can really only be used once you're in orbit.
By always accelerating (with engines lit), hot staging improves the payload to orbit about 10%. So it's well worth doing.
I think it'd be interesting to see a breakdown of that 10% improvement number. Hot staging in and of itself resulting in a 10% additional payload capacity seems large enough that I feel it's rather odd that it isn't more commonly used. I'm curious how much of it is due to "direct" improvements from reduced gravity losses and how much is due to "indirect" improvements like (maybe?) not needing to save as much fuel for boostback.
A comparison against what a "Saturn-style" staging that uses ullage motors might achieve could make for a fun addition as well.
Also, If you are not reusable you have much more margin to play with. SpaceX is optimizing this thing to an incredible amount. Liftoff thrust is 2x as much as Saturn V and they are aiming at 3x as much. Total payload to orbit is 2-3x larger while being reusable.
SpaceX could have done what they did on Falcon 9 (200+ successful launches in a row) but Hot-Staging like the Soyuz is also successful.
SpaceX optimizes for long term performance and operational simplicity. Ironically that leads to more Soviet way. The N1 would also have used hot staging.
Hot firing simplifies things in this regard.
A reusable approach would involve some form of gas thruster, so might as well just try hot staging.
https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/64713/how-is-hot-s...
The primary reason for hot staging is that without it, they had to turn off all engines, mechanically "push" the ship away from the booster and then light the ship engines. Say this takes 5 or 10 seconds. During this time, the entire system is not accelerating anymore, but it's still screaming away from the launch site (because to go to orbit, you don't just go "up", you mostly go "sideways", that's why you often hear "vehicle pitching down range" during broadcasts) and to get the booster back to the launch site you then have to spend more fuel to get back to the launch site - you have to counteract all that time you spend moving away from the launch site.
With hot staging you get to the velocity you need to get the first stage to orbit sooner, because the system never stops "pushing", and there's less distance you need to cover to get the first stage back to the launch site. With means you need less fuel that remains in the first stage after stage separation, which means you can use more fuel during the first stage firing (and therefore put more mass to orbit).
https://nitter.net/planet4589/status/1725873032244195495
Edit: a newer update shows direct evidence of the debris field area https://nitter.net/planet4589/status/1725917544114974995#m
I'd personally ballpark that there will be well over 20 launches before anything regarding humans is considered.
All of the crazy stuff they're planning, like returning and catching the booster, having the ship re-enter and land/get-caught, in-orbit refuelling, etc. will probably take a while to get right; but those are all "bonus features" that other rockets/companies don't bother with. I imagine it will be launching satellites pretty soon (next year?), at least in-house Starlinks, since refuelling, re-entering, landing, etc. can be done after the payload is safely deployed; and returning/catching the booster only takes place after safe separation (as we saw today, when the ship kept going after the booster's spectacular demise)
It will take a while to human-rate it. I imagine we'll start by seeing crews transferring to Starships that launch uncrewed (e.g. like the HLS for Nasa); eventually we'll probably see crew launch, once it's established a decent track record. I'm unsure if we'll ever see people in the landing flip; I'd rather eject beforehand and parachute down!
https://prod-ec-us-west-2.video.pscp.tv/Transcoding/v1/hls/O...
----
Much better quality, slightly better latency. Seems like it comes from the Periscope transcoding infrastructure. Found it on reddit here: https://old.reddit.com/r/spacex/comments/17uyblj/rspacex_int...
For those who almost never use VLC (like me), don't download and then open the file. Instead open VLC, Update it from its ancient version, and then File, Open Network Stream, paste in
https://prod-ec-us-west-2.video.pscp.tv/Transcoding/v1/hls/O...
then click Play. Enjoy.
It's literally from Twitter livestream; they are just re-skinned Periscope.
You can even replace highlatency to lowlatency for better latency.
Edit: This is basically how automated FTS works, folks. Follow parameters of the flight, and if an "exception" occurs, solve the situation by exploding the rocket over a safe spot, before it veers too much off course.
(Submitted URL was https://twitter.com/i/broadcasts/1dRKZEWQvrXxB but our software got caught in a redirect to a login.)
* 4 hours from now
* 5 AM Pacific Time
* 7 AM Central Time (local)
* 8 AM Eastern Time
* 2 PM Central European Time
Live Media
* Official yet channel: https://www.youtube.com/@SpaceX
* Labpadre: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DIJTeeZj7k4
* NASASpaceflight: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mhJRzQsLZGg
* EverydayAstronaut: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6na40SqzYnU
* TheLaunchPad: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b0preOnsuo4
* TechniquesSpatiales(FR): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qI4cKoSD-Jg
Ressources
* Mission sheet: https://www.spacex.com/launches/mission/?missionId=starship-...
* Intro video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=18pCXD709TI
* https://old.reddit.com/r/spacex/comments/17uyblj/rspacex_int...
https://www.spacex.com/launches/mission/?missionId=starship-...
Edit: this stream works without having to login to Twitter
*NASASpaceflight
NASASpaceflight.com (and their Youtube channel) has no affiliation with NASA.
For years I was completely baffled why the National Science Foundation had to certify the wire shelving in my apartment...
https://www.srs-i.com/blog/all-about-nsf-certifications-shel...
It's extremely sketchy, and I wish NASA would do something to protect their trademark.
Everyday Astronaut on youtube.
Oh my god!
Oh my god!
Oh my god!
Oh my god!
Oh my god!
Their commenting _is_ like.
Otherwise, I agree.
https://www.spacex.com/launches/mission/?missionId=starship-...
But the real issue is why don't have browsers an integrated way of doing these computations by reading some HTML tags and also providing input widgets to make sure that it is universally readable by machines. Like <datetime ts="1700310507" ref-tz="Europe/Amsterdam" /> (if the event's timezone is Europe/Amsterdam, only for informational purposes)
SpaceX designed their page to display specific time zones for whatever reason.
But it is marked as dupe (HN seems to have already queried it and classified as broken link)
Sorry for whatever you are going through, though. Hope you get through it.
It’s all spectacle, and where will it all lead? We landed men on the moon, and haven’t been back. What is SpaceX going to use for going to Mars? Are you gonna be the one that’s going or are they gonna leave you behind to rot here on this burning planet?
Frankly, I don't see human society surviving long enough - or perhaps better put, maintaining a necessary level of societal development - for us to develop the tech to establish a self-sufficient colony capable of independent growth and to get us to a planet with the resources to make such a thing possible.
It's hard to make rocket parts when everyone is living in shacks made of sticks and mud and leaves.
You also appear to have an internet connection and a means to use it. Again, technological leaps were required for you to be able to whine on HN.
Perhaps - if you're so utterly sincere and serious about saving the planet as you appear to be - you should be living in the nearest available cave? After all, that minivan is likely to use an internal combustion engine and runs on dead dinosaurs; let alone the plastics and metals and silicon used in said minivan's assembly.
See, this is what I don't get about eco-heros like you appear to be - even if you are homeless, you're still, right now, utilising every single technological leap that it took to get you to the stage of even just living in your minivan and complaining about rocket development on the internet. This, to me, reeks of hypocrisy.
So the most likely outcome of a metaphorical or literal asteroid hit on Earth is that it would still leave thousands, millions, or billions of survivors on Earth, while leaving it unable and/or unwilling to sustain maintenance missions to Mars, so the Mars colonists would starve or otherwise die slowly, despite being technically unaffected by the original disaster.
> you talk about new eras, but nothing changes.
And yes, it does affect my life. I have dreamed my whole life of this stuff happening. After growing up in a "third world" country, I navigated the byzantine US immigration system, went through a decade+ of training, to finally be here and working at a new-space company right at the beginning of this new space age. The industry that I am working at right now would be in a completely different place (and a lot smaller) without SpaceX. It also wouldn't exist without the advances made for Apollo and the Space Shuttle program.
> What is SpaceX going to use for going to Mars?
Starship probably.
> Are you gonna be the one that’s going
Maybe. There is a non-zero chance now that the system that will achieve it is that much closer to being operational. You are missing the step change in cost that this will enable.
> or are they gonna leave you behind to rot here on this burning planet
It does not have to be one or the other. The "burning planet" will be solved just like we solved every other challenge facing our species.
You are obviously going through some stuff and seem to be in place where you cannot appreciate the good things that are happening in this world. But that does not change the fact that they are.
I appreciate a lot of good things when they happen. I’m saying this this is not a good thing. Do you think it’s a good thing because it made your life better. But you’re only seeing it from your perspective. You don’t have a holistic view of the world.
You asked me how it impacts me and I answered.
> But you’re only seeing it from your perspective. You don’t have a holistic view of the world.
You are failing to see the holistic view yourself because you seem to be having a bad time. Lowering the cost of mass-to-orbit by a couple of orders of magnitude significantly changes what can be done in space. This includes truly massive satellites (e.g. https://www.k2space.com/) that can provide services for Earth that were not possible before. In-space manufacturing of materials that cannot be made easily on Earth. Moving polluting industries off the surface, mining of resources from space (for use in space or on the surface if it is valuable enough) and much more. It is a feed-back loop that will compound into massive changes.
All of that and more will impact the whole of humanity in a very positive way.
Don’t you understand? You’re all surprised about my negative comments but I’m sure you would be feeling the same if you were in my position right now.
There are things that do not benefit you right at this moment. That does not mean that they are not a boon to society at large and a net-positive for this world.
A significant fraction of the billions of people on this planet have had their life changed positively due to advancements in space technology - in all probability including you. And it will continue to do so. I am sorry that you are not in a place where you can appreciate that and be happy about it. I hope it changes for you.
But there's still more than a month to go until 2024. I'm sure everything will come together in time. </s>
The "magnitude" of the US Space Shuttle program was definitely reduced for me even as a white kid; I got to watch the shuttle launch on a TV rolled into the classroom, and then go right back to reading my mangled, outdated science textbook, watching my teacher write on a chalkboard with chalk he had to purchase himself because our school district apparently couldn't afford to buy enough, because it was more important that we have more, and better, nuclear bombs and missiles to transport them than Russia.
We went to the moon. The rest of the world did things like set up universal healthcare for its citizens, build housing, non-punitive criminal justice systems, public transit, etc.
Can you define that a bit more before I ask further questions?
Why is it that the most difficult things to do are the most caring things?
That letter was written over 50 years ago, and we still have homelessness. We still have poverty, people are still starving, we still have idiotic, ideological wars, and separation of wealth. So when’s the return on the investment going to actually happen?
It already did many times over what it cost. And continues to deliver.
That school was publicly, though poorly, funded. I also had Pell grants for college, subsidized medical insurance, a free bus pass, an apartment made affordable through adequate supply of housing, a criminal justice system that has so far protected me from violence.
I have no chips on my shoulder from any deprivation, and appreciate everything that helped me to get where I am today, which I don't think would have been possible anywhere else in the world.