SpaceX's fourth Starship launch approved for Thursday | Hacker News Reader

SpaceX's fourth Starship launch approved for Thursday

arstechnica.com

111 pointsmmwelt45 comments

The reentry videos during the 3rd launch were unreal. Live images of plasma dancing.

Just looking at the 2 vehicles stacked also looks sci-fi.

It's great being part of another space age, having missed the first one when it was at its peak. Exciting times.

The tumbling sure made the footage a lot more spectacular than straight-and-level flight would have :) It's still pretty stunning that we could watch it live, in that quality, nearly uninterrupted.

Would love to know if the reentry ship vibrations might make patterns in the plasma akin to the cymatic patterns on a chladni plate or faraday waves in a dish of water. Maybe it would be useful… but maybe it would just look cool!

That footage is the coolest thing to come out of this so far.

Seeing starship in person, both it being stacked and also taking off, was the most "I live in the future" experience of my life. It genuinely felt like science fiction and I was grinning so hard as I was driving towards Starbase and seeing the stacked Starship off in the distance for the first time. I car camped on the beach directly outside the base (thankfully AC all night in a Tesla) and it was also a really fun experience waking up in the middle of the night, and again later at sunrise, and seeing Starship immediately outside my window

The most interesting part of the announcement is the agreed failure modes which won’t require the lengthy FAA mishap investigation afterwards (if they occurred).

Seems reasonable. FAA is like: Do no damage to people or property. Don't deviate from the specified corridors and times. Don't have anomalies/fts before you get to that nominal (slightly-sub)orbital insertion. Tell us beforehand if you're going for controlled or uncontrolled reentry. GLHF with the rest.

11 hours ago. 11 comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40578585

Let's hope they continue making progress. Expected failures are fine. Unexpected failures have the potential to derail such a program for years.

> Unexpected failures have the potential to derail such a program for years

Catastrophic ones, sure. But not just the unexpected. If you aren’t unexpectedly failing in such an endeavour, you’re not pushing hard enough.

Not really. Anything other then outright shooting a rocket at an inhabited area, years of derail is incredibly unlikely.

> Unexpected failures

That's literally why SpaceX tests the way it does. Unexpected failures are this program's M.O... It's a test program and Starship, unlike Falcon, is not operational (let alone human rated). They can -and do- retrofit fixes to the new vehicles they already had at the time of an anomaly and are now capable of going SN to SN pretty fast (months).

An unexpected failure in a program like Vulcan or SLS would -maybe- derail it for years. I say maybe because Vulcan's upper stage's tank exploded during testing and it barely moved its schedule. SLS is a different beast, precisely because they simulate and ground-test every single little detail and possibility and building another SLS with fixes would probably be a multi-year project.

It has the capacity to derail it forever as SpaceX has largely burned through their NASA cash already.

SpaceX is not cash constrained. Every offering they do is extremely limited in terms of who they let invest, yet is still always massively oversubscribed. They're spending multiple billions per year on both Starship and Starlink but haven't been tapping the capital markets -- IOW internal cash flow is also massive.

Elon would also undoubtedly pour his Tesla money into SpaceX to keep it afloat. He's a lot more passionate about SpaceX than Tesla. But it's a moot point because SpaceX has a massively profitable monopoly on efficient space launches and probably will for a very long time.

Which Tesla money? He said if they don't "solve" self-driving Tesla is worth zero. Nobody really knows how profitable SpaceX is.

NASA's cash is nice to have. But it's not what's important to SpaceX at this point. Their estimated valuation is somewhere in the $200bn range. Their cash cow is Starlink (with 3 million subscribers and growing each month), the future profitability and competitivity of which is highly dependent on Starship being operational and fully reusable.

I know Elon says Multiplanetary this and Mars that but the real reason for the Starship push is Starlink. They need Starship to put bigger (V2s non-minis and V3s) and more satellites into the orbit if they want to get to that 35000 number this decade and not break the bank. They need to hurry before the likes of Amazon get their shit together and start building their own internet satellite constellations.

> I know Elon says Multiplanetary this and Mars that but the real reason for the Starship push is Starlink.

Elon Musk has been talking about Mars colonization since 2001, and first brought up the idea of a "Mars Colonial Transporter" mega-rocket in 2012. Starlink did not come along until 2016; that business was created to provide a profit-generating customer for Starship.

SpaceX's advances are one of the biggest sources of excitement about humanity's future for me.

Same. Really looking forward to this and also the subsequent launches

Certainly better than the same old new adtech, fintech, programming language, AI, crypto, techbro drudgery that is common, uh, in a lot of sites.

I don't want to denigrate those subjects, but yes, this is much more inspiring.

Why? Without speed of light or faster than speed of light travel we are stuck with uninhabitable planets (and we can't even fix our own)

Who cares about planets. Space stations like big ONeil cylinders is where it is at. Why succumb to another gravity well after we successfully fled the first one.

lol, sure. Those work in sci-fi movies, unless you want vertigo every time you stand up. Or require to have ungodly amount of resources, as those things need massive radius to actually work like earth's gravity

There are massive amounts of resources in our solar system to put towards this type of construction, so why worth about that?

And an O'Neill cylinder large enough won't cause vertigo.

Yes to both.

But we are nowhere near to even realistically plan on achieving something like that

It is achievable with existing technology and materials. We would need something like an industrial lunar base to get material cheap into orbit, though.

If you mean to unite all nations and replace calipalism with a technocratic system aimed at exploration and scientific progress.

So then humanity could pool together all resources to operate moon habitat and space industry to create space megastructures... then yes its 'achievable'

A reusable Starship being churned out one a day at the Starfactory can achieve that:

A Kalpana One space habitat is estimated to require a mass of 10 billion kilograms, or 10 million tons.

One Starship launch can place 100 tons in orbit. 10,000 Starships, launching once a day, can place 10 million tons into orbit in 10 days.

From there, tapping extraterrestrial resources becomes far more feasible, and using them to construct an O'Neill Cylinder comes within sight.

Sources:

Peter Hague's Planetocracy blog provide the Kalpana One mass estimates: https://planetocracy.org/

Starfactory planning to manufacture one Starship per day: https://www.space.com/spacex-starship-one-a-day-starfactory

Being able to explore and learn more about other planets, which are our best sources of information of whether we're alone in the universe, will help answer one of the most fundamental and long-lasting questions in all of human history. That's pretty exciting to me.

I can't imagine any where with tolerable gravity and solid ground is uninhabitable. It will just require advances in habitat construction, which will massively expand the space for human settlements.

Space exploration has already spurred significant technological advancements and I anticipate that space colonization will catalyze orders of magnitude more innovation.

Elon suggested SpaceX is going to have ~5-6 launches of Starship this year. It's interesting where we could expect the next launch, if everything goes reasonably well with this one.

[dupe]

Some more discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40578585

I get the feeling it's going take several attempts before re-entry is a success.

I have a feeling this launch will end exactly as the last one did.

Just a personal opinion.

I dunno, if you followed the falcon 9 test launches, each launch made progress and often surprised everyone. I expect that this system is bigger, more complicated and so that iterative success will be a little slower, but generally I think it will continue as it has been: each launch is an improvement over the previous one.

I was wrong pretty quickly! lol

Starliner or Starship launch next?

it's 50/50

Starliner made liftoff at last.

Hopefully they make it to orbit this time.

They are attempting the same just below orbital trajectory as last flight. They will not be attempting an in orbit-ish deorbit burn, as they have stated that their primary goals are getting the ship through peak reentry, and the booster to a simulated soft landing burn.

So they still aren't getting to orbit?

Not because they can't, but because they need to stay suborbital.

Starship hasn't been to orbit yet.

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