Super Heavy has splashed down in The Gulf of Mexico
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Living in central Florida I cannot wait for the new launch facility to come online. We're going to have lines of spectators into the space coast like we did for the shuttle.
If any of you are heading to Disney World you should stop by the NASA Kennedy Visitor Complex, it is so well done and not that expensive (it takes less time than 1 line at Disney world to get to :) ). It has the original launch control room for Apollo that you can tour, a Saturn V rocket that is laid horizontally and you can walk under, the crew module for the moon landing. My favorite part is the Atlantis shuttle suspended from the ceiling, they left it in its "raw" landed format with scorch marks and tiles, it looks absolutely amazing.
There were quite a lot of them at the time.
"Once the rockets go up, who cares where they come down? 'That's not my department,' says Werner Von Braun." -- Tom Lehrer https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QEJ9HrZq7Ro
This century has yet to see anything like WW1 and WW2, and those who are alive today are incredibly disconnected from our recent past.
An argument made that WW2 was continuation of WW1 and that WW1 was wanted by British leadership who were locked in an arms race with Germany that they could not sustain much longer and wanted a war with Germany while they were ahead so the assassination that triggered WW1 was the pretext tobstart WW1. If you disagree please try to answer why leaders are regularly assassinated and that does not cause a world war.
Germany, on the other hand, wanted to emerge as a stronger power than Britain while avoiding direct conflict. German leaders pleaded with Britain to remain neutral and not declare war on Germany. However, from the British perspective, war with Germany was deemed necessary to suppress its increasing power and maintain Britain's position on the world stage.
British leaders may not have actively sought to start a war, but they believed that confronting Germany was crucial to protect their national interests. See my reply to sibling comment with more details.
Today there is a similar situation with China being the rising power and America seeking to suppress it.
Britain's system of alliances, particularly the Entente Cordiale with France and Russia, made it likely that any conflict involving these powers would draw Britain into a larger war. When the July Crisis erupted following the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, British leaders did little to prevent the escalation of tensions. Despite last-minute efforts by some, such as German Chancellor Theobald von Bethmann-Hollweg's plea for British neutrality, Britain remained committed to its alliances and the belief that war with Germany was necessary.
It's worth noting that other European leaders, such as French President Raymond Poincaré and Russian Tsar Nicholas II, also played significant roles in the outbreak of the war. However, Britain's long-standing rivalry with Germany, its naval arms race, and its commitment to alliances that would likely trigger a larger conflict all contributed to its readiness to enter the war when the opportunity arose.
How, exactly, mechanistically, does Britain manipulate this crisis into an Anglo-German war? They didn’t make Austria-Hungary declare war. They didn’t even declare war alongside the French. And they certainly didn’t make Germany invade France by way of Belgium in order to give Britain a pretext. It sounds to me like Germany wanted war with Russia and was confident they could also afford war with France (having kicked their asses in 1870 already) but would have really preferred to keep Britain out of it.
If there is a criticism one can levy against the British, it might be that they simply weren’t forceful enough in making that consequence clear to the Germans ahead of time. The “alliances that would likely trigger a larger conflict” were in fact a consciously designed system of balances of power meant to deter exactly that type of large scale war, in the tradition that was established 99 years previously in the wake of the Napoleonic Wars. It’s easy to dismiss that system because it failed catastrophically in 1914, but the fact that it had mostly worked since 1815 was unprecedented in European history. The 99 years between the Napoleonic and First World Wars were the most peaceful 99 years of European history since at least the Roman Empire; check back in 2044 to see if we can break that record.
You make a good point about the "Long Peace" between the Napoleonic Wars and World War I. While there were indeed several conflicts during this period, they were generally shorter and more localized. The Revolutions of 1848, which affected many European countries. The Russo-Turkish War (1877-1878) The Serbo-Bulgarian War (1885) The Greco-Turkish War (1897) And there are others that I missed
> Germany wanted war with Russia and was confident they could also afford war with France (having kicked their asses in 1870 already) but would have really preferred to keep Britain out of it.
Yes I also agree however had Britain remained neutral and not created alliances that it knew would put it in conflict with Germany is it possible that the Germany vs. Russia conflict might have remained a regional war (like others I mentioned above) and so continuing the so called “long peace”? Instead there was an escalation to a global conflict. So what motivated Britain to make these alliances that caused the escalation? Is there a better explanation than “Thucydides Trap”? (See my sibling post about this.)
“Thucydides Trap" suggests that when a rising power threatens to displace an existing great power, it often leads to war. Russia, Britain, and Germany found themselves in this predicament before World War 1, with each nation acting rationally to protect its own interests. However, the complex web of alliances and the fear of losing power ultimately led to a global conflict that no one truly desired.
The answer to this is incredibly obvious. It's the same reason people have always made voluntary alliances - for security. See also: NATO.
As for the "Thucydides Trap", there's plenty of criticism on Wikipedia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thucydides_Trap#Criticism
Personally I file it alongside Marxism, Asimov's Psychohistory, and all the other Grand Theories Of History that try to pretend human behavior is simple and predictable.
Notice many of the criticisms that you linked to focus on whether the trap applies to the current dynamics between the USA and China. The mere existence of such debates implicitly accepts the validity of the trap pattern itself.
Other criticisms question the trap's applicability to different historical situations and its underlying mechanisms, such as assigning blame for the resulting conflicts. However, these arguments overlook a crucial aspect of the trap: "incredibly obvious" security moves by one party can provoke equally "obvious" security responses from the other, potentially escalating into a devastating war that neither side truly desires. This can occur even when all parties act rationally, as the challenge to the established "pecking order" drives the trap.
> Personally I file it alongside Marxism, Asimov's Psychohistory, and all the other Grand Theories Of History that try to pretend human behavior is simple and predictable.
It's essential to distinguish the "Thucydides Trap" from grand theories of history like Marxism or Asimov's Psychohistory. Rather than attempting to simplify and predict human behavior on a grand scale, the trap is better understood as a cognitive bias that can lead groups into conflicts with one another. The numerous examples listed on Wikipedia support the existence of such biases:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases
While human behavior may indeed be unpredictable at times, it is be unwise to dismiss the influence of cognitive biases on group dynamics and decision-making.
For instance, the Franco-Prussian war of 1870, where the German Empire you seem to idolize was effectively born. Also the same war that gave the German Empire a degree of overconfidence about their chances against France.
> however had Britain remained neutral and not created alliances that it knew would put it in conflict with Germany is it possible that the Germany vs. Russia conflict might have remained a regional war (like others I mentioned above)
Did Britain create the alliance between France and Russia? They certainly weren't a party to it, because that wasn't their casus belli for entering the war. Their casus belli was the German invasion of Belgium. My contention is that if Britain was less neutral and more proactive about creating alliances that could put it in conflict with Germany, they could have successfully deterred the First World War.
Britain did not create the alliance between France and Russia - that alliance was formed independently in 1894 as a counterweight to the Triple Alliance of Germany, Austria-Hungary and Italy. Britain's casus belli for entering WWI in 1914 was Germany's violation of Belgian neutrality, not any direct alliance obligations.
However, I would argue that Britain's shift away from "splendid isolation" and toward the Entente with France and Russia in the early 1900s, while stopping short of hard alliance commitments, still had the effect of emboldening France and Russia in their disputes with Germany and Austria-Hungary. The Anglo-Russian Convention of 1907 in particular eased long-standing tensions between Britain and Russia.
So in that sense, while Britain didn't create the Franco-Russian alliance, British diplomatic moves in the pre-war years did strengthen the Entente bloc and alter the balance of power in a way that made France and Russia less likely to back down in a crisis. A more fervently neutral Britain may have left France and Russia feeling less confident.
> My contention is that if Britain was less neutral and more proactive about creating alliances that could put it in conflict with Germany, they could have successfully deterred the First World War.
In the lead-up to WWI, there was a prevailing belief among European powers that any war would be short. Many did not foresee how devastating and prolonged the conflict would become. So even a more hardline British policy may not have been seen as a strong enough deterrent in 1914. Additionally, a more assertive Britain risked further inflaming tensions and sparking a crisis. The European alliance system meant any conflict had the potential to spiral out of control - more British alliances could have simply added fuel to the fire. And if war came, Britain would then be obligated to join from the start, rather than having the option to stay out.
> German Empire you seem to idolize was effectively born
I disagree with your characterization that I "idolize" the German Empire. My argument is that the outbreak of World War I was primarily caused by the "Thucydides Trap" dynamic - the dangerous instability that occurs when a rising power threatens to displace an established power. In this case, Germany's rise in the late 19th/early 20th century threatened the European balance of power that had long been anchored by British dominance.
I don't believe in the simplistic "evil Germans started WWI" narrative that was promoted by the war's victors. This narrative served to justify the punitive terms of the Treaty of Versailles placed on Germany, which most historians agree was a key factor in the rise of Nazism and the eventual outbreak of World War II 20 years later.
Portraying it simplistically as "evil Germans" against the noble Allies is not productive and does not do justice to the immense tragedy of the war and its aftermath.
My contention is we should strive to analyze this world-shaping event objectively and resist nation-centric narratives shaped by wartime propaganda. I believe examining it through the lens of great power competition and the "Thucydides Trap" is a more constructive approach.
If you have evidence showing that I "idolize" Imperial Germany, I would appreciate if you could quote where I expressed those sentiments. But I suspect this is a misreading of my arguments about the war's root causes.
And the idea of maintaining a balance of power in the first place was part of the legacy of the Congress of Vienna following the Napoleonic Wars. It wasn't a uniquely British policy.
> However, I would argue that Britain's shift away from "splendid isolation" and toward the Entente with France and Russia in the early 1900s, while stopping short of hard alliance commitments, still had the effect of emboldening France and Russia in their disputes with Germany and Austria-Hungary. The Anglo-Russian Convention of 1907 in particular eased long-standing tensions between Britain and Russia.
> So in that sense, while Britain didn't create the Franco-Russian alliance, British diplomatic moves in the pre-war years did strengthen the Entente bloc and alter the balance of power in a way that made France and Russia less likely to back down in a crisis. A more fervently neutral Britain may have left France and Russia feeling less confident.
Germany's goal in 1914 was to attack Russia, so Russia's confidence is of little relevance. Do you have any evidence that France was more confident in allying with Russia because they felt they could trust Britain to help? Because that doesn't seem at all consistent with the history of Franco-British relations. And, as discussed above, it's also perfectly explainable in terms of maintaining the balance of power, which had been the consensus method of maintaining peace for the past century.
> I disagree with your characterization that I "idolize" the German Empire.
You're furthering a theory in which Britain is somehow to blame for the outbreak of the First World War. I assumed that your attempt to rehabilitate the historical legacy of the German Empire was motivated by some sort of fondness for the German Empire. If I'm mistaken, please accept my apologies.
> My argument is that the outbreak of World War I was primarily caused by the "Thucydides Trap" dynamic - the dangerous instability that occurs when a rising power threatens to displace an established power.
Yes, this was exactly the dynamic taking place between Germany and Russia.
> In this case, Germany's rise in the late 19th/early 20th century threatened the European balance of power that had long been anchored by British dominance.
There are multiple problems with this idea, most of which I have already enumerated, but I will re-enumerate them for your convenience:
* Britain and Germany operated in very different spheres. Britain was a global thalassocracy while Germany was a land power with mostly Eurasian concerns. Germany was attempting to develop sea power on their own, but they were never particularly close to eclipsing Britain on that front.
* Even if Britain had the goal of engineering the outbreak of a war with Germany, they did very little that contributed to the outbreak of such a war. Meanwhile, Germany took several such actions.
> I don't believe in the simplistic "evil Germans started WWI" narrative that was promoted by the war's victors. This narrative served to justify the punitive terms of the Treaty of Versailles placed on Germany, which most historians agree was a key factor in the rise of Nazism and the eventual outbreak of World War II 20 years later.
That's a non-sequitur; even if the Treaty of Versailles was too punitive, it doesn't follow that Germany didn't start the war.
(For what it's worth, the most punitive effects of the Versailles Treaty had been effectively waived or ameliorated long before the Nazis took power. The consequences of the Versailles Treaty did motivate support for the Nazis in the 1920's, but by the end of the 1920's, hyperinflation was over and Germany had successfully renegotiated itself into a much stronger economic position. What really helped the Nazis after that point was the start of the Great Depression. But this is a tangent.)
> Portraying it simplistically as "evil Germans" against the noble Allies is not productive and does not do justice to the immense tragedy of the war and its aftermath.
Some simplistic historical narratives also turn out to be mostly true. For example, would you make the same claim about the Second World War that you're making about the First?
I'm not particularly interested in moralizing about history. But here are the concrete actions Germany took which served to either start or expand the war:
* Germany gave diplomatic encouragement to Austria-Hungary to declare war on Serbia in the first place.
* When Russia joined the war in defense of Serbia, Germany responded by declaring war on Russia, knowing that Russia and France had a defensive alliance.
* When France joined the war in defense of Russia, Germany attacked the neutral country of Belgium.
Britain could have stayed neutral at this point, and yet a world war would have still broken out purely by virtue of Germany's actions. Let's contrast the actions the British took, which you attribute the outbreak of the war to:
* Britain eased tensions with Russia and improved relations with France. (Very strange to start a war by improving relations with your traditional enemies!)
* After Germany was already in a war with Russia, France, and Belgium, Britain entered the war and refused German demands to remain neutral.
My objection with your theory here is that you haven't provided any credible mechanism by which Britain could have possibly engineered the start of an Anglo-German war, particularly when the causal links in that chain included many actions that were entirely within Germany's control. Can you please address that particular objection? You can say "Thucydides Trap" until you're blue in the face but the facts don't fit the theory in this instance.
If you believe this you misunderstood me.
There was a regional war (the “long peace” had many of these) which only became a global war when the British empire got involved. What I pointed out was that British involvement was optional. The British Empire was concerned about maintaining a balance of power in Europe. German dominance threatened this balance hence the British empire wanting war with Germany and declaring war on Germany. Belgium was a convenient pretext.
> I assumed that your attempt to rehabilitate the historical legacy of the German Empire was motivated by some sort of fondness for the German Empire. If I'm mistaken, please accept my apologies.
My argument is that the outbreak of World War I was caused by the "Thucydides Trap" dynamic and I do not believe the simplistic “evil Germans were responsible”. Nor do I believe the British or Russians were responsible. To cast blame is to misunderstand the "Thucydides Trap".
> Even if Britain had the goal of engineering the outbreak of a war with Germany, they did very little that contributed to the outbreak of such a war. Meanwhile, Germany took several such actions.
When above I said “WW1 was wanted by British leadership who were locked in an arms race with Germany that they could not sustain much longer and wanted a war with Germany while they were ahead” I did not say “Britain had the goal of engineering the outbreak of a war with Germany”. You misunderstood me.
> My objection with your theory here is that you haven't provided any credible mechanism by which Britain could have possibly engineered the start of an Anglo-German war, particularly when the causal links in that chain included many actions that were entirely within Germany's control. Can you please address that particular objection?
I may want a new car, however I am not going to get a new car unless my current car needs big repairs but I am not going to crash it for that purpose to “engineer” the situation. Similarly British leadership who were locked in an arms race with Germany (that they could not sustain much longer) wanted a war with Germany (they were ahead) but it would be foolish to engineer war on purpose.
At the start of WW1 the British Empire played a dominant role in the global economy -- it was perhaps about one-quarter to one-third of the global economy. Adding to this the economic contributions of English-speaking allies like the United of States of America, which was rapidly industrializing and increasing its economic output, the fraction could reasonably be estimated to range from approximately 30% to 40% of the world's GDP being either English-speaking or under British control at the beginning of World War I.
Would we call it a “world” war if 30-40% of world GDP was not involved? Did the British Empire have to be involved? Were they attacked? No, there was a treaty about keeping Belgium neutral that was used by the British to declare war on Germany. Did Britain have to declare war if it did not want war?
To help answer this question let’s look at a more recent example: the Budapest Memorandum on Security Assurances. It was signed in December 1994 by Ukraine, the United States, Russia, and the United Kingdom. The signatories offered assurances against the use of force or coercion against Ukraine and pledged to respect the independence and sovereignty and the existing borders of Ukraine. Could this treaty be used as a reason to declare war on Russia? Yet nobody wants war with Russia so nobody declared war on Russia. So going back to the British Empire, if it did not want war with Germany did it have to declare war due to Belgium?
> That's a non-sequitur; even if the Treaty of Versailles was too punitive, it doesn't follow that Germany didn't start the war.
It may look like two separate issues however if victors need to justify a punitive treaty are there no incentives to write the history about the start of the conflict in a biased way? Did you witness the start of WW1 in person? Understanding biases in how history is recorded is important is it not?
> (For what it's worth, the most punitive effects of the Versailles Treaty had been effectively waived or ameliorated long before the Nazis took power. The consequences of the Versailles Treaty did motivate support for the Nazis in the 1920's, but by the end of the 1920's, hyperinflation was over and Germany had successfully renegotiated itself into a much stronger economic position. What really helped the Nazis after that point was the start of the Great Depression. But this is a tangent.)
> Some simplistic historical narratives also turn out to be mostly true. For example, would you make the same claim about the Second World War that you're making about the First?
Simplistic historical narratives belong in patriotic propaganda. “Why did your family members and friends die? They died for our country! They died for freedom! Democracy!”
You come across as smart so why would you accept simplistic historical narratives?
What you say may be true but how do you explain that World War II is often viewed as a continuation of World War I? Do you doubt that unresolved issues and punitive conditions of the Treaty of Versailles left Germany economically and politically destabilized? Do you doubt that the harsh penalties, including significant territorial losses, disarmament, and crippling reparations, fostered deep resentment among Germans? Do you doubt that this environment allowed extremist parties like the Nazis under Adolf Hitler to rise to power? Do you doubt that Hitler's aggressive policies were aimed at overturning the Treaty of Versailles and restoring Germany's stature? Nothing to do with WW1?
The bombing of Dresden is arguably a war crime by todays standards. It was unnecessary.
Remember that we were allied with the Soviet Union (Joseph Stalin was the "good guy" on our side). After WW2 he was given half of Europe as a reward, forcing that half of Europe to become communist, and the Soviets got to write the history books about Germany and WW2. Not the most transparent and unbiased source of information.
The Soviets and other allied soldiers (the good guys) also had a free-for-all with the German ladies after winning the war.
"The majority of the assaults were committed in the Soviet occupation zone; estimates of the numbers of German women raped by Soviet soldiers have ranged up to 2 million"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rape_during_the_occupation_of_...
And yes. Stalin was a bad guy and it's a pity the war didn't end with the demise of both the Nazi and Soviet regimes. This is also irrelevant to the matter of strategic bombings perpetrated by America and Britain.
"We may have been fighting the wrong enemy (Germany) all along. But while we're here (on the Soviet border), we should go after the bastards now, 'cause we're gonna have to fight 'em eventually."
https://books.google.com/books?redir_esc=y&id=32DxAAAAMAAJ&d...
You realize that this is exactly how the war between Oceania and Eurasia started, right?
Your points about the Communists stand, but keep in mind that the West always considered them the least bad option. They started out on Hitler's side and they only got half of Europe because they already had it occupied with masses of troops. The West couldn't have pushed them back to Moscow unless they were willing to fight a couple more years, killing millions more.
And some would argue that nuking entire cities is completely unacceptable.
1. Invade. Expected Allied casualties of 300k all the way to much more than a million. Expected Japanese casualties: tens of millions, perhaps up to literally all of them. Previous Japanese strongholds fought to the last man, earlier in the war the Allies invaded an island with 11000 Japanese soldiers, and I think 47 of those eventually surrendered. The rest died. The civilian populations on these islands infamously committed suicide in huge numbers rather than be captured by the Allies. How much harder would an invasion of the home islands be!? The Japanese government issued an order that every single person must fight to the death.
2. Starve them out. The allies had submarines all around Japan and completely blocked all food and oil imports. This was working. But given the Japanese fighting spirit, likely tens of millions would have died before any change took place. It's also possible that the population could drop so low that the islands would become self-sufficient and then the war would drag on literally forever.
3. Conventional aerial bombardment. The Allies were already trying this with great gusto, to little diplomatic effect.
4. Demonstration nuke off the coast. The Allies only had two nukes left after the test one, and weren't 100% sure it would work. A failed demo would only strengthen Japanese resolve. There were concerns whether one demo nuke would be scary enough to force a surrender. Given that one actually used nuke wasn't, these concerns turned out to be valid.
5. Actually drop a nuke. This option turns out to have had the lowest bodycount in the end and had the unexpected side-effect of ushering in an unprecedented era of global peace.
First, there is no evidence of any actual casualty estimates made during the war that were anywhere near as high as the ones you give in option 1. Those numbers were made up after the war. The wartime estimates were about an order of magnitude lower.
Second, you left out an option: clarify the status of the Emperor if the Japanese surrendered, which the US government well knew, since they were reading Japanese diplomatic traffic and also had plenty of intelligence from spies, was the only real obstacle in the way of the Japanese surrendering. The final surrender agreement left the Emperor in place as the head of the Japanese state. If the Japanese had known that was going to be the final outcome of surrender earlier, it is highly probable that they would have surrendered earlier. The status of the Emperor was the primary weapon the military war faction in the Japanese cabinet used to quash surrender proposals.
Third, to call the time since WW II "an unprecedented era of global peace" is a bit much. What the bombs ushered in was an era of nuclear stalemate. The US does deserve credit for not using the bombs again, even though the US was the only nuclear power for at least four years after WW II. It is also true that many people after WW II expected a nuclear conflict to happen as soon as the USSR got nuclear weapons, and none did. But that didn't stop plenty of conventional conflicts from continuing to break out all over the world, nor has the US kept out of such conflicts.
I don’t know much about the second point, so you may be right.
Third, you have to look at stats, not emotions. Battle deaths - in absolute terms and per capita - dropped like a stone after 1945.
After rising like a rocket when WW II started. If you leave out WW I and WW II, it's not clear that post-1945 was more peaceful than pre-1914.
Even one battle death is too many but having them go down overall is very good.
Post hoc ergo propter hoc is a well known logical fallacy. That is what you are doing here.
Also, the relevant comparison, as I said before, is not post-1945 vs. pre-1945. It is something like post-1945 vs. pre-1914, so that the comparison involves peacetime conditions on both sides.
The cold war was cold because of M.A.D.
And I will compare any periods I want. The nukes fell in 1945, so I compare all of human history before that and after that. There’s a clear and massive decline even if you only look at pre-1914 rates.
You are inferring direct causality based on one event following another. That is the logical fallacy I referred to.
> There’s a clear and massive decline even if you only look at pre-1914 rates.
That's not what I see, so I guess we'll just have to disagree.
Have you noticed how in history good guys always eventually won every major conflict? What are the odds? 100% if you paint a bullseye after you shot.
Probably the biggest share of the blockade at the end was done by naval mines. At the end, the US airdropped naval mines in Japanese harbors to prevent them from importing food, and this sunk more Japanese shipping than the submarines ever did. It was even called “Operation Starvation”.
Given that you don’t know the body count of the other options, given they didn’t happen, that’s a bold statement to make.
The reason hiroshima and nagasaki (small cities) were chosen as nuke targets was because every other bigger city was already mostly destroyed due to firebombing campaigns.
Only the emotional impact was different. A nuke was an otherworldly weapon that marked a technological superiority that was impossible to overcame during the war, hence the surrender. Carpet bombing would have to go on until enough Japanese cities and industries were reduced to hash. Then maybe an invasion. As somebody pointed out, the surrender of the Japanese troops in China was a goal of the war and they could not carpet bomb or nuke China.
Only because the US froze all trade with Japan and intentionally refused all Japanese attempts at diplomacy to negotiate some kind of arrangement. The US did that knowing that the Japanese government would go to war, since the US had broken the Japanese codes and was reading all Japanese diplomatic traffic. In other words, the US intentionally provoked Japan into going to war.
The Soviets were allies. Look up what they did in Germany at the end of WW II. And that's not even looking at all the other atrocities they had perpetrated before the war started, many of them on their own people.
Also, the empire building I referred to on the part of the US, Britain, and other European countries took place well before WW II. That doesn't mean it can just be ignored.
> Or maybe just stop spreading Soviet propaganda.
It seems to me that you are the one spreading Soviet propaganda since you are not even acknowledging the moral implications of having the Soviets as allies in WW II.
You don’t have to convince me that the Soviets were evil. They were part of the Allies purely because Hitler put them there.
They then immediately started propagandizing the world to undermine the genuine contributions and general legitimacy of the West.
Stopping Axis aggression against the US, Britain, France, and other Western countries was good for everyone.
Stopping Axis aggression against the USSR? I'm not so sure. Particularly not since the price of doing that was condemning Eastern Europe, China, and a good chunk of Southeast Asia to tyranny.
And with it, the enactment of the Final Solution in its territories.
Are you sure you mean to say that you're "not sure" if stopping this project in its tracks was a good idea or not?
We know that this wasn't the primary motivation behind the decision of the Soviet-Western alliance, of course. But it was indisputably one of the key outcomes of the war and that cooperation.
All this is true, but it's also true that the nukes weren't the only factor involved. A good case can be made that it was actually the Soviet invasion of Manchuria, which started at midnight local time on the same morning that Nagasaki was bombed, that gave the peace faction in the Japanese government enough leverage to get the Emperor to intercede. The Japanese still weren't exactly sure what the nuclear bombs were, and they had already been firebombed for months so having two more cities incinerated was not the huge change that later US propaganda made it out to be. But the Japanese had been trying for many months to get Stalin and the USSR to broker a peace agreement, and Stalin and Molotov had been stringing them along without any real intention of helping, to ensure that Stalin would have time to enter the war against Japan. The Soviet invasion of Manchuria shocked the Japanese government into realizing their true position and made surrender an urgent priority since Japan greatly preferred being occupied by the US to being occupied by the USSR. The nuclear bombs were a convenient way for the Emperor to save face and not have to admit that it was really the strong desire of the Japanese to surrender to the US and not to the USSR that drove the decision.
See the excellent book Racing the Enemy by Hasegawa for a detailed and thorough exposition:
https://www.amazon.com/Racing-Enemy-Stalin-Truman-Surrender/...
Even so, a land conquest of Japan would have cost vast numbers of lives - far more than the nukes.
When people die one by one in war, the emotional impact is blunted. But when a million die in one bomb, it seems much worse, even if the overall body count is lower.
That was the strategy that FDR and Churchill agreed to, but the primary person driving it was Stalin, because he didn't want the US and Britain to defeat Japan before he got a chance to attack them, and he knew he would not be able to attack them until Germany was defeated. (He wanted to attack them so he would have a pretext for taking over territory that Russia had lost in the Russo-Japanese war in 1904-1905.) As events proved, the US and Britain did not need any help from the USSR to defeat Japan militarily, and with different diplomatic choices they probably could have gotten Japan to surrender before the USSR attacked.
Once FDR died and Truman took office, btw, it was no longer clear that having the USSR enter the war against Japan was a US objective. Truman, unlike FDR, was not a fan of Stalin and viewed him as a geopolitical threat, not an ally. Which, historically speaking, was a sounder view.
Such as?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y43-p3xLDyo
This is from the final episode of the series. Easy Company have fought their way from Normandy to Germany, losing hundreds of their friends and brothers in battle after brutal battle. Now the Nazis have surrendered and they finally have some respite - but their celebrations are shortlived. Their commanding officer informs them that they're to be redeployed to the Pacific. The war isn't over, and the expression on Malarkey's face at 2:09 says it all.
Whatever anyone says about the atomic bombings, I bet those men were damn happy to hear about Japan's surrender. Imagine if they'd been sent to invade Japan, in another brutal campaign that would have taken months if not years, costing hundreds of thousands more Allied lives.
Then imagine telling them that the government had secretly developed a powerful new weapon that could have ended the war earlier and avoided all this bloodshed - but they hadn't used it because they were worried about the moral implications. I don't think they'd have agreed it was the right choice.
Japanese knew that Soviet rulers did not care if another million of soldiers died and Soviet occupation was considered much worse outcome. That contributed to their surrender to US.
I like how they ultimately accepted the unconditional surrender, but still tacked on a condition that the emperor was not to be blamed.
Even though he should have been:
https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/hirohito-the-war-crimina...
Contrary to what this article says, I’m absolutely convinced that not prosecuting the emperor was the right call. The country would have more or less literally exploded overnight.
The fact the man himself told everyone to surrender was of more importance than almost anything else done, both at government and civilian levels. Most of the internal efforts to stop the surrender were around stopping him from declaring as such.
The emperor directly mentions the atomic bomb in his address; "Moreover, the enemy has begun to employ a new and most cruel bomb, the power of which to do damage is, indeed, incalculable, taking the toll of many innocent lives. Should we continue to fight, not only would it result in an ultimate collapse and obliteration of the Japanese nation, but also it would lead to the total extinction of human civilization."
He only tacitly mentions the battle situation; "But now the war has lasted for nearly four years. Despite the best that has been done by everyone – the gallant fighting of the military and naval forces, the diligence and assiduity of our servants of the state, and the devoted service of our one hundred million people – the war situation has developed not necessarily to Japan's advantage, while the general trends of the world have all turned against her interest."
I know that. And I said why: to save face. He didn't want to tell the Japanese people that the Soviet invasion of Manchuria was the reason. The atomic bomb made a much better reason for public consumption. That doesn't mean it was the actual reason that drove the decision, which was made in private.
That's not clear either. Without the atomic bomb they might well have found another way to save face.
Now I will say that I have not read Hasegawa's book but Wikipedia says that it is "challenging the widely accepted orthodox view that the atomic bombings on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were the most decisive factor in Japan's decision to surrender ending the war against Japan."
It will be interesting to read but it looks like that it is not the accepted theory and that primary sources from the era were destroyed on all sides.
I imagine there were more before that.
"The Allies" included the Soviet Union, which did initiate war--against Finland, against Poland, against Japan (this in the 1930s, before historians say WW II started)--and wanted even more war, hoping that all of the capitalist countries would destroy each other and leave the USSR to take over. And as others have pointed out, the USSR ended up in control of Eastern Europe, which was supposed to be liberated from tyranny--that was the original reason for Britain and France declaring war on Germany when Poland was invaded--so WW II actually failed at its primary objective. Even if you make the argument that Allied firebombing raids were a justified war measure, that argument only works if the war succeeds at its objective. If it fails, that argument falls to the ground.
It is indeed very weird to claim that UK and France have won in WWII, when they had initially declared war in order to fulfil they alliance obligations toward Poland and Czechoslovakia, but the result of WWII was that both Poland and Czechoslovakia have lost large parts of their territories (like also others of the former allies of UK and France that happened to be neighbors of the Soviet Union).
UK did not won anything in WWII. They have just preserved their integrity like someone whose home was under attack by a gang of robbers and murderers, but they got rid of the attackers by paying another gang of robbers and murderers to do most of the work, and the payment was done not with their own money, but with money stolen from other assault victims (i.e. by giving to Stalin the Eastern Europe, which was not the property of Churchill, for him to have any right to give).
Poland was much luckier than all the other neighbors of the Soviet Union, because much of its territorial loss has been compensated with territories taken from Germany. Therefore, when one compares pre-WWII with post-WWII Europe maps, at the first glance Poland does not seem to have changed much in size. However, after a more thorough look, it becomes obvious that Poland has moved on the map from east to west.
If you wanted to make the case that America started it you would have to go back to the 1850s when America rudely introduced them to modern gunboat diplomacy. But for that argument you would need to read a damn book instead of parroting any fool opinion you learned on Reddit.
No. I meant exactly what I said. I didn't say anything about Japan except that the USSR attacked them--more precisely, they attacked the Japanese troops in Manchuria. Not just in 1945--in the late 1930s.
I believe this view indicates you may have drunk a bit too much of the kool aid. Germany had zero ability to hold all of Europe longer term, let alone the entire world. This is a comic book tier view. Any end to the war would have had concessions and land transfers but there is no precedent to suggest that even France would have remained under Germany longer term if the Germans had won. Western Poland and bits of other nations, sure, but that is hardly an entire continent or world. The notion that they were a serious threat to occupy the US is hilarious and goes to show how effective the fear mongering propaganda was and continues to be to this day.
> The Allies did not initiate war and did not want war
England and France declared war on Germany, not the other way around. Arguably the whole thing could have been avoided if England and France hadn’t backed Poland, which would have likely caused Poland to negotiate on the original land bridge problem rather than dig their heels in. It’s eerily parallel to the situation with Ukraine today, in fact.
You say that as if it is meaningless. How about just not invading your neighbors?
It also just sets a bad precedent to let the bullies have their way. Though I’ll admit that it’s questionable whether it was worth it in hindsight, we have only one possible branch of history to compare.
The France and Britain invasions were pretty straightforwardly defensive actions by Germany. They both allied with Poland and when Poland was invaded (an aggressive act by Germany) they declared war on Germany. What evidence is there to suggest that Germany would still have invaded France if France and Britain had simply abandoned Poland? Note that I’m not asserting that they “should have” abandoned Poland, just that the “we’ve got to stop them before they conquer the whole world” is almost always a bogeyman.
If you fail to achieve your stated goal and you still declare victory, you are either lying about your goal, or you are lying about your victory.
Invading the USSR probably wasn’t the most efficient way to ensure a free Poland. Have you heard of negotiation? Did the USSR really not want anything that the Allies could give to ensure a free Poland? Or did the Allies simply not value a free Poland enough to give up something big enough? If it was really their main reason for entering the war, don’t you think the negotiations math would have worked out differently?
I'm sorry, but this is not a realistic view of what transpired. Russia was and continues to be an opportunistic colonialist. They keep moving territory markers overnight in Georgia. Crimea/Donbass didn't happen because of some breakdown in some peace treaty. The last minute deal offered and wasn't accepted right before the 2022 invasion that some blame Ukraine on was awful in every possible way. It would have neutered Ukraine militarily and required a puppet government subservient to Russia be installed.
Had the axis powers won the war I'm certain it would have been classified as a war crime and Bomber Harris would have been the first against the wall.
Both sides were not the same.
Feel free to be outraged no matter who it is.
You will get an nuanced perspective on the whole conflict from a lot of angles and all discussions that lead to firebombing/nukes etc.
Those thing didn't happened out of the blue.
Additionally, reports of damage to the British capital city was very morale-raising for the Germans who saw mostly the destruction of their own cities. That also has military value.
Weirdly, that's how it almost always works out. Didn't work in England, didn't work in Germany, not working in Ukraine. Kinda makes that "though" look silly in retrospect. That's why today we consider bombing civilians to have no military utility.
- NATO in Libya in 2011
- Operation Iraqi Freedom
- Operation Enduring Freedom (Afghanistan)
- US and coalition campaign against ISIS
- Saudi bombing in Yemen have pretty much stalled the Houthis.
- Russia in Syria for the last decade
- France in the Sahel
- The Turks in Iraq and Syria, been going on for almost a decade.
- Israel against Hezbollah in summer of 2006, didn't get the captured soldiers back but did stall the rockets against Northern Israel. And in Gaza in 2014, similar result in stopping the rocket attacks.
- Kosovo in 1999
That's all off the top of my head, though I did have to Google the names a bit. And it's all within recent memory, I remember every one of those conflicts. I'm sure some old timers here will mention quite a few more, spanning further back in time and further geographically.
No one sane is disputing that bombing can have value, but modern military bombing is done with (relatively) precise strikes against militarily useful targets, not indiscriminate attacks on civilians. When Israel bombs a civilian building, it's at least because they think there are Hamas fighters or weapons there.
> Did they specifically work by making the citizens push the government to capitulate?
This seems like a perfectly legitimate military strategy? It’s a strategy which the allies used to great effect in Germany and Japan :/
The Germans used rockets instead of bombers because they couldn’t, not because they didn’t want to.
Of course we bombed the hell out of German noncombatants too, so we don't exactly have an unsullied record.
> even if it's effective at demoralising the enemy.
It wasn't.
> and your goal is to terrify enemy civilians, which is not a legitimate military strategy
That just doesnt work, pretty much never. Yes civilians will be terrified but that is all you will achieve. It holds true during 2nd world war, it holds true now with every single ongoing conflict.
Going after civilians changes nothing, often results in the opposite - even harder resistance.
- Tom Lehrer.
Written in 1961. Wild.
It's nothing special; it's a logical consequence of the question "how would you land a rocket" when you assume the rocket is single-stage and can just travel from world to world, and you're a fiction writer who doesn't understand (or purposely neglects) the rocket equation. I mean, how else would you land a rocket, so it can be blasted off again? (Again, remember this is sci-fi that's very light on the "sci" part, where they're thinking in the future that humans will have self-contained rocket ships that can just travel from world to world without worrying about supporting infrastructure, the rocket equation, having enough fuel, needing to do any maintenance, etc.)
For all born after July 1969, you lived with rocket landings: Apollo lunar lander was a propulsive soft landing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_Landing_Research_Vehicle
The bus tours are also neat, visiting and walking around launch pads from the early days of space exploration, seeing the bunker near a launch pad with ~8" thick glass and the mechanical linkage over a couple hundred feet which let them monitor the weight of the added fuel on an early mission.
I've gone 7 times since I was a child, and love the new things I find.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_external_tank
https://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?action=dlattach;...
https://www.postapocalypticmedia.com/wp-content/uploads/2022...
Via: https://www.postapocalypticmedia.com/westworld-season-4-film...
Here is Musk describing them as a dinosaur bear trap: https://youtu.be/t705r8ICkRw?t=1714
It still almost doesn’t look real.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/52/Falcon_H...
https://rare-gallery.com/mocahbig/1305111-SpaceX-Starship-Bl...
but nowadays it can be a drone.
There are drones which carry full DSLR cameras or even cinematography film cameras. I don't think you will be able to tell if the camera was hoisted by a crane or a drone based on image quality.
> given the guys in the picture are on cherry picker type cranes, I'm guessing the photographer was on another of those
I don't think so! That picture appears to be the fitment check of SN20 with B4 on 06th of August 2021.
I believe this picture shows the same scene from a different viewpoint: https://starship-spacex.fandom.com/wiki/SN20/Ship_20?file=E8...
As you can see the stack is standing next to the integration tower. If I were to hazard a guess most likely the photographer was on the tower. One could attempt to verify this by matching the terrain in the background with the view one would expect from the integration tower.
I found a youtube of drone footage of flying around starship and I think the camera is pointing south west like this (time set to 6 seconds in)
https://youtu.be/0sA9rGc80Y4?t=6
whereas from the tower it would be looking north east.
Even if you can get the resolution from a drone camera, the shot looks like someone spent quite a while lining everything up to look nice and like the historic NY pic.
I don't know. There are really good drone photographers. They have remote controls for all the settings, and remote viewing is also possible. They could have lined it up with the drone. Or made the photo with even higher resolution and cropped it to perfection. Or made hundreds of photos and selected the best.
Not saying it was a drone. But the "quality looks a bit high for a drone" is not convincing me.
> given you can see the beach with a car to the left of starship and land to the right it suggests the camera was looking south west whereas from the tower you'd be looking north west.
I think you are right. Now based on that I think it was probably not photographed from the integration tower.
There is a fourth place it could have been shot from: There is the crane holding up the starship. You can see it on this image of the same hoist operation: https://x.com/BocaChicaGal/status/1423629854877028355/photo/...
The reason I don't think it was shot from a fourth cherry-picker is because I can't see a fourth one in any of the photos. It seems they only had 3 up on that day and they were all in the frame.
There is footage here that looks like it might be from that https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zi5DXe_65J8&t=52s
What he could do (and Blue Danube yesterday gave me the idea) is to buy the PanAm brand and do a rebrand of the crew services at least to the ISS.
Like Star Trek, most of the action occurs where this civilization comes in contact with its barbaric neighbors. Unlike Star Trek, The Culture is very keen on interventionism and many of its characters volunteer for these dangerous foreign assignments because of their ennui/restlessness with their utopian society.
Musk's private wealth management firm, Excession LLC, is also based on the series.
Saturn V slight larger than Statue of Liberty.
I never realized that.
What will viasat stockholders think now?
So pay for your services in full and don't leak negotiation documents.
I very much doubt that the same bandwidth and signal reliability is currently available from just "any orbiting satellite" outside of some military constellations.
I honestly couldn't make out much of what was being shown at those last moments. And I'm curious why SpaceX didn't have a ship there at the expected landing site to assess the landing (maybe they thought it wouldn't make it)?
It was a great event, surely, but it would have been nice to have a 3rd person view of the landing (you have the diagram at the bottom but it's not the same thing) .
The issue at the end wasn’t as much artifacts as it was the camera housing getting blasted during the descent. It visibly cracked as the fin caught fire.
sometimes just looking at things from a different perspective makes me smile on the relative nature of "fast"
If the object is heating up due to air resistance (and compressed air), then it's moving far faster than terminal velocity. The heat is from the air getting compressed and slowing it down.
To hell with Disney. KSC is a lot more interesting. And much cheaper.
And, with SpaceX's increased launch cadence, the odds of watching a rocket launch for free increase dramatically from the shuttle era.
this was hard sci-fi, streamed live for everyone to see.
Which should mean they know where it "landed".
Still a successful test, still a lot of work to do before they can meet their promises for Artemis (which require >10 back to back launches for one lunar mission...)
What I mean by that is that we have it down well enough that the tech exceeds tolerances and can degrade gracefully.
You see this in some sci-fi where there are rust bucket old ships that work.
The sheer hostility of space kind of precludes the "she's a good ol' ship" trope. When your door doesn't shut on your pickup, you can bang on it a bit. When your door doesn't shut on your spacecraft, you've got a ship full of corpses that look like a blob fish brought up from the Marianas Trench.
The real problem are the storms, as a naked human you won't survive in an ocean storm any longer than in vacuum.
At least you are going to space in a sophisticated vessel full of redundant life support systems. People sailed the high seas in old, barely seaworthy wooden ships dangerously overloaded with cargo, which didn't even have a reliable way of determining where precisely they were, because no one could tell longitude at sea before the mid-1700s or so.
Until today, some jobs at sea are pretty dangerous. Being a fisherman in Alaskan waters is much more risky than being an (American, not Russian) soldier.
People still do it. Which convinces me that people will risk their lives going to Mars, and more than a few of them. Some people are just built that way.
Generations of explorers, many of whom lost their lives for no gain, indicate otherwise.
Let us make a thought experiment. Let's say that Musk, tomorrow, declares "we are now creating a list of future Mars colonists, reasonably healthy individuals under 70 can apply from anywhere in the world, please send us your resumes".
Would they get fewer than 10 million applicants? I'd rather guess 50 million or so. Of course, some of those are going to get cold feet the moment they receive their one-way flight ticket in mail, but quite a few won't.
By your hypothesis, there would be approximately zero applicants. I don't believe that.
Sure they do. There’s a queue at the top of Mount Everest despite regular deaths; a couple rich folk got squished to pulp in the Titanic submarine last year. The free solo guy climbs Yosemite for the fun of it.
Plenty of people still have that itch.
Now it’s a race every few years - Vendee Globe. Something like half do not finish.
Still remember that at one time moving faster than 15mph was considered insane and pushed the limits of materials and vehicle design. Same for high altitude flight, McMurdo station, deep ocean diving, etc.
In a lot of ways very deep ocean diving is harder than space. The pressure differentials are a lot worse.
The hard part about space is really launch and delta-V budgets.
The ISS leaks air on a daily basis.
A true space age will involve many ships that never enter atmosphere or land.
A scramjet power first stage for example could overcome the tyranny of the rocket equation (at least on earth).
The issue is orbital velocity is an absolutely bonkers high velocity. Nothing can even come close to that velocity in the atmosphere. The SR-71, fastest air-breathing aircraft ever flow topped out at around 1/9th of orbital velocity. Yes scramjets could certainly beat that speed, once they are developed but even if that doubles the speed of a SR-71 (which already was pushing the limits of heating) then you are still only doing 1/4th of the speed you need for orbit.
So you have a bit of a catch-22 situation - You can have plenty of oxygen for your engines all around you, or you can have the speed you need for orbit - But not both at the same time. Yes, a scramjet can reduce the amount of oxidizer required (by a lot) but to do this you need the extra weight of wings and everything else you need for proper aerodynamic flight.
Some of the newer missiles like the BrahMos are designed like this and have a ramjet powered second stage to save on oxidizer. It doesn't reach anywhere near orbital speed, but with this design, the shock cone takes the majority of the heating vs. the SR-71 where there were many exposed parts and materials.
Or even better - keep the current setup but have a ring of air breathing engines in the booster that work as long as they can.
There's a lot of stuff some extra engineering can do, given enough time and resources. For now, SpaceX is going for the biggest bang for the buck, and they have a very healthy aversion of complicated solutions. But in time, adding a few air breathing engines may become simple enough to be worth it.
At an abstract level, it's the same issue as with aerospikes, the idea has too many caveats, too much expense and not enough benefit to justify the relatively small improvements in efficiency.
https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/6256/why-were-jet-...
The summary is that there isn't enough oxygen at the range of altitudes needed.
And Star Trek doesn't have "good old rust-bucket" ships in it, but the whole premise of it is that they found a way to move faster than the speed of light.
Here are a few likely use cases: * in-space science * in-space R&D * in-space industry * mining small rocks (asteroids) in space * space-based power * military applications
Long-term, we may see terraforming planets and minor planets.
If there's cabin decompression on a plane, you get an oxygen mask and land safely in the nearest airport. If there's cabin decompression on a spacecraft, you're dead. If there's a problem with engines on a plane, you can still glide and land somewhere. If there's a problem with engines on a rocket, guess what, you're dead.
There are rust buckets flying out there without any issue. There's a guy on tiktok that bought a literal $200 plane and is documenting his work on it - and he started test flying it almost immediately.
I don't have enough experience in the field to tell myself if aviation tech is mature enough to be considered "rusty truck level", but we definitely have the data to know it.
Yes it's different from a car's requirements, no the concept is not different, rusty pickup just means different things.
They're gathering a ton of data to make it robust! Many of these engineers built Falcon 9, and I have a pretty high degree of confidence they'll shake out the issues. SpaceX operates very differently from traditional aerospace, so we'll likely see many more issues come up before Starship is human rated.
Why? For NASA, human-rating - for either Earth launch or Earth re-entry - requires a very detailed engineering analysis of probability of loss-of-crew (LOC), and then NASA has some maximum LOC probability they allow (for NASA Commercial Crew, both launch and landing it is 1-in-500, which is 0.2%-for whole of mission it is 1-in-270). That analysis is based on engineering data, which can include simulations, data collected from actual flights, and data from ground-based testing. If SpaceX can demonstrate N successful uncrewed landings (with maximum G forces within acceptable limits for crew, etc), for sufficiently high N, logically the LOC probability will fall beneath NASA’s threshold, and then NASA will human-rate it. However, they don’t actually have to land it 500 times - all they need is an engineering analysis which calculates the LOC probability as being below threshold, and then NASA’s own engineers review it, and once NASA’s engineers are confident it is correct, the human-rating will be approved
Elon had that idea of using rockets for passenger transport so I’m sure it’s in the plan, but for astronauts I don’t see why you’d rush.
SpaceX wants NASA to human-rate Starship because their long-term plan is to retire Falcon 9 / Dragon.
How I expect it will happen: SpaceX will run their own internal analysis of loss-of-crew probability for launch and re-entry. No point going to NASA until they've convinced themselves they are going to meet the standards for human-rating. Once they believe they are, then they'll decide when is the right time to try to convince NASA of it too.
Obviously they are already doing this for lunar landing/launch. Some of that is going to be transferrable to Earth landing/launch. Other parts are unique – e.g. probability of surviving re-entry – but they need to estimate that anyway for non-crewed use cases.
That very analysis will include the fact that they have no launch abort system like normal capsule based systems and that the belly flop landing is much more dangerous than landing a capsule. Space Shuttle memories may come to mind. So the only realistic way to get the 1 in 500 confidence would probably be to really land hundreds of times for unmanned missions and not mess up even once. Granted, they may eventually get there, but I estimate this would take about two decades, if Falcon 9 is any indication.
You are talking about this as if it is based on feelings as opposed to probability calculations. SpaceX will present a probability calculation to NASA, who then either accepts it or disagrees with it on engineering grounds, not "memories". There is no formal requirement for a launch abort system in NASA's safety standards – just a requirement that the probability of death be below a certain threshold. A launch abort system is one way to get that probability below the threshold, but if you don't have one, that's okay so long as you have some other way of getting there.
> So the only realistic way to get the 1 in 500 confidence would probably be to really land hundreds of times for unmanned missions and not mess up even once.
What they do is list every possible failure mode, give it a probability of happening and probability of a lethal outcome if it happens, multiply those two probabilities together, and then add them all up. If the result is above the threshold, they will fail certification. If the result is below it, they then have to convince NASA engineers that (1) their probability estimates are accurate and have sufficient evidence to justify them (2) there are no failure modes they've omitted in the analysis. For (1), actual flight experience is a valid source of evidence, but there are others as well – such as simulations and on-the-ground testing of components. There is no minimum number of flights required to gather sufficient evidence, it all depends on how much non-flight evidence is available and how NASA engineering evaluates that non-flight evidence (which is going to depend on the component or failure mode we are talking about).
You are looking at this from a "big picture" perspective, whereas NASA will be looking at it scenario by scenario, component by component
My concern is that the flip maneuver is just too risky for landing with people on board even if Starship manages to do 200 perfect landings in a row (that would be a better record than the Shuttle).
Each lunar flight implies four launches and three landings on Earth, so the numbers should build up rather quickly.
In a lot of ways they will learn far more from the heat shield burn through around the flap(s) than they would have if they had been "lucky" and it had all gone perfectly.
You during testing you want things to fail, that is the point of testing. If it's all successful you only learn that under those conditions your design works, but if it fails, you learn another way to not do things.
When parts last longer than expected, it is considered something that needs "fixing". It is a signal that the part can be made cheaper, lighter, etc... If SpaceX had gone with heavy, thick tiles, and they did their job because they were overspecced, it is that much less payload capacity.
Even value engineering, which is often criticized when it comes to consumer products is a good thing. Yes, your new dishwasher is not as robust as the one made in the 50s, but it is also 10x cheaper (inflation-adjusted), and it can still wash dishes for maybe 10-15 years without repairs, at which point you may want a new one as technology has improved. Note that I am talking proper engineering, having a single point of failure that prompts a replacement is planned obsolescence and terrible engineering, there should be no single point of failure with good engineering.
Regarding return from orbital (and above) velocities - there was a flight ( https://space.skyrocket.de/doc_sdat/irdt-fregat.htm ) in 2000 when the payload was returning from orbit using inflatable heat shield, which would tolerate much less of heat flow than Starship. The approach was to dissipate a lot of energy in high enough atmosphere, so that while temperature (measure of gas molecules kinetic energy) is high, the heat flow (amount of gas molecules with that kind of high energy to the ship) is low and so heat effects on the ship are also low.
Another approach was used e.g. in Zond-6 flight ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zond_6 ) when the spacecraft entered the atmosphere, shed some speed and got heated, then ballistically exited the dense atmosphere layers, cooled down a bit, then got into atmosphere again with less speed and so less heat load.
The point is we still have some tricks up our sleeve to fight the problems of atmospheric reentry.
After more reflection, I realized that the bigger picture is learning about how quickly it decelerates and how quickly it heats up. With that data, they can design a different reentry profile. E.g. maybe it's better to "plunge" to lower altitudes and experience higher peak pressure for a shorter duration or maybe it's better to have a very gentle but slow reentry to minimize peak pressure. After seeing how robust the ship is (and knowing SpaceX :P), I wouldn't be surprised if they decide to go for a higher peak pressure/temp.
A better reentry profile is like massless heat shielding!
Maybe more challenging than the profile or optimizing the heat shield though: how are they going to reject heat from the flap joint?
Maybe relocating the flaps leeward, like Elon's been saying for a while, will do the trick
That was amazing!
Absolutely wild and historic.
Its tenacity in the face of hellfire was epic.
As neat as the idea of different shields is that's a whole extra layer of weight and controls for a non critical thing so I'm not surprised it doesn't happen.
Like, your suggestion is a box attached to the ship that changes its aerodynamic profile, with an actuator that can be a point of failure/ fly off and hit other critical instruments?
They have lots of cameras. Were we watching the same video? The thing got absolutely melted and you’re complaining that you didn’t get a front row seat?
5 short years ago we would get a few frames from the camera on the barge where Falcon 9 landed and that seemed incredible.
Just because they’ve accomplished something hard (mostly reliable cameras), doesn’t mean it’s suddenly easy and saying “why didn’t you just put more cameras on it?” comes off as mind bendingly pedantic
Having said that, cameras today can be really small. Not a big box. Lenses or their protectors can be rather, well, protective (I'm thinking about moissanite here, but may be better solutions are possible). And I didn't see lots of cameras when Starship was going through atmosphere back - how many did you see? Yes, flap melted - but if, say, the ship had cameras all over (figuratively), you could switch to the one which works at the moment.
All of that and more should be, and I'm sure is, rather obvious to SpaceX guys, just like some reasons why some of this can't or shouldn't be done - they are the professionals here most intricately familiar with the hardware and the landing conditions. We'll see how they choose to move forward soon.
I'm genuinely shocked by how you are wording your comments, but that may just be your writing style. Anything of the form of "could be solved..." it kind of ridiculous because the circumstances just happened for the first time yesterday. This isn't like the motorsports cameras that spin the lens or transparent protection 360 degrees to wipe off buildup.
No, that's more like an unfortunate choice of wording :( . Sorry.
The glas used would probably be ok if the flaps held up.
Why would you expect this? It's literally the bleeding edge.
They will have had internal cameras pointed at the structure looking for hot spots, and presumably those will have been fine
This one just became one accidentally.
https://bsky.app/profile/planet4589.bsky.social/post/3kub775...
P.S. I have not done any of the math (I might be able to figure it out but it might take a week or two to figure it out).
P.S.S : Maybe if they could refuel in space efficiently (asteroid mining?) it might be worth looking at but it will be a while before I would expect anything like that. It would just be the ship.
And then the wings would also survive the flip and vertical landing. Or if you want to land like a plane, then you also need landing gear.
So there is really no way to add wings without adding a huge amount of mass. You are building a completely new thing.
There are some super cool mega-space planes designed in the 70s (I think). But of course these were never built or even tested. I remember they had some overlapping metal heat shields and a big ass delta wing. They would also start vertically and use air breathing engines.
At some point you lose enough energy that your speed drops enough that your altitude starts dropping significantly. You can't lose the energy without losing altitude, and once you lose altitude you start losing energy whether you like it or not
I think what you are wondering is "can I stay in the thin atmosphere bleeding X Joules of energy for 50 minutes until most of the energy has gone rather than entering more steeply and bleeding 10X Joules for 5 minutes"
However once you lose energy, you lose your altitude, and as you lose altitude the atmosphere thickens and you start very quickly losing 5X, 10X, 20X joules every minute.
The curve is such that if you don't lose enough speed, you're going to start moving way from the planet.
If you're still on parabola (technically you never are, it's infinitely thin case between ellipse and hyperbola, physically not really possible) or hyperbola, you're not comping back - so if you need to get to the planet, you have to be on elliptical trajectory.
Even if you're on ellipse, you don't want that ellipse to be too elongated - e.g. the elliptical trajectory from the Earth to the Moon, which is rather close to parabolic one, takes about 4 days one way. You don't want to spend that much time when you're landing, so you need to lose enough of speed in the atmosphere. Which means you need to brake relatively aggressively.
This means there's a "reentry corridor" - not too steep, not too shallow, and the spacecraft needs to survive the reentry, and going from the Moon is harder than going from LEO because coming from the Moon the spacecraft has higher initial speed entering the atmosphere. It's still possible to balance various approaches, but you can't have (correction: it must be particularly hard to have...) zero fuel use, relatively fast landing (without long ellipses between reentries), speedy planet approach and low heating at the same time.
Your orbit would have to be high enough to do a burn to cancel your orbital velocity (lots of fuel), then you have to burn against gravity for a slow vertical descent (lots of fuel). The rocket equation says... you'll need a larger craft and more fuel to carry the extra fuel in to orbit. It gets pretty out of hand.
Instead of using fuel to slow down, spacecraft make a small burn to have the orbit intersect the atmosphere, and then use drag instead of fuel to slow down.
The other is at too shallow of angle at high speed you bounce off like skipping a stone off the surface of a lake.
Once you start touching the atmosphere, it very quickly becomes deterministic. There are a limited number of descent profiles that actually get you to the ground, and believe it or not, starship as far as I can tell is actually taking a "shallow angle" and spreading the atmospheric braking friction over the largest possible time. A steeper entry would melt every conceivable material
To have a better hypersonic lift-to-drag ratio you need significantly more wing area, which is dead weight (and drag and a control problem) on the way up.
That doesn't mean that it's impossible, just means that it'd require things that don't exist yet.
Worth mentioning that, additionally, reentry heating isn't a huge problem, and you're not going to create new propulsion tech to counter it, you're just going to make better heat tiles. What you need new propulsion tech for is doing expanse type stuff, where you can accelerate for months at 1G so you essentially have artificial gravity and can get places extremely fast. If you're into sci-fi, the show/books "The Expanse" goes into what that looks like in practice fairly well.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsiolkovsky_rocket_equation
double the Δv means you square the mass ratio. The space shuttle had a mass ratio of about 16, a mass ratio of 256 would be absolutely insane.
You get this velocity change at the cost of dealing with the heat and all but a tiny fraction of that heat ends up immediately in the atmosphere.
There's enough energy in a Tesla battery to for the Tesla to reach escape velocity. If you could simply drive at max acceleration (and the car didn't fall apart, and the tires continued to have grip, and a million other reasons why this is impossible) eventually you'd reach escape velocity and still have some percentage left.
In a more realistic sense, a long railgun type system would be very practical in a no-atmosphere environment, and then not being subject to the tyranny of the rocket equation, you could launch whatever you wanted. Enough fuel to decelerate is no problem.
No, it's not even remotely close. A Model S weighs around 2000kg and has a battery of 100 kWh. That's √((100 kWh)/(1/2*2000kg)) = 600m/s of delta-v. Escape velocity for Earth is 11.2km/s, almost a factor 20 more.
This nerd sniped me a LOT, I’m wondering if it’s possible for a chemical battery to reach orbital velocity (not escape).
An idealized Tesla would just be its battery (500kg) perfectly dumping energy to mechanical forward speed. Cutting 3/4 of the weight gets you closer to the delta-v you need, but youre still off by a factor of 5. Though orbital velocity, and leaving from the equator and gaining that speed, means you only need to get up to ~7.2 km/s. Still only a third of the way there.
Maybe you could split your battery into chunks, and expel them once they’re expended?
Once you hit an orbit intersecting the ground, you have to scrub all your speed in whatever that amount of time is, which is gonna be short. It's basically an orbital launch in reverse.
The heat shield material can handle a certain amount of heat and a certain maximum temperature before it starts to ablate away, so you're forced to thread the regime where both variables are within its tolerances.
So to slow down more evenly and have less heat at the max point per square inch, you need wider surface area (or you need to expend fuel firing engines in the opposite direction of travel, what both parts do at the end to slow to 0, and a problem due to the rocket equation, fuel has mass and so increases the amount of kinetic energy you must dissipate), and that means more mass and more engineering and a bigger vehicle. The goal ultimately is of course optimizing all these variables.
What you need to protect is on the inside of the heat shield. Heat conduction is based on temperature difference and time[1] and the conduction of the material[2]. Since the heat shield tiles have a very low thermal conductivity, it takes a long time for significant heat to pass through.
Yes a more aggressive approach will lead to a greater temperature, but it'll also provide significantly greater drag, thus the the extreme temperatures only exist for a relatively short amount of time, and thus it doesn't have time to pass through the tiles and heat up the inside.
A very shallow approach has significantly less drag, and you spend significantly longer slowing down. The temperatures might be a fair bit less, but the much longer time spent decelerating means it has a chance to make it through the heat shield tiles.
It's not entirely unlike iron meteorites which can still be cold when landing, as they only spend a brief time in the atmosphere[3] and thus don't have time to heat up.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_equation#Interpretation
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_conductivity_and_resis...
[3]: https://earthscience.stackexchange.com/questions/127/what-te...
Either you do that with atmospheric drag, or a huge amount of fuel. The weight of heat protection is much lower and more efficient than the fuel option.
Keep in mind that the object orbiting is already falling. Orbiting earth is literally "falling around the earth", compared to "falling down to earth" which we are more familiar with from throwing rocks and whatnot.
So to go "straight down" either it would need to orbit the sun (instead of the earth) and have its orbit intersect that of the earth, like the meteors we're worried about, or it would need to do a very strong deceleration burn.
To continue moving "straight down" its angular velocity would need to be constant, which means as its altitude decreases the circumferential velocity would need to decrease. But gravity only pulls down, there's no force to accelerate it in that direction. So therefore it appears to curve off to the side.
If you move slower, you are no longer in orbit and your trajectory will intersect the ground.
If you tried to slow down more gradually, your orbit would keep dropping until you suddenly hit the ground.
Think of it this way: orbital speed is the speed required for a ship to stay in orbit without thrust. If you had infinite thrust, you could land on the ground at any speed you wanted. But without thrust, you have to go from orbital speed to 0 in less than one orbit.
And of course, the thrusters you'd need would add huge complexity for the shape, and need extra fuel in the stage 2 itself, greatly reducing its cargo capacity.
I marvel every time I see people on HN talking about being served ads on youtube videos or elsewhere. You would think here of all places adblock would be standard.
Keeping the mission parameters simpler (no “refueuling” or door bay demonstrations as far as I am aware, just orbital insert and reentry) definitely shows they are capable of the basic ideas of how they want Starship to work, especially for Starlink missions.
The team should be proud.
The one way trip to mars is orders of magnitude more complicated than moon.
Keeping people from being riddled with cancer in 6months trip is not trivial.
Landing and then what you plan a flag and die?
Pretty much, why do you think columbus set off? And he didn't even know if he'd actually find anything.
I don't understand your attitude and people like you, human beings have been explorers forever, and seem to value exploring even over survival potentially. I'd say it's pretty obviously evolutionarily coded into us. Maybe not you, but into many people.
In general, human-based space exploration makes 0 sense. We have robots that can do everything a human in a life-support suit can, and don't need to carry 100 times their mass just to not day on the way there and back. Doing a few experiments with humans in space, like we do on the ISS, is indeed worth it for exploring the unknown unknowns of biology. Maybe some day, far in the future after we have explored Mars with many hundreds of robots, it will even make sense to send a human there. But until then, it's just a waste of everything.
We’ve been mars-capable since Apollo. It’s a matter of will, which is a political function of cost, which is falling rapidly.
serious citation needed!
you cant make shit up. Apollo and saturn5 were nowhere near getting humans to mars. Not even close.
It got us to moon with bare minimum. A weekend trip vs 6 months trip.
The scale up of needed resources is mind boggling. At every step. I mean pick any step and explain how Apollo could achieve it.
The gist of it is that the Saturn V has enough delta v to get to Mars, on the count of Mars having an atmosphere, which can be used for aerobraking.
Given the capability of reaching Mars with a Saturn V, the rest of the plan revolved around using Apollo hardware, with some modification, for both transport and habitats(re-use of empty stages featured prominently).
Ultimately even if we had hit some roadblock with martian soil or what have you, in an alternate timeline we could have at least sent uncrewed test flights to Mars and back.
You have roughly 40t at best for a craft that needs to land there.
quick google. astronauts need around 1.7kg of food per day, x3 crew, x(8x30) days is:
thats 1200 kg of food - one way - just to get there food.
And then you are doing to do what exactly?
> the rest of the plan revolved around using Apollo hardware, with some modification, for both transport and habitats(re-use of empty stages featured prominently).
This is basically handwaving problems away, massive problems.
The best I can agree is that a crewed fly-by could have been possible. But landing on mars would mean death sooner or later.
It's over 400 pages and contains some of the details you seem to be curious about.
What now? Will Elon stop? If Elon doesn’t stop, does that make you right?
Of course, building a "city" on Mars is well beyond our capabilities, so that will either not be attempted at all, or it will fail. Maybe by 2124, but more likely 2524.
"No point" here means "no reasonable goal". In this case reasonability is subjective - somebody sees obvious reasons why Mars colony could be useful for humanity, somebody doesn't. Pro arguments are science, learning how to live off another planet, certain insurance against planet-wide cataclysms, general progress in space engineering. There are contra arguments as well, but which are more important is also subjective - we don't have hard data or commonly accepted facts which would solve this arguments one way or another, so, to some, it's natural to investigate the matter further...
Elon's job is to massively accelerate that timeline.
Cuz probability of both are closer to each other that to probability of them being achievable.
Getting to mars would require a technological leap. Planes -> rockets kind of leap.
Currently we have yet to be able to get back to the moon.
Creating self sustained colony on earth would require some kind of technological miracle.
And it will not be enough to use few nukes to malt ice caps on mars.
And no, it's not a good plan against a nuclear war, Mars is far far far less hospitable than the Earth would be if we launched all of the nuclear weapons we have today. It's far more radioactive, dusty, cold, toxic, and everything.
Nobody is permitted to build permanent habitats in either of those areas, even though they might be feasible.
hahahah
Columbus set of because he wanted money, wealth for the crown. not because he was explorer.
Columbus, Vasco Da Gama, Cortez et al were not dreamers but entrepreneurs.
>> Landing and then what you plan a flag and die?
Nobody (within reasonable definition of nobody) wants to go to Everest to die on top. Nobody wants to dive to Marianas trench to get crush to death.
Who would go to Mars without a way back?
For a reasonable chance of being forever immortalized as one of the first humans to step foot on another planet?
Granted, I myself will never get the opportunity so it’s easy for me to say “oh hell yes I’d sign up in a heartbeat”.
It's pretty trivial. Put mass in between you and space. It's already been researched to death and we have many years worth of data about the subject.
Seems like you quite confident. So go on. Expand on that a bit... its trivial after all.
You will teleport all that mass to ELO? Or use tracker beam to capture asteroid and space mine it to smelt shielding.
I am super curious how you solve it trivially.
edit: You downvote but dont explain this trivial solution. Am I asking too much? Calling someone out to explain something is offensive or something?
Folks on Mars is still quite a ways away. Not impossible or pointless by any means but it will require significant advancements in many domains before we can really do it safely.
As an aside, this is why the original Moon missions used simple aluminum. One of the typical angles people who don't think we landed on the Moon used is that to safely get through the Van Allen Belts we would have needed massive lead shielding on the craft, when in reality it was shielded by a pretty thin layer of aluminum, precisely to minimize secondary radiation. If you put that thick lead shielding on the craft that people intuitively think you'd need, it very well could have killed the astronauts.
And every ton you take increases fuel cost.
Currently you need what 10-20 trips to fuel for moon. How many trips would you need to fuel trip to mars? You would need a fucking conveyor belt of starship to prep the mission. Who is going to pay for it? And why?
Just because the materials for shielding/tools are simple it doesnt make the solution simple.
On the water topic, here's [2] a very readable little writeup on the mass inputs required for longterm space missions. Water makes up the overwhelming majority of your requirements. Starship, in its current form, can carry 150 tons. And that will be substantially increased once the tech is stabilized. A sizable chunk of that storage, for Mars missions, will be water. Also, the big threat is not the persistent ambient radiation, but infrequent extremely high energy bursts from solar weather.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delta-v_budget#Delta-vs_betwee...
[2] - https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/20190027563/downloads/20...
Mars has essentially infinite CO2 and hydrogen. So this means we can produce essentially infinite methane and water. In fact you can carry out electrolysis on some of the produced hydrogen and feed it back into the system. This leaves you with a final excess product of methane, oxygen, and water. The Starship's engines, uncoincidentally, run on oxygen + methane. So we can locally produce basically limitless amounts of water, oxygen, and rocket fuel on Mars.
Of course this begs the question of what we do initially. And like all long distance colonization efforts, you're not sending just a single ship, but rather a small group. Those other ships are carrying additional critical supplies, including fuel. Upon landing those ships can also be used as shelters until something more permanent can be constructed. And the extra fuel provides a means of getting back to Earth if necessary while giving you a big window of time to start establishing basic local infrastructure including energy and methane production.
The permanent dwellings and really whole infrastructure would be underground. Lack of atmo and magnetic field basically forces you to dig down. Limited resources - rudimentary food and water. More less bunker life
On top of that 0% prospect of return. Essentially you are doomed to penal colony for the rest of your life.
I find it hard to believe anyone would want to sign up to that. And the people who would are absolutely people who should not be sent there.
And what happens if earth decides supporting mars outpost is pointless, you want alex jones types create conspiracies that colony is fake and its a tax payer scam? What would that do to minds of those stuck on mars?
And the Mars program is not being publicly funded in any way, shape, or fashion. If it was - we would have likely colonized Mars decades ago. Werner von Braun - the man responsible for the success of the Apollo program already had workably viable plans drawn up for Mars before we even set foot on the Moon. The government's decision to defacto cancel the space program is what led to his very premature retirement. But I do think rapidly aiming for the basics of self sustainability will be important nonetheless. Fortunately Mars is almost set up like a video game in that most of everything we need to survive is somewhat serendipitously present.
---
As for what people want to do. It's funny, because I feel the exact opposite. I simply cannot understand people who have no desire to adventurize, explore, and see all that this universe has to offer in what little time we have on this Earth. It's probably why I'm an American yet find myself living half way around the world. And I would be the first to sign up for a mission to Mars as well. It'd certainly be a rather difficult life, but what more could be more desirable than spending the rest of your years laying the foundation for our children and our childrens' children, so that one day people coming to Mars would simply be just a holiday. And perhaps they then will then be the ones laying the foundation on Europa, or perhaps destinations that we can't even realistically imagine today.
It's certainly the same mindset people leaving the luxuries of the Old World had when setting out for the New World. The Old World was richly developed and full of culture, life, and civilization. Going to the New World entailed a voyage, as long as 4 months, and one which was quite frequently deadly. All to get to a completely undeveloped chunk of land full of oft unfriendly natives, new diseases, and all sorts of great ways to die in the middle of nowhere. And that's if you survived the voyage across to begin with, which many didn't. In many ways, we have it easier.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ramsar,_Iran#Radioactivity
Return from Moon Surface to Earth ∆V: 2.44+0.68+0.14+0.68+1.73 = 5.7 km/s
Earth to Mars Surface ∆V: 9.4+2.44+0.68+0.09+0.39+0.67+.034+0.40+0.70+3.8 = 18.6 km/s
Return from Mars Surface to Earth ∆V: 2.44+0.68+0.09+0.39+0.67+.034+0.40+0.70+3.8 = 9.2 km/s
Yes, it's more, but it's really not _that_ big of an engineering stretch.
Poor choice of words in this context :)
Simple idea, hard to execute.
However, a steady dose of relativistic heavy nuclei is entirely different matter. Gun wound vs bulldozed over. Cells have mechanisms for repairing local damage, even in the cell nucleus. However, a fact heavy nucleus wrecks so much that the repair mechanisms have no chance - a cell that got hit simply dies (or, at least, is never going to be able to divide again). The damage is cumulative, does not get repaired.
In game parlance: Gammas reduces your HP (that can come back over time, if the hits do not occur too fast). Fast heavy nucleus reduces your max UP. You are doomed, given enough time.
It is until it suddenly isn't. Just because it's very far out still and any timelines mentioned are wrong, doesn't make it 'pure BS'. It very much has been the goal of SpaceX from the day it was founded to encourage human travel to Mars, and we're getting closer every day.
And that's before you start to think about a launch pad for the return mission. So you'd probably need to have launch a series of robots and factories to build this in advance. Maybe, but we haven't even come close to robots building something of that magnitude on Earth, let alone a planet that's quite different.
So, never say never, but it's a _long_ while off yet; long enough that social upheaval due to climate change will probably put a pause on any efforts for quite some time.
> The one way trip to mars is orders of magnitude more complicated than moon.
From an energy perspective its not that much more complex.
And from a living perspective, yes it is an order of magnitude, but guess what, the ship is also an order of magnitude bigger. Meaning that for a small crew you have enough space for training rooms, labs, living quarters and medical facilities and so on.
> Keeping people from being riddled with cancer in 6months trip is not trivial.
That's mostly wrong. The cosmic radiation isn't much of a problem.
The only issue is the solar radiation. And solar radiation is very low most of the time. That can be measured and if its detected, the crew can go into a radiation shelter for a while.
But its not like if they are exposed to solar radiation for a few minutes, they will grow cancers instantly.
> Landing and then what you plan a flag and die?
No. the plan is to send robotic ships first to deploy infrastructure. The atmosphere has useful stuff in it. And then you need to get water from the ice. With water and the atmosphere you can make rocket fuel and other useful materials, such as drinking water, plastics and so on.
Of course that requires development of methods to gather water and of course development of chemical or biological reactors to transform the material. We are pretty sure we can build that stuff technically speaking.
The other big issue is energy to run these processes. We either need a shit ton of solar or a deploy-able nuclear reactors.
Then you wait until the earth comes back around and fly back. And hopefully other people are arriving again. So you can continuously have an occupied base that you are building up over time.
The whole point of what SpaceX is trying to build is a railroad to Mars. The opposite of flags and footprints.
> From an energy perspective its not that much more complex.
As in what exactly? Its not much more complex because you have to 'burn to moon' and 'burn to mars' which is pretty much the same because you need energy to do both??
Here, have a look at required deltaV. https://www.reddit.com/r/space/comments/1ktjfi/deltav_map_of...
how is this 'From an energy perspective its not that much more complex.'?
>And from a living perspective, yes it is an order of magnitude, but guess what, the ship is also an order of magnitude bigger. Meaning that for a small crew you have enough space for training rooms, labs, living quarters and medical facilities and so on.
What ship?!? Labs, medical facilities wtf r u smoking.
https://www.humanmars.net/2021/01/cutaway-schematic-of-space...
here is spaceX graphics? Are you talking about facilities for an ant farm?
And why dont you mention how many fueling launches you need to go to the moon in an essentially 'space liferaft' vs an actual spaceship needed to get to mars?? hm?
> No. the plan is to send robotic ships first to deploy infrastructure. The atmosphere has useful stuff in it. And then you need to get water from the ice. With water and the atmosphere you can make rocket fuel and other useful materials, such as drinking water, plastics and so on.
How? Just how is that infrastructure going to get there deploy itself and... it boggles my mind how you handwave the solutions to colonising a fucking planet.
Sure mate, you played minecraft and all you need is a crafting table on mars and whabang infrastructure poof icewater mining and puryfing faclities "shazam* and your farm is ready! So easy, who thought.
> The whole point of what SpaceX is trying to build is a railroad to Mars. The opposite of flags and footprints.
Who is going to pay for all of it, and why would you do it in a first place? Cuz you are not setting up a colony, you are setting up the most expensive treehouse.
According to that chart:
Moon landing ∆V: 9.4+2.44+0.68+0.14+0.68+1.73 = 15.1 km/s
Mars landing ∆V: 9.4+2.44+0.68+0.09+0.39+0.67+.034+0.40+0.70+3.8 = 18.6 km/s
So in actual reality with Starships design they are quite close.
I guess ChatGPT is pretty good.
Just because you listened to podcast doesn't mean you know what you are talking about. Cuz your arguments are clearly all hype a surface knowledge.
The biggest chunk of deltaV there is the LEO
Removing it makes trip to mars 160% more expensive. And "Areobreaking" is already counted in the trip to mars.
You also conveniently forget about the fact that mars spaceship will be much heavier. And while deltaV doesn't change the amount of fuel to achieve it does. Significantly.
Not to mention the 8.5 months transfer will have damaging effect on the body. We already did a study on impact of prolonged space stay. Whats the impact on humans living in 3.7m/s2 ?? How would fetus develop in such environment.
But lets sweep this under the rag, it will be solved soon (tm)
Its very convenient to overlook actual small details that dont fit a narrative. But in space Yes-man run out of air really quickly.
I am done with this thread as you are just stubborn kid parroting same old bs hype people produce to justify their existence.
Factually speaking my argument is correct by how most humans view this answer. But you have to poke holes in it because you knew it was correct. Its fucking ridiculous to say 'excluding LEO' then its incorrect. That might be relevant if we started from LEO but we don't. Self owned.
Lets remember what you said:
> The one way trip to mars is orders of magnitude more complicated than moon.
So my response correcting that is simply appropriate and correct, its certainty not 'multitude' orders of magnitude more complex. Specifically when talking about a one way trip.
Its easy to see how people who haven't study the subject wouldn't think how small the difference is energy wise is reading your statement. And the longer habitation is well within what we have been able to do for decades. So neither qualifies with 'orders of magnitude'. And that includes the Starship would be heavier argument.
So the simply reality is your statement was flat out wrong.
Then your other statement about radiation was fucking ridiculously wrong but you somehow refuse to acknowledge that.
Since you have no fucking leg to stand on regarding nuclear, you decided to move the goal post and find a new topic.
The actual studies you quote go against your argument, significant space time can be massively mitigated by training. As the Russian astronaut who is the world leading expert on the topic has demonstrated. One of the problem on ISS is that astronauts on ISS are incredibly busy and can't do that as much training as a Mars crew would have time for. For a Mars mission, where they don't get new instruments and experiments sent all the time, physical preparation for Mars, would be one of their primary activities.
We can't know for certain, but from everything we know, training at 3.7m/s2 should be more then sufficient with dedicated training. I always believed NASA should have invest in a rotation station so these effects can be studied better. But in the absence of that, we have to draw conclusion from micrografity research and that seems to indicate it will be fine.
> How would fetus develop in such environment.
Wow, just picking up the goal post and running down field. If we are at the point where we have to seriously think about this point I have already won the argument anyway.
> Its very convenient to overlook actual small details that dont fit a narrative.
I'm simply addressing your points, not laying out a comprehensive plan. I am refuting your points, not making points of my own. So claiming I'm ignoring points you haven't even brought up is dumb.
Are you seriously acting like those points you brought up somehow aren't thought about by SpaceX, NASA and co?
> I am done with this thread as you are just stubborn kid parroting same old bs hype people produce to justify their existence.
Funny how how the people at SpaceX, NASA, ESA and friends, who want to make this happen are 'bs hype people'. How NASA papers and simply math on the subject is 'bs hype'. Sorry for repeating that nonsense.
I didn't know you personally are an old veteran who did all the research on the objections yourself, right? You made your own orbital dynamics calculation. You calculated the mass difference and have clear assumption about the weight of different Starship version. You have detailed calculation on aerobraking efficiency of different vehicle and how that effects delta/V. You have personally looked at the data from decades of human health studies in microg.
Sorry I just didn't know that you were such a genius who hovers above us 'kids'. I humbly apologize and bow to you enlightened wisdom.
> What ship?!? Labs, medical facilities wtf r u smoking.
The Starship. SpaceX is currently building an interior for the Moon Lander together with NASA that will have those things.
For a small crew its totally possible to have this. Not sure what to tell you.
> And why dont you mention how many fueling launches you need to go to the moon in an essentially 'space liferaft' vs an actual spaceship needed to get to mars?? hm?
I don't even know what the fuck you are trying to say ...
Yes, it needs to be refuelled a number of time. So what?? hm?
Falcon 9 is literally launching every 5 days right now and it wasn't even designed with rapid reuse in mind.
> How? Just how is that infrastructure going to get there deploy itself and... it boggles my mind how you handwave the solutions to colonising a fucking planet.
I don't know why haters like you are so hung up with colonising. Colonising starts small. The solutions in the beginning wont be the solutions 50-100 years later. So criticising the current architecture with 'it can't do colonisation' is fucking stupid. Thanks captain obvious.
In the beginning its about establishing a research base that can be continously inhabited. If that can be achieved its fucking fantastic. And from there it grows or it doesn't.
And in terms of how. There are these things called wheels....
There are plenty of designs around for different aspects of the architecture. You haven't addressed any of them.
> Sure mate, you played minecraft and all you need is a crafting table on mars and whabang infrastructure poof icewater mining and puryfing faclities "shazam* and your farm is ready! So easy, who thought.
Those things would be built on earth. So your comment doesn't even fucking make sense.
Its not easy to do these things but you have not made any actual argument that its not possible or harder then other parts. Building the Raptor engine is hard, a lot harder then a device that takes oxygen out of the atmosphere. Building a device to collect water is hard, but a hell of a lot easier then building Starship.
You argument is basically just asserting things you don't know much about and then making childish insults.
Its funny how there are 10000s of really smart scientist and engineers that are working on different aspects of these problems and they all believe they can be overcome. But I am sure you are just so much smarter and more enlightened then all those people. Go stand in front off a mirror and pat yourself on the back buddy.
> Who is going to pay for all of it, and why would you do it in a first place? Cuz you are not setting up a colony, you are setting up the most expensive treehouse.
That's fantastic. I didn't know you were that optimistic. A continuously inhabited house on Mars would be absolutely fucking amazing. One might even say its a colony. Because, guess what, that's how colonies started.
Glad I could convince you.
I mean, I ask you a question and you straight up talk about something else... what else is there to say... you are like a politician on tv. Talks, talks, talks but doesn't say anything.
Its pointless arguing with parrot.
But I'm reading marketing. What you saying isn't even pamphlets or propaganda. Its just flat out fucking stupid.
That the ship in principle is capable of landing on Mars doesn't seem that crazy. They are designing with that in mind from the beginning. Again, that's difficult but very possible with current technology.
The more difficult problem would get to get the energy on Mars and the necessary water to do the chemical processing. But all of that of course is only even worth really investing in fully if you can get some significant payloads to the surface.
Starship
Moon Base
Orion Pulse Nuclear ships launched from the Moon
Mars Base
Is the winning formula, because the Orion payloads are so huge and the transit time so greatly reduced.
One starship trip could probably transport enough "fuel" for a midsize orion trip to mars and back (I haven't run the numbers, but 150 tons of fissile nuclear fuel is pretty effing compact.
The "Super Orion" 8 million ton ship uses 3,000ton bombs.... but most of the bomb is the inert propellant that can probably be obtain from regolith.
And the Moon could probably have a nuclear launch cannon pretty easily to reduce the payload or initial acceleration.
Politically it sounds dangerous putting nuke bombs on the moon, but frankly it is safer having them there than on Earth. You know, as long as a mass driver catapult doesn't send them back ....
Oh, but to your point, one of my ideas for Starship is to design an antimatter catcher from the solar wind:
https://www.niac.usra.edu/files/studies/final_report/1107Jac...
So you could probably do the antimatter catalyzed drives a lot more feasibly in space, but its still a lot more complicated than dumb bombs on pusher plates.
The number of Starships needing to be built, the amount of launches necessary to send that many people, and other details don’t line up.
I am not skeptical that SpaceX could do a mission to Mars by the 2050’s, sending a small team to explore the planet and come back. I am skeptical of SpaceX being able to launch hundreds Starships loaded with a hundreds of people and everything they need for building a self sufficient colony, by 2026.
The plan Musk outlined has SpaceX sending people to Mars at the same time they send people to the Moon.
Here is a link to the presentation: https://x.com/SpaceX/status/1776669097490776563
But the point that matters here is that even if only 0.00001% of this goal is achieved, its fantastic.
So when we evaluate their plan we should evaluate it as 100% success or failure. We should evaluate the chance that they are 0.00001% successful.
And we can still be sceptical of that 0.00001%. Since doing that is hard as fuck and will need not just SpaceX but many others as well.
But what SpaceX is doing, is for the first time making it possible to seriously consider that 0.00001%.
Various shades of plasma visible during re-entry:
Reddish/orange: 1h 26m
Blue/purple: 1h 28m
White/blue: 1h 34m
Yellow: 1h 37m.
The forward flap visible in camera view starts melting away around 1h 38m (until basically the end of coverage).
(the two stunning minutes from 1h 27m to 1h 29m were the highlight for me)
DAAAAMN looks like Starship made it! This truly fit their slogan of "Excitement guaranteed", that Starship reentry was so thrilling, falling apart, seeing the fins disintegrating, yet at the end they still moved and flipped!
And then, install the RP-1 mod and get blown away.
I have 2k hours in this game, worth every of those hours.
SpaceX already has the Falcon Heavy and there have only been a handful of launches, primarily military.
I guess the argument is it'll open up new opportunities but will this really replace the Falcon 9 workhorse, which at this point is I believe the most successful launch system in history?
Won't someone make a fully reusable smaller launch vehicle that'll suit commercial needs?
It might be overkill for satellites, but space stations and habitats need the payload capacity of something like this to become anything resembling economical.
Apollo program flew once in 6 months.
If we're to build a Moon base, we're going to have at least this frequency of flights - really, I'd prefer to have a great margin on top of that, because Moon is much harder than LEO, and we might need more resiliency to safely explore.
Each flight to the Moon will likely need to involve 10-20 Starship flights (rough number) to LEO. So even if we're flying twice a year - and 6 month stay on the Moon right now looks like a pretty serious expedition - we need to have a Starship flight every ~10-15 days.
So even for a robust Moon exploration program we need as many Starships per year as the whole world was launching rockets per year just some ~20 years ago.
As for moon, I'm surprised with the estimate you have provided. Apollo needed just one launch for each mission. Even if SpaceX will do orbital re-fueling, it's just two-three launches, why would you need more?
BTW, the idea of getting heavy Starship to the moon and back is interesting, but at the end flying the vehicle optimized for re-entry far away and back is suboptimal. My prediction that they quickly will go to specialized LEO-LMO vehicles with LEO re-fueling.
Wikipedia says Starship weights 120 ton empty and 1320 ton fueled, plus 100 ton payload (approximate numbers). That means fuel weights 1200 ton. So to carry fuel to LEO to fuel up a Starship you need 1200 / 100 = 12 flights. You can change this number maybe 2 times into both directions, but I doubt you'll fuel Starship with just 2 or 3 flights of tankers. Would be glad to err here.
It’s a bit hard to compare to Apollo since Apollo dropped stages at every step of the process, but it seems they used 70 tons of fuel in the third state of Saturn V for original trans lunar injection of 45 ton Apollo. Apollo itself was 2/3 fuel. So it’s ratio of 15 tons to 90 tons. I.e. 1/6.
Numbers: from LEO (low Earth orbit) to TLI (translunar injection) - approx. 3.1 km/s; from Moon hyperbolic to LMO (low Moon orbit) - approx. 0.8 km/s; from LMO to the Moon surface - 1.6 km/s, back to LMO - 1.6 km/s, total - 7.1 km.s . Numbers are optimistic, no errors. You absolutely, positively have to add delta-V for landing, Apollo LEMs, for example, had ~0.6 km/s, and also for docking - about the same, so total is already 8.3 km/s . This is more than Starship needs to get to LEO after SuperHeavy boosted it from the Earth.
So... no, if you're planning to get to the Moon anything near the Starship regular payload - 100 ton - you absolutely have to fuel it up fully.
Two comments here. First, we assume now SpaceX is going to have Starship HLS - human landing system - which doesn't go back to Earth, doesn't have flaps or heat shield, and is going to be used between low Moon orbit (LMO) and Moon surface - maybe one roundtrip, maybe more. Yes, for each following roundtrip HLS needs to be refueled.
Second, Musk mentioned "Moon base Alpha" in his talk. Having a serious Moon base makes it possible to produce some of propellants there. Oxygen is plentiful in the form of oxides on the Moon, and by mass it's 2/3 - 3/4 of the propellant load of the Starship, so it might be useful to produce it on the Moon.
We can finally start sending useful amounts of things into space, millions of solar panels for one
Also, the limitations of being in an extreme hostile environment make it completely impossible to get cruise ship levels of comfort in outer space, at least with currently known technologies. The huge amounts of radiation and the bone density loss from being in low-g for any weight of time, coupled with the extreme acceleration on the way up and the way down, will also severely limit space tourism regardless of transport costs.
You can send the power via microwaves so less interference, problem is the largish ground based capture device.
Apparently $200/kg makes it economic, Starship is aiming for more like $2/kg
Starship solves all these issues: The upper stage is more fuel efficient, and it has more room for really big payloads and/or kickstages.
> Won't someone make a fully reusable smaller launch vehicle that'll suit commercial needs?
Half of the people tried went bankrupt already due to F9: It is already too big for most payloads, so it does a lot of rideshare missions that pool multiple smaller launches together. It's very hard to compete with that.
So even if, for some reason, commercial customers don't really want to exploit the capabilites of Starship (ignoring the fact that multiple did already), SpaceX can again offer ride shares at a larger scale for F9-class payloads.
During the third test flight they also tested their weird side eject design for Starlink (or other flat pack style satellites) and the video looks like the door completely ripped itself apart.
Your first clause is correct, the second is unnecessarily hostile.
I'd add "again" into your sentence. They already did it before. Now they proved that they hadn't lost that ability yet.
There are purchasers for the full lift capacity too, like ISS modules and major telescopes.
Geosynchronous satellites are an obvious case where satellites will collect into a limited number of orbits but they vary on what point of the Earth they sit over. Also getting to geostationary orbit takes a lot more fuel so the rocket has less room for payload than, say, low EArth orbit. I'm not sure one rocket can launch a geostationary satellite above the Americas and above Europe in the same mission.
But you can't really launch a satellite in a polar orbit and an equatorial orbit in the same mission, for example. Likewise, how economic is it to deploy one at 150km and another at 250km?
Starlink is a special case because it's a related constellation of satellites where a number of satellites are in the same orbit.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falcon_Heavy [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX_Starship
Easily. Moving within an orbit is a matter of fine adjustment. For example, any stationkeeping that expands the orbit slightly will cause the satellite to "fall back" over time. Geostationary satellites are the best orbit for this, since every satellite in such an orbit essentially shares it with all others, differing only in position along the orbit.
Also if you're in a geostationary orbit to deliver one payload you have to leave that orbit to get to another geostationary orbit because there are other satellites in your way.
It can. Geostationary satellites are a certain distance above the equator. If they adjust their orbit a tiny bit lower than that they start to drift east, if they adjust their orbit a tiny bit higher they start to drift west. This process is called "repositioning".
Generally there is a tradeoff between how much fuel you spend on it and how fast the repositioning is done. So you can do it quick and then your sat will have less fuel for position keeping. Or you do it "slow" and then you preserved more fuel potentially extending the lifetime of your satellite.
But these are all done with tiny bits of fuel (compared to the fuel needed to put the satellite up there in the first place) because the delta-v involved is very small.
"The human remains aboard the lander won't be the first on the moon, as ashes of Gene Shoemaker, the founder of astrogeology, were buried on the moon in the late 1990s by the Lunar Prospector."
> In addition to the NASA science experiments on board the Peregrine lander are cremated human remains and DNA collected by two private companies, Celestis and Elysium Space.
> People hoping to memorialize their loved ones or colleagues pay the companies thousands to send a few grams of cremated ashes to the moon in metal capsules.
There are large bespoke payloads (eg JWST) but these are inherently so expensive anyway the launch vehicle costs almost don't matter.
I'm not yet convinced there's a huge demand for super heavy payloads.
If launch costs are going to be $250M, you need a budget of that order of magnitude to make a mission viable. At that point, you might was well spend anywhere from $50M to $1B on the payload because that's where your budget is. Or, to put it another way, only payloads with a $50M to $1B budget can afford to exist if the launch costs are of the order of $250M.
However, if launch costs are of the order of $5M, then missions with much smaller budgets suddenly become economically viable. And there are a lot more potential missions out there with $10M budgets than there are missions with $500M budgets.
Satellites get smaller not only because the tech gets smaller, but because launch costs/kg are so expensive, or so limited. Currently it's worth spending $10M to reduce your mass by 10%, if doing so means you can reduce your launch costs by $25M. Or, if doing so means you can double your onboard station-keeping fuel, and double the lifespan of the satellite.
If launch costs are less and available upmass is higher, your budget for engineering to reduce your payload mass is less, and so is the reason to do so.
There was IXPE, which has been the smallest dedicated payload launched by F9, which otherwise would've had to launch on a much smaller, air-launched pegasus rocket to get to the right inclination. I recall that they were able to simplify some aspects of the satellite deployment due to the roomier vehicle.
There was another mission, maybe Psyche? where the original plan would've required the risk of testing a new kind of engine to get to its deep space destination, but being able to get a dedicated ride instead, that risk was eliminated, such that it was going to be able to get there even if the engine tests failed.
That's not accurate. In fact, currently the industry is going in the opposite direction.
The new space revolution start with cube sats and have now grown bigger. Starlink is the best example. Their v1 sats were small, v1.5 are bigger and v2 are even bigger.
There is lots of investment into bigger buses currently. K2 for example.
> 38. Capabilities drive requirements, regardless of what the systems engineering textbooks say.
Sure, if a decade is "no time".
5 years from concept to prototype, another 5 years to operational and then another 5 years to full capacity.
Starlink was super quick, but it's design started in 2014.
Iterations on existing concepts like telecom or imaging will be quicker, but truly new fields like mining or tourism are at least a decade out before they're using substantial lift capacity.
Imagine if what you put in orbit (or indeed into deep space) was limited by your imagination, not by the very limited capability of launch vehicles.
I would not be surprised that most revolutionary thing that this level of launch capacity will enable hasn't even been suggested yet.
With the Starship, there will be single payloads of 100t or more - Elon is even talking about 200t in future versions. That is a total game changer. A station like the ISS could be set up much quicker. You could start designing real spaceships with e.g. ion drives. And a 100t payload might even cost less than currently a single F9 flight.
It could have similar impact on other scientific missions like rovers and probes. The ceiling for what’s possible is much higher when you’re not having to question the worth of every gram and square millimeter.
So that's larger but not that much larger. Remember the JWST was a huge step up from Hubble's 2.4 meter mirror.
I expect NASA/ESA will take the opportunity to deploy even larger mirror by using the folding tech they've developed.
But here's the main point: these kinds of flagship missions don't support and sustain a commercial launch system. There are only so many JWST 2.0s that you can and will build, launch and deploy. Your bread and butter is going to be commercial communications satellites and other than deploying large constellations like Starlink, I'm not sure what the market is here.
As for the commercial market, I think it opens up a new branch of materials science for high-end manufacturing by making zero G financially accessible. E.g. growing crystals or perfectly spherical things. If you or I already knew exactly how that would be valuable, we'd already looking for seed investment ;)
Also, let's conservatively estimate its payload to be 50 tons and triple the target launch cost to $30 million. That's $6000 per 10 kgs.
If there's a regularly scheduled flight to Korea/Japan, how many manufacturing and mining operations that are offline for want of a critical part would be willing to pay upwards of $6000 to take delivery of a 10 kilo part in <24 hours when they're losing a few thousand dollars per minute?
I remember reading about building a virtual mirror out of hundreds telescopes, scattered around Solar system. It will allow getting kilometer-resolution images of Alfa Centaur system planets.
Building and launching that with Superheavy can become viable in the next 30-50 years.
Rocket Lab is doing that.
The only company building a fully reusable vehicle are SpaceX and Stoke Space.
This isn't just a new big rocket. This is the most powerful rocket ever built, with the goal of launching it for less than the cheapest rockets cost. The current goal is to aim for $10 million within a few years, and then keep pushing it lower. For contrast, a Falcon 9 currently costs about $67 million to send 18 tons to orbit. Rocket Lab's Electron micro-rocket costs $7.5 million to send 0.3 tons to orbit. Starship can deliver 150 tons to orbit, a number that is planned to increase substantially.
The thing about space is that the potential is infinite, but it only becomes possible to start doing stuff once you get launch costs really low. Falcon 9 has brought launch costs down by orders of magnitude, but most people don't even realize this because unless you're a giant telecoms company or something, then $2000/kg doesn't sound that different than $50,000/kg --- wayyyyy too expensive for anything. But now imagine a world where you could launch things for $10/kg. Suddenly the entire universe opens up to expansion and exploitation, and life as we know it would basically change overnight.
It only costs $150 per kg in the near future to send objects into space with Starship; so I could, for example, send a Raspberry Pi (47 grams) into LEO for ~7 dollars (as long as I also had 149 tons of other objects from other people to send). A more useful use case would sending fully automated manufacturing facilities (probably either for semiconductors (https://www.nasa.gov/general/the-benefits-of-semiconductor-m...) or crystals (https://uofuhealth.utah.edu/newsroom/news/2017/07/proteinxl))
But taking things in the abstract, single digit prices per kg to space would transform the Moon (or space in general) to just another place to build stuff and expand out into. Obviously there are technological hurdles but nothing particularly challenging, especially in contexts where we could have regular traffic flow to/from Earth. The possibilities of this rapidly enter into the sci-fi domain. But there seems no real reason for that "fi" suffix to really exist in these scenarios. So again, it's all just quite weird.
If things work out as they seem increasingly likely to, then are all living through what will be the most critical segue in humanity's history to date, and perhaps ever. So far as we know space really is the final frontier, and once we can start expanding outward into that, humanity's existence will be radically shifted, and our perpetuation as a species will also be all but completely guaranteed.
Large orbital habitats, like Elysium. Asteroid, moon, and Mars mining. Colonization of the aforementioned, space trade and shipping between Mankind's Interstellar Empire.
Demand will rise for energy production and terraforming, all kinds of things will boom. All of a sudden we'll have 100,000x more resources per man than we have now.
Everything changes on that track. Everything.
- dude on the internet in the early 1800s
The only unfortunate bit was some debris cracking the camera lens during the last part of reentry so the view for spectators was occluded but SpaceX maintained their live data feed all the way through, which is the important part. As they say, for these tests "the data is the payload."
Thank you Flap Norris.
someone update the status from Blocked to Ready for Dev
So that just happened. Been even better if the camera wasn't mostly melted, but looked like a slow enough landing.
reason they're going hard on booster reuse is those 33 engines, they cost lotsa money to be dumping them over and over.
Booster splashdown at about T+7:30, Ship engine cutoff at 151 km: https://x.com/NASASpaceflight/status/1798700946983358535
Starship splashdown in Indian Ocean, mostly intact, with landing burn just before splashdown; landing burn: https://x.com/DJSnM/status/1798715665916014715
Full flight profile: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX_Starship_integrated_fli...
Watching the stream and hearing the excitement of the whole team in the background honestly made me tear up a little. Congratulations!
I was absolutely certain it wasn't going to make it when I saw chunks breaking off the flap.
Already the first launch of Starship a year ago showed how tough the rocket was. It was out of control, spinning wildly in high winds, and yet it still held together and had to be blown up remotely. Anything made of aluminium or aluminium alloys would have been torn to tiny pieces by the sheer aerodynamic force alone.
And now, the melting flap that was still capable of actuation and steering the ship towards a successful landing...
One day, this sturdiness is going to save some lives.
and even when they blew it up, it just laughed until it depressurized enough to break up.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX_Super_Heavy
meta but it absolutely would not kill anyone to include some context in your submissions here.
Also the significance is not Super Heavy landing in the Gulf of Mexico, but Starship landing in the Indian Ocean.
Go SpaceX! Go Starship!
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_Lander_(video_game_genre...
Human nature at work. On both sides.
I get the dislike - his politics are pretty reprehensible - but it’s hard to argue with the results his businesses generally achieve.
What he brings to the table apart from money is an absolutely bull-headed madcap drive to make the infeasible into reality in the face of a chorus of naysayers, and that, I respect.
>What he brings to the table apart from money is an absolutely bull-headed madcap drive to make the infeasible into reality in the face of a chorus of naysayers, and that, I respect.
This is exactly my point. Elon didn't make the infeasible into reality, other people did, and could have done without him. And if his behavior at Twitter and Tesla are any indication, his "absolutely bull-headed madcap drive" has to be managed and worked around lest it do more harm than good.
But it’s not due to him alone, but also due to the people that he managed to attract, hire and keep. Due to the people he passed the responsibility onto, and just as much due to the processes and philosophy he put in place. Alone having the people doesn’t guarantee success on this scale, you need the magic stuff, and the vision.
Nobody else did what he has done today with Starship or in the past with enough other things. And when it comes to costs and capabilities of Starship, nobody is even close. Not even close.
It can't be merely "other people" who are responsible for the success of SpaceX, because Blue Origin (and other rocket companies like ULA) also have "other people", but are not anywhere near as successful.
Musk had, at the very least, the ability to pick good talent, enough commitment to try for one last launch even after burning through most of his fortune with no results and the ability to establish good culture for an R&D focused company. This is relatively well documented in books about the early days of SpaceX.
Theoretically someone else could have made the exact same decisions as him, but by that same logic Einstein should not be praised for his contributions to science because someone else could've theoretically had the same realizations.
Shame.
Galileo was notorious for being a douche.
The world is complex. I'm a huge SpaceX fan, and a big critic of Musk's handling of Twitter. It's OK to hold these opinions simultaneously.
Then we're in a agreement that Musk's arbitrary bans (https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2023/04/elon-musk-twitter-st... / https://theintercept.com/2022/11/29/elon-musk-twitter-andy-n...) are bad. I'm glad!
Musk is not perfect but compared to the way the previous leadership handled the ban hammer he's doing quite well. I hope he ends up leaving TwiXXer in capable hands who take freedom of expression seriously and who are on the level with regard to policies and supposed violations of such. Who do not allow themselves to be used by governments to circumvent their own laws with regard to the suppression of speech. Who follow the law of the land, not the feelings of a few noisy extremists. I'd rather have people like Musk focus on projects like SpaceX but I see it as a net positive that he wrested control of 'the public square' away from ideologues who had turned it into the 'Red Square'. May it end up like (my possibly idealised idea of) Speaker's Corner in Hyde Park where anyone can put down a soapbox, climb on it and say what's on his mind as long as he stays within the bounds set by law. If what he says makes sense he'll mostly get applause plus a few boos and jeers, it it doesn't he'll get pelted with rotten tomatoes.
</soapbox>
Steve Jobs is a nice, more recent example, being just about old enough to remember his death, I know he was very much an asshole with many strongly held opinions most people would've disliked, but a current teenager is probably only aware that he was the visionary founder of Apple.
Bill Gates is also an interesting example, he was notorious for being cutthroat back in his day, but since he has mostly just been doing charity stuff since retirement, that reputation is fading.
Starship is designed to land on any flat surface (earth, moon, mars) but again they won't attempt ground landing until they feel confident in the design.
I'm hoping they had a reconnaisance aircraft out there, though.
I wouldn't assume it's 1 guy though, probably a team, or a woman for that matter.
> [S]hortly before landing,[67] it ignites its engines to slow sufficiently to be caught by two mechanical arms attached to the tower.
Congrats on the booster, still an awesome achievement! Still a long way to go, unfortunately.
Edit: seems I was premature in thinking that pieces melting off would mean it exploded. A partial success, ultimately!
My question: is the US Navy going to blow up this largely intact Starship, or are we just going to leave it on the floor of the Indian Ocean for another country to find?
Actually, it's probably just floating there at this moment.
Like how do you move a satellite or satellites to a certain area, at the right time, avoiding other space objects, and then keep them there for 45 minutes during the mission or at least 15 minutes during the blackout zone. I'm sure it takes a huge amount of planning, math, coordination with various entities....
> As of May 2024, there are 6,078 Starlink satellites in orbit, of which 6,006 are working - https://www.space.com/spacex-starlink-satellites.html
They have 6000+ satellites in orbit. While it may not be easy, it is probably not a huge challenge to plan for one or more to always be in the field of view for this flight.
So four people would arrive at Lunar orbit in an Orion, board a huge prepositioned Starship, and fly that down to the surface?
That's the idea, yes. [1]
1. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/1/13/20...
However, before that, a Starship will be launched into LEO. There will then be something like 17 (the actual number is not clear, but it is a lot) Starship tankers that will launch to re-fuel the original Starship.
The Starship then does a Trans Lunar Injection. The Orion docks with the Lunar Gateway, Starship docks with the Lunar Gateway, the astronauts transition to Starship, which does a propulsive landing on the moon.
One dumb question I have: There was no payload, and yet starship used essentially all of its fuel to achieve this trajectory. How does this compute?
*update* if you check the video just before launch (39:54), you can see that the fuel bars for both the booster and the ship is not 100% full: https://twitter.com/i/broadcasts/1OwxWYzDXjWGQ
Also the title is wrong for the subject. It should be about Starship, not Super Heavy. I don't know who did this but you did it wrong.
One of the fins burned half away and still managed to control for a soft splashdown. https://imgur.com/a/zNXUjbt
Edit: supposedly the Space Shuttle could also communicate with satellites during re-entry. There's a hole in the plasma behind the spacecraft and, Starship being large, must leave a bigger opening for the signals to pass through.
> Until the creation of the Tracking and Data Relay Satellite System (TDRSS), the Space Shuttle endured a 30-minute blackout. The TDRSS allowed the Shuttle to communicate by relay with a Tracking and Data Relay Satellite during re-entry, through a "hole" in the ionized air envelope at the tail end of the craft, created by the Shuttle's shape.
Starlink's just much higher bandwidth.
Edit: Thanks for the answers!
https://library.sciencemadness.org/library/books/ignition.pd...
If you’re reading this thread and haven’t read the book, stop immediately and open the pdf.
The eventual plan was to catch these with towers on modified oil rigs, then refuel and relaunch from there. But that has been put aside for now, there's so much land infrastructure to focus on.
It's always struck me as a very risky gamble on SpaceX's part to do that because you're risking your whole launch infrastructure if something goes wrong in those last seconds.
None of that applies to civilian rockets. ITAR regulates them because exporting either the finished rockets, or their components, or the tools and processes used to make them, might help foreign powers build their own. Salvaging wrecks isn't very useful for that. Meanwhile, if you want to know the exact performance figures for those rockets, you can just look them up on the manufacturers' websites. Nobody has any reason to lie about them; if you exaggerate them, customers will find out quickly, and if you downplay them, customers won't buy it.
This is why the Chinese and Russians (and before them, Soviets) tend to keep "fishing trawlers" full of SIGINT and recovery gear around NATO missile exercises, but not civilian launches. They care just as much about NATO military missile performance as the USN cares about their own. (And both sides rely on good old industrial espionage to copy manufacturing technology.)
Thank you in advance!
Now we have the 2nd!
Falcon 9 is an impressive and revolutionary vehicle. We don’t need to overstate the capabilities.
What Starship is doing is completely different from what Falcon 9 is doing. Falcon 9 is not the only other sub-orbital booster to propulsively land. Starship isn’t the only other spacecraft to survive hypersonic re-entry. It’s not even unique in being reusable.
Starship and Falcon 9 are incredible achievements. It’s simply not necessary to lie about their capabilities.
I realize re-lighitng main engines is novel but it isn't unique and even if it was that doesn't make the up-thread claims any less inaccurate.
Shuttle was a reusable orbital vehicle with multi-day endurance capable of hypersonic reentry. Falcon 9 is not that.
For most of the Starliner launch, all we got to see was a Windows desktop showing some basic animations that look like they're from the late 90s and unexplained telemetry with about a 1Hz update rate. Perhaps interesting to hardcore space nerds but not very exciting for John and Jane Public. Also, the "timeline" at the bottom of the webcast looked broken most of the time since it only updated when a couple major milestones occurred. Boeing even tried to address some of this in the press conference stating that video of the crew riding up to the station will be available after they download it post-flight (which, at that point, hardly anyone will care about).
Meanwhile, Starship had nearly-continuous live HD-quality feeds of video from multiple cameras from both the booster and spacecraft including all the way through reentry, producing some absolutely incredible views, some of which have probably never been seen before. Also, SpaceX puts very user-friendly telemetry displays on the bottom of their webcast that are easy to understand and seemingly have high update rates.
Maybe in the end it doesn't matter. On the other hand, if you were a potential future aerospace engineer, I think the Starship launch this week was the one that would have created most of the interest and enthusiasm. SpaceX is winning in the public-relations battle and a lot of that is because they've put focus and attention into their webcasts for a long time. Old space needs to learn a thing or 2 from them.
They are so far ahead if you're paying attention it's not even funny.
Can confirm. My coworkers are hardcore space nerds and datavis nerds, and they took over our #random slack channel yesterday really digging the Starliner visuals.
1 engine out on the way up, who would have thought getting 33 full flow combustion rocket engines to startup at the same time would be so hard.. /s
I see a lot of newspeak used with Musk's firm. Is this intentional ?
Which word in that is Newspeak? Unlike other companies Tesla and SpaceX usually use very straight-speak.