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Comment by themgt | Hacker News Reader

That was seriously some of the most dramatic television I've ever watched. Video of Starship being melted/torn apart by supersonic plasma, the broadcast stream dying multiple times maybe due to ship destruction, then finally back online, peeking through the cracked camera to see the nearly destroyed grid fin STILL ACTUATING. The announcers laughing about the ship being "maybe held together by some nuts and bolts" and then it still pulled off the fucking landing burn!

Absolutely wild and historic.

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I have never rooted for a flap so hard, and likely never will. I am ready to buy flap merch. The energy of the SpaceX employees gave me goosebumps, this was great, it was hard not to get caught up in it- you know this is the culmination of years of hard work that is mostly theoretical until tests like these.

Yes, Flappy McFlapFin for the win on that flight!

I think the camera deserves a medal too!

Life is really beautifully unpredictable. When I got up today (Central Europe, so several hours ahead of Texas), I never had an idea that a random steel flap is going to be my new superhero in mere hours.

Its tenacity in the face of hellfire was epic.

hearing the spacex is half the fun. Its fun to hear them cheer. and then hearing the Gasps and "ooooooh"s and wondering what do they know thats happening.

Really wish the camera housing had held up to get a complete video of the fin being eaten away. I wonder if any of the other cameras got good footage too because they stayed on the camera with the obliterated lens for a long time which makes me think the others also fair pretty poorly. There wasn't much to see on the fin cam after the housing broke until right at touch down.

I'd really expect SpaceX to have more cameras, and to have some shielding - maybe so that cameras would get open shields at different points in flight, so they'd be protected before that. We only saw left-back flap, I suspect there's a camera looking also on right-back flap, maybe towards the engines section too. SpaceX is known to have rich telemetry, that would be awesome to see.

They had at least 3 (I think 4 but there were 3 visible at once) different camera's on the upper stage I think they also got destroyed though and the melting fin was the most interesting thing they could show so they just stayed with it.

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.

I might have been thinking of one of the earlier shots that had some of the booster cameras. There's only ever two views of the upper stage.

Can you please explain how exactly you would heat shield a camera?

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

No, I didn't complain about the front row seat :) calm down. And yes, SpaceX is the trend setter in the industry right now, there is no question that their approaches are more modern.

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.

Sapphire optical windows are cheaper than you think, but in this case the problem seemed to be that the lens was splashed by molten metal that then solidified.

This could be solved by replacing the protection (I think solutions like that are rather common, mechanically move the flat transparent screen) or by just switching to another camera.

Are you actually familiar with how reentry causes deposition from a melting fin onto the lens of a camera.

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.

> but that may just be your writing style

No, that's more like an unfortunate choice of wording :( . Sorry.

Aha all good my friend. Sorry to jump on that.

You could protect it in the same way they shielded the pad cameras during apollo (such as the E-8 camera https://youtu.be/DKtVpvzUF1Y), with a quartz shield

A quartz shield doesn't help if it gets coated in iron by a hot plasma. I think the only solution would be sveral shields you can jettison.

The glas used would probably be ok if the flaps held up.

Also we'll probably see footage from the other external cameras later like we did with the third launch... at very least, the opposite fin had one, and the interstage camera; plus there are 11 internal cameras...

This is funny because this flight once against demonstrated the unexpected, bleeding edge of live coverage of a launch. Nobody else even tries to make their cameras or network work on reentry. The camera we are discussing certainly had shielding because it survived reentry. The live view was blocked by buildup and cracking of the camera lens, not camera failure.

Why would you expect this? It's literally the bleeding edge.

I think the only other external camera was on the fin that disintegrated, so I wouldn't have high hopes.

They will have had internal cameras pointed at the structure looking for hot spots, and presumably those will have been fine

"will have had", "will have been" - amazing construction

Future perfect and future perfect continuous, respectively, if you're interested in the names.

They're both future perfect I believe, of the verbs "to have" and "to be". Future perfect continuous is "will have been filming", this was "will have been fine".

What's the difference between those two?

"Will have been filming" is the future perfect continuous form of the verb "to film", while "will have been blue" is the future perfect form of the verb "to be", with "blue" as a subject complement.

Makes sense, thanks for clarifying.

To give them names destroys the magic a little

You can tell the ship still exists because the telemetry still updates

A friendly fyi just in case it wasn't a slip of the tongue: grid fins are only on the booster.

Grid fins are only intentionally on the booster.

This one just became one accidentally.

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