Hacker News Reader

Comment by somenameforme | Hacker News Reader

The 'worst' thing about watching space launches on streams is that you simply cannot grasp how ridiculously huge these things are. Even if, like in the stream today, you see a water tower for some scale, the size discrepancies just make it so hard to intuit. Starship is 121 meters high. That's something taller than a football field, jetting off into space! I've only gotten to see a decommissioned Space Shuttle in person, but that was also amazing. Even its fuel tank [1] makes you feel just tiny, yet it's merely 47m. Getting to see Starship live would be such an amazing opportunity.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_external_tank

View on HN

I've got the black and white arty photo as my lockscreen which gives you an idea https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/E46BxzjjUkpthVBNE6k8mn-192...

It reminds me of the old photos of builders eating their lunch atop half-finished skyscrapers.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunch_atop_a_Skyscraper

I think it was inspired by that. There's a high resolution version here:

https://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?action=dlattach;...

They also did an homage to that in Westworld Season 3!

https://www.postapocalypticmedia.com/wp-content/uploads/2022...

Via: https://www.postapocalypticmedia.com/westworld-season-4-film...

That's an incredible photo. Something about it makes me think of an old-timey silent film about alien invasions.

That is an incredible picture, thank you.

A striking picture! Thanks for sharing!

oh wow, i always imagined those breaking fins to be about tennis racket size !

They look to be about 4m^2 in the main part. You could make a nice deck with one.

Here is Musk describing them as a dinosaur bear trap: https://youtu.be/t705r8ICkRw?t=1714

My desktop. My login screen is two Falcon heavy side boosters landing.

That is still my favorite background.

It still almost doesn’t look real.

My opinion that is biggest fete of engineering in the last decade. Amazing

Do you have a link?

Not sure where I found it. I think it is this.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/52/Falcon_H...

Here's the full-sized pic:

https://rare-gallery.com/mocahbig/1305111-SpaceX-Starship-Bl...

I was going to say... who took the picture

but nowadays it can be a drone.

I was pondering but given the guys in the picture are on cherry picker type cranes, I'm guessing the photographer was on another of those. The quality looks a bit high for a drone.

> The quality looks a bit high for 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.

It was the first time the booster (bottom) and starship (top) had been mated together.

Dunno.

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.

> Re image quality, beyond the resolution it looks like someone spent a while getting things lined up nicely?

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.

Ok. I now think it was a drone.

There is footage here that looks like it might be from that https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zi5DXe_65J8&t=52s

I think you are right! That is an excelent find!

Got me wondering why the visitors are not wearing helmets?

I love how utilitarian that rocket looks - still has all the layout marker marks and welding/grinding marks all over it.

This looks like one of the earlier prototype ships, when they were still working out the tile geometry, but still also wanted to do a dry run of stacking it.

You could not pay me enough to stand there…

I would pay anything to stand there.

I had that printed out as a poster, keep it on a wall in my office. It’s a great inspiration and looks great at the same time.

Not to mention the sight itself is much less notable than the sky-tearing pressure waves you experience when you’re on-site. As soon as those engines fire up it’s very obvious why it’s so much different from watching it on a screen - the sound. The sound is so immense that it almost acts as a sort of audio silhouette that reveals the curvature of the earth if you listen closely enough.

If you're in LA and want to see the first Falcon 9 that landed, you can see it displayed in front of Space X HQ.

https://maps.app.goo.gl/2LMvohTfwJ1Sq3o56

I only live close enough to be able to see Enterprise, which didn't go to space, but I like to go there at least once a year, just because seeing the sheer size of it and knowing that all the Shuttles were like that is inspiring (the SR-71 helps too). I'm planning a trip to the space coast when family visits next year though.

Man I hope Musk names one of the Starships Enterprise.

Bet he will

He doesn't give many Star Trek vibes though. Space Socialism isn't really his thing.

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.

I could definitely see Musk getting into Make Pan American Great Again.

Please don't ruin it ;-)

The Pan Am brand has passed through at least one or two low-cost regional airlines.

Yeah, but we don’t need a Make PanAm Great Again thing.

Sorry, we all have to stick to what we’re good at.

The SpaceX drone ships are named after spacecraft from The Culture series by Iain Bank. The Culture is very much a socialist post-scarcity civilization where intelligent machines do all the work and most people apparently just party or do passion projects.

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.

The SR-71 in the Richmond Science museum was even more impressive to me than the Saturn V. The thing is _huge_ with a tiny cabin.

Work around ships and those rockets will seem very much smaller. Try walking under the hull of a tanker in drydock. While we call SpaceX rockets "big" by aerospace standards, they land on barges we call "small" by maritime standards.

Standing next to the S-IC stage from the Saturn V at Kennedy really puts it into perspective. And the Starship full stack is larger and taller than the Saturn V!

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/51/Saturn_v...

Saturn V slight larger than Statue of Liberty.

I never realized that.

Makes it look like the statue of liberty is pointer her thruster the wrong way.

She will not go to space today.

I have to admit that i found the statue of Liberty much smaller than I expected. Many things are larger than the statue, even when including the pedestal.

It’s bonkers how quickly such a large steel object goes from 0kmh to 100kmh+ so shortly off the pad.

For comparison the Statue of Liberty is 93m. Big Ben is 96m.

So this means we can strap some rockets to it and send the Statue of Liberty to space?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com