Pretty impressive. The engineering team at SpaceX is really something. Some thoughts;
The 'chopsticks catch' was amazing to watch. Seems like it adds a lot of risk and clearly the booster needs additional fire suppression systems :-) perhaps the tower could mount something that sprays the booster like the barges have for the F9 boosters.
The heatshield held out for a much longer time, the asymmetric heating on the flaps was interesting. I had guessed that all four flaps would have equivalent heating based on an approach that was basically that side of the rocket perpendicular to the flow but it seems like that isn't the case. Still it seems like they are close to having something workable here.
The detonation at the end was pretty spectacular too, but I suspect that structurally the tanks failed as the rocket hit the water vs anything that was an engineering failure. Engineering it to be strong enough to land on water would presumably compromise the cargo to orbit number.
The use of Starlink was really interesting. The ability to get live video for the entire re-entry is pretty game changing for engineering. I'd guess there are even more 'views' than they showed (there would be if I were running things :-)) but overall that capability is something that really helps evaluate the changes made.
I can easily imagine that flight 6 will be nominal end to end without any unintended damage. That would enable, perhaps, one of their 'massive' Starlink missions to test cargo delivery. It will also start to give us some better numbers on exactly how much cargo Starship can put in orbit in 'full reuse' mode which is essential if they want to create a fueling station on orbit for the Artemis program.
Again, hats off to engineering at SpaceX, y'all did good.
As to whether catching the booster adds risk - I'm not sure it does.
First, to the extent the booster is out of position in the x (sideways) direction, the chopsticks can move to accomodate error. But actually I think this dimension is the easiest of the three, as the booster has plenty to time to null any error in this dimension.
In the y direction (direction of travel towards the tower), the rails on the chopsticks can cope with the booster touching down along quite a long distance. But importantly, they appear to be smooth, so the pins can initially skid along them and then the booster can swing if it has not fully nulled any horizontal movement.
In contrast, if the booster used legs and has not yet fully nulled any horizontal motion at touchdown, there is a greater risk of breaking a leg or simply tipping over.
And in the z direction, it should be possible for the chopsticks can absorb more vertical motion than legs can absorb, because you can easily build in huge springs/dampers/etc into the ground equipment without concern about mass.
Catching also puts the booster in tension rather than compression - it's easier to be rigid in tension than compression.
Finally, if legs were used, the engines would have to get close to the ground during landing, so reflected shock from the ground could cause damage. I know Falcon 9 does this, but the area of the base of Starship is much greater, so there's effectively less room for the reflected energy to escape. Catching completely removes this risk.
On balance, I think they would have better chance of success for each mission by catching. The main downside would be if you fail to catch, you may need to build a new tower, whereas a flat pad would be cheaper and easier to repair.
I am really curious what the maximum wind speed allowed for a booster landing will be. Upon landing, it has a lot of windage and not nearly as much mass as during take-off.
I have experience with docking large boats and it does seem to be a bit similar. In the case of boats, wind is a big deal, and the booster has nothing "below the waterline" to slow down the effects of wind.
Not because wind wouldn't affect an empty booster; it certainly would.
But since the booster returns within 8 minutes of the launch, the weather in which a booster lands is restricted to the weather in which they will launch a rocket.
That value is unlikely to be significantly different than safe takeoff conditions. Yes the booster is lighter at landing, but launch is way more dangerous with larger error margins and more conservative condition requirements.
The value of what is going up (which includes the booster) will be greater than the value of the empty booster. Factors of safety would be based on the launch rather than the catch. In other words, if it's deemed safe to launch the calculation for safe to land is easier to pass. Especially when you are taking passengers on launch. Wind is already a significant factor in launch.
That's true, except it neglects the cost of the launch tower itself. If you botch a catch and need to rebuild the launch tower, that could get very expensive, both in immediate costs of rebuild, plus in opportunity cost of missed launches. So in the end, whichever has the lowest wind limit, launch or landing, will likely determine whether they fly.
Ah, excellent point! They wouldn't ignore one hazard because another is less severe. And you are correct, I wasn't considering hazards to the launch tower itself. I think you are absolutely right, either would cause a flight to be scrubbed. I wonder if the two wind limits would be different.
Definitely not, and I am not trying to be a doomsayer here. It's just interesting. Now that I think about it more, I believe a Falcon 9 Starlink launch was once delayed due to weather conditions at the drone ship.
I'm actually wondering about that. If I understand correctly, the arms can move up and down, and pivot around the tower. This allows them to correct for some error in the rocket trajectory and also (presumably) "soften" the final contact. Between the nozzles and the arms, it gives SpaceX a lot of degrees of freedom in the final seconds (you can see how the booster kind of "hovered" right at the end) and in certain respects might even offer more forgiveness than the hard ground.
Could it smash into the tower? For sure. Would that be more dangerous than smashing into the pad? I don't know.
It's a new technique with which we don't have a lot of experience.
It helps enormously that unlike Falcon-9 this rocket can dial down the thrust of its engines low enough to be able to actually hover or to move arbitrarily slowly in the final meters before touchdown.
It can arrive to the designated intermediate point with some already good accuracy, and then take some time to trim the remaining errors to the noise level more slowly, possibly with feedback from the ground sensors.
The chopsticks also include rails with shock absorbers, the action of which can be seen in the view from the tower during the landing [1], so the required accuracy is probably relatively modest, provided one plans the maneuver carefully.
The main takeaway from Scott's commentary is that the chopsticks allow the ommission of landing legs and all their subsequent systems and saves a ton of weight. The added risk to dial this technique in is likely worth it in the long run from a sustainability stand point.
Except that the landing legs allow you to land anywhere with a flat pad of concrete, whereas this requires comparatively enormous infrastructure investment.
The first stage doesn't really need to land anywhere, it launches from a known location that already has a comparatively enormous infrastructure investment.
The second stage might want to land in other places. Not as a satellite launching bus or fuel truck though, that just wants to go up and down in an uncomplicated and unsurprising way, and that's where the vast majority of their launches will come from.
For inter-planetary missions yes, but they have different second stage designs for those that aren't made for tower landings. If it gets used as a military transport, then similarly it will be a different second stage design.
With maybe totally different requirements on the G forces and vibrations that the equipment and people inside a Starship must withstand compared to flying. Not necessarily all the existing equipment can survive a Starship launch and not necessarily all military personnel can fly in a rocket. Of course they can select the personnel, like they do select paratroopers. Fixing the equipment or developing new one might be costly.
Thankfully, military stuff that is field deployed typically already has insane shock and vibration requirements. We build military stuff at our facility and it all has to go through lots of shock, vibration, and temperature testing. The military really wants to be sure things don't fail on the battlefield (which could also be aptly called "the-shock-and-vibration-field")
Just want to add that a lot of military equipment is already designed to be airdropped in addition to any other expected battlefield stresses, so they’re probably some of the best candidates for rocket transport in existence.
There's some work needed to have the launch flexibility though.
Ie lead time to launch, multiple launch locations.
In comparison, simplified, if you have a bunch of things you need to send somewhere, you can go to the nearest airstrip and call a bunch of C5:s from somewhere a couple of hours away.
That could actually probably be worse as the orbital path would not likely go near the wanted landing site, potentially in days. And anyway how do you know in advance what you are going to need (if it's not a nuke)?
Instead, with a near-future rocket, you could have some sort of assortment of "most likely stuff needed" stored near a launch site and be ready to pack and launch in an hour.
The booster is always returning to the general vicinity of the launch tower (either the tower itself or a barge). It isn’t used anywhere unimproved, and in particular is not used on Mars. So what scenario would it be helpful to be able to land the booster on a flat concrete pad?
It sounds like sci-fi thinking tbh, but at the same time, Musk has hinted at using rockets for intercontinental travel. But even then, it wouldn't be just a concrete pad, it'd need disaster recovery systems and infrastructure in place.
Landing legs are out of the question for Super Heavy anyway. If the engines come that close to the ground, the reflected sound from the ground will tear the engines apart.
The 3 RS-25 (1860 kN each)[1] used for the Space Shuttles had 300,000 Gallons of water output per 41 seconds [2] when it launched. On landing, the Falcon Super Heavy used 5 or so [3] of the Raptor Engines (2750 kN each [4]). I'm making a few assumptions based on Napkin Math, but the parent comment seems about right since the engineering required (and the payload weight lost due to the weight/space requirements of landing feet for the FSH), would be too high to withstand the vibration reflection of landing on solid landing pad.
>comparatively enormous infrastructure investment
Any infrastructure that can remain on the ground and doesn't have to be on the rocket is worth whatever the investment cost.
You note of course that instead of legs, which have mass and have to have a structure in the stage which distributes the loads the SH has those parts with pins which were locked eventually with Mechazilla's arms, and those parts also have mass and need to have corresponding distribution of loads.
How different those consoles with pins are from possible landing legs, and how much savings they provide is an interesting question. It's quite possible they provide some savings - but it would be nice to know some details.
Why so? Pin parts need to withstand similar loads - and if amortizing rails of Mechazilla may soften the contact, the direction of loads for pin parts is less favorable than for legs. Legs don't need to be big or too numerous - effectively legs are those pin parts moved to the engine compartment and turned for an angle.
Compression and tension are quite different loads. There have been rockets in history that would collapse under their own weight unpressurized. Neutron's second stage is a hung tank for similar reasons. Bucking is a pain. Super Heavy can obviously support its own weight, but tension is always going to be the easier load path.
Because the pins can be much shorter. Take a look at the falcon 9 legs. They are enermous both in absolute terms and relative to the whole rocket. They need to be that long to provide a stable platform and enough clearance for the nozzles and the residual plume as the engines shut down.
Don't forget that between certification and catch attempt that catching infrastructure is subject to the launch of the most powerful rocket man has ever created. It seems that the consideration about another part to fail is not valid here as the parts to fail have not disappeared but rather moved to the tower. They could still fail - in fact it seems that there are now many more recovery-critical parts.
That is, unless the falling rocket could abort a tower catch and move to a secondary nearby tower if a failure is detected in time.
> and move to a secondary nearby tower if a failure is detected in time.
They will have a tower in the Cape. It’s conceivable they could land there depending on return trajectory and save some mass for payload with that maneuver. I am also quite sure they will be a dozen towers in Boca Chica and I wouldn’t be surprised if they build a couple in California for Southward launches.
They do checks of the tower systems before using it, and have abort contingencies in case something goes wrong during final approach. I'm not sure if they intend (or have fuel budget) for last-second aborts to other towers, or if they just ditch in the ocean (remember there are no humans on the booster).
I'm curious how late in the catch sequence they can still abort.
I think it is very much valid if the entire context is taken into account.
The tower is used for various stacking and craning operations between launches. There is a better chance to detect any developing anomalies outside the launch context.
Also, being on Earth and flying nowhere, it can be sturdier and heavier than any flight hardware. Much like Roman aqueducts, it can be overbuilt a bit to ensure some extra resilience.
Plus, more towers at the same site, as you say. If one malfunctions, another one can act as a backup. In contrast, every single landing leg is a mission-critical component and cannot be replaced in-flight by another one.
This seems a bit like removing landing gear from aircraft and telling airports to shoulder the added cost of accommodating them. You've simply shifted complexity elsewhere. I understand that people are dazzle-eyed over the science fiction appeal, but IMO this feels like a distraction. The rocket's already reusable and already the largest rocket ever built, this doesn't add any fundamentally new operational capability while also burning a lot of engineering cycles and adding complexity and uncertainty.
What you're missing is the rocket equation. The less weight, the less fuel you need and the larger your payload. We should trust the decisions of these experienced engineers who are deeply familiar with the tradeoffs involved in spaceflight more than our own intuition.
Removing unnecessary systems that have mass is a big part of making reusable rockets work. It's why propulsive landing is superior to landing with wings, for example.
What you're describing with airplanes already happened. Large airplanes used to land on the water, which incurred a mass and aerodynamic penalty for the airplane but was very cheap to operate airfields ("fields"?) for; it only required a flat lake or harbor which was already there. The switch to landing gear allowed airplanes to be more optimized but requires more infrastructure expenditure for large aircraft.
It is not just about shift of complexity from A and B. Anything that stays on Earth permanently can be built without particular regard to its weight, e.g. much stronger, much more resilient, with bigger safety factors etc.
With any flight hardware, you need to make painful tradeoffs between reliability/sturdiness and weight.
If anything out of the ordinary happens, massive steel chopsticks can take a lot more strain than a landing leg which needs to be carried to the edge of space and back.
Super Heavy and its 33 raptor engines really needs a specific launch pad - on the first launch they tried to see what happens when they just fire it over a regular concrete slab (but still way above in a launch mount) and ended up with a massive crater. While Starship might be able to hop from unimproved landing sites, that is not really an option for Super Heavy, even with low fuel and short hops IMHO.
There's always a risk, but at the same time, they've designed the infra now, they can rebuild it from the plans (and iterate on any flaws). There's a (imo unnecessary) idea of doing a lot of launches, for which you'd need multiple liftoff and landing sites.
Yes, we should probably assume that the SpaceX engineers have considered all of the risks HN readers are able to come up with in a few hours. And that they have evaluated alternatives like the added weight etc of having foldable legs on the booster.
The catchzilla solution is an example of their amazing ability to think out of the box. This solution, and things like the rapid evolution of the Raptor engine (see picture, story here: https://medium.com/@futurespaceworld/the-evolution-of-spacex...), dynamic engine configuration (33, 13, 3, zero, up again) and control is almost magically impressive. This is the stuff of Sci-Fi, brought to life.
To me, it's not risk reduction that they're after with that booster catching mechanism, but weight reduction. Those landing legs that we've seen before (and the mechanism related to them) are costly weight that is absolutely necessary only on the rocket itself, because that is expected to land on its own somewhere on a bare rock. For booster however, it makes sense to have as much of such launch and landing weights externalized, considering booster's reduced use-case of starting from a spaceport and very soon ending up back there too.
The way the trajectory is designed is that it has to scoot over to the tower at the last second, and it only does that if it's really really sure it can make it, otherwise it crashes off to the side.
My thought (admittedly not well developed) is that smashing into a landing pad of concrete can damage that pad but it can be quickly repaired without affecting the ability to launch future rockets. If you damage the launch tower significantly you're going to have to suspend launches from it until you fix it. So the "higher risk" is more critical assets offline in the event of a non-optimal return.
Apparently they are heavily investing in having multiple towers ready to go to be able to do multiple successive launches. Presumably with that approach, one being damaged for a while will be annoying but not project-stopping.
That was a launch pad, not a recovery pad. The launch pad has to be engineered to survive full thrust from all the engines, and for a rather long time as the loaded vehicle accelerates upward.
> The detonation at the end was pretty spectacular too, but I suspect that structurally the tanks failed as the rocket hit the water vs anything that was an engineering failure.
It's possible that SpaceX programed the AFTS to trigger some time after the rocket touched down in the water. Just to make sure that it completely submerges quickly.
> I can easily imagine that flight 6 will be nominal end to end without any unintended damage.
I think it depends on what you mean by "nominal". SpaceX ultimately wants to catch the 2nd stage as well. I suspect that they are a ways off of that, since it would have to approach over land. The FAA is going to need to have very high confidence that it will do exactly what it's designed to do before they're going to allow that.
> It's possible that SpaceX programed the AFTS to trigger some time after the rocket touched down in the water. Just to make sure that it completely submerges quickly.
The SpaceX host on the stream said that they were going to try and touch it down on the water at more of an angle than the previous flight to attempt to get it to survive the initial splash-down so they could get some more data and video footage.
Obviously this wasn't guaranteed to succeed, but it indicates that they weren't planning to immediately detonate the ship on touchdown.
As I recall it was common on the early Falcon 9 landing tests that splashed down in the ocean to also explode after tipping over and smacking the water. Once they're actually landing them on a pad, tower, or ship that should be much less of an issue.
Yeah. It wasn't planned, but was a likely outcome.
I'm not sure if they would have actually attempted to tow this one somewhere given its location in the Indian Ocean, but they might have taken the opportunity to do some inspections before sinking it.
> Just to make sure that it completely submerges quickly.
Why would they want to do that? (genuinly curious).
I reckon there would be a lot of useful data left if they could recover or even just inspect the remains. The remains are one big tank, so it would have floated.
No doubt it would be very useful to recover. SpaceX isn't the only one who could pluck it out of the Indian ocean though. You don't want to leave a prototype for the most advanced Spacecraft ever made just sitting around for competitors to grab (most notably China which is currently speed running SpaceX-like designs).
Yep this will be the reason. And lets not forget that Bezos was able to find and recover the Apollo 11 Saturn V engines from point nemo. If that was relatively simple you can bet plucking a freshly dropped entire starship from the indian ocean would be a doddle, especially when sat views likely show exactly where it landed.
I'm fairly certain the Apollo first stage engines were recovered from a location relatively close to Florida/Bahamas, just east of the launch site. Not point nemo.
That is correct, off FL. The recovered engines were from the first stage they would never have made it half way around the world. Point Nemo is used to stash spacecraft that were in orbit.
It landed right next to their own camera-bearing buoy. You can bet their own recovery ship was right nearby. And with access to radio control too. Likely with a couple US military ships on hand too.
It might not be that simple - I've read an article how they recovered one of the solid rocket boosters from the first successful Ariane 5 flight to check all was fine. IIRC it was a slog, they had to tow it back very very slowly, avoid it sinking, fighting all kinds of weather and tow line issues, etc. Have not found the article, but there is a picture how it looked like[0].
With Starship it could have been similar & possibly worse given the size and more complex shape (various voids that might fill/drain & the thing is not really built for floating). Also you are in the middle of an ocean (Indian in this case) with potential for all kinds of weather on the way. Towing might again be very slow, so you might need to stage a massive submersible transport ship or something similar to make a recovery successful. And then the thing might still tip over and explode anyway - meaning all this was in vain.
I think is most likely they won't bother and instead just stream as much data as possible over Starlink in real time (or heck, even via WiFi once the buoy is in range) for analysis. They want to catch the shop eventually anyway, so manual post flight analysis will wait.
They can now check all over the first recovered booster anyway. :)
You wouldn't need to tow it; if you really wanted to you could use one of those deep see platform recovery ships that sink themselves. The rocket is big but it's tiny compared to ocean-going vessels.
Possible yes but still, this is a prototype with new fin configuration, materials and lots of detail to be understood from inspecting it in detail. An inspection would be very useful.
At the same time, this is SpaceX and they have a few others ready to launch already. Perhaps they indeed can keep it somewhat coarse and wait for detailed inspection until one of them makes it right back to solid ground?
The previous ship did not come down where it was supposed to. I don't think they wanted humans anywhere near where it was coming down, at least until they can reliably do pinpoint landings. Even the Falcon 9, as accurate as it is, doesn't have humans anywhere near the landing location.
I certainly hope so. Ocean are polluted enough and although such a ship is just a, well, drop in the ocean, the ideq of accepting to pollute more is unbearable to me, especially for a world class company like SpaceX...
Other than some electronics it's actually pretty clean vehicle - methane will gas off, steel will quickly disintegrate in water, there isn't tons of plastic or paint.
Looking at the composition of the ship, it won't be polluting the ocean much. No people on board to produce trash etc., mostly just plain stainless steel and a bit of ceramics that will make great hiding spot for the abyssal fish for a few years.
correct me if I’m wrong but I don’t think the second stage is meant to be caught. It will have legs to land on Earth/Mars without any landing infrastructure.
Pretty sure the Artemis lunar missions are going to use a different vehicle for Earth to LEO and LEO to Earth, so I don’t think anyone will be inside a Starship belly flop for quite some time
Plus, their 'evidence' is a leading conversation with an LLM. It's the AI equivalent of a conspiracy nut taking 50 tangentially related articles about Apollo and stitching together a narrative about how the landings were faked.
1) legs are heavy
2) empty rockets are stronger in tension than compression
the scale of Superheavy is such that the above two items are making the arms scheme make sense. The number of engines also gives this rocket the ability to hover, which probably makes the scheme easier to pull off.
This was also true for this engine's predecessor, the Merlin 1D. However that engine's rocket (the Falcon 9) can't hover, as the power of a single engine throttled to its lowest setting still overcomes the weight of a nearly-empty booster.
All high performance engines tend to only throttle in a range in the upper half of the engine's performance, the difference making hovering possible in this case is that the Super Heavy has _so many_ engines that it can turn off. This is a sort of secondary throttling, or meta-throttling, and the rocket can use the combination of engine throttling and engine-off to hover comfortably (while near-empty) with three engines going.
Spent rocket stages are empty of fuel, but not necessarily of the ullage gases, the pressure inside could be e.g. 3 atmospheres and that could be enough to provide some stiffness in the direction perpendicular to the axis.
The engine load is probably a steady, consistent magnitude. While a landing load is rapid and variable. Also, you need to design legs for wind loading after landing, which can be high if you want to launch often.
I imagine that they will be their own first customer - putting Starlink satellites into orbit while they are gaining confidence in the reliability of the system for external customers.
They have to prove out the landing of the second stage, either with another catch or with landing gear, which they need for the lunar lander anyway.
I think that has always been the plan. the V2 starlink sats were designed to fly on Starship. When Starship wasn't coming along as planned they shoe horned the guts of the V2 on to a smaller sat that became the V2 Mini.
If Im not mistaken, they already delivered a payload in one of the previous flights, because they cut the transmission for a while and didn’t show the payload bay like one previous flight.
I’m not sure they are, if only because of the altitude. They only took Starship up to 200km, Starlink are nearly double that so while they do have thrusters that’s quite the distance.
Starship is not really in a true orbit, I forget the exact terminology but the trajectory is designed to re-enter regardless of what happens with the the flight.
It is in an suborbital trajectory but with enough energy to be equivalent to reaching orbit.
Think of it as instead of thrusting perpendicular to gravity for the most optimal energy usage Starship instead points its nose up gaining more altitude but now lacks the speed to miss earth as it comes down.
They actually made use of this this flight again - eq. they still did not perform a deorbit burn this flight & let the trajectory to pull them down to the atmosphere.
I'm wondering if they'll be using the vertical equivalent of arresting gear on aircraft carriers[0]. See when fighter jets land on aircraft carriers? There's a cable that decelerates them. That, but for vertical landing.
The way these chopsticks are set forces the booster into a dangerous, snake like maneuver (a SnakeX maneuver) at the last second from a vertical setting, to get into the chopsticks. This maneuver is due to the fact chopsticks are short and the booster has to land on one point in space. No degrees of freedom.
Now, imagine if the chopsticks were long. The booster wouldn't have to land at one specific point, but it could now land on a line. One degree of freedom.
Now replace the long chopsticks with cables, and then add another pair of cables perpendicular to them. So you have a pair of parallel cables perpendicular to a second pair of parallel cables. Now the booster doesn't have to land on a line, but can land anywhere in the grid that's covered by the cables. Two degrees of freedom.
Pushing this thought leads to having a sort of iris diaphragm, like the ones in optics, but an iris diaphragm of cables. The diaphragm is open when the booster is about to land, then closes in quickly. Imagine this[1], but it's cables cinching in.
Now, it's a diaphragm of cables, not a diaphragm of rigid beams, so I imagine the deceleration to be even smoother as the cables elongate, and an additional system of springs and dampers to counter the weight of the booster.
The booster is vertical and stays vertical. Granted, an unstable equilibrium, but it beats doing the SnakeX maneuver to get to the chopsticks, and that's another story.
Now, imagine the iris cable diaphragm can move up and down like equipment handling containers, and now you have three degrees of freedom. That's less control to worry about on the booster's side at the worst possible moment, landing, where you can't make adjustments anymore.
This not only means being more forgiving on mistakes related to position, but also on speed and angle. The diaphragm catches the booster at any angle, and given that it cinches way above the center of gravity, the booster goes back to a more stable vertical position.
For the fire, maybe you just need a big hole down there.
>SpaceX likes to simplify and not to complexify things. And they demonstrated they can do landing accurately.
Yes. Something falling into a web of cables. I'd say it may be simpler than optimally controlling that last SnakeX maneuver to be hugged by a short-armed T-Rex.
>Think about physics involved for longer arms and how much more stress you will putt on the connection points.
That's why I wasn't talking about arms, but cables, as explained by most of the reply.
Did you think about how you support the cables ? Surely they must be tensionned or else they will hang. How do you tension them ? Of course you know that the more the cable is tensionned, the more force you need. So you need a big-ass structure to hold all of these cables. They must be able to circulate around the perimeter, while being in tension, while not collapsing the structure that holds them, etc..
I'm sure you think it's easy, but I'm sure some people thought a bit more
>Did you think about how you support the cables ? Surely they must be tensionned or else they will hang. How do you tension them ?
Mechanical advantage. The booster weighs 250 tons. A 40' shipping container has a max payload of about 30 tons. There are cranes that can lift 250 tons, and it won't be one, but many. Have you seen gantry cranes?
>So you need a big-ass structure to hold all of these cables.
Similar to the big-ass structure holding the 250 ton booster with the T-Rex arms?
>They must be able to circulate around the perimeter, while being in tension, while not collapsing the structure that holds them, etc..
Not circulate, but translate. The cinching in is a result of them translating. Again, see cranes and gantry cranes. Or, just see the actual chopsticks: circulating, not collapsing the structure that holds them, while being in tension, holding the booster at the free end.
Are you seeing the shear and moment diagram of that cantilever beam with point load? (I know, it's an extension of a supported beam, but still cantilever).
>I'm sure you think it's easy
I'm not sure I think it's easy, I can't see how you're more sure than I about my own thoughts.
>but I'm sure some people thought a bit more
You are people, too. Nothing prevents you from thinking as well, if for nothing than to have a civil conversation on a forum.
Now, that's all fun. Imagine they keep it the way it is, but they duplicate the setting to make a circle, so the booster lands in the middle of many chopsticks... What do you think about that?
The crane lifts on the same axis as gravity, so the force is the same as the object. If the cable is horizontal-ish the the force is X/cos(a), which can be many times higher than the object
> so the booster lands in the middle of many chopsticks...
And how exactly this requires less precision? I see multiple issues:
- No way to escape/last second abort away from tower once you dipped into that net.
- The booster arms must be longer/heavier, the tower support structure need to support more weight.
- Cables have a lot less thermal mass than the tower/arms - if the torch coming out of raptor engines will touch the cable, it may either cut or soften the cables and they will behave in a different way.
I mean we could have had this discussion previously but now they demonstrated on the first try that they can catch the booster... why bother?
>I mean we could have had this discussion previously but now they demonstrated on the first try that they can catch the booster... why bother?
Because these things must work every time, not just the first time. Because why not talk about it, it's an interesting topic and musing about it is amusing. Because it's not a bother. I'm surprised one needs a reason, but here are three already.
Good luck not ruining rocket with that cable web. Now you got other problems to target into some cell. Moreover cables could be lingering depending on thrust. Or maybe thrust will just cut em easily.
This is a solution for a problem that's already solved, that is, booster maneuverability and accuracy. But they've just demonstrated that the booster is accurate and controlled enough to land on the chopsticks, and they have over a decade of experience in making rockets land accurately in a specific zone.
That's exactly it, thank you! What worries me with the current one that landed is the gradient: because the arms are short and the spot is tight, the burden is on the booster to make very sharp corrections (especially on pitch) to get caught when there's literally a few meters left, with an increased risk at the worst time (no altitude, and structures around), as opposed to leaving the pitch as is and landing vertically. In other words: the possibility to screw a perfect launch by introducing irremediable risk in the last few seconds and meters.
Then again, I just watched the launch and that was the first thing that popped into my mind, and the first "design" that popped into my mind as I was replying to the thread, so not much thought went into it.
One thing to note is that the "Snake" maneuver was designed to keep the tower safe during the test, and not forced on the rocket by the chopsticks.
The rocket was set to come down on the pad just in front on the tower and launch mount until the final 3-engine landing burn started. This kept the infrastructure safe until the last moment, but also required that lateral translation you referred to.
They showed 4 streams at once during some of the reentry. One view of each control surface. They may have had still more views but just that 4 was a first.
I think the primary reason would be that landing legs are heavy, and it wastes performance to carry them. If your landing mechanism is mostly on the ground, you get that performance back.
Secondary reasons might include that it's simpler to get the booster right back to the pad. Once things have settled into an operational cadence, it's likely feasible to lower and lock the booster onto the stool, stack a ship on top, refuel, and relaunch -- no more messing around with barges, transport, weather issues, etc.
Your primary reason matches what SpaceX themselves have said. You either need to be strong enough to handle the shock of inpact, or need to spread the impact over time. Building either into the rocket adds a lot of mass.
Landing on a device that spreads out the shock moves that weight to the static landing platform.
To my knowledge, you're right, but in reverse order. I believe the driving force is time, rather than mass overhead, but certainly both play a large part.
It's worth noting that at least 1 Falcon 9 core probably got trashed not from the landing, but from rough seas - so cutting out the ground logistics chain adds resiliency.
The reflected sound of the engines is enough to destroy the engines, ironically. That's also why the launch mount is so high. You'd need truly enormous legs, which wouldn't work for weight.
The load for landing and almost empty booster would be less, but otherwise yes, it would be much more than the single Merlin engine on the Falcon 9, with all associated issues (local scorching/spalling of the pad, acoustic issues, extra weight, longer turnaround, etc.).
The rocket equation implies that if you want to maximize the delta-v a rocket gets out of a certain amount of fuel, then you should get the dry mass as close to zero as possible. Eliminating landing legs helps a lot.
You save the mass of the landing systems, you get to have all that mass on the ground and not have to lift it into space. Dramatically improves the performance of the rocket.
1) legs are heavy 2) empty rockets are stronger in tension than compression 3) the booster is large enough to make (1) and (2) matter more than they did for Falcon 9.
Why send the landing mechanism to space when it isn't needed there? Whatever kit you put on a rocket has to be brutally miniaturized to limit how much you eat into the payload mass. Also has to be rugged enough to withstand tremendous vibrations and thermal stresses. That adds cost and more points of failure. You want to move as much of the complexity off the rocket as possible. Then doesn't matter if the catching mechanism on the launch tower is big and heavy.
>The 'chopsticks catch' was amazing to watch. Seems like it adds a lot of risk and clearly the booster needs additional fire suppression systems :-) perhaps the tower could mount something that sprays the booster like the barges have for the F9 boosters.
There's no reason to reinvent the airport firetruck.
Unless you're gonna make it fully automated, it's not gonna work here as it can't be within kilometers of the landing site during landing in case there's a catastrophic failure.
>The heatshield held out for a much longer time, the asymmetric heating on the flaps was interesting. I had guessed that all four flaps would have equivalent heating based on an approach that was basically that side of the rocket perpendicular to the flow but it seems like that isn't the case. Still it seems like they are close to having something workable here.
Heat shielding didn't look relevant at this section of the flight at all. The booster didn't have any shielding.
The booster actually does have heat shielding behind the engine bells, to protect against aerodynamic heating on the return. In some of today's footage you can see it glowing yellow.
However, Raptor 3 is supposed to obviate the need for this shielding.
The booster doesn’t travel fast enough to need heat shielding ever.
It makes zero sense to use heat shielding behind the engine bells. Why? Think about it. If the booster renters the atmosphere engine bells first the engine bells would burn up BEFORE the air even touches the heat shield. If there are actually tiles there it’s just there to protect the booster from the heat of the exhaust.
> However, Raptor 3 is supposed to obviate the need for this shielding.
Not completely getting this. So there’s a case for the booster entering the atmosphere at orbital velocity engine bells first? I would think if they did this then THEY want the booster to burn up. Anything entering the atmosphere at that velocity needs to be made aerodynamically stable as it will be traveling faster then the speed of sound. This is what causes the heat. If you send something at the speed of sound engine bells first that’s not stable and is unlikely they will do that at all, with or without heat shielding.
I don’t think parent knows what he’s talking about.
> Where did it glow yellow? What time in the video?
This is a better view than the sibling comment linked. It's a greater close-up and you can clearly see the yellow glow behind the engine bells. This view is from Cosmic Perspective, a partner of Everyday Astronaut, whose video is linked:
In case you get confused due to lack of context, the booster shot is a replay. When Tim goes to split-screen view, the right-side image is a live view of the second stage ("Starship") as it re-enters from orbital speed. It is not a different angle on the booster that is shown on the left.
Later commentary explains that the heating behind the engine bells is due to atmospheric compression and SpaceX specifically orients the drop of the booster to focus heating in this spot.
You ought to do some basic research before making a post like this. Honestly might be the most baffling comment I've ever seen on HN---what kind of mindset does it take to have this kind of overriding confidence in one's own lay speculation?
The engine bells are made of different material than what's behind them (a material that has to directly withstand hot exhaust) and the aerodynamics of the ass end of the rocket are complex; some combination of these factors means this heating isn't an issue for the bells but is a concern for what's behind them. The booster does not re-enter from orbital velocity, but does come down engines first at supersonic speed. Stability in this orientation throughout the descent is a problem SpaceX solved with Falcon 9, and SH works the same way.
See the other reply to your comment for timestamped video of aerodynamic heating behind the engine bells.
Is it possible you're confusing the booster with the second stage (Starship)? They are not the same thing.
>You ought to do some basic research before making a post like this. Honestly might be the most baffling comment I've ever seen on HN---what kind of mindset does it take to have this kind of overriding confidence in one's own lay speculation?
Don't appreciate this at all. I can be wrong, but there's no need to make personal comments on my mindset.
Here's a timestamped link to Scott Manley's commentary video where he points out that the yellow glow at the bottom of the booster is the heat shielding behind the engines.
Nothing could have prepared me for how that catch looked. I was sure the rocket was careening into the tower at the last second before it straightened out. The control algorithms must be incredible for the landing system to work within those small tolerances.
MIMO and nonlinear control theories are probably some of the hardest topics in all of engineering. SpaceX control system also has to compensate for the fuel moving inside their rockets so the control algorithms probably involve some kind of fast numerical fluid simulation.
Another interesting thing SpaceX is doing is to use consumer-grade chips in triple redundancy configurations instead of using $100,000+ radiation-hardened aerospace/defense grade chips.
> control system also has to compensate for the fuel moving inside their rockets
My stepfather worked as a programmer on the Apollo program, and the thing he always talked about as his biggest accomplishment was working on the "slosh problem" -- so yeah, props to the SpaceX team for managing that landing. And props to my stepdad for managing it on hardware that was... a billion times less capable? :-)
I might be misremembering but I think slosh was the failure cause for one of the three failed Falcon 1 flights. It was number 11 out of a pre-flight list of top 10 most likely failure scenarios. Definitely a difficult problem.
> Another interesting thing SpaceX is doing is to use consumer-grade chips in triple redundancy configurations instead of using $100,000+ radiation-hardened aerospace/defense grade chips.
This has been known in the high availability and safety systems industry for a while and a good book to learn these reliability engineering techniques is "Reliability Evaluation of Engineering Systems".
One downside of using non-rad hard parts is degradation from TID (gamma) and latch up effects. You can have chips monitoring other chips to reset whenever they latch up but TID is mostly permanent. The good thing is that TID in LEO, where SpaceX mostly operates, is relatively lower than GEO so they can get by with mostly commercial parts. It's not like the big defense contractors haven't figured out the same thing, they do fly stuff using commercial parts as well, they are just slower to adopt the same culture. SpaceX and the companies that built components using commercial parts are building the new-space industry.
But would using redundant systems separated in space connected with each other not offset the chance that they all would be affected at the same time? This is actually not rocket science .. just hard engineering and hardware/software design for redundant systems which is also usable on the ground.
High energy gammas have a relatively low cross section, most are going to pass right through the chip. If you add a too little shielding, or don’t layer shielding appropriately you are going to stop more gammas but produce lower energy x-rays from the shielding, which have a higher cross section, potentially increasing your chip dose.
Would it be possible to create a "skip" EM shield that does the opposite - increasing the energy of the gamma rays thereby reducing the likelihood of stopping them?
No idea how. Energies of most chemical bonds / electrons around atoms are not very high, not sufficient to emit proper gamma rays AFAICT. High-energy gamma rays are produced in nuclear reactions. While "clean" nuclear reactions that emit only gamma rays and not neutrons do exist, they are very high-energy and thus hard to initiate, and I don't think it would be easy to capture the energy of incoming gamma efficiently enough.
No, that's correct. Of course there's still some level of reduction beyond which the gamma rays don't matter, but where you want to place it is somewhat arbitrary.
A box with 1.3’ walls seems doable, actually, depending on how small the chips are. Might still be cheaper and more effective than specialized chips. But I know nothing, so am probably wrong.
Hah, beat me to the nerd snipe. Moreover, that sphere would cost $10k to make and, at a launch price of $1500/kg, cost $4.5 million to launch into orbit.
The aim for the launch price of the entire rocket is to be around 5 million (once it's fully re-usable and in production). Basically the price of fuel and maintenance.
So something might be off with your assumption of 1500 usd / kg.
IIRC the CPUs are much less susceptible to damage when powered-off ? So have a bunch of them in cold standby or even as additional pluggable modules on missions with humans on board & swap to good ones when needed? :)
If the only thing that effectively shields these processors from radiation is lead, concrete etc (per earlier comments), what design changes / quality improvements can compensate?
You don't need to block gamma radiation completely to increase the electronics reliability :)
Maybe you could improve the system availability considerably by a bit of gamma radiation protection combined with some more parallelism of the components ..
The point is that shielding turns a single high energy particle that would otherwise strike and probably destroy a single transistor, into a veritable spray of lower energy particles causing bit flips or worse all over the circuit. This spray of particles can be stopped... with 1.3 feet of lead shielding.
"Hollman also found that creativity got him a long way. He discovered, for example, that changing the seals on some readily available car wash valves
made them good enough to be used with rocket fuel."
Considering the political views of Elon Musk, it might be worth noting that his biographer is not the same Vance who is currently running for election as vice-president of the USA!
I have seen some people who decide to keep moving forward with whatever they have at the time. Sure what they produce is way less than perfect, but what they produce is way ahead of what everybody else is doing.
Perhaps the key is to be relentless, and resourceful.
From an article for this I remember one more interesting side effects of this approach - the flight computer ends up as a generic x86/ARM board that the engineers can just have on their desk during development. Previously the dev boards would use the same rad hard chips and would be as expensive and scarse as flight hardware, resulting in much harder development & engineers having much less experience with the real hardware.
But it turns out, it doesn't matter how many redundant backup diesel generators you've got if a 45-foot wave comes along and they're all left underwater.
I always thought the liquid sloshing would be one of the hardest to simulate (considering how chaotic fluid mechanics is). Interestingly, I think this caused the 2nd Falcon launch to fail (the LOX sloshing).
It is difficult, but there are modeling approaches that work, such as VoF (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volume_of_fluid_method). Basically, in addition to velocity, pressure, temperature, etc., you store an additional scalar in each cell of your computational mesh representing the liquid's volume fraction. Then, you solve an additional equation to transport that scalar.
Solving the Navier-Stokes equations numerically in 3D is very time-consuming, even on HPC clusters, not to mention the additional modeling required for multiphase flows. Your answer implies that the solutions are obtained almost instantaneously, which is not the case.
Oh no, apologies if that was the impression I gave!! I actually perform CFD simulations in HPC clusters, and in fact I'm an admin of the small cluster at my research institute =)
These are indeed heavy computations. What I meant is that VoF is one additional equation to be solved besides the N-S equations (either filtered as in LES or Reynolds-averaged as in RANS), the energy equation, your turbulence model equations, and so on. Certainly, not instantaneous at all, but simply an additional "simple" model that we can hook into our current way of doing CFD.
So, my point was, sloshing is a problem that we know how to simulate, although certainly you need HPC resources. Though, looking at those 100k NVIDIA H100 Elon has, I guess they have them! :P
It really depends on the problem to be solved (domain size, complexity of physical phenomena such as turbulence model, heat transfer, acoustics, multiphase flows, combustion, etc., number of time steps required...). In our case we perform for instance simulations of turbomachinery acoustics that can take 3-4 weeks running in a few hundreds of CPU cores, combustion acoustics simulations that can take a week or two running in 1k-2k cores...
I think the reason these kind of simulations are fast enough is because they are very coarse and approximate. Don't think of asking how exactly the foam swirls around the individual longerons, more like a very rough estimation of which side of the tank the liquid is slumped to. Remember it doesn't have to be "exact" just close enough to be useful.
By their very nature model predictive controllers operate in a world where not everything is perfectly modelled. Engineers do their best and whatever is left is the "error" the controller is trying to deal with.
Maybe they don't need to model the fluid dynamics, they just need to detect the mass movement / acceleration forces caused by it, and use those sensor inputs to inform a picture that's fed into their correction thursting.
Sort of like how you can balance a few pitchers of beer on a tray in your hand by remaining aware of the weight, even when people remove one! hahaha :)
Still if there indeed is "free" mass moving about, you need to make sure your control inputs don't make it slosh harder, so you compensate for that, so it sloshes even harder, etc - basically avoiding oscilation. :)
They don't need to solve the Navier-Stokes equations, they don't care how the fluid is actually behaving, they just need to approximate how the mass is moving within a margin of error that the control system can handle.
Maybe the tank is just not a large hollow structure but contains fins/compartments/whatever to restrict the sloshing motion and it's not that big a contribution to the overall motion.
If it's no stronger than a sudden wind gust, it's just something the controller has to be able to take care of without a heads-up.
I remember a very similar anecdote about Von Braun & the early Juno/Jupiter rockets - with someone pointing out issues with sloshing on a press conference & Von Braun brushing it off as insignificant.
Then the next launch crashed due to slosh induced oscillation - and the one rocket after that had anti-slosh baffles. ;-)
At least for the retro-propulsive landing burn, I think the modeling problem is probably aided by the high G-forces that must keep the fuel very close to the bottom of the tank. Even before re-light the booster is falling near terminal velocity (I think?), so the fuel is likely sitting at the bottom.
I think it's a huge problem when re-lighting the engines in orbit, though.
Also IIRC the massive main tanks in Super Heavy should be basically empty at landing & the landings propelants come from a set of small header tabks that are near the central axis of the vehicle & arr completely full. This should reduce or even fully remove sloshing issues at landing time.
I think some Kerbel Space Program players have attempted to approximate the liquid sloshing as an inverted single or double pendulum problem inside the rocket that the control algorithm has to take into consideration in addition to the primary control of the rocket.
Has it been considered to spin the fuel via some centrifuge mechanism as a way to remove sloshing from the equation, or is that more complex/expensive/error-prone than just predicting it via simulation?
I'm thinking we will eventually end up with "active fuel management" techniques like this for in space vehicles.
Bug tanks make sense there & they might not be always full. So I can imagine all kind of interesting ways you can work with the fuel in zero go to avoid not only slosh but also the need for ullage thrusters. Eq. some programmable nozzles using in-tank gas to nudge liquid fuel blobs to move in the right direction. Or even some nets or bags that herd in the fuel in the middle of the tank + prevent it from directly touching the side, reducing boil-off or refrigeration requirements. :)
Interestingly cheap redundancy is also how life does things for the most part. Most biological organisms just replicate a lot to guarantee success, so it's clearly a good strategy and an efficient use of energy.
People don't realize how powerful applied math (especially in the areas you've mentioned) has become. Same tools can be applied to people in the ad tech/social media.
Just as a note, Space Engineers has a mod that accounts for fuel in the tanks and also various orbital mods. If one feels inclined to try it for themselves ;)
as someone who absolutely loves SE -- please don't.
the orbital and planetary mechanics kind of suck. They're meant to provide a decent 'arcade realism' for the sake of player/player interactions and pvp/pve.
if you want to experience fuel slosh/weight during a vertical ascent/descent go with kerbal. It models a lot of that stuff without mods -- and mods can make the model even more accurate.
"instead of using $100,000+ radiation-hardened aerospace/defense grade chips"
Well, that makes perfect sense considering that both the spaceport infrastructure, and the booster need to do their calculation on the ground level instead of the highly radiated environment that is space. However, for the rockets themselves, which happen to reach that harsh environment, they may use more resilient and expensive hardware in the future, after passing over the current "let it splash in the Indian Ocean" development and testing phases.
I know MPC takes a LOT of compute power. It's not like a finely tuned PID loop or even a cascade of PID loops, computationally.
Does anyone know (or have educated speculation on) what kind of hardware is running these algorithms? Like, do they have a linux machine that's running the control loops? Are we talking megabytes, gigabytes of SRAM?
I would think no -- you would definitely need hard real time for something like this. But my only experience with real time systems is in tiny MCUs with kb of SRAM. That's definitely too small for a controller like this.
MPC doesn't need to take a ton of compute power. It all comes down to how sophisticated the underlying model is. You can have a MPC with 20 variables and run it at multiple kilohertz on a tiny microcontroller.
When you build something like this, you're torn between having a big model that represents everything and a smaller model that is easier to validate and reason about. Based on simulation, you might go for a smaller model that "knows" to stay away from operating areas where hidden variables (like really complicated tank slosh) invalidate the small model.
I doubt the actual control loop is too much processing, but it's certainly possible to build controllers with SDRAM, millions of variables of state, and hard realtime processing, though I wouldn't build it on top of preempt-rt. ;)
Less than 5% of a full load. Any extra fuel you brought to the edge of space and back is lost performance, so substantial efforts are made to minimize this lost mass fraction.
(Not an engineer either) My understanding is that it's been done before on smaller scales but having a giant piston in the tank requires a good seal, railings to keep it straight, and overall way too much mass and rigidity. Consider that the tank walls are only a few millimeters thick.
Instead, it's more common to use gasses injected at the top of the tank to push the liquid to the bottom. Falcon 9 uses helium. Starship uses https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autogenous_pressurization as well as small header tanks for the landing propellants.
>probably involve some kind of fast numerical fluid simulation
Sometimes even a simple approach can work. On Apollo they developed (at the time cutting-edge) passive RC filter networks, to avoid the control system "exciting" the rocket at frequencies of the slosh/bend/torsion modes.
I never thought of using fluid dynamics in the rocket stabilization algorithm—maybe it's something that could be useful to prevent many of the accidents involving liquid-transport trucks
I have been told by people who worked on them that you get radiation hardened aerospace/defence grade chips by backing off the clock speed about 20% to give signal stabilization slightly longer time. I can understand the population being confused about this but industry being confused seems to have more to do with regulatory capture and beaurocratic moats which SpaceX does seem to be bypassing.
You also have to add massive amounts (relatively) of static sink by approaches like ‘silicon on insulator’ to prevent energetic electrons from hopping into the transistor layer.
> SpaceX control system also has to compensate for the fuel moving inside their rockets so the control algorithms probably involve some kind of fast numerical fluid simulation.
Surely this isn't necessary with a small enough sensor granularity or whatever the terminology is. You can have very dumb software if it reacts quickly enough to changes in perception.
That's amazing footage, and you're right about the perspective: from the official feed the distances seem compressed compared to what we see in this footage.
I certainly can explain it, I'm just not sure I can do it in a way that you could understand. If you yell me what's one of the greatest things you have seen and why, I might be able to better relate.
I know the control algorithms are the mind-blowing part here but,
does anyone have any literature about how the Rocket localized itself with respect to the chopstick arms? It must've been some combination of GPS and Radar pings to the arms?
And then the onboard IMU to make sure it hits it straight.
Great question! Could just be Real-Time Kinematic (RTK) GPS like someone mentioned. Essentially the landing arms know their position very precisely and they measure the tiny errors in GPS data, and send that correction data live to the rocket in real-time as it's landing. Once the rocket gets very very close it could also just be using vision systems to zero-in on exactly where the chopsticks are.
To speculate more, they could also be using something like ultra-wide band positioning. This relies on the same time-of-flight principle as GPS but instead of using satellites in orbit to provide the precise time information you rely on various nearby ground stations. Would only be useful right at the final approach, the last couple hundred meters, but it's another way they could get very very precise position information. (fun fact: Ultra Wide band positioning is also how iPhones can locate AirTags with centimeter accuracy)
Why bother with GPS or other "absolute" coordinate systems? Once the rocket's in close, all that matters is relative position and orientation of the rocket with respect to the landing apparatus. Eg, if you had many sensors in known locations on the rocket and many sensors in known locations on the landing apparatus, and you could measure relative positions between all pairs of these sensors, you could get extremely precise relative position/orientation information without beaming information to satellites or whatever.
From the control point of view, isn't this exactly the same as F9 landing on a pad, except the pad is virtual, floating in between the chopsticks and the ground? Or course one difference is that the approach needs to be from the correct direction.
A major difference is that F9 (landing on a wide flat pad) had a quite wide acceptable horizontal error, 10 meters or more, whereas I think this (landing between two chopsticks) needs like ~1 meter accuracy in the radial direction.
I seems to remember some article mentioning the Falcon 9 using radar (+ presumably other sensors) & even having a landing site map uploaded (mainly for the return to launch site scenarios) with prioritized exclusion zones in case of a landing failure.
The booster was falling at 4500 Km/h 30 seconds before the catch with 2-3% fuel left. How is that amount of fuel remotely enough to stop the downward momentum?
First off, the booster was going about 1250 km/h when it started its landing burn, it relied purely on drag to get it slowed down to that speed.
Going by the telemetry of the seconds before the landing burn and noting the speed vs time, it seems drag was around 40 m/s^2 when it was going at around 3000 km/h. Since drag depends on velocity squared though, it had reduced to just above 10 m/s^2 just before the engines lit at 1250 km/h, and so would quickly become negligible once the engines lit.
Going by Wikipedia, the Super Heavy[1] has 3400000 kg of fuel at launch, so 3% of that is about 102000 kg. For the landing burn, it used 13 Raptor v3 engines[2] to scrub speed. Each Raptor flows about 650 kg/s max, so 3% fuel is enough for about 12 seconds for the 13 engines.
The empty mass of the Super Heavy is about 275000 kg, so about 377000 kg before the landing burn with 3% fuel.
Using the sea-level vs vacuum performance of the Raptor v2 engines, one can estimate that each Raptor v3 produces about 2.45 NM of force at sea-level. So 13 of them would produce about 31.85 MN of force.
Using Newton's second law, F=ma, this gives an initial deceleration of about 84 m/s^2 and about 104 m/s^2 when empty. If we do a rough spreadsheet integration, we get that a burn of roughly 4 seconds is needed to scrub the speed assuming no other forces.
Now, comparing this with reality, the full 13 engines were lit for a little over 5 seconds.
In my simplified calculations I was assuming full throttle the whole way, which obviously isn't realistic, and I also assumed 3% fuel. So over all I think that's a pretty decent estimation.
Methane has 28% more energy per kg than kerosene and also produces slightly less CO2 (2.75kg CO2/kg burned vs 3.00 for kerosene) when burned [1]. SpaceX uses a 78:22 LOX to CH4 ratio, so for 34M kg of fuel burned, 20.57M kg of CO2 are produced (34×0.22×2.75).
Somewhat tangential, but as far as rocket fuels go energy per volume is also an important metric to consider. It's one of the (several) reasons hydrogen isn't quite as good for rockets in practice as it is in theory - while hydrogen has tons of energy per unit mass (120-142 MJ/kg for hydrogen vs. 50-55 MJ/kg for methane and 43.1-46.2 MJ/kg), it has a far lower density (70.85 kg/m3 vs. 422.8 kg/m3 for liquid methane and 820 kg/m3 for kerosene). As a result, you need quite a bit more tankage for a given amount of energy from hydrogen compared to what methane/kerosene requires.
IIRC there's a tradeoff between efficiency and thrust as well. Heavier fuels aren't quite as energy-efficient, but it's easier for them to develop a lot of thrust, which is important for the initial stages of launch. If I'm remembering events described in Ignition! correctly this led to "thrust density" being something that was optimized for - to the point that there were experiments with mixing mercury into the fuel!
Just a programmer, though been interested in physics since I was a teen and did take a bachelor degree in simulation (mainly physics).
Long ago though so rusty, $dayjob doesn't involve any advanced math at all.
edit: To expand, the "rough spreadsheet integration" was just the Euler method[1] assuming a constant acceleration. So
v(t+dt) = v(t) + a * dt
The acceleration comes from F=ma as mentioned, where F is the force of the engines (Newtons), m is the mass of the rocket (kg) and a is the acceleration (m/s^2). Solving for a we get a = F/m and we get
v(t+dt) = v(t) + F/m(t) * dt
To make things easy I assumed the weight of the rocket was constant at each timestep, but if we take dt to be small enough it's a decent enough approximation. For each timestep I also updated the mass using the estimated mass flow:
m(t+dt) = m(t) - 650 * dt
I started with m(0) = 377000 kg, v(0) = 1250 km/h = 347 m/s, and a constant -31850000 N force from the engines.
Using dt = 0.1 seconds, I got almost exactly 4 seconds until the velocity reached zero.
Newton's laws of mechanics are high-school physics IIRC; my son studied them at 8th grade or so. They are really simple; an evening with Wikipedia or 3blue1brown or whatever floats your boat will let you get sufficient understanding, provided you're also comfortable with high-school math.
That's excellent work, only nit is I think these were not the v3 raptors. I think they're just now starting production of those, so they still have a bunch of earlier ones they need to use up in these early test flights. This actually makes your calculation more accurate, as earlier versions will need a slightly longer burn time.
Ah, good catch, I must have misread the Wikipedia page. I misread that they were included in the rocket in August. Reading the Raptor page more closely I also see that the 2.75 MN of the Raptor V3 are supposed to be at sea-level.
Anyway, plugging in the Raptor V2 thrust numbers the approximation increases to 4.25 seconds. This is in line with the thrust I used for the V3 being ~8% higher than the V2 thrust figures.
The atmosphere does its bit to slow down the booster as well. It’d be interesting to see a plot of the power output over time on reentry but I’ve always assumed the motors aren’t doing a lot of work other than keeping the booster stable, until the very end.
Yes, for most of the booster return it’s ‘gliding’ with the rocket engines completely shut down.
They ignite a subset of engines just a few seconds before landing for the final slowdown and maneuvering.
Edit: here is a video from further away that shows the rocket gliding in under control of the grid fins before the engines light and execute the final landing maneuver:
> Yes, for most of the booster return it’s ‘gliding’ with the rocket engines completely shut down.
Watching the video, it looked like the bottom of the rocket was glowing hot, but the engines were cool. I imagine that means they were probably running some amount of methane through the engine bells to cool them.
Super heavy probably makes certain aspects (unrelated to the tower catching the booster) of landing much easier, by virtue of its greater mass. Timing with the Falcon 9 was always essential, because the minimum thrust (with one motor, throttled all the way back) of one of the engines was enough that if you left the motor running, the booster would start to rise. Time the beginning of the final burn incorrectly and you had a real problem, with the booster either crashing or rising at the end and... then crashing, but with Super Heavy, it might simply be a matter of having to compute a slightly different sequence for shutting off the engines.
Super Heavy is easier to control on landing because it's using 3 engines so has better directional control, and it can throttle those engines down into a sustained hover, which is what it does before being "caught" by the arms.
Surprising to see this work first time though - I don't recall them doing any hover and lateral movement tests, but I assume they must have done.
What's also wild is that the booster isn't being caught/supported by those giant grid fins, but rather by small lifting pins just below them, and seems to only have two of these (one on either side), so it also has to get it's rotational position right so those pins engage with (are supported by) the arms.
Yeah, but even without fuel the booster weighs 200 tons. It's pretty wild to have 200 tons of steel incoming at supersonic speed, then nailing a gentle pinpoint landing like that !
Yeah if the engines didn’t light and it hit the launch facility that whole place would be a crater. The whole thing was shocking to me but how fast it was coming down was extra shocking haha. I wonder what deceleration forces were at play because when the engines lit the booster slowed down very fast.
It weighs about 10% of what it did at liftoff, but half of the engines fire to slow it down.
Also I don't think the telemetry on the feed is that accurate, so with all of the atmospheric braking, it was probably going a bit slower than the 1200km/h at engine reignition.
Note that the energy of 3% of the propellant (~100 GJ) could theoretically get the empty booster (100,000 kg) to a little over 5000 km/h if properly applied.
Very cool :) I got a good enough score in the basic scenario by playing around a bit but it would be cool if you could link some kind of tutorial (e.g. to a digital PID video or something like that).
I thought the same, screamed out "ouch that doesn't look good!" right before the catch.
The last part of the live stream they showed footage from a different angle and there it didn't look too bad though! For sure controlled.
Scott Manley put out a tweet that they went down towards a non-tower position until they were at three engine controlled burn, and only then did the side shift.
A clip from some news program popped up on YouTube, just a two minutes clip of the catch, I was convinced that it was reversed. The fact that this is possible, that they made it work is nothing short of amazing.
Yes, indeed. But I will add that the sheer size of the rocket helps in this regard. I think it is rather hard to appreciate the massive scale of the feat by watching videos.
When Musk first proposed this, I thought he was crazy. It seemed like something a school boy would draw up. Now I think this will become routine and forgettable after a few more successes. Is there a word for that - something out of fiction becoming mundane?
2 related expressions:
1. Creeping Determinism - the idea that even magical leaps forward were somehow inevitable and were anticipated.
2. Nihil Admirari - the idea that wisdom is anticipating every possible thing that could happen, therefore a wise person would never be surprised.
But I lump both these together as the *"Wiseass Movable Feast"*
I thought it was plausible given the accuracy of F9 landings, though I still wonder how it will work at scale if one failure destroys the landing site. That could ruin the cost benefits.
Where his vision hit a lot of speed bumps is second stage reusability. Starship is a beautiful second stage to throw in the ocean. They’ll probably get it landing but the heat tiles will require a lot of refurbishment between flights. They’re going to have to figure something else out.
It took months to more than a year to repair shuttle’s heatshield in some cases. SpaceX replaced the entirety of the heatshield with a new design and a new ablative underlayment in a matter of weeks. I suspect they will be able to do it even quicker with design and process improvements. Small scale repairs of the heatshield between flights probably wont be all that big of a deal.
The fact that Starship is unmanned probably helps expedite the change process quite a bit vs. the manned Space Shuttle. If you want to "just try something" the most you can lose is money, and not create a national political scandal.
I think the problem with shuttle was more fundamental. most of the tiles for Shuttle were custom cut to fit exactly one spot on one orbiter. I've read that NASA replaced about 75 tiles per mission, and that 2/3rds of the cost of refurbishing a shuttle after flight was the TPS. so the cost of trying something out was massive.
I really don’t think it will ruin the cost benefit as much as you suggest, especially when they have multiple sites and multiple locations. It wound be catastrophic, but they are presumably building Tower like the rest of their hardware, and every time they launch it represents a $100M saving compared to the competition.
I'm expecting that SpaceX will have lots of towers, not just one (currently) or 3 or 4 (under way). It won't just be for redundancy. The duty cycle of a tower might simply not allow for the cadence that SpaceX wants to maintain. With Falcon 9 they currently have a 3x weekly launch cadence (which is unbelievable enough). With full reusability they might be able to get to daily and better cadence, so if the duty cycle of one tower does not support that (I assume right now it does not) then they'll need more towers.
A flight to Mars is currently going to require 10 tanker flights just to get enough fuel into orbit for 1 Starship trip. Containing liquid fuel for long in orbit will not be easy.
This likely means they are targeting 10 flights in a day at least. They've mentioned 1000 trips to Mars during one transit window, which means ~10000 Earth launches within 3 months, or >100 per day.
This happened with LLMs in a big way. Basically humanity surpassed some kind of AI milestone and we zoomed past the turing test in a big way. But thanks to social media everyone is sort of rolling their eyes at it.
If I had to bet, I would bet against it. Boston Dynamics for example, for the longest time, didn't use anything other than Model-Predictive Control. Only recently have they started using RL
I think that catching a grain silo in mid air that fell in a semi-controlled way from effin low earth orbit is undeniably incredible.
SpaceX continues to blow me away with these unbelievably lofty ideas. I remember seeing their "grasshopper" flights years ago and they blew it up because they couldn't land it at the time, who knew within a few years they'd be doing this.
I think they still have "Grasshopper" (the custom test unit) sat outside at McGregor, it was F9R Dev1 (a modified F9 booster) that they had to destruct after one of the engines failed mid-hop.
They were originally going to do high-altitude tests with an "F9 dev2" (similar to some of the early starship test launches) - but they gave up and just did some testing with real landing Falcon 9s instead.
Naive question: I obviously expect there to be flames from the engines, but there were flames on the lower sides for quite a while after the catch – is that expected?
It is common for Starship prototypes to have uncontrolled fires, but it is obviously not a good thing.
For example, prototype number 10 exploded 8 minutes after landing [1] because of a seemingly insignificant fire at the bottom.
After today's flight there was a long lasting fire in the engine section, with occasional flaming pieces of plumbing raining down from the rocket. Examining the aftermath should help SpaceX to understand what improvements need to be made to prevent this from happening.
This highlights another thing I love about watching SpaceX's unprecedented rate of progress. They're managing the complex balance of risk, learning, time and budget extremely well. I'm not an expert in the relevant domains but even I've noticed and appreciated that the typical SpaceX development test always manages to get big chunks of new data, while still having some notable things not quite working.
It's an object lesson in rapid engineering development. If everything goes perfectly in a development test, it's a sign you're not moving fast enough (meaning not taking enough risk per increment to maximize learning). As valuable as Falcon, Starlink and Starship are, the biggest near-term value of SpaceX may be providing such a clear demonstration of well-executed "fail fast, learn fast" engineering that even politicians and bureaucrats can understand it.
Maybe the flare on the side started as purposeful. But there was also a fire inside, between the engines, with flaming pieces of some pipes or cables raining down from the rocket. You can see one example of this just after this timestamp: https://youtu.be/YC87WmFN_As?t=12928
It does look like venting, but on the Everyday Astronaut video feed it also looked like a COPV inside one of the strakes looked like it exploded as well.
It looked to me like the fire was on the fuel intake valves and if you watch carefully that area was scoured by the nozzle output when it was first slowing down so it probably blew through the shutoff valves or something
If not an intended vent, probably some methane leak. Given that they have the first stage intact, they will know exactly what happened very soon. Yet another advantage of having the rocket returned instead of sinking it in the ocean.
Isn’t this a forum of hackers caring about the news? Everyone seems excited here and that excitement naturally leads into curiosity for many who identify as hackers.
There’s a bunch of people crapping on you who clearly haven’t been through a flight test campaigns.
100% with you. The teams I’ve worked with would be celebrating and trying to figure out what’s burning at the same time. And especially trying to figure out if there’s anything that they need to do to collect evidence for that investigation (eg zooming the remote PTZ cameras in on specific areas or things like that)
They have mission goals which were achieved (booster was caught). Goals that they didn't think they could do (Starship being within the buoys). While there was flames and those could be dangerous you judge the mission based on the planned outcomes but they will try to eliminate the anomalies to improve the next mission while still achieving the goals.
The thing is that no one is judging the mission based on this imperfection. It's just intellectual curiosity, which is a good thing. The comments that are getting down voted are all assuming some negative motive that just isn't present.
I wonder what will happen when they get to 99% reliability? They clean up and rebuild the Mechazilla every once a hundred catches, on that occasion that one fails?
I suspect there's already a whole "refurbishment" process for the crane even for non-reusable launches, and once it's working darn reliably, they can just have a bunch of them ready to go, and cycle once in a while.
The booster aims towards the shore until the landing burn starts, only then does it swing towards the tower. So, for the most part, failures should mean that the booster safely crashes into the water.
I'm just so happy to see this level of progress. This another big step for opening up space. To think that one day this will be considered normal. 150 Metric tons sent on a fully reusable rocket.
So, reusable is supposed to reduce the cost. But the space shuttle was reusable and it has been shutdown because it was too expensive. What is the differences between the two?
SpaceX builds vehicles. The Shuttle was “reusable” because they needed a term between the default for transportation capital expenditures (e.g. trains, planes, cars and ships) and the modified missiles that defined post-War spaceflight. “Reusable” in the Shuttle’s context meant months of specialist overhaul time and the cost of a Falcon 9 launch in SRB booster replacements alone [0].
At the end of the day, in 2010, “the incremental cost per flight of the Space Shuttle was $409 million, or $14,186 per kilogram” [1]. ($591mm and $20,512 in 2024 dollars, respectively [2].) SpaceX’s prices per kg are around $3,170 on Falcon 9 [3] and $1,520 for Falcon Heavy [4]. Starship should bring those costs below $1000.
It might, but it's also at a scale where people can dust off the old plans for orbital rings and ask if this time the economics work out.
(My guess is the economics are fine, but the politics would kill it on earth, so the moon or mars will get one, but that's just an interested amateur opinion).
Term of art for this is "design for demise", i.e. make everything of pieces small enough and materials ablative enough that there's less than 1 in 10k chance that any debris will survive to the surface.
Presuming it’s in LEO. When and if we ever get around to building these things they probably won’t be in LEO at least not for long. Some of them might not even be constructed from materials launched from Earth.
IIRC, above something like geostationary they tend to decay upwards? Though the old orbital ring white paper wasn't suggesting anything like that, this was an alternative to needing to go so high in the first place.
(I may be misremembering or getting confused with a thing specific to tidal locking?)
That is indeed what you get with tidal forces - bodies closer than geostationary orbit lose angular momentum and decay inward, bodies further out steal angular momentum from Earth and move outward.
I suppose the same effect is there with satellites much smaller than the moon, but it would be tiny.
I wonder if they could have an orbit high enough to move away from earth with some kind of drag cables dangling from them into low orbit to counter the outward movement. Would that work?
These orbits have vastly different speeds though. Consider a high geosynchronous orbit vs. something like ISS which goes around the Earth in an hour or two.
but you are towing the cable and you'd only get so far down for the counteraction of force from gravity to pull on the cable. Would speed or friction on a cable be a problem.
The main difference is that this is built by a private corporation who can't afford to throw money away, while the Space Shuttle was build by the government, and moreover it had to fulfill a number of conflicting requirements, and commercial profit was not one of them.
But on a more technical level. I think the vertical landing is the main difference. Vertical landing was obviously known and done by NASA, this is how the lunar modules landed on the Moon. But doing it on Earth, with vehicles weighing hundreds of times more, I don't think the world had that technical readiness a few decades ago, when the space shuttle was designed.
And another major difference is the mass manufacturing idea. From the start SpaceX planned for getting to mass manufacture its rockets. The Falcon rockets are much cheaper than any other alternatives even if you remove the reusability.
Then it's the methane burning engines. This was pure old fashioned engineering progress. SpaceX's engines are miracles of rocket engineering. Aside from that, the fuel choice is extremely smart. Methane is better than all other fuels, except for hydrogen. Hydrogen was the fuel of the space shuttle, but it's very tricky to work with. It has very low volumetric density, so the tank of the space shuttle was absolutely humongous. Hydrogen needs to be stored at an absurdly low cryogenic temperature, so this adds to the complexity. And that tank was not reusable, so it adds to the cost.
In order to land as a glider, you'll need wings, landing gear, doors, rudder, stabilizer, flight controls, streamlining, all the structure needed to support it, and a heat shield for all of it. All that complexity has to work reliably, too.
All of that adds tremendous weight, complexity, and cost.
Yeah, methane is kind of second best (or worse) in many parameters, but most importantly, it's cheap, abundant, and easily and safely storable and transportable, and it does the job.
And while not the reason, also on Venus! Venus seems like a very interesting colonization target - gravity almost like on Earth, and there is a place in Venus atmosphere where temperature is around 30 degrees Celsius and pressure is 1 atmosphere (Earth); and human air is a lifting gas in Venus atmosphere. As a bonus, interaction of Venus atmosphere with the Sun produces a magnetic shield.
Staying in orbit means risk of catastrophic failure on puncture and doesn't provide access to the heat of lower layers of Venus atmosphere that can be used as energy source or carbon source. You also have to think about heat management - big colony means gigantic radiators. And most importantly no gravity and no magnetic shield - these make Venus imho better colonization target than Mars.
On Venus, a puncture doesn't immediately destroy anything - because of equal pressure on each sides of the balloon wall. You have more than enough time to put on a protective coat and fix it.
And building more living space is much easier + you could source the material (carbon) on site.
Its high cost would (should!) have killed it regardless, but its low reliability was going to be a huge problem too, and arguably it's the lack of reliability that finally killed it.
The high cost should have killed the project before it ever flew, but that's not how governments behave.
I did the math, and the impact is not negligible. One single launch releases the equivalent of 5000 tons of CO2. Elon wants to get to the point where there are thousands of Starships, each doing a few trips to orbits per day. That would be more than one millions launches per year, or more than 5 GT of CO2-equivalent. That's about 10% of the worldwide emissions today.
One million launches per year seems to be adequate trade for 10% global emissions. This level of technology implies we are able to reduce emissions elsewhere.
I think it’s ludicrously optimistic to think that this would substitute for reductions elsewhere. What possible
mechanism could reduce 10% of global co2 emissions when many of these launches will be tourists and starlinks?
1 million launches per year implies at least a decade or two of development. There is a lot that can change in that time - for example energy production can move towards renewable and nuclear. Few decades more and we might get fusion too.
The limiting effect for Starship launches won't be CO2 (direct air capture could counter that), it's injection of water into the stratosphere. Ballpark I think the limit would hit at about 100,000 launches/year.
Spacex might be a private company, but this project is funded by NASA, meaning the American taxpayer. Approved by a person whose last act was this approval before leaving NASA and joining Spacex (effectively putting money in their own pocket).
It is also yet to be seen how Starship will ever be profitable (outside of spending government money), who is going to pay for those launches and for what purpose. Other than Starlink, of course.
Partially. They have a fixed-price contract to land humans on the Moon, and notably got that contract because they severely undercut the other bids and were the only bid that actually fit within the available budget: they bid $2.94B, while Blue Origin bid $5.99B and Dynetics $9.08B.
That 3 billion is also much less than what they're spending on the project.
With a payload volume of 8m diameter by 22m height you could fit a James Webb size telescope inside with minimal folding. The sunshield (21.2 m by 14.2m) would only need to fold along one axis and the mirror (6.6 m) could be monolithic instead of having to fold, probably only requiring the mounting points for the primary and secondary to be hinged. This shouldn't be discounted because it makes telescope design much simpler and less expensive.
It also allows for launching individual space station modules that have almost the same volume as the entire ISS in one launch.
Their plans for refuelling on orbit with tanker versions of the starship open up the entire solar system to unmanned missions with much shorter timelines and much higher payload size and weight.
The fact the entire system is re-usable will make it both cheaper and faster to use than any other launch system.
All of this combined mean that it won't just be countries and space programs bidding for space on launches, it puts space within reach of many corporations and some private individuals. This isn't conjecture, it's already happening with the Falcon 9. Starship will make it even more accessible.
Just park the starship as the sun shield. Or two starship, or an origami starship that unfolds for more surface area, your own personal sun umbrella made from a starship.
About 10% funded by NASA. Starship is a >$10B program; SpaceX is getting $3B for Artemis of which >2/3 is for operational tasks and moon-specific stuff that SpaceX aren't relevant for SpaceX's goals of LEO and Mars.
The problem is that launch costs went down fast but satellite costs haven't gone down as fast and still have long development timelines. The other problem is the market for satellite services hasn't developed as fast as anticipated, except for starlink.
Starlink for all intents and purposes is the market for satellites now. All the other launches are nice to have extras.
Now personally I’m looking forward to NASA, ESA and JAXA to launch outer solar system probes like new horizons but with tons of fuel left in the tank to safely make orbit around there.
Having enough lift capacity to take a shot at putting a pair of telescopes out far enough to exploit solar gravitational lensing to resolve exo-planet surfaces would be a hell of a thing. Orbital refueling would mean we could reasonably build something big enough to be able to boost out that far (would still take decades to arrive).
The whole design process for them is based around launches being expensive and taking a long time to plan. It will be very interesting to see what happens when the whole process gets used to launches being relatively cheap and frequent. No need to spend years making sure the design is perfect and will definitely last a long time if you can launch a new one in a week if you make a mistake.
Things can only be cheap if you mass produce them. That tends to require standardization of components, and inevitably standardized components are a compromise between requirements, where up until now, saving mass was a critical requirement. If you don't have to care nearly so much about mass and volume, then that opens up many avenues for much cheaper standard satellite components.
Exactly. Private companies like space X would not exist if NASA didn't deliberately make the market for Private space companies. That's what governments do, make markets.
Think of the word ‘reusable’ in this case as less a binary descriptor but more of a scale of reusability.
Yes, both systems are reusable, but there are key differences in the refurbishment of the systems that partly explains the cost difference. It took more labor, resources and time to refurbish the shuttle. Also consider rapid reusability was a stretch goal when it was being designed, but we have come a loooong way since, spacex in particular has had it as a driving competitive differentiator for years now.
Another big difference is that NASA post Cold War was a skilled jobs program, with an incentive to do distributed, high overhead work to appease their bosses (congress), while SpaceX has the opposite.
> Yes, both systems are reusable, but there are key differences in the refurbishment of the systems that partly explains the cost difference. It took more labor, resources and time to refurbish the shuttle.
Starship uses essentially the same ceramic heat shield tiles as the Space Shuttle, so the fact the Shuttle had so much trouble with refurbishment doesn't mean that SpaceX has solved these refurbishment issues with the Starship upper stage.
Though the Starship lower stage, which contains the most expensive engines, doesn't have this problem. Since it doesn't need a heat shield. So partial reusability should be pretty realistic.
Shuttle's tiles were each unique. Starship is mostly clad with identical hexagonal tiles which can be mass produced and eventually refurbished by machine. A robot already welds on the tile fittings.
More of an ignorant assumption. I asked ChatGPT now, and got this:
> In terms of shapes, the tiles were not uniform. In fact, there were over 17,000 different shapes used to fit specific areas of the shuttle's body. Each tile had to be individually manufactured and shaped to fit a precise location due to the complex curvature of the shuttle's surface. The unique shapes were necessary to ensure that every part of the shuttle received the proper protection against the extreme temperatures during re-entry.
Please don't cite LLMs for factual questions. They are prone to confabulation. Why not type the question "How many heat shield tiles did the Space Shuttle use?" into Google?
Since I mentioned I got the info from ChatGPT, people can decide for themselves how much they trust it.
Note that the question here is how many uniquely shaped tiles there was, not the total number.
This is interesting because if you have to manufacture and keep in stock 17,000 separate tile shapes, that will be vastly more expensive than SpaceX who, from what I hear, only uses a singe hex shaped tile everywhere.
The tiles are very similar; the attachment system is very different (a big part of why Shuttle's were a pain to maintain) and Starship's simple shape means most of the tiles are the same (the ridiculous number of SKUs was another factor in Shuttle TPS costs).
Shuttle itself was refurbishable, but not rapidly re-usable. It was also incredibly expensive to build and refurbish. A shuttle launch also utilized boosters that were not re-usable.
Starship is supposed to be (and clearly well on the way to being) fully rapidly re-usable. That means all stages (in this case two) are re-usable, and that the capital and time required to get either stage flight ready again after a flight should be minimal.
Said another way – it is cheaper for SpaceX to build an entirely new Starship + Booster than it was to refurbish a Shuttle between flights, by a factor of about 4x ($90M for a Starship+Booster / $400m for Shuttle refurb).
The boosters for the Shuttle were reusable, but it turned out the cost of refurbishing them was similar if not higher than simply building new ones. Plus it contributed to the Challenger crash, see "Mr. Feynman Goes to Washington", https://calteches.library.caltech.edu/3570/1/Feynman.pdf
Percentage of reusability: boosters of shuttle cannot be reused, maintenance of shuttle itself is also very expensive (heat shields were pricey). whereas the starship stack has higher reuse percentage and allegedly cheaper to maintain.
The shuttle was not even reusable by any modern metric, the main tank was always expended, the boosters had to be recovered, fully disassembled and cleaned.
I'm not even sure the SRM case segments could be easily reused, given the tremendous stress. They were made of a very high strength steel (maraging steel, with a yield stress of something like 250,000 psi) operated with a safety factor of 1.4.
You've got a lot of responses on the difference of reusability, but the shuttle was also more expensive because it had to carry a lot of capabilities with it every time. If you were launching a satellite, you were carrying along the crew compartment and a couple astronauts. If you were bringing a few astronauts to the space station, you brought a cargo bay. And in either circumstance, you brought big wings. Starship can be filled with all cargo. And if you're just changing crew on the ISS, you could... not use Starship and launch a Falcon 9 instead. One of the mission profiles required by the Air Force for the shuttle was that it be able to rendezvous with a satellite, put it in the cargo bay, and return to Earth, all under 2 orbits and along a path that avoided flying over the Soviet Union, which required a rather large turn in-atmosphere to make it back to landing on the west coast.
One of the drivers was the need to Abort Once Around on a polar orbit launch from Vandenberg. The launch site rotates to the east during the orbit so cross range was needed. No such polar orbit launch (abort or otherwise) ever occurred, though.
SpaceX took advantage of tech from both the US and Russia, including the experience with the Space Shuttle. They have better computers, better metallurgy, advanced 3D printing and their own experience with the Falcon 9.
There is no guarantee that it will reduce the costs that much, but will all that experience, the chances are success are higher than with the Space Shuttle.
One big issue that isn't talked about much and that SpaceX takes very seriously is simply a lack of demand. There is only so much stuff you want to put in space. Satellites are expensive, and even with disposable rockets, the launch is only a smaller fraction of the cost. It is already a problem with the Falcon 9 as they have a bunch of rockets and not much to do with them. Starlink, orbital refueling, and crazy ideas like earth to earth transport are all ways to address this problem.
It was a problem for the Space Shuttle too, they couldn't achieve the economies of scale they planned it for. It was supposed to fly for routine maintenance missions but it didn't work out.
No one has answered with one of the biggest issues with the shuttle: each one was extremely custom. Every single heat shield tile was unique to a specific position and a specific shuttle. There were probably over a hundred million individual components in the Shuttle, and with many critical ones being custom, the time to refurbish it for a new launch was much longer.
This is in contrast to something like the falcon, which has a very standardized mfg process and components, which allows for really rapid iteration
Reusability increases costs if you don't reuse often enough.
The shuttle would have been much, much, cheaper per launch if it had flown more often. The expected costs for the shuttle included a range based on how often it flew which turned out to be reasonably accurate. They were much worse at predicting which end of the range they would be flying in. At the rate they ended up flying they had the extra costs of reusability without any of the benefits.
Starship is ludicrously expensive, but still much cheaper than even the best case for the Shuttle, and it has a guaranteed source of launches to help it benefit from resuability.
The Space Shuttle was not fully reusable as the biggest single part, the orange tank, was destroyed every time. But more importantly, the orbiter and boosters needed 2+ months of refurbishment/rebuilding after every flight.
One of the design goals of Starship is for the booster and ship to relaunch with zero refurbishment. To literally land over the launchpad, refuel, and go back to orbit within hours without people even approaching them. The heat shield is the biggest risk to that goal IMO, and we saw today that it definitely sustained serious damage despite improvements. But if they ever get there then per-launch costs will be a tiny fraction of the Shuttle with 6x the payload.
Falcon 9 has already proven that partial reusability is economical. SpaceX has dominated the entire worldwide launch industry and their competitors are nation states with no need to make a profit.
The difference is that they have already proven to be the lowest cost and most reliable launcher due to reuse. This is them lapping the industry with second stage reusability.
Beyond the fact that they eventually did quit, the shuttle program was the public face of the US space program, and part of having more than one way to launch military stuff.
The military rapidly gave up on the Shuttle after the first accident. No shuttle was ever launched from the pad on the west coast at Vandenberg (plenty of F9s have been, though.)
They were but the cost of refurbishment was almost more than just building new boosters. Thats why SLS is currently using Shuttle Derived Boosters but not worrying with reuse.
The Shuttle consisted of the shuttle (orbiter) itself, the external tank (not reusable), and the two boosters which could be reused after ocean recovery. The orbiter itself was slow and expensive to reuse since (among other things) all the heat shield tiles were inspected and 30-100 replaced between each launch. I don't know how much work was done to the engines between launches, but SpaceX's parts and cost reduction on the Raptor engine have to give it an advantage there.
StarShip consists of the Super Heavy booster that we saw "caught" today, and the StarShip (orbiter) itself. Having the booster return to launch site vs requiring ocean recovery should potentially increase cadence and reduce cost of reuse. StarShip is also meant to be reusable, although it remains to be seen how that will pan out. On the previous flight there was burn through from inadequate heat shielding - maybe we'll see an improvement with today's vehicle. I'd expect SpaceX to iteratively arrive at a quicker and more cost effective orbiter reuse procedure than NASA had with the shuttle, but how quick remains to be seen. Of course they are planning many of these to go on one-way trips to Mars rather than being reused.
> The orbiter itself was slow and expensive to reuse since (among other things) all the heat shield tiles were inspected and 30-100 replaced between each launch.
Worth noting that Starship's heat shield is very similar to the one of the Shuttle. They actually got the manufacturing method from NASA.
That's why I remain very skeptical about the easy refurbishing of Starship. Initially, way back around 2016, the plan was to vent liquids to create a cushion around the ship. That sounded more easily reusable.
Yeah. I think they originally planned to use ceramic tiles only for certain spots and still transpiration cooling for the rest. Then they fully switched to ceramic tiles. In an interview with Everyday Astronaut on YouTube, if I recall correctly, Elon Musk said they first believed the ceramic tiles to be lighter.
The main thing is... Space shuttle wasn't all that reusable. It had to be launched with a massive rocket and two massive boosters that just fall into the ocean.
The majority of damage to shuttle's TPS apparently came from foam strikes from the external fuel tank. Superheavy's optimized profile certainly helps here, since there are no large cryogenic tanks hanging ominously over the TPS while being shaken violently by solid rocket boosters.
The shuttle wasn't fully reusable, just for starters. The boosters were reusable with a lot of refurbishment work. The center tank was expended every time. It was very expensive. Only five shuttles were ever made, which means that no effort was put into automation of production of engines etc., everything was custom, and everything required great care to save the sunk costs.
It is a very daunting problem no doubt, maybe the hardest one, but I also don't doubt that the end form of Starship will require way, way less than 20 000 man-hours per turnaround (as the Space Shuttle required) to refurbish the heat shield. They simply cannot afford that.
the space shuttle was "reusable". It had to be taken apart and meticulously cleaned and tested and basically had to be rebuilt after each flight, in a process called turnaround. SpaceX's rockets are much closer to what you'd consider reusable.
I wonder how much of that difference is because the space shuttle was human rated from the start: F9 eventually got there, but only after plenty of "testing in production" with disposable payloads.
The other big difference, an elephant in the room grade difference I think, is that SpaceX reliability was developed with memories of a reusable vehicle failing mostly due to turnaround costs and risks on everyone's minds. That clearly wasn't the case when the space shuttle was designed, they were the first and enjoyed the privilege of making all the beginner mistakes.
I had an email exchange with Homer Hickam, before SpaceX existed, where I remarked that the shuttle design looked like a giant kludge, and a winged reentry vehicle was a fundamentally bad design, for various reasons which I enumerated elsewhere in this thread.
He emailed back that he agreed with my reasons and had argued that case with NASA in the early stages of the shuttle program.
I was under the impression tha they also thought this themselves but got "persuaded" with the prospect of more money if it could handle certain payloads of use for defense?
The case for the Shuttle was so marginal they needed every prospective customer they could get. The military was dragged into it unwillingly, but did give their requirements when forced to commit. They backed out as quickly as possible after the Challenger disaster.
Estimated costs of the fully loaded cost of the shuttle program ended up at $600 million to $1 billion per flight. The refurbishment costs per flight and man hours/staffing were astronomical.
It actually would have been a lot cheaper if they had gone for serialized, mass assembly line production of Saturn V class disposable rockets to launch piece of space stations, satellites and manned missions into low earth orbit.
To answer this oversimplified question with a simple answer, the Space Shuttle couldn't be a more different vehicle than this one. It truly is a comparison between apples and oranges.
Let's start with the fact that it was designed in the 1970's. If you had a Cadillac DeVille from 1970 it would get 8-12 miles per gallon. Just the mere fact that the design is about 70 years old makes that vehicle too expensive to operate, and that's before we even start talking about other issues with the design (performance, safety, reliability, etc).
Because people are reflexively averse to government spending unless there's a billionaire making profits on the way through thanks to 100 years of academic capture by Austro-libertarian economists.
Manufacture and maintenance contracts for the Shuttle were deliberately spread out across many companies and states, especially in key congressional districts. It was a jobs programme; waste was a feature not a bug.
More fundamentally, there were contracts. SpaceX does things itself; there's no legal friction internally. This gets back to the "Theory of the Firm" for why firms exist in the first place (transaction costs).
The need to codify what work is to be done in contacts is antithetical to SpaceX's rapid development processes.
Is that 150t of payload or total? What’s the cost in fuel alone (let’s ignore maintenance and operations costs for now)? I’m trying to get a feel for the relative scale compared to today’s commercial flight.
They previously threw around a number of around $1M per flight, as mostly fuel costs.
Also, while 150t is the target payload capacity, the current test vehicles are closer to 50t in payload capacity, there are revisions in the pipeline based on data from these test flights which will bring it up to 150t.
None of the vehicles have demonstrated any payload capacity yet. 50 tons is the on-paper capacity only, and seems quite high given how little fuel is left when the bring an empty starship to orbital altitude. I assume that as the engines and launch procedures get more efficient, they will start being able to bring stuff to orbit (and quite a bit of stuff, too).
They've actually been having to dump propellant in order to more accurately test what a Starship in orbit would be like, given they're not flying with a payload that would consume that propellant on ascent, but that they still want to launch with a full tank.
The dumping of this excess propellant actually caused an explosion and loss of vehicle on the second test flight.
That's what they said about the second test flight (and the third), but the webcast recordings looked a lot more like fuel leaks to me, and that is in line with Starship and early Falcon's past issues. I'm going to press X to doubt that the dumping narrative is the truth, since a nice face-saving white lie is in every corporation's handbook.
To put this in perspective: at 150t/launch, if a launch is $1M, then for the cost of an SLS launch (at least $2B) Starship could launch 300,000 tons, about the mass of three Nimitz-class nuclear aircraft carriers.
Methane is about 900-1500$ / ton. About 1000 tons is used for the launch in addition to 3600 tons of lox. That should be a bit cheaper than methane per ton. Ballpark, the propellant might cost around 2M$.
A modern airliner on a long flight might burn around 80 tons of kerosene. It's slightly cheaper than methane. Call it 75-80K$.
Indeed. You sometime see an argument that launch to space is expensive because of the propellant and therefore energy required. And as you note this argument is utterly wrong.
Am I mistaken, or are there distance/payload combinations for which Starship is cheaper per pound on a point-to-point basis than air transport, even setting aside 30 minutes versus 12 hours? Isn't that the non-intuitive outcome of ballistic trajectories?
No. But it gets within an order of magnitude, which is remarkable. Economy class on starship could be priced similar to first class tickets on transoceanic flights.
Just the current market price for fossil methane, which of course goes up and down. But I'm assuming SpaceX gets their methane on the open market.
It's quite possible that SpaceX has access to some cheaper methane source. Texas produces a lot of it.
And SpaceX has speculated about eventually switching to some renewable source by e.g. synthesizing methane. In which case that would boil down to cost of electricity and carbon. I don't see that becoming cheaper short term but that could happen long term.
There are no dollars in the laws of physics. It's connected ultimately to productivity of all the activities involved, and there's no obvious upper bound to productivity.
Falcon 9 is still the most advanced rocket flying real missions to date. The only thing close to it is Blue Origin, which didn't even have their maiden flight yet.
Is their timeline too optimistic? Yeah, but if the industry still catches up with F9 and they are close to having something a lot more advanced it really doesn't matter.
Even without reusability nothing comes close to Starship's cargo capacity. If you don't have to put a lot of engineering into getting things as small and light as possible you can put things in space a lot faster.
And, eventually, if it becomes cheap enough to put people in space for the task, you can plan to actually maintain things there rather than design for extreme reliability.
Robert Zubrin's Mars Direct would have got "flags and footprints" on Mars without needing something like Starship. He worked on a version of SLS in 1989 in Martin Marietta that would have cost $1B and been ready in the second half of the 90s and would be retiring soon after many successful flight to Mars (and to the Moon), but instead we got SLS and Orion so we need Starship to get anything done.
The Mars Direct book is worth reading not only for things like transport and mission design but also a wealth of other good ideas about how to “live off the land” when we get there too. Truly worth reading for anyone remotely interested in space exploration
Can recommend the book as well - its still not that dated and provides a very good overview of how not just a real missing to Mars, but also a sustainable settlement might look like. :)
The difference is that Mars Direct was a conservative plan, wrt rocket technology. It just used existing Shuttle parts and was meant to fly from Shuttle pads in between Shuttle flights. It didn't require developing anything new, that's why they were sure it would be cheap and fast, and flight rate would make it possible for it to be reliable. SLS is that idea turned into a jobs program.
If you toss it into Google’s NotebookLM, it’ll probably produce a much more accessible version of the blog that’s succinct and easier to parse in a few minutes.
That’s exactly what I did, and it seemed to do a good job of hitting the main points in about 13 minutes (which is much quicker than how long it would take a slow reader like me read this article).
I’m sure it still didn’t do the article justice, though.
Well I mean going to Mars isn't that hard per se, a fair few countries have done it... but carrying enough supplies and shielding to last people 2 years until the return trip and then actually getting back are way harder problems.
Seeing Starship get burnthrough on these suborbital launches really shows how hard it'll be to do Mars return entry with a fair few extra km/s.
Getting to Mars is hard but not that hard compared to getting a large payload to Mars surface and back to Earth. Some people may assume Mars return is around twice as hard but it's orders of magnitude harder. And that's before even contemplating doing so with a cargo of humans and the necessary tonnage for them to survive on Mars at least 26 months.
> Russia/USSR tried multiple times and didn't succeed.
Pedant mode: the USSR did land softly on Mars, but the lander got caught in a dust storm and was not able to transmit back the data ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_3 ).
I think that the number of countries reaching Mars (lander or orbiter) is in single digits and thus when talking about how hard it is to reach Mars and then come back, both of the scenarios kind of hold similar weights.
Going to Mars is relatively easy compared to setting up a self-sustaining human civilization on Mars, which will be thousands of times harder. Many people don't understand the scale and scope of the biosphere services the Earth provides to humans free of charge, though, and forget that little of that exists on Mars, other than gravity.
It's difficult to overstate how important the milestone of catching the booster is. Now we have a reusable rocket an order of magnitude larger than anything we've had before, and the cost of kg to orbit just nosedived.
Second stage reuse seems the far more challenging problem. Other companies should have reusable boosters soon but if significant amounts of Starship continue to ablate on the way down they could be faced with a disposable Starship competing with smaller and cheaper second stages that are well sized for typical payloads. We already knew boosters can be flown back to launch sites reliably with high accuracy. We don't know if it is possible to make rapidly reusable thermal protection systems that can operate on an orbital vehicle of Starship's size until it is demonstrated.
> Second stage reuse seems the far more challenging problem.
Sure, SpaceX has been doing first stage reuse for a long time now. But they have demonstrated landing the second stage successfully at sea twice now with the same sort of smoothness that they demonstrated once for the booster before they then caught the booster on the first real try.
A partial list of unbelievably hard things that SpaceX has so far made seem easy:
- building a rocket from scratch
- landing Falcon 9 boosters
- landing Falcon 9 boosters *reliably*
- 3x weekly launch cadence (Falcon)
- the bellyflop manoeuver
- mass manufacturing(!) a rocket engine
- catching the booster
- simulated landings of the ship
Catching the booster is really just like landing a Falcon 9 booster w/o legs, but clearly much harder.
Anyways, if they can do all those things then it's pretty clear that they can catch-land the ship.
There's still a huge list of crazy-difficult things that SpaceX say they want to do that are hard to believe are possible, except for the fact that SpaceX has already done so many unbelievably difficult things already.
They have a history of pursuing solvable problems and abandoning those that were not working out or had better alternatives. Parachute recovery of the booster was abandoned in favor of propulsive landings. Catching fairings was abandoned for water proofing. Proposed Falcon and Dragon variants were abandoned as was Dragon propulsive landing. They abandoned carbon fiber construction and multiple concepts for Starship/Heavy.
The tiles in combination with ablative materials and the insane robustness of a steel vehicle is sufficient to get Starship through re-entry and soft land in the ocean. We know ceramic thermal tiles worked on Shuttle and X37B and presumably will on Dreamchaser so while the success was an awesome achievement it wasn't unlikely given time to refine their methods.
SpaceX are limited by the properties of real materials, not their ambitions, and we still don't know if rapidly reusability is possible with ceramic tiles or if their fragility will require inspections and refurbishment. They can't do it with ablatives and there aren't many other options. I am optimistic but also realistic about the difficulties of what they are attempting. Sometimes risky projects run into brick walls and you don't know what is possible until you try.
If the ceramic tiles aren't working out, I think they could try transpiration cooling (previously planned for Starship) or a metallic heat shield (was planned for VentureStar). Or some combination. There seem to be quite a few options.
They landed an earlier version of the second stage on the ground a few times as well. It's the atmospheric reentry from orbital velocity that currently necessitates the safety of a splashdown: they're not going to risk bringing a damaged and potentially uncontrollable vessel down over land, even if they could nail the landing with an undamaged ship.
I would say they are there. Sure, they're having some burn through on the flaps, but they managed to hit their virtual landing spot anyways, and if they caught a slightly damaged ship they could study that damage better, repair it, and refurbish the ship.
But I imagine that by IFT6 they'll have nailed the flap burn through problem.
They can't have burn through like that and achieve the kind of rapid reuse Starship needs to be useful outside low to mid Earth orbit, to go outside of there it requires a large number of flights to refuel the one Starship that will go on to Moon/Mars. Without the ability to refuel for Moon or beyond trips Starship is trapped in LEO/MEO because it's hauling around so much extra mass for it's own reusability.
IMO a better use for it might be to ferry up large pieces of purpose built craft with less excess dry weight. A single reusable Starship launch can put the entire mass of the Apollo craft needed to make it from LEO to the Moon and back into LEO. Put a craft in two launches and dock it in orbit and you've got a huge capability to put a lot of mass onto the moon and still use the cheap cost to orbit Super Heavy gives.
I found Jeff’s Bezos interview with everyday astronaut really illuminating on this topic.
Supposedly they’re working on both a reusable and cost optimised non-reusable second stage at the same time. And they don’t really know yet which one will end up being cheaper.
You also see this kind of thinking with Rocket Labs neutron rocket. Where they focus on making the reusable booster do more, while making the second stage smaller, cheaper and simpler.
I think if it wasn’t for the rocket engine this wouldn’t be a question at all. The tank doesn’t have much value. It’s just a thin shell and probably a fraction of the cost of the fuel.
So I’m thinking, perhaps the optimal solution is something like this: the bottom part of the second stage with the engines separates, and a small engine and fuel tanks places the engines in a stable orbit. The tank itself is deorbited and burns up.
At some point later something like the Starship collects several second stage engines and deorbits them safely to be reused.
Or perhaps just the engines can be immediately deorbited with an inflatable heat shield and parachutes.
> Other companies should have reusable boosters soon
You're way too optimistic. Starship will deliver commercial payloads, with SpaceX phasing out Falcon 9 outside of ISS launches, before anyone has a reusable Falcon 9 equivalent.
It pains me to say this, but SpaceX is in a class all its own.
New Glenn finally has flight hardware undergoing pre-flight testing. I think they're pretty likely to manage to fly in early/mid 2025, and they do aim to recover the booster in their first try.
SpaceX couldn’t manage the first Falcon 9 landing until 2015. The first Falcon 9 reuse wasn’t until 2018, so 3 years to achieve reusability. The Chinese prototype hasn’t yet succeeded at sub-orbital landing. I wouldn’t be surprise if it’d take them longer than 3 years to have a reusable rocket. Starship would have been routine at that time.
Blue Origin plans to launch New Glenn in a month, with landing planned. They are a wild card.
Chinese startups have historically been the only ones to be able to move as fast as Musk. One very underrated ability of Tesla is they can develop new products in 2-3 years from conception to market. The only other car companies to do it at scale is BYD, Nio and Xpeng. The company he is talking about is probably LandSpace. They got from conception to hop test in what seems to be 5, maybe 4 years. SpaceX took 7.
I think China has about 5 companies working on reusable launch and it is part of a national government strategy. People can argue about the timeline but it is inevitable.
I’m not saying they stole the plans through industrial espionage, I’m just wiggling my eyebrows suggestively while glancing in the direction of the suspiciously similar looking booster.
I promise you the fancy technology is in the electronics, software, and implementation, and not the fact that the cylinder with legs looks like another cylinder with legs
I think it pains some of us to say it because of the person Musk has turned out to be, which is the opposite direction I think many of us were hoping his character development would take him.
Trump may well win this election. But there’s no scenario under which he’s going to also win the popular vote while doing it, at least none that I’ve heard of. If you have credible information that says otherwise I would be interested in reading it.
Absolutely false.
Trump got 74M votes in last election in 2020. US population was 330 millions.
Today US population is ~340M.
I seriously doubt that more than 170M people support a convicted felon for president.
I bet that he will get less than 170M votes in less than a month.
Do you want to take the other side of the bet to back up your provably wrong assertion?
Someday in a land far away people would be mature enough to spot complexity instead of judging people as purely "right" or "wrong". I think the best way to explain Elon is... he is a complicated individual and has some really good parts and some really not so good parts. And you know what, that is just fine.
This manufactured, polarized "us vs them" thing on the internet is toxic corrosive goop. People are complex and that is fine.
Using ableist language on Hacker News, however, is alright? I dislike Elon too, but this comment feels a little out of place and date, especially for the point it's trying to make
I think that is only part of it. Musk gave an interview where he talked about how the woke medical establishment trans'd one of his kids. They falsely told him to do the transition or his child's death was a near certainty. European countries are now restricting this "treatment" for children. The US has been slow to follow. There is a lot of money and political pressure from the left to keep the medical intervention industry alive.
Are you aware of what you're doing: you're removing agency from that person who transitioned. They're abundantly public about how their transition was appreciated and needed. Do you ultimately care more about the feelings of your own dad over yours?
It was more than a slight. Biden pointedly ignored Tesla when conducting an EV summit and handing out subsidies. Then there was the FCC fiasco where the FCC snubbed Starlink.
> Then there was the FCC fiasco where the FCC snubbed Starlink.
You mean that time that the FCC removed Starlink from the broadband problem when they couldn't deliver the speeds that they had committed to, as defined very explicitly in the program?
Musk has never, no matter what he claims, ever a progressive democrat. He would be at best, someone who believed in the liberalization of certain drug policies. His economic beliefs have always been max pro business (aka, hands off, anti labor). He solidly fits under libertarian like the rest of the tech billionaires. Republicans, if it weren't partly driven by Christian fundamentalists, would be libertarian. The conservative GOP party of the 70's hasn't existed in decades.
A few things that I (as someone who doesn't follow Twitter) have heard about from anecdotes and from the news about why people dislike him:
- He called some guy who worked for him a pedo for no reason, which he was sued over
- Took over Twitter and promoted right wing tweets to everybody, unbanned far right accounts and sued critics who said he did so
- Started promoting far right ideas, like when he retweeted "Interesting" to some tweet of a 4chan post saying that high-status, high-testosterone males are the only ones who can think freely and should be the only ones who can vote
- Took the side of the right-wing rioters who attacked mosques in the UK, saying civil war is inevitable
- Just seems to insult companies for little reason - advertisers who leave him, and Apple
There has been kind of a slow back and forth. Some people who liked him were miffed about the pedo thing, but they didn't hate him. But he has just kept doing things that some people hate.
> Took the side of the right-wing rioters who attacked mosques in the UK, saying civil war is inevitable
Leave out the part where the riots were started because someone with an immigrant background killed a bunch of kids at a Taylor Swift concert and police were withholding the identity. Along with your other 'anecdotes', can you make your political position any more transparent?
I see I accidentally came off implying that I'm disaffected and take no sides - most of the time, right wing politics seems abhorrent to me. Those are the main things I remember because left-wing spaces tend to hate him, and I dislike him because of those things, but no more than CEOs of companies like Nestle, which has engaged in things like slavery and child trafficking.
> because someone with an immigrant background killed a bunch of kids at a Taylor Swift concert and police were withholding the identity.
It might be somewhat justified if they burnt the house down of the murderer, or those who assisted him. They didn't - they burnt down houses, shops, and mosques, because they wrongly assumed the guy was Muslim and decided that was just cause to target any Muslim. His identity was hidden because he was a minor at the time of the attack.
No it isn't. It might be soon in some early way: "the first launch is expected to take place no earlier than November 2024", "The booster for the flight is named So You’re Telling Me There’s a Chance, alluding to the difficulty of landing a reusable booster on the first attempt." -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Glenn
Didn’t they look at all kinds of ideas earlier like squirting some propellant or water out over the skin on the way down, and wasn’t steel chosen for its thermal robustness? Did they get into the problem and realize it’s a lot harder and abandon those things for tiles?
Maybe they will have to sacrifice more payload mass for active or passive shielding or more fuel for powered deceleration. That would yield a less impressive lifter but with full reusability.
Interestingly, the inside surface of a rocket nozzle is covered with tiny holes. Fuel is circulated in a jacket around the nozzle both to pre-heat the fuel and to cool the nozzle. Additional cooling of the nozzle comes from fuel leaking into the combustion chamber through those holes, carrying away the heat so it doesn't melt the nozzle. It's called boundary layer cooling.
It was one of the technological breakthroughs of von Braun's team with the V2.
They already plan refueling infrastructure in orbit. That would include stuff to "squirt" on the way down if necessary. If they can use one extra launch to reuse 5-10 starships that might be interesting. Noone knows yet if it's actually needed.
Yeah for rapid reusability tiles aren’t going to work, too fragile. Iirc it was with a lot of reluctance they went with tiles and will have to make breakthroughs on the heat shielding to get where they want to be.
I'm not sure how critical "catching" the booster is to reusability, but it does save weight by not needing legs for landing, and perhaps the booster suffers less stress this way?
Note that the booster is not really being "caught" although this is the word it seems we're stuck with. It's really more like landing on the arms, since it throttles to a hover at that point.
> I'm not sure how critical "catching" the booster is to reusability
Not necessarily for reusability, but it helps significantly for rapid reusability: it eliminates the need to transport the booster from the landing site to the launch site. Given that it's 9m x 70m and weighs 270 tonnes, that's not an easy process.
I think saving weight is definitely one of the main issues, see those proportionally large legs on Falcon-9, I guess it simply doesn't scale on bigger vehicles like Starship / Heavy booster. Also, by catching the booster on site, they can even save the transportation and do the refurbishing on site, so even shorter turnaround time I guess.
They're still having some significant burn through problems on the upper stage fins during reentry it looks like. Way better than last time but the top part of the fin was glowing far a while after the main reentry finished.
Maybe. Kind of impossible to know until we see launch costs but you could make a much cheaper upper stage than they have if you wanted disposable. Trick with that is you need a payload heavy enough to justify it. Has SpaceX talked much about a disposable upper stage version of the system?
Strategically this is huge for the US and NATO. Being able to put orders of magnitude more payload in orbit at a fraction of the cost of the competition is a huge advantage in controlling space. Starlink and starshield are already years ahead of what china and russia has, starship is going to widen that gap even further.
Amen! If it turns out we can’t make humans a multiplanetary species in any reasonable timeframe, at least we can make the last few decades of livable earth climate a friendly atmosphere for US business interests.
Even a nuclear war would have that outcome. Even a KT boundary scale asteroid impact would have that outcome. The rest of the solar system is just hell.
The most expensive part is to support the risk and cost of research & development. Sure, that renders you the first place for a while, but expect others to move easier (and thus faster) after you marked the trail.
To get an inert object through the atmostphere and do real damage it has to be very large. That's a very inefficient way to use mass that you've boosted to orbit, even if it's relatively cheap to get there. So any weaponary they put up there will likely look fairly conventional. The speed of deployment and difficult of intercept would be the game-changer.
Well you answered it yourself, anyone competent can dodge that. It's useful for attacking existing installations, but well, you can do that with any weapon.
Plus it's easier to intercept orbital bombardment since you know where it is ahead of time and have plenty of time to intercept.
But it’s true for any orbital-based weapon that needs to de-orbit for striking. Once it starts retro burn you know it’s going for strike and know where it’s going to strike.
it takes few minutes for it to reach target so no it's not easy to intercept also what exactly are you planing to use to intercept a solid tungsten rod with exactly?
It needs to re-enter, i.e. have the thermal shield, etc. This is what this Starship thing is all about - re-entry is really hard. Regular guide bomb is just going to burn or re-entry into atmosphere.
I've wondered about that. In a series of sci-fi books (the lost fleet series, starting with Dauntless), our intrepid heroes bombard military bases with BFRs. Big fucking rocks. Which are tungsten slugs coated with ceramic I think.
These are fired from light hours away at approximately 0.2 to 0.3 c. I had assumed that something going so fast would just disintegrate if it hit an atmosphere head on? The projectiles are described as "increasing velocity" as they approach, and they strike with gigaton effects. I remember reading an xkcd that showed something traveling so fast in atmosphere would cause huge explosions from air turned into plasma.
Depends on the mass of the object, of course, but at at this speed (i.e. energy) it will become a stream of particles going through atmosphere and vaporizing anything in it’s way.
Wow, I knew they were going to try to catch the booster this time but I really didn’t think it was going to work on the first try, I was just hoping they didn’t destroy the launch tower in the process. Congrats to the SpaceX team, absolutely amazing! Hope y’all are celebrating
That was crazy, 50% of me thought as it was coming in, especially as it pitched towards the tower, "they've overcompensated and are going to bring the whole tower down" but they absolutely nailed it.
Even without the catch step, I always feel like their boosters are coming down way too fast way too late, with engines reigniting startlingly close to surface. Never ceases to surprise me.
Every moment your engines are burning at anything less than maximum thrust, you are wasting fuel. You want to relight as late as possible with as high thrust as possible for maximum efficiency. But that it actually works is nuts.
I remember playing KSP, I had used some mod to program a moon lander to do a suicide burn, a maximum thrust burn to land. I did the maths myself and when it actually came to the landing I was 100% certain I had either a bug in my code or did the math wrong because I was coming in way too fast, or so it seamed, but to my surprise the thing slowed down in time!
Mind you ksp is way simpler than the real world and the spaceship could handle some… error, the landing was hard but successful
Point is it always seems like you’re coming in too fast
The math is pretty intuitive; every second you're burning is another 9.8 m/s of delta V you have to spend counteracting gravity instead of slowing the craft down (minus air friction) so minimizing deceleration time cuts your fuel expenditure massively. It also means you have to carry less fuel so you weigh less and you spend less fuel for the same acceleration. It's the inverse of the rocket equation really, less mass is easier to slow down and you waste less energy (ie fuel mass) decelerating faster.
The higher the thrust, the lower the gravity losses. Gravity losses go down as you approach orbital speed but they aren't zero until you're in orbit. And when boosting out of orbit, the higher you are the less benefit you get from the Oberth Effect, so you want to do the burn before you rise too much, which implies sufficient thrust.
Exactly. In addition, by delaying the relight as long as possible you're giving drag as much time as possible to do the work for you (assuming you're not at terminal velocity, so not applicable for the ship.)
I have the same feeling watching Starship when the telemetry on the bottom right of the screen showing “0km” but landing burn hasn’t started. Later did I know that it was meant to start the burn only a few hundreds _meters_ from the ground
Prior to today the only landings you've seen are Falcon 9, which has to do a "hoverslam" because it can't throttle low enough to actually hover.
Even just one engine in minimum thrust would make the rocket go up when empty.. so the computer lights the engine at the precise right moment so it will have 0 velocity at 0 altitude, then it cuts off the engine. "Hoverslam".
The Starship booster is different, it can actually hover.
Yeah, it also always catches me off guard how late they reignite, while at the same time I'm always surprised by how slow the liftoff is even though all the boosters are on full throttle. Of course both things make sense given the respective mass at both points in the process, but given that it looks like the same rocket from the outside, a bit unintuitive.
What does Starship reusability mean for $/kg to LEO? I know there are longer term targets of $10/kg but that supposes efficiencies that aren’t here yet. Would be helpful to understand before Starship reusability where the state of the art was in terms of $/kg to LEO and where we would be with impending Starship reusability.
I don't think we have a number for it yet. But it will definitely be the cheapest launch system at the time of launch.
People say 200$/kg just with booster reuse, and 20$/kg with full reuse. Of course this might be too optimistic, but I truly believe we might reach under 50$ in this decade.
$50 is a number for LEO (Low-earth orbit). $/kg to a Moon orbit (or flyby) might be significantly more expensive. Not only that, because it is further so it needs more fuel, but also it is a few days trip which would need a bunch more kilos in provisioning food, water and other things. So yeah, unfortunately not that cheap to have a honeyMoon in the moon (heh)
There is a lot of possibilities to make a trip to the moon cheaper though. If we make LEO that cheap, we can build a lot of infrastructure in the space that would make the tourism to moon more affordable. Like keeping a few starships always in orbit as some kind of space-hotel-metro system.
This will probably take a few more decades, though.
Yeah it wasn't explained well in the book, but I did some reading of third-party sources and diagrams about the Uphoff-Crouch Lunar Cycler orbit, which helped (Wikipedia and the like).
Everyone gets this wrong, cost is not price. SpaceX themselves launch Starlinks at about $1,200/kg but they charge customers closer to $12,000/kg. Do the math. Costs coming down are increases in SpaceX profits, not decreases in customer prices.
Over the extremely long term in competitive industries, prices asymptote at ~costs. So it's still a generally useful measure, and in ~all cases, it's at least a directional indicator.
Besides what 55555 said, in the near term SpaceX has indeed passed at least some of the cost savings onto customers. NASA administrator Bill Nelson quoted a member of the Joint Chiefs as telling him that SpaceX had saved the US government $40 billion for just launching military payloads. <https://www.fool.com/investing/2022/06/05/did-spacex-really-...>
The dominant variable is how often they can reuse the stages. Last I heard Musk was targeting dozens of reuses for the upper stage and hundreds for the booster. If they are short of the cost per kg goes up.
> What does Starship reusability mean for $/kg to LEO?
All we can say is under $1,000/kg. Which is conservative, that limit being about two thirds that of Falcon Heavy’s theoretical cost to LEO in a reüsable configuration.
The catch looks amazing, but one thing I don't understand is why SpaceX needs the technology to catch a booster they've already demonstrated the ability to land boosters on barges. Is the arm more cost effective to scale compared to a barge?
This booster is much, much larger than the Falcon 9 first stages that land on barges. It's ~70 metres high, versus ~40 metres for the Falcon 9 first stage, and weighs about 275 000 kg compared to the ~20 000 kg of the Falcon 9 first stage.
In short, it would require such huge and heavy landing legs and landing barges that it probably wouldn't be feasible.
FYI that first link is showing a previous, larger, concept iteration of Starship (then known as ITS) which would have had a 12m diameter, versus the 9m version that SpaceX ended up building.
The second link seems to show a version of Starship that's relatively up-to-date.
After checking if everything is okay with the vehicle. And of course the government agencies must determine that frequent sonic booms (there is one per booster landing) are acceptable for the public.
Weight. Legs weigh a lot. That's dead weight for a launch system, and it serves only to reduce payload to orbit.
For Falcon 9 that's not that big a deal because they're NOT trying to reuse the second stage. Whereas with Starship they need more fuel to recover the ship, and that means they need to save weight elsewhere to avoid losing too much payload to orbit.
It takes time for the barges to return the booster to the launch pad. They want to be able to launch Starship, have the booster land back at the launch pad, have the arms set it back down on the ground, and recycle the booster for another launch in just a few hours. Then the arms can be used to stack the booster and the next payload on the launch platform.
Awesome achievement. Watched it with my sister at home and brought back memories from the 60s in front of the B&W TV watching some of the early amazing flights and landings.
Question for hackers: How does this reorient space programs world-wide? If I were a politician or technocrat in China, Russia, or the EU this would feel like an inverse and intense Sputnik moment — “holy sh—- we have to up our game!”
Eventually it convinces everybody that "quantity in space" is possible. Moving to projects where you don't have to count every ounce. It opens the path to wild schemes, in amount of weight that could be moved.
And why "eventually"? SpaceX should have already convinced people of that. Yeah it's not yet in production, but the momentum and progress have been amazing to witness.
(The previous one was convincing everyone that there was lots of space for tech improvement. Wake up call achieved just a few years ago also by SpaceX.)
An interesting question (because all the others will probably be too slow) is what does that change for SpaceX itself (which can be fast)?
It gets to complete and upgrade Starlink. Sure. And that keeps it busy for what? Two years? At most. Sure. Done. Just kidding, that provides some background launches as a guaranteed customer going forward. But nowhere near enough to make a dent in what will be the new SpaceX launch capabiity.
So what else can it do, that exploits its own launch capability?
Going to Mars is not an obvious commercial venture - not at first - not until some government somewhere convinces itself to fund that.
So what else? What can SpaceX do on its own with this launch capability?
> So what else? What can SpaceX do on its own with this launch capability?
Apart from Starlink, not much I believe. The main thing will be the Artemis contract with NASA, which requires two figures worth of Starship flights to LEO to refill the Starship tanker to get the HLS Starship to land a few people on the moon.
So I do think Starship will mostly generate money through NASA contracts, Starlink, and commercial launches. Though there aren't that many commercial launches currently. Perhaps there will be more once the launch prices drop due to reusability, though that remains to be seen. Developing a satellite is already more expensive than launching it.
We saw that solar power venture unveil their idea. With lower cost/kg, there might be quite a few flights just to deliver piles of hardware in various new orbits. And these might require refueling launches as part of that process. Some delivered all in one place, some in separate locations.
Yeah, there are some very speculative markets. Solar power from space, commercial space stations etc. The chances seem relatively low that those would develop into a big market and require a lot of Starship launches. I currently don't see a big space economy on the horizon. Space (LEO) tourism perhaps could be thing to some extent when Starship gets human rated for both launching and landing. Because a Starship could actually deliver larger quantities of people, unlike Dragon or Starliner capsules, but this is still many years away.
One answer might be "infrastructure". Infrastructure in space will become big if space becomes big (beyond launching telecom, observation and science - which are small for now, compared to their launch potential.) SpaceX will need infrastructure itself - like refueling, landing stuff in exotic places, cargo delivery to other spacecraft, de-orbiting stuff, spacecraft to spacecraft networking, bringing cargo back to earth, carrying / delivering crew around, spacecraft repair, emergency access, etc.
A bit like Amazon then: if SpaceX needs some capability in their grand plan to Mars or whatever, they could try and package that as a commercial service after using the bare bones version for themselves.
thankfully elon has hundreds of billions of dollars and presumably will spend most of that sending shit to mars, either before he dies or as part of a trust. most of what we need to send there isn't expensive - electronics and steel and composite materials. the limiting factor isn't going to be the cost of stuff we send there, it's only going to be how many starships we can get flying and how often they fly
It doesn't. It makes one or two mega-constellations cheaper for their operators and therefor more profitable, but no one except telecom and sensor platforms really want orbit. It's useless for most things, far worse than working on the planet's surface where all the labor and materials already are.
When I was visiting the space center in Huntsville, Indiana, I had a chance to talk with one of the volunteers. His name was Brooks Moore (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O3hudRA3yL8), and he had been the director of navigation systems for the Apollo (and other) projects.
The first SpaceX barge landing had just taken place, and I asked him what he thought. He got a faraway look in his eyes, and agreed that it had been spectacular. For those guys, it must have seemed like all of their dreams were coming true.
Incredible achievement, my American friends! Congrats! We, Europeans, can only feel jealous, but hey at least we have free [but comically broken and dysfunctional] healthcare, so, there's that. I hope you'll bring a lot more progress to humankind beyond space exploration!
The long-term goal is becoming a multi-planet species, so in that context it's not about countries. Go Earth!
(also, while NASA has been generally helpful to SpaceX's efforts, American FAA bureaucrats have managed to inject unnecessary delays and uncertainty into the process (in addition to some necessary delays).
Without denigrating his achievements, which I can recognise and respect despite my distaste for his recent politics, that's not quite true. Musk came from a fairly wealthy and very well-connected family and was able to draw on those connections to secure opportunities that most others would not have had. That really helped when it came to sourcing funding for Zip2, and later in terms of getting someone like Bill Harris to be CEO of x.com.
Errol Musk was one of several investors, and in any case the vast majority of people aren’t in a position to have their parents invest $28 000 (nearly $60 000 today) in an uncertain business venture.
> Musk was the richest man in the world when he acquired x.com. He didn't need family connections for that.
Source? Zip2’s sale only brought in $300 million. That’s not richest man in the world stuff.
You edited your comment to remove the bit about living in youth hostels and working menial jobs, this was my reply to it:
A rite of passage. It was quite common for upper middle class and wealthy South African kids to spend a year working menial jobs and living in hostels as a way to build character and find themselves.
I know, personally, people who worked in tree clearing in Canada, picking fruit in Australia, manual labour at ski resorts in New England, and living in youth hostels all before going to university to start the courses their parents were paying full tuition fees for. All of the people I mentioned are doing well in their careers, because none were actually poor despite working manual labour jobs for a year.
His biography doesn't mention any others, and did go on about how they barely had an office.
> and in any case the vast majority of people aren’t in a position to have their parents invest $28 000 (nearly $60 000 today) in an uncertain business venture.
Sorry, $28,000 is not restricted to wealthy investors. You can't buy much of a business for $28,000. Business ventures are always uncertain. The median house in 1995 was $140,000. The median salary then was $27,845.
The idea that $28,000 was some stratospheric investment in 1995 is simply not true.
Musk himself has said that he started Zip2 using money from himself, his brother Kimbal, Greg Nouri, and Silicon Valley angel investors.
Errol invested a bit later.
I didn’t say that $28 000 was a stratospheric amount, I said it’s something the vast majority of people don’t have access to, let alone the angel investors. They also don’t have access to the doors that were opened by his family’s connections.
Again, I’m not saying Musk was merely gifted his success. Clearly that’s not true, there were hundreds if not thousands of others with similar connections and opportunities who didn’t achieve anything near his success. But your assertion that he started from rock bottom and was entirely self made is far from an accurate representation of events.
Musk was already a very successful businessman by then - selling zip2 for $300,000,000. $22 million was his cut. Successful businessmen attract investors.
If you aren't born in South Sudan in a trash during a civil war and a hunger epidemic, you don't deserve credit, you are privileged and you should feel bad. That seems to be a mentality of people that want to claim Musk didn't do anything.
Was Musk more likely to be successful then a trash-can baby in the South Sudan? Yes of course. But to make it out that Musk success is some inevitable outcome of his upbringing as if he was the son of a hereditary king is also a idiotic claim.
Musk most important help from his family was really his mothers Canadian passport.
> Musk came from a fairly wealthy and very well-connected family and was able to draw on those connections to secure opportunities that most others would not have had.
What connections are these? I've heard them alluded to a couple of times but never heard specifics.
It's hard to tell, I really can't believe the guy I see on TV lately has anything to do with any of this stuff, kind of makes me wonder if he is even real.
It's a really unfortunate situation in my opinion.
The thing that impresses me even more is the kinds of cameras they mount on the rocket. How do they shield it from all the heat and debris with a material that's optically clear?
As in life, when a person is on a road to nowhere, it’s the homecoming that’s sweet. The only thing more exciting than an Earth landing will be a moon or Martian landing. Or the in-orbit fuel consolidation docking, if only because it will be a huge milestone.
The booster landed on "pins" that are structural load points and designed to support it's weight.
Here is a brilliant profile shot looking down one of the "arms" after the catch today, you can clearly see it resting on the "pins", not the grid fins.
They also use those "pins" to raise/lower it with a crane when they need to during construction and during transport to the launch tower. It's the primary mode of lifting the thing
Improvements that make space flight more sustainable are welcome ... unless that means an order of magnitude more pollution in a less controllable form, like emissions. [Due to more frequent flights]
Daily trips to space likely also mean more debris in space and falling to earth.
I hope there is a balance that includes the lives of people near these sites and all of us sharing the same atmosphere.
SpaceX proposed it but I doubt there is any chance of this architecture ever achieving the airliner-level reliability needed for people to accept routine Earth-to-Earth passenger service. That's several levels beyond what you'd need to fly astronauts.
Maybe a future architecture with more redundancy could get there someday.
> Considering the safety and prosperity that can be brought online from 1,000 launches / 150,000 tons in orbit, that’s the deal of the century.
Regardless of the (in)accuracy of ChatGPT, you're assuming a lot can be accomplished with those flights. I strongly suspect 600K cars getting people where they need to go has far more utility than 1K flights of anything into / out of NEO.
> Debris is an absolutely non-issue.
Astronomers probably don't want 1000x (or even 10x) as many satelites obstructing their view.
> There is zero environmental downside, only Luddite foot stomping.
Name calling isn't going to help your cause. And the luddites had a good point, they didn't mind innovation. They minded being cut out of the benefits of innovation without any say in the matter.
Please avoid tit-for-tat spats on HN—they're nasty and boring. And please don't post in the flamewar style to HN—it's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.
Please avoid tit-for-tat spats on HN—they're nasty and boring. And please don't post in the flamewar style to HN—it's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.
I just quit my job at a SaaS. What am I doing with my life... The SpaceX team just caught the biggest rocket in history with a giant arm, we all need to dream bigger!
Update: SpaceX has set the booster back down on the launch mount and reconnected the "quick disconnect" hoses that fill it with propellant before launch. If they refilled it with propellant they'd be close to launching it again! Presumably they will be draining it instead.
Apparently the rails that catch the booster can translate in and out relative to the "chopstick" arms so the booster can be positioned and rotated to match the launch mount after landing.
Very inspiring, glad I woke up to watch it. Congratulations to the SpaceX team. This is what competition looks like. It’s funny how last decade SpaceX had to sue the government to get more launches.
They don't actually have any jurisdiction in this case. Launches from Vandendberg are from a military base and while they do try to work with the California commission they ultimately are the ones that decide what does and does not get launched.
The California Coastal Commission has no authority over a Federal (Military) launch range so there's no need for real concern. Yes using people's personal opinions for denial is illegal, but it's moot regardless. So I'm not sure SpaceX could sue for any damages.
Well that may still continue to happen. The wonderful and competent state of California is literally trying to block SpaceX launches over Musk’s constitutionally protected political speech:
I cannot remember a more explicit case of authoritarian government abuse in a developed nation in recent memory, and it’s especially infuriating given SpaceX and Musk are one of the most important and innovative companies and leaders of all time. No other country would think to look at such accomplishments and try to undermine themselves through petty politics and lawfare.
It is a state commission composed of political appointees. It's unlikely it has the jurisdiction over Vandenberg to ban any activities, except when such activities violate state environmental laws. Even then, the federal government might be able to override them. It will be interesting to see what comes of this.
Ideally, the commission will withdraw its objections and allow the launches; SpaceX obviously chose this site both for its proximity to the Pacific Ocean and for redundancy in case of poor weather in Florida (like this past week for example).
Vandenberg does not provide redundancy. It accesses completely different orbital inclinations. You cannot launch east from there but you can launch south. The opposite is true in Florida.
Seems like it nonetheless provides redundancy. Also, one site can only handle so many launches per day. If SpaceX gets really busy, it will need multiple launch pads to handle the traffic, both launches and landings.
But then, there may be military missions that require launching from an air force base.
It has jurisdiction over Vandenberg for private launches, and there is debate over what counts as private versus federal. However, regardless of possible environmental concerns, they’ve already explicitly said they’re targeting SpaceX because of Musk’s political speech, which is morally reprehensible and also illegal per the constitution.
Can the federal government override them if the launches are purely commercial. Presumably that would be the case eventually, so I think it’s something that needs to addressed sooner.
I don’t understand how this is a constitutional violation like you claim. Let’s pretend he posted something absurd on Twitter for arguments sake, like “I’m going to use my rockets to kill every endangered bird on every California beach”, do you think that should not be considered when evaluating the request for more launches?
Congress shall make no law respecting
an establishment of religion, or
prohibiting the free exercise thereof;
or abridging the freedom of speech, or
of the press; or the right of the
people peaceably to assemble, and to
petition the government for a redress
of grievances.
The first amendment has been interpreted by the courts as applying to all of the government, not just Congress, and via the 14th amendment is has been incorporated against the States, meaning that it applies to them too.
Therefore, for a California state government agency to punish SpaceX for its founder's speech is unconstitutional.
Title 18 USC section 232 lays out criminal penalties for violating a citizens civil rights, thus unconstitutional acts can be and often are criminal acts.
It’s straight up unconstitutional. It doesn’t matter what the speech is, the government cannot make rules that discriminate on the content of the speech.
More money would make the situation worse. They need competent leadership. Everyone like to just say “add more money” because it means no actual operational change to the status quo.
The FAA already has competent leadership and staff. They don't have the budget to handle the increasing number of tasks they have been given to manage.
The FAA manages more flights and space launch operations than it did in the 1980s, when it had a budget more than quadruple the size.
We're going to need a dedicated FSA (federal space agency) at this rate, which should do most of the heavy lifting (ha) for the FAA and just use them for NOTAMs and TFRs.
It seemed to not be FAA here, but the several other agencies that all had 60 days to respond. FAA fast-tracked it but couldn't fast track it past the other guys' 60 day allowed time.
No, launching big heavy explosive things into space shouldn’t have fewer regulations. That’s insane to think they should be able to just do it without much oversight.
Sure the safety part of it is something that should be verified before launch. But when they are launching multiple of these things and the variables are all mostly the same you don't need to do the same analysis over and over again.
A prime example is the environmental impact stuff. They have already done that multiple times. Nothing really changed. If it succeed and doesn't blow up the impact is X, if it blows up the impact is Y. Yet these approvals take weeks and months.
There are also multiple agencies that put their foot down. Famously fish and wildlife was worried starship would crash in the water and hit a shark/whale. No seriously. https://youtu.be/kS8G5D9fg3g?t=21
Then there is the story that at Vandenburg air base, they had to strap a seal to a board and play rocket noises through headphones to see if it was distressed. Keep in mind Vandenburg has been a military rocket launch site for decades. But only now when its SpaceX do these agencies put up road blocks.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3SvJP5wfN4k
Regulations probably are not going to fix the rot that's inside Boeing. It's like putting water in groundhog tunnels, clamp down on one area and it will pop up somewhere else.
They need to die off and get replaced by better competition when they mess up. And their market centralization ground to a halt instead of encouraged by the gov because of jobs and total risk aversion.
If by the size of government you mean the budget, there have been multiple instances of the government shrinking. As a percent of GDP the 90s saw cuts to federal spending, the 2011 sequestration saw a drop in spending even in nominal terms, and obviously the end of WW2 saw a massive collapse in government spending and the end of multiple different programs
Our risk-to-regulatory oversight cost benefit analysis seems extremely off - we overregulate small things that do not have large-scale meaningful impact while basically grandfather in stuff like depleting the Great Salt Lake, coal emissions, etc. which have vastly less regulatory $ spend per environmental impact.
Ideally, if we could quantify all environmental impacts into a single number (ie. CO2 emissions but also wildlife impact, etc.), the $/impact spent across different fields would be equal.
Currently, however, we are likely spending 100x+ on a per-impact basis on SpaceX regulation.
>while basically grandfather in stuff like depleting the Great Salt Lake, coal emissions, etc.
Gee, almost as if decades of austerity politics, lobbying by financial interests, and regulatory capture has malformed a well intentioned regulatory apparatus? Seems like we need more regulation that's less interested in what "united citizens" have to say. (read lobbyists)
How are you arriving at that assessment of regulation of spaceX? i'd be interested in reading more.
Austerity politics? I don’t agree, we have record spending as a percentage of gdp and are rapidly approaching sovereign debt crisis levels of mismanagement. We aren’t Europe, we never really had an austerity moment.
> How are you arriving at that assessment of regulation of spaceX?
I mean, SpaceX launches simply do not have a large impact on the environment compared to say, all cumulative coal emissions in the US. The FAA AST budget (which is for SpaceX launches) is about 60 million. Total EPA budget is about 9 billion. That’s about 160x the size of the FAA launch regulatory budget, but the environmental impact of things the EPA covers (and mostly fails to cover) is much much much more than 160x the impact of spacex launches.
Reagen's and thatcher's whole agenda can be summed up by: "the biggest lie is 'i'm from the government and I'm here to help'"
Have you not paid much attention to politics since Reagan and Thatcher? Their whole objective was to hollow out the government piece by piece, then point to its declining performance as justification for getting rid completely, or to gut further. Repeat. This has been the modus operandi for conservative parties since at LEAST thatcher and Reagan.
>we have record spending as a percentage of gdp and are approaching a sovereign debt crisis
Yeah, it's those pesky regulatory agencies riding up that tally I'm sure, not the almost 1 trillion we spend a year perpetuating apartheid states or our military bases all over the world while 3 americans hoard more wealth than 50% of all americans combined. Silly, patently false defense for an already silly position.
Couldn't be the trillions we spent on the war on "terror". Or the trillions we spend on futile measures like the war on drugs. It's def the ftc and the epa. Those lot. That's who's causing our problems. Yep. That makes sense.
Are you serious? Either you're not a student of history or we have drastically different readings of the past 40 years of american government.
>We never really had an austerity movement
Patently false, dishonest rewriting of history. Did you not pay attention to Reagan actually did?
Reagan's whole thing was the whole govt helping is a lie.
Reagan cut food stamps and almost all other spending while drastically increasing the military budget, cut taxes on the wealthy, deregulated in the name of austerity, got the war on drugs going to villainize his political opponents.
You simply can not be serious. Maybe read Reagan's wiki page before writing such demonstrably revisionist history.
They have the experience and control systems to do this reliably with Falcon 9 so it seemed doable in time but seeing it on a new vehicle on the first attempt was still surprising. Really impressive engineering.
Can I hijack this thread for an almost completely unrelated question that I have observed in nearly every simulation of movement in space, even from sources like NASA and SpaceX which “should know better”?
And I’m mostly asking this out of scientific curiosity, not as a criticism.
Why do they always portray movement in space by showing stars moving past the view at variable rates, or even at all?
The opening screen of this video while you’re waiting for the feed to start shows stars moving that seem to be only feet away, and only a few inches in diameter. Like little orbs of light just passing outside the window.
Isn’t this highly unrealistic, for even extremely fast travel in space?
I would imagine at most you would see very slow movement of a very static field of stars. But every depiction in sci-fi, video games, and other simulations like in this video insist on making it seem like space is full of tiny 6-12” stars floating only feet away from each other.
Is there any explanation where this could actually be considered realistic that I’m not thinking of?
I’m just a lowly software engineer, so my expertise in this area is null. But from a basic understanding of stars and physics, this seems unrealistic.
Admittedly, I guess it wouldn’t be very exciting to view movement in space in a way that I’m imagining would be realistic, and maybe that’s the only explanation there is/needs to be.
But I guess I’m thinking that there would be enough people at SpaceX (for example) to scream “this is not even close to realistic!” for something like that to not make it to production, even if it is more exciting to watch.
As others have said, you're correct. But one reason for doing this, beyond just looking cool, is to give a visual cue for motion. The aim isn't primarily to look realistic, but to make it as easy as possible to interpret the outputs. Motion cues help with this.
As an example, if you're watching an airshow against a clear blue sky, especially filmed with a long lens where you can't see the ground, it is very hard to understand what's actually happening because you can only see attitude changes, but not the velocity vector. Add just a few clouds in the background and the impression is very different.
I’m guessing when making an artistic depiction of something going very fast in space, that sort of parallax helps? The goal of consumer content (including the ones by spacex) isn’t to be realistic, it’s to entertain
That said, “the expanse” is an exception here - they make it look as realistic as possible, including the battles where ships don’t even see each other. Stars barely move on it too
You're correct, it's hilariously unrealistic (IIRC requires actual superluminal speed), but people have been conditioned to accept it by various scifi media.
> Is there any explanation where this could actually be considered realistic that I’m not thinking of?
You could record the full trip, and then speed the record up. What the point to watch at thousand years of the record with slowly changing picture, if you can watch it in a few minutes.
That’s what I was wondering — even if you sped up a realistic capture from space, wouldn’t it still just look like stars moving at about the same speed?
There might be small variances in velocity, but it seems like not near to the extent we see in these simulations.
Again, this was mostly a theoretical/scientific curiosity — I understand why they do it like this, I’m mostly trying to figure out what real movement might look like, even at nX speed.
anybody not watching these live better be delivering a baby,or saving someones life
its a very short list of things that should take precidence over what are the most astounding things happening for our species,ever
The engineers at spaceX are amazing, and I'll admit I envy their tenacity and genius.
The amount of progress we have seen in rocketry and space travel in the last decade is mind blowing, I never thought I would see this in my lifetime.
Edit: Decided to give it a shot and applied for a backend software engineering position at SpaceX. I'm not sure if it will be noticed, but its worth a shot. I may not be a rocket scientist, but it would be great to contribute using the knowledge I do have.
That isn't exactly true though. For example, the neural net models that are used today in various GenAI startups were invented in the 1980s. But we couldn't have LLMs "all along" because we couldn't store the models, the training sets, or do the training compute with the computer hardware we had at the time. Similarly with rocketry there many technologies that have only been available in the last 10 - 15 years that make Starship possible. A sampling;
First there are solid state inertial motion sensors[1]. Those combined gyros, accelerometers, and magnetometers that way just a few grams. Those bad boys weighed a couple hundred pounds in the Apollo rockets. We put the equivalent up in a $100 quadcopter these days.
Second there is 3D printing of rocket engine alloy, this allows SpaceX to 3d print a raptor engine[2] both faster, lighter, and without error than any engine we could have built before 2010.
Third was the development of fracking which created so much methane availability [3] that using it for rocket fuel became cost effective.
Fourth and fifth changes were three decimal orders of magnitude on the ability of computers to compute with a commensurate drop in cost, and with that an explosion the the ability to use high frequency radio to do things that used to be done by cable harnesses and wiring. (sorry no citation, general knowledge)
I can appreciate that it is really really hard to internalize how much as changed and improved since Apollo and can strongly recommend a trip to one's local science museum if you have one to get a visceral sort of amazement at what Apollo engineers did with the technology available to them at the time.
So it isn't accurate to say we could have had this all along, although if one of the 'big' players like Lockheed Martin or Grumman Aerospace had continued investing even after the 'Star Wars' program was cancelled I do agree we would have had it sooner than we did. How much sooner? Maybe 5 years? But it is important to realize that at that time (late 80's early 90's) they didn't know that the Internet was going to be a thing and so they didn't have a built in "market" for all of that launch capability. Even with Teledesic[4] which tried to go there, you needed someone who like Musk who was too ignorant of what "could be done" to push a bunch of really smart people beyond what they thought they were capable of.
No. It all depends on cheap computation, reliable/free satellite location systems, and other stuff that weren't things in the (60s, 70s, 80s - pick your own starting point for "all along").
Sure. As a human he's (at best) a deeply-flawed agent of chaos (aren't we all to some degree?)... but at the same time we DO need a lot more people like him to put blinders on and act as undeniable agents of change.
For better or worse, he's single-handedly facilitated watershed progress in more areas than just about any individual we can name from recent times. All the "cringe" and human shit he does that we hate and clown on will be erased by history and forgotten when the stuff that -other people- create, as a byproduct of him starting and funding these companies, pushes us forward and eclipses the clickbait and/or questionable personal behavior of the man himself.
Teamwork makes the dream work, and I believe sometimes we need gigantic egos to set the ball firmly in motion.
Why don’t they deliver, in spite of them being decades more experienced in this area? Why don’t they deliver in spite of getting much more money from the government and from your mentioned complex?
Outstanding engineers care of doing engineering and making progress. And having a leader they can see burning for a mission and a goal. A leader who gets down and dirty with them.
I don't get this hero worship. Elon Musk didn't build and launch this rocket. Thousands of engineers, scientists and technicians did. Elon wrote their salary checks, but anyone with gobs of money could do that.
People are prone to either giving Musk too much credit or too little.
Musk isn't Tony Stark, single-handedly building everything. But then again, that's not how most innovations work.
Engineers who worked directly with Musk, such as Tom Mueller, have spoken about Musk's technical acumen and involvement in managing projects.
There have been many rocket programs, both public and private, that have accomplished less with more money. Bezos's Blue Origin, for example, started earlier than SpaceX and had a much richer backer for most of its existence, but is only now hoping to launch its first orbital rocket (and I hope they succeed).
> “Never been done before – xAI did in 19 days what everyone else needs one year to accomplish.”
It's a lot less impressive being the second person to fly a plane. Grok was released in November 4, 2023; Llama was released freely in February 2023. They had plenty to build off.
> He’s a twat? What are your credentials?
What credentials would be relevant to determining that?
I credit Musk for a lot of the vision behind SpaceX, but I'm glad he seems a bit distracted from it right now with X etc. It's possible to be both visionary and a twat simultaneously. Howard Hughes serves as a similar example.
> I credit Musk for a lot of the vision behind SpaceX
For sure. Outstanding vision. I'll give him credit. But vision doesn't launch a rocket or finance a business. There are probably thousands of people out there with sufficient "vision" to build a space program, but only one of them is a billionaire willing to finance it. Musk is not some one of a kind unique person. He just happens to be one of the few who have the means ($$) to hire people who can actually bring his vision to life.
"There must be a beginning of any great matter, but the continuing unto the end until it is thoroughly finished yields the true glory." -- Sir Francis Drake
Eh, maybe. There’s a lot of computing and telemetry going on that benefits from the last twenty years of miniaturization and performance. The iPhone seemed impossible when announced to BlackBerry; tech has gone crazy fast.
You should take a look at what Von Braun was planning for the Saturn V by the mid 1970s.
IIRC they were talking about 100+ Apollo launches to get a real space station, moon base, and expedition missions to Mars by 1980 and with that would have come a real drive to innovate and improve on the Saturn V.
Without the computational power that we take for granted today they would have definitely brute forced their way to elegant solutions and got somewhere close to where we are by the mid 90s.
This would have lead to tremendous innovations in solar panels, batteries, and metallurgy much sooner than we ended up getting to them.
Instead we chose a different path and made ourselves completely dependent on oil.
I guess the main problem was nobody had a budget for those plans. ”Technically speaking we can do it but we can’t afford it” unfortunately still means ”we can’t do it”.
Now only if Project Orion had not been canceled due to international treaties banning nuclear testing we’d be on the moons of Jupiter by now (sigh).
Apollo was pretty goofy if you think about -- Yeeting a couple of dudes to the moon in a giant ass rocket so that they can tool around in a little electric-go cart with lawn chair seats and play some golf but it worked.
I think that the Saturn V was a solid platform that was robust enough to do the kinds of things that Von Braun and others had in mind as well as versatile enough to be improved upon.
They would have done it with sufficient budget but the political drive wasn't there. The politicians were more concerned with killing Vietnamese and Cambodians and then selling out American interests to oil companies.
An additional advantage is that it’s theoretically possible to make fuel for Starship on Mars. The Luna lander will need to bring enough fuel for the return trip.
What is the object beside the rocket at 37:49 to 38:02 ? Is that debris ? It seems to be falling with, then away from the rocket. (it looks like a small glowing ring to the right)
Maybe 'the Jetsons' and 'the Flintstones' aren't as far apart as we think, us being people who like to think we are witnessing 'the Jetsons' now. Maybe that is just a relevant distinction.
Maybe those two descriptors are much closer than they would appear to some outside observers. Maybe it's really just 'Flintstones part 1;' and 'Flintstones part 2', right now.
Or...
Our 'Flintstones' was already 'Jetsons' compared to everything else in this observable universe, which winds up mostly being just peat bogs on Dagobah, comparatively, and we're just inching out the icing on the cake at this point.
This is what makes it bittersweet. So many comments here talking about this being progress for 'humanity'. I may be cynical, but most of humanity will get no benefit from any of these accomplishments. This is technology owned by and ultimately in service of a minuscule fraction of humanity.
The launching of Starlink will absolutely improve the quality of internet to underserved countries and rural areas. Quality internet is a game changer.
Agreed. Even if it takes a long time for us to be riding rocket ships to visit our grandparents, we'll be benefiting from this technology way faster than that
better weather forecasting (launching and replacing the existing old satellites) seems useful. starlink has already been a game changer in communities experiencing natural disasters and is now coming to commercial airplanes.
This is truly an amazing feat! Congratulations to the SpaceX team.
Can someone explain to me exactly WHY it's such a big deal though? Like subjectively I can see it's incredible but while watching the video there were enormous applauses at points I knew were a big deal but I lacked the understanding of physics to truly appreciate.
The current Falcon rocket always expends a stage and lands a stage. Starship will land both stages. Also Starship is far larger and in rocketry there is something called the square cube law that means bigger is better. So its far more efficient. That leads to far cheaper mass to orbit costs.
In order to land not just the first stage but also the second stage more fuel will have to be carried on the ascent phase just to enable the recovery phase. This then necessitates weight savings elsewhere to avoid payload to orbit being cut way back. SpaceX chose to remove the landing system from both, the first and second stages (both because, after all if you can eliminate the landing system from one stage then you can eliminate it from the other).
This and other weight savings will enable high payload to orbit in a fully reusable launch platform.
Landing without legs requires something like this catch system -- something never done before, and clearly very difficult to do.
For humans to have any reasonable presence somewhere else in our solar system (moon, mars, etc.) we need the ability to launch tons (literally tons) of stuff to orbit and to the destination. and we need to launch it often to do anything in a reasonable amount of time. the only way to do that is to make reusable launch systems. SpaceX's Falcon 9 has aced that for satellites (see Starlink and everything else they've launched). The Starship launch system is capable of launching a significantly larger payload, ~20 times more. What they demonstrated yesterday is that a launch system that is capable of getting us anywhere in the solar system can be reusable. Huge accomplishment.
Ok. I will admit this. SpaceX Engineering is making me feel regret for not choosing Aerospace Engineering back in Undergrad. Oh well, That Tower is almost within Civil-Structural Engineering.
In the video you can see the engines light (reflecting off the metal control flap and water) and the ship make a soft touchdown on the water. It then tips over and the tanks pop from the force of smacking the water sideways.
Imagine the number of amazing space telescopes that we are going to get! When it's cheep to launch a 10m diameter object into space, so many possibilites open up.
For things like that, they could build special versions of the star ship which remain in orbit as the housing. They would need no flaps, no tiles, just the 6 engines and the fuel tank. The body of the starship itself would be the telescopes tube.
Sure, thats what they did with the JWST. But that ist complex and expensive. A custom Starship could be the cheapest way to get telescopes up to 9m mirror size into space as you can assemble everything on the ground and you don't need a separate housing.
And here I was blown away by the ignorance of many of the questions. Why no landing legs? Why is this more impressive than the other rocket landings? What’s the thingy that fell off during separation?
Sometimes I need to remind myself that other people have lives, I guess. XD
Couldn't watch the livestream on X because it was erroring out. We live in a world where you can't stream a video or Chromecast on X but you can catch a damn rocket...
Does anyone know of a live map where we can see the trajectory of launches? Wondering if starship went above my head during reentry, but I can't find the info
This chopstick catch was really impressive. I had my money on them managing it the first time. I haven't been so excited since the dual landing of their Falcon 9 boosters.
Question I can't find the answer to anywhere: considering that SpaceX already had other ways of re-using boosters, why are they doing this?
Is it to explore more options? Or because it's faster to re-use the booster if it's already in place? Were the other approaches not satisfactory, perhaps? Or no longer applicable due to size?
First because the rocket is lighter without landing legs. Second because they're aiming for rapid reusability, they want to tower to catch the rocket, lower it to the launch mount, and get another Starship stacked on it.
mass that's on the tower that was moved to the rocket is no longer on the rocket, which means the rocket can carry more fuel/payload. hence the tower catching the rocket instead of the rocket having heavy landing gear.
Can someone explain to me why this is more impressive than landing the rocket? To a layman like me, it looks very similar - the thing looks just like a rocket but without a pointy tip, and on the way down I don't understand why difference that matters.
(I mean I still think it's mind blowing, because I think landing a rocket is also mind blowing)
(1) Much larger than any previous rocket landing, (2) This rocket carried no landing gear (more efficient - landing gear is heavy), (3) This rocket landed right back at the place it needs to be to launch again - right on its launch tower - which in a routine situation might make it much faster to prepare it for the next relaunch. (4) It's yet another step in control prowess - impressive in itself.
I must say though "right on its launch tower" is fun and all...
but things would have to get pretty extreme in the "routine" dimension for that to be very useful. If there are 20 first stages and 5 land/launch towers, for a first stage that only spends an hour in flight in between inspections.... well are you going to keep them parked on a scarce launch tower for maintenance? The towers with fill/launch infrastructure (such as reinforced concrete, fuel tanks, cold filling system, deluge water system) become the bottleneck. It's more likely then that the 1st stage lands, is safed, then is taken a couple hundred yards away for inspection and maintenance while the next in line is moved to be stacked for the next launch. The inspection / maintenance would have to be truly minimal (think airliner) to keep it right there on its own relaunch tower.
"No landing gear" is more key, compared to Falcon 9 - because of the effort toward minimal launch cost.
It is a rocket. The biggest difference with the Falcon 9 first stage is that this one is about 6 times as big (diameter of 9m vs 3.7m), and that catching it with the tower requires a much higher precision in landing location. The drone ships that Falcon 9 lands on are about 90 x 50 meter. To catch it with the tower, they need to be accurate to within a few meters.
The big advantage of catching it with the tower is that it'll (eventually) allow them to put another Starship on top, refuel and launch again within hours, as opposed to the weeks it currently takes for Falcon 9.
The critical differences between Falcon 9 first stage and the Starship booster is that Starship booster lands using 3 engines rather than 1, and can throttle them down much further. 3 vs 1 gives Starship more directional control for precise landing (critical for this "catch" maneuver), and throttling allows it to hover, as it does right before the "catch".
But as far as I know, one Merlin engine produces more thrust than the empty booster weighs which means they have to time things perfectly to get to zero velocity exactly at the ground.
Super heavy can hover and even go down by throttling down more. This gives them more control for the landing and don’t have to time it exactly perfectly
The tower is also how they plan to perform maintenance and re-staging for another launch. The tower can place it back on the launch structure or lower it down to the ground if it needs to be transported back to an enclosure for extensive repairs but a lot of work is just done with it at the tower. I imagine the goal is to eventually get to an automated system that catches the booster, inspects it for damage, clears it for relaunch, positions it on the launch structure, grabs another Sharship second stage and stacks it and then refuels the whole system and launches as soon as possible.
This booster is significantly larger than anything landed on an orbital launch before. Here is a size comparison, previous largest landed orbital rocket stage is the SpaceX Falcon 9 (three of them launch together as Falcon Heavy) on the left. Starship is on the right.
Landing via tower catch versus on a pad is advantageous because the weight of adding retractable landing legs to such a large rocket would be significant.
It’s also already on the tower that it launches from, which drastically reduces the expense and complexity of setting it up for its next launch, making it easier and faster to reuse.
From what I understand, it reduces the turnover dramatically. In theory the booster should be refuelled, new second stage mounted on top and ready to go for another flight. So could cut down from weeks to days/hours. That's significant.
I think landing a booster is just as impressive. It's just that nobody's done this before, so it's exciting! Plus it's a lot bigger and part of a fully reusable config which has huge implications for space travel.
This one seems way harder than the others which land on legs and on a relatively larger circular landing pad, this one needs to nail the tower and its arms.
Amazing achievement, but also reminds me that what NASA and its contractors accomplished during the 1960s still stands with current day systems engineering.
The 3rd Saturn V launch put three men into orbit around the Moon. The 6th landed two of them there.
Sorry for the newbie rocket question: Blast off happens around 33:00 in that video. The rocket appears to be vertically still (does not move) for the first 4 to 4.5 seconds. Is it held in place, or are not enough engines burning (yet) to induce take-off?
While I cannot say if it moves immediately, it definitely moves within 2 seconds. It does not appear to move because it is so massive at more than 100 meters.
This was insanely cool to watch. And on the first try!
As a complete lay person with little to no physics knowledge: what stops the use of something dumb like a parachute, or even wings and landing gear, to "land" the booster? I assume it is impractical (since they don't do it), but what are the actual particulars that stop it from working? While super cool to watch, it seems crazy that plucking it out of the air like that is the best way to preserve the booster for reuse.
Parachutes give little or no control over where and how the rocket lands, are unreliable (unfurling fabric behaves chaotically; modern spacecraft still don't have 100% reliability on their parachutes), and are surprisingly heavy.
Wings and landing gear are useless extra weight during launch, and excess weight on the booster has a super-linear reduction weight delivered to orbit. (the Tyranny of the Rocket Equation)
During the 1960s, NASA investigated using inflatable Rogallo Wings (basically hang gliders) to land the Gemini capsule. It worked fine, but was more complicated than parachutes, and re-use was not one of the goals of the Gemini or Apollo programs.
None of those give much margin for error on landing. Without any kind of propulsion, there's no option to come to a hover or do another go-around if the landing isn't going well. Space Shuttle pilots had to do extensive training in simulators for the landing because they only got one shot at it during the mission.
Propulsive landing doesn't require any hardware that isn't already on the launch vehicle, only a little excess propellant. (And it is a small amount; Super Heavy is like a soda can that's full of liquid at launch and only has a swig at the bottom during landing.) Propulsive landing gives Falcon 9 and Super Heavy the ability to overcome wind and other weather conditions to make pinpoint landings. Engine throttling gives Super Heavy the ability to hover, so it has a huge margin for error when coming in for a landing.
Super Heavy could have had legs, like Falcon 9, but it has such a huge payload capacity that they can simply choose to always launch with enough propellant to come back to the tower, and it saves a lot of flying weight and complexity by simply not having them. The arms on the tower can be massively overbuilt to ensure however much reliability SpaceX wants.
> As a complete lay person with little to no physics knowledge: what stops the use of something dumb like a parachute, or even wings and landing gear, to "land" the booster?
The main advantage is that you don't need to spend any of your payload mass budget on a parachute, or wings and landing gear. The secondary advantage over a parachute is that you don't need to fish it out of seawater and make your refurbishment process more of a pain in the ass.
At the very least, reducing the number of concerns on the rocket is definitely worthwhile. They are going to have an engine in any case, and using just that and nothing else on the rocket itself simplifies testing and reduces risk. The tower can have a separate testing and there's no way something that happens on the way to orbit and back breaks the tower.
Wings, parachute, etc... All very easy to break or burn at hypersonic speeds, and very chaotic to control. It probably (very probably) wouldn't be possible to land back exactly where the rocket launched on wings or chutes - that would probably need an extremely long and wide runway, but compare the size of Starship to the Space Shuttle... It's like braking a toy car vs braking an actual truck.
The Starship second stage is surprisingly not all that heavy compared to the 78t Shuttle orbiter dry mass, despite the many-fold difference in volume and payload, plus Starship needing to be a legitimate second stage rather than just an orbiter.
It mostly comes down to reducing extra weight. You have to carry those wings and landing gear upwards, which reduces useful payload weight. But having the booster right where it started also helps with reusability. No need to transport the booster from a landing strip back to the starting table
Falcon-9 relies on GPS and a couple of altimeters. (Filtered, as others have already said, with the help of data from the inertial sensors.)
Compared to Falcon-9, Starship/Superheavy additionally has a command link from the ground. Whether it is used to coordinate the movement during the catch is not publicly known, but it is easy to imagine how this could be useful.
I'd imagine a combination of inertial and GPS, combined with a Kalman filter. Inertial handles short term estimation; GPS correcting drift in the inertial system. But they could roll in other information sources at the end.
For the centimeterish precision needed to hover into the chopsticks, they also have the opportunity to use signals from the tower area for final alignment. I'm thinking riding a beam like aviation ILS. Just speculating but it would be easy to implement.
Optical/camera alignment is probably out of the question due to fire and smoke.
The arms themselves could have sensors on them. Inductive loops sensing the presence of the stainless steel structure?
Also, I doubt centimeter scale precision would be needed; the arms have some compliance in them, I'm sure, as well as the ability to control how far in they swing.
What parts of this can be reused? I bet the engine is OK, but seems like the sides of the ... tube ... were pretty roughed up. I guess that's probably the cheapest part of the assembly though.
Everything except the stage connector ring (which uses pyro bolts I believe) should be directly reusable, after an inspection, light brushing, and refueling / recharging.
Maybe the bottom uses some ablative material, then a new coat of it needs to be applied / attached.
All the internals should have enough resource for likely dozens of launches, if Falcon-9 is any indication.
To be honest FSD is way harder. The platform doesn't occasionally have a road closure sign or a new traffic light or a guy unloading his van or an emergency vehicle with its hazards on.
Don't get me wrong the engineering and physics are crazy ugly, but it's at least consistent within a range. Humans are messy, unpredictable, unreliable and chaotic.
They did pull the bottom of the previous booster out. On the webcast they mentioned adjusting the landing maneuver for the ship to be a bit softer in case they decide to recover it too.
For extra context: that "3× deeper" makes costs seriously explode. People do know how to engineer for that depth, but it's a lot of effort and there's pretty much no commercial market. For shallower stuff there's oil rigs, deep-sea cables, seafloor mining, even just tourism… but at some point it just peters out and only research vessels tackle the depth.
(source: friend of mine works at a UK university doing deep-sea vehicles)
(Their vehicles don't even go that deep, but again that was the point I was trying to make… even in research, the very deep stuff is rare and a "big project" that ends up fanned out ⇒ MRIL made only the cameras for a 4km vessel…)
I mean, yes [0]. It's probably the main reason SpaceX went to effort to recover [1] all the engines of the previous booster (IFT-4), which landed in accessible, shallow water in the Gulf of Mexico. The Raptor engines hold valuable secrets, particularly to China who are trying to clone a lot of SpaceX things.
The CIA did something very similar to this in the Cold War [2], though they used a boat instead of a submarine.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akula-class_submarine#Operatio... ("In August 2012, the news media reported that another Akula-class submarine operated in the Gulf of Mexico purportedly undetected for over a month, sparking controversy within U.S. military and political circles...")
It's more of a financial question, do you want to shell out for some chance at it. And Russia and China can build their own engines, SpaceX is very good but not like a century ahead good.
(If anything, I'd be more worried about North Korea or Pakistan getting their hands on stuff…)
Either way the risk is the shit that's left floating, if they don't fish it out it'll randomly wash up in Madagascar or so…
If anything, the last 2 flights have shown how good a decisions it was to go with steel. The thermal reserves seem to be really large. While not as bad as with the previous flight, there was still significant leakage of hot air between the starhip and the flap. But it didn't seem to cause significant damage, at least as far as for the landing. For complete reuse, they probably have to still improve that a bit.
It's not just cheaper, it's preserving capacity. Every pound of landing gear you carry has to be offset with fuel to lift it, and then that fuel has to have fuel to lift it and on and on.
Why can only Elon do stuff like this and not BlueOrigin or the hundreds of other aerospace startups? Does he just have a 1/100000000 combination of intelligence, tenacity, and directionality that can't be matched by anyone, even those trying to emulate him as closely as possible?
Isn't BlueOrigin going after at totally different market segment, I thought it was focused on things like space tourism and more "space base" type stuff? Also pretty sure BlueOrigin is almost all funded by Jeff B, SpaceX has a lot of external funding and focused on tangible markets vs just "people will want to do stuff in space" - I think it was only very recently they started to work with NASA.
> Isn't BlueOrigin going after at totally different market segment, I thought it was focused on things like space tourism
They have New Shepard, a crew-rated suborbital spacecraft, primarily targeted at tourism, but it has also done some science payloads for NASA, university and commercial clients.
But they also are doing a lot of non-tourism stuff: they designed and manufacture first stage engines for ULA’s new Vulcan launch vehicle; they have their own reusable orbital launch vehicle (New Glenn) due to launch soon (planned for next month, but might slip to early next year); they have a contract with NASA to build a lunar lander to compete with SpaceX’s; they are part of one of the teams NASA has chosen to compete for the contract to build a commercial ISS replacement.
And SpaceX is involved in space tourism too: both directly, and indirectly via resellers such as Axiom.
It is just that the most publicly noticeable thing Blue Origin has achieved is space tourism, which makes people think it is primarily a space tourism company; meanwhile, SpaceX has had numerous publicly visible achievements other than tourism, so people view tourism as just another thing they do, not their main thing.
Why do we think its Elon 'doing' this? Just curious, since it could just as well be that its the engineers and other leaders who could be the differentiator.
Because it's Elon who said "ok, build it." There's no one else except him with that power and/or the guts. Even landing a rocket the government had given up on, and no company was even trying until he did. People were calling the 'chopstick' landing system a dumb idea until today.
It's not like engineers don't come up with wild ideas all the time to their leadership, but is the leadership good enough to understand the good ideas from bad ones? Take the risk, spend billions to actually execute?
Elon has enough of a physics/engineering background to ask the right questions, understand the trades engineers put in front of him, and make the risk/reward calculation to make the right decisions the ends up winning.
To get what SpaceX has you need strong technical leadership all the way up the chain. Many companies don't. Their CEOs are experts in legal, PR, finance, etc... They make poor technical decisions.
I would agree with that if it weren't the case that the collection of engineers and other leaders working under Elon consistently outperform their competition in multiple domains.
I don’t understand, the starship has to stand on something, and what ever that is in contact with ( arm or barge or land or whatever ) , needs to be as heavy, how they are saving weight ?
> I almost had a heart attack when it looked like the booster was about to slowly careen into the tower
Same but it looks more dramatic on the feed we all got: on other vids the angle is different and although close it doesn't look it's going to crash into the tower.
Does anyone know what this circular thing is at 5:36 mark in the below video under the booster? It's like a piece which separated and keeps falling off.
No, each individual engine has 2 DoF (x-axis and y-axis rotation) which correspond to torque on x and y plane to the rocket. They need to use more than one at once (three in starship's case) pointing in different directions to get z axis torque.
SpaceX's Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy have already revolutionized the space industry with their reusable first stage boosters and rocket engines. This advance in rocket design has resulted in the cost to launch one kilogram of payload to orbit from approximately $15,000 in the pre-SpaceX era, to around $1,400 with the Falcon Heavy.
This graph shows the incredible impact of SpaceX on the volume of rocket launches, with an exponential rise in recent years:
With Starship, SpaceX is striving to make rockets fully reusable, which, if they succeed, will transform human civilization by radically reducing launch costs and enabling large-scale space exploration and industry. The kinds of possibilities this opens up include economically viable permanent lunar bases, Mars colonization, and revolutionary industries like asteroid mining.
Stage 1 sucessfully caught. That was pretty incredible. I remember watching the Falcony Heavy launch when both boosters landed in sync.
It's hanging pretty high in the air, I assume so the engines do less damage to the pad. One wonders how they're going to get it down. Do the chopsticks lower on the tower?
They'll lower it to the launch mount... the catch arms are effectively a crane. But I wonder if it's more "toasty" than they were expecting? There were some fires going at catch (those look out, at least on external camera views) and the engines are still a bit.... smokey. Don't know if that's normal... or if they were expecting it.
My hunch is that they don't put it down for awhile. If there's still an issue were there are fires lingering inside, my hunch is they want that as far from the ground infrastructure as possible.
The fire I mostly saw was coming from the quick disconnect ports and related plumbing. Also, there was fire on the other side, close to where there was part of a chine was clearly missing. There were a couple other things, too.
Wasn't perfect, some things to work out... but still pretty damn good.
Remember on the first launch when, on the way up, there were hydraulic units exploding off the side and the engines started exploding taking out more hydraulic units? Heh that and all the concrete flying up on ignition was like watching a heavy metal music video.
There was a lot of smoke coming out of the bottom after the catch. I was worried about an internal fire but it’s since stopped. The glow from the engine mount on re-entry was amazing. The fire on landing had me worried too I was expecting it to grow but put itself out eventually.
Yes, the chopsticks lower and raise. They will lower the tower onto a transport vehicle and send it back to the bay for examination, and then possible reflight.
I went to follow this on the SpaceX YouTube channel since it is usually closer to real time.
It seems someone hijacked and played a video of the previous launch. Just as we got to launch time it cut to a fake badly dubbed speech by Elon Musk going on about Bitcoin, with a handy QR code.
This was a bit confusing but since it was 10 minutes in advance I managed to switch to another channel.
Still amazing, even if the video glitched at the key capture point.
And an hour later the Starship itself re entered to soft salty sea landing.
I don’t know how many prototype runs they need to do, I’m guessing they could stuff a shed load of Starlinks into the next one.
You need to look closely at the channel name in a URL and not just the branding signals on the page itself (logos, "presentation name"), etc. What you'll find is that the on-page channel name can be made pretty much anything as well as logos, banner's etc. But when you look at a URL that leads to the channel page, it's not the same and it doesn't have the verification check.
Note that it's just "spacex" and does have the verification mark. Also, SpaceX doesn't stream anything there (anymore): it's all just promotional videos... some of them are cool, but that's all they are. Nothing real-time. SpaceX only streams on X now, so I'd recommend one of the third party Youtube channels like https://www.youtube.com/@NASASpaceflight (which isn't NASA) if you'd prefer to stick to Youtube for such things.
I don't have any Apple products, so I couldn't give you any advice here.
My experience is that, while YouTube has a lot of content creators that I very much enjoy... I enjoy YouTube stewardship of the platform... less so.
I have an admittedly old Chromecast Ultra and Pixel Pro 8 phone which I usually use to control it. As they continue to upgrade the app and the service, they steadily make it worse and worse. Damn thing is almost unusable.
In the end, I think they may well be poorly product managing themselves into a position where they could be vulnerable to a more able, savvy, and competent competitor.
All this is to say you're probably just out of luck on being able to see these sorts of scams if you aren't already hip to them existing.
This is why Musk is silly when he claims fear over what certain possible gov administrations would do to him if elected.
He's allowed to believe whatever he wants. He's too valuable to the United States. Imagine what a BRICS country would pay for his talent? Worth his weight in gold wrapped platinum.
basically they transfer equipment from the rocket to the landing tower so that the rocket can be lighter which is why they have to catch the rocket instead of the rocket landing by itself.
Speaking as a non-American. SpaceX just made one of the most significant technological leaps in the last decade. This is obviously hugely significant in many ways, including retaining the US military edge.
Yet the US administration hasn't congratulated SpaceX. Incredible.
There has been some kind of beef between Elon Musk and the Biden administration even before Musk's public right-wing turn. For example Biden has given speeches praising US EV vehicle manufacturers and not mentioning Tesla but mentioning all their competitors.
Lots of examples. And I’m not just talking about his general opinions on government response, but actual misinterpretations and misstatements of data that were straight-up wrong.
It was also a clear breaking point between Elon and local and state government in California over how local restrictions were going to affect Tesla’s factory in Fremont.
2. Kids essentially immune but elderly with existing conditions vulnerable, so family gatherings with close contact are risky. (https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1240758710646878208) ... seems correct?
3. He said "the coronavirus panic is dumb". (perhaps downplaying it too much, but in 2024 I think most people would say that the societal response such as not being allowed to go to a beach or park was absurd)
4. He wanted to keep factories open and for people to be allowed outside their homes. (similar to 3)
5. He posted: "Yes, reopen with care & appropriate protection, but don’t put everyone under de facto house arrest" (https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1255386895145672705) ... which also seems reasonable.
Did I miss anything or were his posts relatively uncontroversial with the benefit of hindsight? Personally, I was more concerned about covid than he was at the time, but I would say that his approach to it was more reasonable.
> That they will probably get to 0 cases. (he was wrong, but this prediction was made fairly early on when the data looked like this:
This was an incorrect interpretation of data that did not account for reporting lag in case numbers, which were actually increasing. It was a bad statement, a bad interpretation of data, and poor judgement to post it.
"Kids are essentially immune" and "Kids seem to be less affected" are two different statements. There are thousands of child deaths associated with COVID-19.
In March of 2020 we had very little characterization of this virus and its effects. Whether predictions were mostly right or mostly wrong, I think a prominent public figure making definitive statements about probably trending to zero or kids being "immune" was irresponsible. If nothing else, to me it makes him look dumb considering how much he downplayed the impact of the virus itself, how much he vilified the 'panic', and how many millions of deaths followed those statements.
> He wanted to keep factories open and for people to be allowed outside their homes.
Most people (in the US at least) were not trapped in their homes, that is an exaggeration. He wanted his factory to be kept open. I'm not sure whether he was right or wrong on that, but given that his opinions were based on at least some bad interpretations of data from above I don't think it was well considered. Basically all of his statements on COVID seem to correlate with a personal motivation to keep his factory and business running, rather than a consideration of actual public health impacts.
Anyway, my point above was not really to legislate what he was and was not correct about. My point was to highlight that his public "turn" into making strong political statements and clashing with government administration was not a new thing that started recently during the Biden administration. Right or wrong he very much clashed with the government response to COVID in 2020 and there's a fairly direct line you can draw between that clash and many of his current statements and positions.
I was watching a youtube stream with tens of thousands of viewers and 20 seconds before launch it switched to an AI generated video of Elon on stage talking about his "crypto currency program". It was so well executed and generated, it nearly felt real.
The violent anger I felt and still feel for scammers has ruined my day.
Same here. I was actively showing the (scammed) live stream to my 4yo daughter, and had to switch back to the live version for yet another 10minutes of wait.
Quite the embarassment, I think I begin to understand how my parents feel when they are completely unaware of some technical aspects I try to explain, and how easy it would be to scam them. Seems like it is getting easier to scam me, too.
To be fair, once they switched to Fakelon, it was quite clear. But I started the same stream again later as the YT app does not properly highlight the channel's name before clicking.
They do this every launch unfortunately. Youtube seems completely inept at stopping them. They make enough money to hire hundreds of thousands of fake accounts to subscribe.
At this point I am finding it hard to hate Elon Musk.
For everything he does that has annoyed me (like Gloating at people being bombed in the middle east) — his business acumen has completely unlocked for people what they we thought was impossible.
There should be nothing wrong with recognizing that any individual is a mix of things you're going to like and things you're not. That could be judged all the way to a mix of things which are morally correct, amoral, or immoral... but the reality is probably a mix.
It should be OK to praise the guy for those good traits and in turn to criticize the guy for what he does wrong: both in turn calling out the specific actions and less "the person". Its rare that demonizing someone is really appropriate or anything other than self-serving and we should see those that make that effort in that light.
Completely agree. But regardless of if we criticize or praise. He is gossip worthy. Going from being in a Marvel Movie as the architype of Iron Man, all the good things he has done, to recently jumping around at a rally of a madman, and kind of looking nuts himself.
It does beg comparison to the typical evil genius. He could literally be a villain from a Bond Movie, funding Specter. It's all fun and games. But just on surface, it is hard not to talk about him. He embodies too many sci-fi tropes.
On days like today, that was amazing to see. I'd like to think all the bad is overblown.
Is there any source for first-hand specifics of what she does?
I used to argue in reddit (same username as my HN) basically calling Musk a fraud and Gwynne Shotwell being all the brains 6 years ago, but I've since changed my position after seeing engineers in spaceX give props to Musk at podcasts, twitter, and various interviews.
Yes he’s amazing and we’re lucky to live in a time and place where he can lead thousands of people that can do these things. He’s an example of what’s possible by a capitalist and how capitalism empowers individuals to shape the world and make it better for everyone. So naturally there’s a group of people trying to stop him due to envy and other copes.
Think you are confusing capitalism with variety of other political fields.
Capitalism does nothing to ensure personal/individual freedoms. There is no 'empowering'.
Technically slaves were also a valuable part of the capitalist system at the time. They were integral to the flow of capital, as they were an asset.
You can have Dictator/Authoritarian governments also be capitalist. Huge misunderstanding these days is thinking China is communist. They stopped being communist decades ago and are not as Capitalist as the US. But that doesn't help individuals that much.
Even today, Human Resources, is about 'humans' as capital, how to manage the human assets. Capitalism doesn't help the individual, the induvial is the resource to be mined.
China stopped being real communist because they were tired of starving. They are the proof that a centralized managed economy only leads to stagnation at best and mass death more commonly. Today they are a very competent cartel that takes a big on all free market production. Deng was mainly a genius and saved the country from Maoism.
Slavery existed well before capitalism and is economic system independent. Slavery occurs across a wide spectrum of economic systems today. It will always exist. It’s up to governments not capitalists to outlaw it. Capitalists need rules to play by.
Human Resources are the socialist/communist/leftist contribution to our economic system. They can’t actually contribute anything useful but they can deploy commissars to ensure the humans in the organization have right think. HR and all the associated schemes are simply leftist grift that infects everything.
>>>China stopped being real communist because they were tired of starving. They are the proof that a centralized managed economy only leads to stagnation at best and mass death more commonly. Today they are a very competent cartel that takes a big on all free market production. Deng was mainly a genius and saved the country from Maoism.
Doesn't change my statement that they aren't communist anymore, now. You are just agreeing. I didn't make any statement that was pro-communism.
>>>Slavery existed well before capitalism and is economic system independent. Slavery occurs across a wide spectrum of economic systems today. It will always exist. It’s up to governments not capitalists to outlaw it. Capitalists need rules to play by.
Yes. That was my statement. That capitalism alone does not lead to individual rights. I guess you agree again. I miss-understood your previous statement that seemed to imply capitalism had lead to individual flourishing, and thus SpaceX.
>>>>Human Resources are the socialist/communist/leftist contribution to our economic system. They can’t actually contribute anything useful but they can deploy commissars to ensure the humans in the organization have right think. HR and all the associated schemes are simply leftist grift that infects everything.
HR has nothing to do with socialism. It is clearly a Risk Management department. They are just as likely to fire victims as the guilty. The only calculation they use is the risk/cost to the company. If it is more expedient to get rid of a victim they will do it. They are not on the employee's side. If HR fires you for hanging a noose on your coworkers locker, that is minimizing the risk from someone unhinged.. That is not being socialist.
The only 'grift' that holds up is about FSD. Everything else is nonsense. They are making Boring tunnels, the costumer paid and they delivered. The company didn't take off as much as Musk hoped but calling it a 'grift' isn't accurate.
Hyperloop was never promised, that's literally just people who don't like Musk made up. In fact he EXPLICITLY said 'I'm not gone build Hyperloop, its just an idea I had', and then people who don't like him 10 years later 'where is the promised Hyperloop'. How does that make sense? Musk never received a single $ for Hyperloop, but somehow this is a 'grift'.
> how many billions of dollars in government subsidies?
They are big cooperation's in capital intensive industries. When you build big investments, you get government tax reduction and other things, this is literally normal. If you don't like it, that's fine, but that how it works. Its not a 'grift' unless you want to go down the 'modern capitalism is grift' route.
Outside of that, most subsidies he got, were just universal subsidies that anybody could get. The US government gave the same amount of subsidies to foreign companies selling EV cars in the US. This was a plan to increase EV adoption in general. And arguably it worked. How is again is this a 'grift'.
And for SpaceX, I think its pretty clear that the government got much, much, much more then it ever paid for when they paid SpaceX. I would argue SpaceX has already saved the US government more money then they ever paid for SpaceX development. Just Clipper going on Falcon Heavy is billions in savings.
There are plenty of reason to dislike him but those aren't really good ones. Except the FSD one, that one I think is quite bad. At least they finally allowed moving the FSD from one car to the next, but that's not enough.
Agreed, but I'm concerned that humans being humans, we'll have the entire solar system to blow ourselves over.
In The Expanse (which I highly recommend), they give a new lease on life to that quote attributed to Einstein "I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought with, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones" - hurling asteroids towards a planet. I really hope humanity's real future will play out in accordance with some of the more optimistic elements in The Expanse.
It's always funny seeing people pretend they live in a world where small issues like land or food don't affect them, even though they only have that privilege because a larger military says they should.
No, it's that you started a massive offtopic generic flamewar tangent on perhaps the single most repeated topic of the last couple years, nothing new or interesting can come of which. That's exactly what we're trying to avoid on HN; we want curious conversation about interesting things, and this is the opposite of that on all counts.
Not that your comment was by any means the worst example of this! But it was guaranteed to spin off into the off-topic flamewar that it did.
Honestly, I didn't realize how fast and far it would go off. Maybe I'm out of touch.
I was actually just wondering if Musk didn't care about Politics and all the political maneuvering was still with the goal of getting to Mars. Space and Politics are like peanut butter and jelly. Hard to separate these subjects.
It's hard to understand why people care so much about someone's personal political opinions.
This is especially prevalent when working in places like Seattle and SF. People ostracizing their coworkers because of wrongthink.
MDS like TDS is real. It's extremely toxic and it needs to stop. People's political beliefs are their own and connecting that to work is a recipe for disaster.
> It's hard to understand why people care so much about someone's personal political opinions.
People care because he has power and money, which he uses to shape the world in alignment with those political opinions.
The same is true of anyone else with power - Xi, Putin, Gates, Thiel, Zuck, and the countless others with influence over business and government. A lot of money is spent to analyze and alter their political opinions.
What's hard for me to understand is why this isn't plainly obvious to you.
We've had decades of absolute liberal control of tech companies but you don't see threads like this every time Google announces something. Some 25% of tech is conservative, it shouldn't be that weird that a few of the billionaires are too.
The man in question personally has more wealth than many nations, co-opted one of the most popular American social media networks in the country and is a massive hypocrite when it comes to free speech.
Musk isn't just some guy near your cubicle complaining about Mexican cooks.
He isn't a co-worker. He's a billionaire that can fund entire campaigns.
It is a lot more like if my co-worker was really my boss, and he really cares about my political leanings during a performance review.. Thus I also care about his.
"Metastable deexcitation spectroscopy (MDS) and thermal desorption spectroscopy (TDS)"
Both. A single person can be great in some areas and a malicious loon in others. In fact, great success in one field can provide the self-confidence and capital to be a catastrophe in others.
But also keep in mind that Musk isn't personally designing and building everything SpaceX does. The staff at SpaceX deserve more credit than they get, especially Gwynne Shotwell.
It's become an absolute meme on the left-leaning internet to say SpaceX isn't Elon and Shotwell is doing all the work. You can't go to a thread on this site or reddit etc without it being brought up.
Really I am pretty sure it is just coping to deal with the uncomfortable fact that Elon (bad guy) is doing something great and clearly is skilled. Ask anyone at SpaceX or Shotwell herself and they will all say Elon is very important to its success.
Everyone who cares about SpaceX, and not Elon-hating, know Shotwell's name. My nine year old does, and he knows that Gwynne got into engineering because she liked another engineer's shoes!
That is true, but it’s also true of Blue Origin who are far behind spacex in so far as flying real hardware. The difference is Musk maniacal zeal and yes leadership. I’m frustrated with Musks politics too, but his drive can’t be denied.
But why are you frustrated with Musk’s politics? The fact that one of the smartest people chooses to demonstrate their view is very remarkable. It does warrant critical thinking and examination. After all he could have kept quiet and ponder to both parties equally.
I never knew the name Tim Cook before Steve Jobs died.
The general public does not know the layers of corporate staffing and their names. That doesn't mean they don't realize there are a lot of people at the company contributing. Nobody thinks Elon is in the back room doing drafting, and doing every job.
Yes. Musk is complicated person. Maybe that is what I was trying to ask. Does anybody have any credible insight into where is head is at. Is he turning into a wing nut, or is this all just a ploy to have more control over the government to further his goals of getting to Mars. Like if Trump wins, he can just phone him up and say, lets put a man on Mars.
SpaceX is not Musk. It may be executing his vision, but it's a team of thousands of skilled and hard-working people, all eager to work on a Sunday for a chance to pull something like this off.
But he’s the catalyst for it all.
There are other billionaires in this game too, why can’t they replicate his success? Why can’t they hire his engineers? Why can’t they deliver the results?
Twitter is not Musk. It may be executing his vision, but it's a team of thousands of skilled and hard-working people, all eager to work on a Sunday for a chance to create a propaganda arm of Trump party.
while a big chunk of the world is still under the influence of religion its been a while that the west worst extremism is not religious. you can turn on any mass media and then you will notice another kind of extremism. this is musk point and he is right about it. I can’t fathom how anyone educated cannot see it. It has to be political bias and dishonesty. be cartesian if you are an engineer.
Where did this meme come from? I’ve seen it twice in 2 days and it’s categorically false. Has the left wing echo chamber really brainwashed itself into believing Musk purchased all his successes and deserves no credit?
Even the “he bought Tesla” meme is lame. He invested in a tiny electric car startup and built it into the massive success it currently is.
Musk is just a front man. He's just an actor like Trump. God knows who is behind them. Banks, "The Matrix" , can anyone fill it in ? The front men are certainly just reading scripts, it is obvious.
They’re still going [1] and it appears to be a common thread across their recent commenting.
But they’re getting flagged, so no need to continue. (EDIT: It’s still getting traction.) It’s a tempting (and in my opinion mean-spiritedly preyful) conspiracy theory on an ephemeral topic. I always appreciate folks with domain experience similarly flagging nonsense in other threads.
This is the third time you’ve spammed the same flagged comment [1][2][3] that’s already been rebutted [4].
If you want to discuss this, consider putting forward better sources or at least new thoughts. Just because it’s wrong doesn’t make it not worth discussing.
This is a nonsense conspiracy theory. It popped up based mostly off conserving a single man’s connection to 2001 SpaceX.
Does Starship enable brilliant pebbles? Sure. But that’s because it provides easy access to space. Starlink could be described as a network of communication ‘pebbles’, as could Starshield, SpaceX’s actual military contract [1].
(Starship provides a technology platform for rapid launch. That’s more valuable for missile defence than orbital nonsense for intercepting warheads by way of predictable and observable plane-change manoeuvres.)
It’s definitely nonsense. As in if they are attempting it it’s virtually fraud on the American taxpayer.
Barring a sci-fi breakthrough in propulsion technology (or vacuum directed energy weapons), it cannot work. (And even if you have that propulsion technology, its existence obsoletes the concept again. You’d need to rewrite orbital physics to make plane changes a better idea than new launch from the ground. It’s just a phenomenally fucked idea.)
> the latest versions of the starlink satellite are significantly heavier than prior generations
This is in the same calibre of evidence as that for more planes meaning chemtrails are real.
> You’d need to rewrite orbital physics to make plane changes a better idea than new launch from the ground.
Namely, the plane change from the pre-positioned orbit to one that intersects with the target? Sorry if this is a dumb question, but is it really that bad? No way to get the loitering orbits closer to an interception than launching from the ground? (Ed: well, those definitely wouldn't be the orbits starlink is on, I think I can see that at least)
(The guy you're responding to has mostly deleted their posts, so I'm missing context, but I did get as far as the wiki page for brilliant pebbles.)
> the plane change from the pre-positioned orbit to one that intersects with the target? Sorry if this is a dumb question, but is it really that bad?
Yes. The closer you get to the surface the faster the orbit which means while you have less orbital energy to kill on approach you need more birds to cover a given area. (To communicate how unintuitive orbital mechanics can be, consider that thrusing "up" or "down" (radial in or out) doesn't actual increase or decrease your mean altitude [1]. You have to fire retrograde, which means a long, swooping, predictable, observable (and thus avoidable) approach to intercept unless you're Project Orioning it [2].)
> guy your responding to has mostly deleted their posts
They were repeating a conspiracy theory around SpaceX's actual purpose being to create a space-based missile defence system. The proof being there are senior people who were involved with the latter who have been around SpaceX. It's total nonsense somewhat orthogonal to why space-based missile defence is between difficult and stupid.
The core concept of boost-stage (i.e. in the atmosphere) space-based intercept isn't physically fucked. It's just that every case where one presents it, ground-based interception--including at the boost phase--does better. You can hide your interceptors better. For any given cost, you can deploy more of them (and more early-warning/targeting satellites). And even primitive ASAT can reliably punch a hole in it.
The only benefit is political/PR, because it sounds cool--that doesn't rule it out. But it isn't something SpaceX is working on much less was founded for.
(Space-based midcourse (i.e. in vacuum, while the warhead coasts) interception is stupid on all levels. It's a slightly more difficult version of blanketing the skies in drones for intercept--except you have more volume to cover and have planes which send off a screaming signal every time they change course.)
> any secret military project is effectively fraud?
No. A project based on bunk science is a fraud.
To be clear, space-based boost interception isn't impossible. You can do it. But in practically every case it's inferior to ground-based systems (with space-based early detection). The only case where it has merit is in containing a specific, small adversary with very few missiles, e.g. North Korea or Iran. But even there, a ground-based solution is superior in stealth, numbers and cost.
Space-based missile intercept is a political project. That doesn't mean it won't be done. But it's not something SpaceX is working on, or would work on without first cashing a substantial cheque.
Nope. And I can say this with more authority than almost anything on HN.
> Trump & Elon literally discussed it on X a few weeks ago
One, they discussed a lot of things. Two, they discussed capability. As I said, any launch system provides this capability theoretically. But (a) the capability is based on the faulty premise that pre-positioned orbital interceptors are superior to stealthy ground-based ones. And (b) it’s going to be true for any cheap space-launch system. (I say cheap because economies of scale mean cheap and frequent are virtually redundant.)
This entire theory comes out of people with no military background, no political experience and no aerospace engineering training wanting to feel special about being “in the know.”
If you can do orbital math, you can verify the plane-change economics. If you’ve even talked to anyone in ABM, which granted requires clearance, you understand why the actual spending in ABM—globally—goes into ground-based interceptors.
This is a tailor-made conspiracy theory for someone who substitutes doing the damning math for connecting bits of string between people and tweets. If you have any domain experience or connections, it’s trivially excludable. That’s why I can shoot it down (hehe) with unique confidence.
> If you can do orbital math, you can verify the plane-change economics. If you’ve even talked to anyone in ABM, which granted requires clearance, you understand why the actual spending in ABM—globally—goes into ground-based interceptors.
Boost phase interception using a constellation of several thousand hypersonic glide vehicles circumvents the plane-change problem; I'm sure you know that. I'm sure you also know that the reason nobody has seriously pursued such a solution before is because putting tens of thousands of interceptors into orbit is absurd.
> Cost of launch is the only recognized limitation
That’s how you read “in principle” and “in theory”? The cost of launch is used, in the third bullet, to justify not analysing the idea further. Not as the “only…limitation.”
As your source says, even a working space-based boost-phase interceptor is trivially defeat-able with “primitive” ASAT capabilities.
Brilliant pebbles are a fucked concept. You’re citing a no-math NAS paper for good reason—it’s good to speculate about it in case we learn something new about how gravity works. Barring that, it’s well-recognised nonsense.
It assumes that decision makers elsewhere in the world can’t get forewarning.
But it’s impossible to hide any project development on that scale from spies, or even just plain corruption, so now that decision makers across the world know that at least the launch mechanisms are possible… the moment such program preparations are detected on a scale that can’t be explained away as noise will result in them activating every panic button they have.
I hate to bring politics into such a momentous occasion, but as a lifelong Democrat, I think Trump might get my vote because of his alliance with Elon. Elon clearly is a once-in-a-century human who has progressed humanity more than anyone else in history. I think we need to let him achieve his goals without being burdened by government bureaucracy. Unfortunately, the Democrats have aligned against Elon. It didn't have to get this way, but it has. A Trump presidency will allow Elon to progress more, bringing humanity with him. I hate Trump and I think he is a narcissistic idiot, but he supports Elon more than Kamala.
The great dichotomy of man. Elon is a hardheaded questionable fellow who stops free speech on his platform if it doesn't suit the agenda and is supporting Trump who literally spurred an insurrection.
But Elon also started one of the greatest revolutions mankind has ever seen, up there with the Apollo project, which one can say is mankind's greatest achievement.
What do you do with that dichotomy is up to you to resolve.
We've banned this account for breaking the site guidelines. You can't post like this or https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41829541 here, regardless of how wrong someone is or you feel they are.
If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
We've banned this account for breaking the site guidelines. You can't post like this or https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41830050 here, regardless of how wrong someone is or you feel they are.
If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
I’m just talking totally out of my A S S. Wouldn’t it be cool if this starship launch somehow utilized starshield for grabbing starship, like proof of concept to the military of some kind of hyper accurate military grade GPS that can pinpoint a rocket and control it to the accuracy of between two chop sticks?
My first thought was nuclear anxiety; it’s nice to feel like we have a secret shield in space. Then I saw Trump talked about it, so my current hypothesis is the partisan parroting that happens on both sides. (Or if someone doesn’t like military spending, maybe it’s an anti-Musk thing?)
That said, the three accounts that have been posting about it seem to really like this topic [1][2][3], so maybe it’s a niche thing. They all seem to really like one Reddit thread.
It's a joke to think trump cares about taking care of his own after all the evidence to the contrary. He throws everyone under the bus the first chance the gets.
> When Elon Musk came to the White House asking me for help on all of his many subsidized projects, whether it's electric cars that don't drive long enough, driverless cars that crash, or rocketships to nowhere, without which subsidies he'd be worthless and tell me how he was a big Trump fan and Republican, I could have said, "drop to your knees and beg," and he would have done it,"
Trump is pro big oil, not electric, so Tesla wouldn't be getting any more favors/subsidies under Trump, and with all the NASA money currently flowing to SpaceX, no strings attached, I doubt they would benefit from Trump either. Money coming from Trump will always be conditional on him getting something back.
I don’t disagree with your overall point, but I’m sure there are significant strings attached to the money from NASA. Like, successfully launching lots of things into space for them. And developing a new human-rated space capsule, giving the US and NASA that capability again after a long time relying on Russia. And developing a totally new rocket system, together with a version that can take NASA back to the moon.
Burt Rutan, one of the most legendary aerospace engineers of all time used to do regular long presentations to people on why global warming was not man made. Some of them are archived on youtube. And there's many other cases of otherwise smart people having bonkers opinions in areas outside of what they are experts in. If anything, successful people are significantly more likely to do this. It rarely results in their downfall.
He's being sarcastic because the standing theme on the internet for most of the last decade is that Musk is an idiot who only got where he is because his parents are rich or he stole from other smarter/harder working people. SpaceX tends to put a hole in this idea since he founded and funded it himself, and they've made more progress in space travel in the last two decades than all existing government organizations and contractors have since the 70s.
The people that dislike Musk (or are afraid of the mob that will go after them if they say something positive about him) can’t deny the amazing things he is accomplishing and so when anything good happens, they are quick to farm karma with thanking and congratulating everyone who isn’t Musk. It is intentional.
Where did I do that? I tried to discredit an example of that which you are lamenting. Seems odd to reply this to my comment, though I understand flagging it.
What was the correct behavior when the notion I replied to is posed? Report it? Ignore it? Is there any reply to that comment you would not have flagged? Earnest questions.
As anyone can hopefully see from my follow up comments in this thread, I have no desire to be nasty nor any intention to degrade the quality of discussion here.
Guess we're using different measures of "success" - in my book any govt program that nets more revenue than than it costs taxpayers or provides more value than it costs (harder to verify) (irs and usps respectively, for instance) is a "successful" program - Thus the irs is a "successful" govt program that is not getting its budget cut because it's successful, and socialist systems would still have an irs... That's kinda where I was coming from
> Have you ever looked up a definition of socialism or read a book from their proponents?
Yup. Which one is your favorite?
Have you ever read "Road to Serfdom" by Hayek? How about "Free to Choose" by Friedman? Anything by C. Northcote Parkinson? "Nothing Like It In The World" by Ambrose? "Monetary History of the United States" by Friedman?
Thanks for the reading recommendations. Sunkara's manifesto for me is the best put case with the most brevity.
I haven't read those, I've mostly read stuff like Piketty and Sunkara, or smaller more focused stuff like Zuboff's surveillance capitalism or Rifkin's green new deal , caste, Harvey's history of neoliberalism, or Hannah Arendt's work that generally rebukes capitalism more than it does fundamentally bolster the ideas of socialism - You do make me reflect I haven't read much that's meant to be anything other than stuff from my side though
Sounds like you didn't live through the Microsoft product launches of the late 1990s. Developers, developers, developers, developers. Same stuff, different day. You might enjoy this reminiscent remix, which also features a SpaceX-ish rocket as well (not bad foresight for a video created in 2009): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rRm0NDo1CiY&t=106
The SpaceX engineers did a great job, as did NASA.
The media needs to stop blindly attributing this to "Elon Musk". He did well taking the risks NASA was not allowed to take at the start. But these days he is toxic to the media and toxic to reporting, so for that reason alone the media could smarted up a little. Well done SpaceX and NASA engineers.
Elon is the guy who said, "that is the craziest idea I've ever heard, here's billions, let's build it"
It's 100% Musk that this happened, literally no one else would have done it. Everyone thought it was dumb until today. No company, no government or sci fi movie for that matter had even thought of it in the first place.
SpaceX engineers given the green light by Musk, not NASA, made it a reality. That's not to say Elon didn't make many decisions along the way in the design and development of both Starship, the launch towers and everything else.
The point is, Elon deserves a hell of a lot of credit along with everyone else. Everyone has their part to play in the success of the mission.
>The media needs to stop blindly attributing this to "Elon Musk".
Musk's biographer tweeted the pages from his book <https://x.com/WalterIsaacson/status/1844870018351169942> discussing how in late 2020 Musk suggested, then insisted against considerable opposition from his engineers, that Superheavy be caught with chopsticks instead of landing on legs like Falcon 9.
(If this sounds familiar, also according to the book, Musk is the person who suggested and, against considerable opposition from his engineers, insisted on Starship switching to stainless steel instead of carbon fiber.
Hint: Musk was right and his engineers were wrong. Both times.)
Musk is the one who makes this possible. There's a reason why neither Bezos, Gates, nor Branson are anywhere close to this achievement, despite also having vast financial resources. I strongly dislike this attempt to erase Musk from the history of what's happening (mostly because people disagreeing with him politically). It is an absolute achievement of all the scientists and engineers at SpaceX. It is also a huge victory and validation for Musk and his way of leading. Both of these statements can be true simultaneously.
Uuuh the first stream on YouTube was Musk giving a speech, so I was waiting for the launch but turns out it was on another stream? So I just missed the whole thing, great.
Youtube is an incompetent organization. I've seen it take them nearly 48 hours to restore channels stolen by scammers to their rightful owners (all the while allowing the crypto scammers to continue streaming.)
There used to be a Twitter AppleTV app and I recently saw an X app for TV platforms has been brought back, but I don’t know if the AppleTV version is out yet.
Of course I’d rather they just stream to YouTube in 4K.
Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments and flamebait? You've unfortunately been doing it repeatedly. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.
Personal attacks in particular will get you banned here, so please don't post like this.
Why don't they mount moving video cameras? I mean, the second part of the fly is pretty boring. They shows us a view from 2 static cameras. Is it so difficult to make one camera moving? With 360 degrees view. Show us the shape of the earth the full circle, show us the moon. Is it so hard?
I don't think they'd need to actually have moving cameras (I think this is what the poster meant) to give a 360 degree view, but 360 degree cameras (well, 180 because they're right next to an obstacle) that could be reprojected to 2d.
Pretty impressive. The engineering team at SpaceX is really something. Some thoughts;
The 'chopsticks catch' was amazing to watch. Seems like it adds a lot of risk and clearly the booster needs additional fire suppression systems :-) perhaps the tower could mount something that sprays the booster like the barges have for the F9 boosters.
The heatshield held out for a much longer time, the asymmetric heating on the flaps was interesting. I had guessed that all four flaps would have equivalent heating based on an approach that was basically that side of the rocket perpendicular to the flow but it seems like that isn't the case. Still it seems like they are close to having something workable here.
The detonation at the end was pretty spectacular too, but I suspect that structurally the tanks failed as the rocket hit the water vs anything that was an engineering failure. Engineering it to be strong enough to land on water would presumably compromise the cargo to orbit number.
The use of Starlink was really interesting. The ability to get live video for the entire re-entry is pretty game changing for engineering. I'd guess there are even more 'views' than they showed (there would be if I were running things :-)) but overall that capability is something that really helps evaluate the changes made.
I can easily imagine that flight 6 will be nominal end to end without any unintended damage. That would enable, perhaps, one of their 'massive' Starlink missions to test cargo delivery. It will also start to give us some better numbers on exactly how much cargo Starship can put in orbit in 'full reuse' mode which is essential if they want to create a fueling station on orbit for the Artemis program.
Again, hats off to engineering at SpaceX, y'all did good.
As to whether catching the booster adds risk - I'm not sure it does.
First, to the extent the booster is out of position in the x (sideways) direction, the chopsticks can move to accomodate error. But actually I think this dimension is the easiest of the three, as the booster has plenty to time to null any error in this dimension.
In the y direction (direction of travel towards the tower), the rails on the chopsticks can cope with the booster touching down along quite a long distance. But importantly, they appear to be smooth, so the pins can initially skid along them and then the booster can swing if it has not fully nulled any horizontal movement. In contrast, if the booster used legs and has not yet fully nulled any horizontal motion at touchdown, there is a greater risk of breaking a leg or simply tipping over.
And in the z direction, it should be possible for the chopsticks can absorb more vertical motion than legs can absorb, because you can easily build in huge springs/dampers/etc into the ground equipment without concern about mass.
Catching also puts the booster in tension rather than compression - it's easier to be rigid in tension than compression.
Finally, if legs were used, the engines would have to get close to the ground during landing, so reflected shock from the ground could cause damage. I know Falcon 9 does this, but the area of the base of Starship is much greater, so there's effectively less room for the reflected energy to escape. Catching completely removes this risk.
On balance, I think they would have better chance of success for each mission by catching. The main downside would be if you fail to catch, you may need to build a new tower, whereas a flat pad would be cheaper and easier to repair.
I am really curious what the maximum wind speed allowed for a booster landing will be. Upon landing, it has a lot of windage and not nearly as much mass as during take-off.
I have experience with docking large boats and it does seem to be a bit similar. In the case of boats, wind is a big deal, and the booster has nothing "below the waterline" to slow down the effects of wind.
I doubt this is an issue.
Not because wind wouldn't affect an empty booster; it certainly would.
But since the booster returns within 8 minutes of the launch, the weather in which a booster lands is restricted to the weather in which they will launch a rocket.
But then wouldn't the limiting factor for launch be the maximum allowed wind for landing?
That value is unlikely to be significantly different than safe takeoff conditions. Yes the booster is lighter at landing, but launch is way more dangerous with larger error margins and more conservative condition requirements.
The value of what is going up (which includes the booster) will be greater than the value of the empty booster. Factors of safety would be based on the launch rather than the catch. In other words, if it's deemed safe to launch the calculation for safe to land is easier to pass. Especially when you are taking passengers on launch. Wind is already a significant factor in launch.
That's true, except it neglects the cost of the launch tower itself. If you botch a catch and need to rebuild the launch tower, that could get very expensive, both in immediate costs of rebuild, plus in opportunity cost of missed launches. So in the end, whichever has the lowest wind limit, launch or landing, will likely determine whether they fly.
Ah, excellent point! They wouldn't ignore one hazard because another is less severe. And you are correct, I wasn't considering hazards to the launch tower itself. I think you are absolutely right, either would cause a flight to be scrubbed. I wonder if the two wind limits would be different.
This is often the case with airplanes; it's not a new concept.
Definitely not, and I am not trying to be a doomsayer here. It's just interesting. Now that I think about it more, I believe a Falcon 9 Starlink launch was once delayed due to weather conditions at the drone ship.
Seems like it adds a lot of risk
I'm actually wondering about that. If I understand correctly, the arms can move up and down, and pivot around the tower. This allows them to correct for some error in the rocket trajectory and also (presumably) "soften" the final contact. Between the nozzles and the arms, it gives SpaceX a lot of degrees of freedom in the final seconds (you can see how the booster kind of "hovered" right at the end) and in certain respects might even offer more forgiveness than the hard ground.
Could it smash into the tower? For sure. Would that be more dangerous than smashing into the pad? I don't know.
It's a new technique with which we don't have a lot of experience.
It helps enormously that unlike Falcon-9 this rocket can dial down the thrust of its engines low enough to be able to actually hover or to move arbitrarily slowly in the final meters before touchdown.
It can arrive to the designated intermediate point with some already good accuracy, and then take some time to trim the remaining errors to the noise level more slowly, possibly with feedback from the ground sensors.
The chopsticks also include rails with shock absorbers, the action of which can be seen in the view from the tower during the landing [1], so the required accuracy is probably relatively modest, provided one plans the maneuver carefully.
[1] https://youtu.be/Ysx4t7ICO58?t=678
The main takeaway from Scott's commentary is that the chopsticks allow the ommission of landing legs and all their subsequent systems and saves a ton of weight. The added risk to dial this technique in is likely worth it in the long run from a sustainability stand point.
Except that the landing legs allow you to land anywhere with a flat pad of concrete, whereas this requires comparatively enormous infrastructure investment.
The first stage doesn't really need to land anywhere, it launches from a known location that already has a comparatively enormous infrastructure investment.
The second stage might want to land in other places. Not as a satellite launching bus or fuel truck though, that just wants to go up and down in an uncomplicated and unsurprising way, and that's where the vast majority of their launches will come from.
For inter-planetary missions yes, but they have different second stage designs for those that aren't made for tower landings. If it gets used as a military transport, then similarly it will be a different second stage design.
The military transport option is going to provide so much capital.
It's the C5 Galaxy, but with only a couple of hours needed to deploy into any theater in the world.
With maybe totally different requirements on the G forces and vibrations that the equipment and people inside a Starship must withstand compared to flying. Not necessarily all the existing equipment can survive a Starship launch and not necessarily all military personnel can fly in a rocket. Of course they can select the personnel, like they do select paratroopers. Fixing the equipment or developing new one might be costly.
Thankfully, military stuff that is field deployed typically already has insane shock and vibration requirements. We build military stuff at our facility and it all has to go through lots of shock, vibration, and temperature testing. The military really wants to be sure things don't fail on the battlefield (which could also be aptly called "the-shock-and-vibration-field")
Just want to add that a lot of military equipment is already designed to be airdropped in addition to any other expected battlefield stresses, so they’re probably some of the best candidates for rocket transport in existence.
There's some work needed to have the launch flexibility though. Ie lead time to launch, multiple launch locations.
In comparison, simplified, if you have a bunch of things you need to send somewhere, you can go to the nearest airstrip and call a bunch of C5:s from somewhere a couple of hours away.
If we’re talking about sending equipment / supplies, you can prelaunch into orbit and then re-enter on demand.
That could actually probably be worse as the orbital path would not likely go near the wanted landing site, potentially in days. And anyway how do you know in advance what you are going to need (if it's not a nuke)?
Instead, with a near-future rocket, you could have some sort of assortment of "most likely stuff needed" stored near a launch site and be ready to pack and launch in an hour.
https://fastcompanyme.com/technology/this-startup-has-a-plan...
The starship can use the atmosphere to change its orbit.
The capability hasn't been tested but why wouldn't it work if it works on a x-37?
Starship has a lot less cross-range capability than X-37.
Exactly. Cross-range capability is expensive mass wise. X-37 is very heavy for its payload, as was the Space Shuttle.
It’s called cross-range capability, and yes Shuttle was able to do this (albeit for different reasons).
The booster is always returning to the general vicinity of the launch tower (either the tower itself or a barge). It isn’t used anywhere unimproved, and in particular is not used on Mars. So what scenario would it be helpful to be able to land the booster on a flat concrete pad?
It sounds like sci-fi thinking tbh, but at the same time, Musk has hinted at using rockets for intercontinental travel. But even then, it wouldn't be just a concrete pad, it'd need disaster recovery systems and infrastructure in place.
You're talking about Starship, not the booster.
Starship will get landing legs.
Only for Moon & Mars landings. The plan is to use the catch tower, Same as the booster, when landing on Earth.
Not just a hint. Here's a 2 minute video produced by SpaceX called "Earth to Earth".
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zqE-ultsWt0
The booster does not travel more than ~50 miles.
Just build another tower, like you build another airport
Landing legs are out of the question for Super Heavy anyway. If the engines come that close to the ground, the reflected sound from the ground will tear the engines apart.
That's fascinating!
Do you have a source for this where I can read more?
The 3 RS-25 (1860 kN each)[1] used for the Space Shuttles had 300,000 Gallons of water output per 41 seconds [2] when it launched. On landing, the Falcon Super Heavy used 5 or so [3] of the Raptor Engines (2750 kN each [4]). I'm making a few assumptions based on Napkin Math, but the parent comment seems about right since the engineering required (and the payload weight lost due to the weight/space requirements of landing feet for the FSH), would be too high to withstand the vibration reflection of landing on solid landing pad.
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RS-25
[2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sound_suppression_system#NASA [3]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pIKI7y3DTXk&t=6850s
[4]https://www.spacex.com/vehicles/starship/
>comparatively enormous infrastructure investment Any infrastructure that can remain on the ground and doesn't have to be on the rocket is worth whatever the investment cost.
You note of course that instead of legs, which have mass and have to have a structure in the stage which distributes the loads the SH has those parts with pins which were locked eventually with Mechazilla's arms, and those parts also have mass and need to have corresponding distribution of loads.
How different those consoles with pins are from possible landing legs, and how much savings they provide is an interesting question. It's quite possible they provide some savings - but it would be nice to know some details.
The booster needs lift points anyway for manufacturing and moving it to the launch mount. You can’t engineer those out, really.
It seems pretty likely that those pins are going to save considerable mass and volume compared to articulating landing legs.
Why so? Pin parts need to withstand similar loads - and if amortizing rails of Mechazilla may soften the contact, the direction of loads for pin parts is less favorable than for legs. Legs don't need to be big or too numerous - effectively legs are those pin parts moved to the engine compartment and turned for an angle.
Compression and tension are quite different loads. There have been rockets in history that would collapse under their own weight unpressurized. Neutron's second stage is a hung tank for similar reasons. Bucking is a pain. Super Heavy can obviously support its own weight, but tension is always going to be the easier load path.
Because the pins can be much shorter. Take a look at the falcon 9 legs. They are enermous both in absolute terms and relative to the whole rocket. They need to be that long to provide a stable platform and enough clearance for the nozzles and the residual plume as the engines shut down.
Not just that. Landing legs need to actuate, which means having actuators - another part that can fail. Pins are just dumb bits of steel.
IIRC at least one returning Falcon 9 stage was lost to a landing leg collapsing.
Don't forget that between certification and catch attempt that catching infrastructure is subject to the launch of the most powerful rocket man has ever created. It seems that the consideration about another part to fail is not valid here as the parts to fail have not disappeared but rather moved to the tower. They could still fail - in fact it seems that there are now many more recovery-critical parts.
That is, unless the falling rocket could abort a tower catch and move to a secondary nearby tower if a failure is detected in time.
> and move to a secondary nearby tower if a failure is detected in time.
They will have a tower in the Cape. It’s conceivable they could land there depending on return trajectory and save some mass for payload with that maneuver. I am also quite sure they will be a dozen towers in Boca Chica and I wouldn’t be surprised if they build a couple in California for Southward launches.
They do checks of the tower systems before using it, and have abort contingencies in case something goes wrong during final approach. I'm not sure if they intend (or have fuel budget) for last-second aborts to other towers, or if they just ditch in the ocean (remember there are no humans on the booster).
I'm curious how late in the catch sequence they can still abort.
I think it is very much valid if the entire context is taken into account.
The tower is used for various stacking and craning operations between launches. There is a better chance to detect any developing anomalies outside the launch context.
Also, being on Earth and flying nowhere, it can be sturdier and heavier than any flight hardware. Much like Roman aqueducts, it can be overbuilt a bit to ensure some extra resilience.
Plus, more towers at the same site, as you say. If one malfunctions, another one can act as a backup. In contrast, every single landing leg is a mission-critical component and cannot be replaced in-flight by another one.
This seems a bit like removing landing gear from aircraft and telling airports to shoulder the added cost of accommodating them. You've simply shifted complexity elsewhere. I understand that people are dazzle-eyed over the science fiction appeal, but IMO this feels like a distraction. The rocket's already reusable and already the largest rocket ever built, this doesn't add any fundamentally new operational capability while also burning a lot of engineering cycles and adding complexity and uncertainty.
What you're missing is the rocket equation. The less weight, the less fuel you need and the larger your payload. We should trust the decisions of these experienced engineers who are deeply familiar with the tradeoffs involved in spaceflight more than our own intuition.
Removing unnecessary systems that have mass is a big part of making reusable rockets work. It's why propulsive landing is superior to landing with wings, for example.
What you're describing with airplanes already happened. Large airplanes used to land on the water, which incurred a mass and aerodynamic penalty for the airplane but was very cheap to operate airfields ("fields"?) for; it only required a flat lake or harbor which was already there. The switch to landing gear allowed airplanes to be more optimized but requires more infrastructure expenditure for large aircraft.
Not a distraction at all.
It is not just about shift of complexity from A and B. Anything that stays on Earth permanently can be built without particular regard to its weight, e.g. much stronger, much more resilient, with bigger safety factors etc.
With any flight hardware, you need to make painful tradeoffs between reliability/sturdiness and weight.
If anything out of the ordinary happens, massive steel chopsticks can take a lot more strain than a landing leg which needs to be carried to the edge of space and back.
You'd still have to recover the rocket. I imagine the number of places you could land and economically recover the rocket is pretty small.
unless it can be refueled from a truck and reused without inspection.
Super Heavy and its 33 raptor engines really needs a specific launch pad - on the first launch they tried to see what happens when they just fire it over a regular concrete slab (but still way above in a launch mount) and ended up with a massive crater. While Starship might be able to hop from unimproved landing sites, that is not really an option for Super Heavy, even with low fuel and short hops IMHO.
That is so many iterations in the future, it's not really meaningful to design for now.
That's why it is good in the long run, assuming the infrastructure can't get annihilated in a crash.
There's always a risk, but at the same time, they've designed the infra now, they can rebuild it from the plans (and iterate on any flaws). There's a (imo unnecessary) idea of doing a lot of launches, for which you'd need multiple liftoff and landing sites.
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Yes, we should probably assume that the SpaceX engineers have considered all of the risks HN readers are able to come up with in a few hours. And that they have evaluated alternatives like the added weight etc of having foldable legs on the booster.
The catchzilla solution is an example of their amazing ability to think out of the box. This solution, and things like the rapid evolution of the Raptor engine (see picture, story here: https://medium.com/@futurespaceworld/the-evolution-of-spacex...), dynamic engine configuration (33, 13, 3, zero, up again) and control is almost magically impressive. This is the stuff of Sci-Fi, brought to life.
But did they consider a giant spider web?
We can probably assume yes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qz7Eb8WiiWA
To me, it's not risk reduction that they're after with that booster catching mechanism, but weight reduction. Those landing legs that we've seen before (and the mechanism related to them) are costly weight that is absolutely necessary only on the rocket itself, because that is expected to land on its own somewhere on a bare rock. For booster however, it makes sense to have as much of such launch and landing weights externalized, considering booster's reduced use-case of starting from a spaceport and very soon ending up back there too.
The way the trajectory is designed is that it has to scoot over to the tower at the last second, and it only does that if it's really really sure it can make it, otherwise it crashes off to the side.
My thought (admittedly not well developed) is that smashing into a landing pad of concrete can damage that pad but it can be quickly repaired without affecting the ability to launch future rockets. If you damage the launch tower significantly you're going to have to suspend launches from it until you fix it. So the "higher risk" is more critical assets offline in the event of a non-optimal return.
There are already 2 launch towers (2nd one not quite complete but getting there.)
Heh Plus one at Kennedy in Florida, LC-39A
Apparently they are heavily investing in having multiple towers ready to go to be able to do multiple successive launches. Presumably with that approach, one being damaged for a while will be annoying but not project-stopping.
Understood, although weren't they out of commission for a really long time anyway the last time they damaged their launchpad?
That was a launch pad, not a recovery pad. The launch pad has to be engineered to survive full thrust from all the engines, and for a rather long time as the loaded vehicle accelerates upward.
Thanks for clarifying!
A good explanation of how it works, from before the catch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ub6HdADut50
> The detonation at the end was pretty spectacular too, but I suspect that structurally the tanks failed as the rocket hit the water vs anything that was an engineering failure.
It's possible that SpaceX programed the AFTS to trigger some time after the rocket touched down in the water. Just to make sure that it completely submerges quickly.
> I can easily imagine that flight 6 will be nominal end to end without any unintended damage.
I think it depends on what you mean by "nominal". SpaceX ultimately wants to catch the 2nd stage as well. I suspect that they are a ways off of that, since it would have to approach over land. The FAA is going to need to have very high confidence that it will do exactly what it's designed to do before they're going to allow that.
> It's possible that SpaceX programed the AFTS to trigger some time after the rocket touched down in the water. Just to make sure that it completely submerges quickly.
The SpaceX host on the stream said that they were going to try and touch it down on the water at more of an angle than the previous flight to attempt to get it to survive the initial splash-down so they could get some more data and video footage.
Obviously this wasn't guaranteed to succeed, but it indicates that they weren't planning to immediately detonate the ship on touchdown.
As I recall it was common on the early Falcon 9 landing tests that splashed down in the ocean to also explode after tipping over and smacking the water. Once they're actually landing them on a pad, tower, or ship that should be much less of an issue.
Yeah, I don't think SpaceX planned for a RUD on tip-over (even if they did anticipate it).
I think they've towed stuff in the sea before so I would have thought that'd be their preference if it were possible.
Yeah. It wasn't planned, but was a likely outcome.
I'm not sure if they would have actually attempted to tow this one somewhere given its location in the Indian Ocean, but they might have taken the opportunity to do some inspections before sinking it.
> Just to make sure that it completely submerges quickly.
Why would they want to do that? (genuinly curious).
I reckon there would be a lot of useful data left if they could recover or even just inspect the remains. The remains are one big tank, so it would have floated.
No doubt it would be very useful to recover. SpaceX isn't the only one who could pluck it out of the Indian ocean though. You don't want to leave a prototype for the most advanced Spacecraft ever made just sitting around for competitors to grab (most notably China which is currently speed running SpaceX-like designs).
Yep this will be the reason. And lets not forget that Bezos was able to find and recover the Apollo 11 Saturn V engines from point nemo. If that was relatively simple you can bet plucking a freshly dropped entire starship from the indian ocean would be a doddle, especially when sat views likely show exactly where it landed.
I'm fairly certain the Apollo first stage engines were recovered from a location relatively close to Florida/Bahamas, just east of the launch site. Not point nemo.
That is correct, off FL. The recovered engines were from the first stage they would never have made it half way around the world. Point Nemo is used to stash spacecraft that were in orbit.
It landed right next to their own camera-bearing buoy. You can bet their own recovery ship was right nearby. And with access to radio control too. Likely with a couple US military ships on hand too.
It might not be that simple - I've read an article how they recovered one of the solid rocket boosters from the first successful Ariane 5 flight to check all was fine. IIRC it was a slog, they had to tow it back very very slowly, avoid it sinking, fighting all kinds of weather and tow line issues, etc. Have not found the article, but there is a picture how it looked like[0].
With Starship it could have been similar & possibly worse given the size and more complex shape (various voids that might fill/drain & the thing is not really built for floating). Also you are in the middle of an ocean (Indian in this case) with potential for all kinds of weather on the way. Towing might again be very slow, so you might need to stage a massive submersible transport ship or something similar to make a recovery successful. And then the thing might still tip over and explode anyway - meaning all this was in vain.
I think is most likely they won't bother and instead just stream as much data as possible over Starlink in real time (or heck, even via WiFi once the buoy is in range) for analysis. They want to catch the shop eventually anyway, so manual post flight analysis will wait.
They can now check all over the first recovered booster anyway. :)
[0] https://www.flickr.com/photos/europeanspaceagency/3700131835
You wouldn't need to tow it; if you really wanted to you could use one of those deep see platform recovery ships that sink themselves. The rocket is big but it's tiny compared to ocean-going vessels.
But, couldn't they wait for like, 6 hours? Take a good look when it's cooled down a bit. Send some drones over to film it, and then sink it?
I get that towing is probably too expensive for what it's worth. But I'm surprised they don't even go pick up some tiles before kablooing it.
Attach a tether to one of the fin pods, then blow up the rest to sink it cleanly and bring back the important part.
Possible yes but still, this is a prototype with new fin configuration, materials and lots of detail to be understood from inspecting it in detail. An inspection would be very useful.
At the same time, this is SpaceX and they have a few others ready to launch already. Perhaps they indeed can keep it somewhat coarse and wait for detailed inspection until one of them makes it right back to solid ground?
The previous ship did not come down where it was supposed to. I don't think they wanted humans anywhere near where it was coming down, at least until they can reliably do pinpoint landings. Even the Falcon 9, as accurate as it is, doesn't have humans anywhere near the landing location.
I certainly hope so. Ocean are polluted enough and although such a ship is just a, well, drop in the ocean, the ideq of accepting to pollute more is unbearable to me, especially for a world class company like SpaceX...
Other than some electronics it's actually pretty clean vehicle - methane will gas off, steel will quickly disintegrate in water, there isn't tons of plastic or paint.
Looking at the composition of the ship, it won't be polluting the ocean much. No people on board to produce trash etc., mostly just plain stainless steel and a bit of ceramics that will make great hiding spot for the abyssal fish for a few years.
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Also a yacht of a fishing boat could run into it in the night and sink - eq it could become an unmarked floating hazard.
correct me if I’m wrong but I don’t think the second stage is meant to be caught. It will have legs to land on Earth/Mars without any landing infrastructure.
It will have legs for Mars but they plan on catching it on Earth.
It is expected to land astronauts on the Moon as well this decade, which will certainly require legs.
That is a different version. The ones launching/landing on Earth are supposed to be caught by arms similar to the booster.
The ones for other celestial bodies are also planned to return to Earth... Being inside one as it does the belly flop will be quite the experience.
Pretty sure the Artemis lunar missions are going to use a different vehicle for Earth to LEO and LEO to Earth, so I don’t think anyone will be inside a Starship belly flop for quite some time
Or have the tower on the moon catch it.
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Stop making alts to spam your conspiracy theories everywhere
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wondering if you all with your fresh accounts and this silly smear campaign are bots or actual people
Just looked at some Reddit links posted and what the account has said over time and it is just _specifically_ this.
Over 4 months old. The same thing posted, over, and over. Even alleging xAI "knows" about Musk's "secrets".
Plus, their 'evidence' is a leading conversation with an LLM. It's the AI equivalent of a conspiracy nut taking 50 tangentially related articles about Apollo and stitching together a narrative about how the landings were faked.
Why is SpaceX choosing to land the booster on the Mechazilla arms instead of performing a soft ground landing like the Falcon 9 booster?
1) legs are heavy 2) empty rockets are stronger in tension than compression
the scale of Superheavy is such that the above two items are making the arms scheme make sense. The number of engines also gives this rocket the ability to hover, which probably makes the scheme easier to pull off.
It's my understanding that these engines can be driven with variable power, which also makes deceleration and controlled hover more feasible.
This was also true for this engine's predecessor, the Merlin 1D. However that engine's rocket (the Falcon 9) can't hover, as the power of a single engine throttled to its lowest setting still overcomes the weight of a nearly-empty booster.
All high performance engines tend to only throttle in a range in the upper half of the engine's performance, the difference making hovering possible in this case is that the Super Heavy has _so many_ engines that it can turn off. This is a sort of secondary throttling, or meta-throttling, and the rocket can use the combination of engine throttling and engine-off to hover comfortably (while near-empty) with three engines going.
Spent rocket stages are empty of fuel, but not necessarily of the ullage gases, the pressure inside could be e.g. 3 atmospheres and that could be enough to provide some stiffness in the direction perpendicular to the axis.
> 2) empty rockets are stronger in tension than compression
True, but wouldn't the deceleration burn be putting much more compression onto the near-empty rocket than the landing?
The engine load is probably a steady, consistent magnitude. While a landing load is rapid and variable. Also, you need to design legs for wind loading after landing, which can be high if you want to launch often.
3) rapid reuse by landing on launch tower
I imagine that they will be their own first customer - putting Starlink satellites into orbit while they are gaining confidence in the reliability of the system for external customers.
They have to prove out the landing of the second stage, either with another catch or with landing gear, which they need for the lunar lander anyway.
I think that has always been the plan. the V2 starlink sats were designed to fly on Starship. When Starship wasn't coming along as planned they shoe horned the guts of the V2 on to a smaller sat that became the V2 Mini.
If Im not mistaken, they already delivered a payload in one of the previous flights, because they cut the transmission for a while and didn’t show the payload bay like one previous flight.
I’m not sure they are, if only because of the altitude. They only took Starship up to 200km, Starlink are nearly double that so while they do have thrusters that’s quite the distance.
Starship is not really in a true orbit, I forget the exact terminology but the trajectory is designed to re-enter regardless of what happens with the the flight.
It is in an suborbital trajectory but with enough energy to be equivalent to reaching orbit.
Think of it as instead of thrusting perpendicular to gravity for the most optimal energy usage Starship instead points its nose up gaining more altitude but now lacks the speed to miss earth as it comes down.
They actually made use of this this flight again - eq. they still did not perform a deorbit burn this flight & let the trajectory to pull them down to the atmosphere.
I'm wondering if they'll be using the vertical equivalent of arresting gear on aircraft carriers[0]. See when fighter jets land on aircraft carriers? There's a cable that decelerates them. That, but for vertical landing.
The way these chopsticks are set forces the booster into a dangerous, snake like maneuver (a SnakeX maneuver) at the last second from a vertical setting, to get into the chopsticks. This maneuver is due to the fact chopsticks are short and the booster has to land on one point in space. No degrees of freedom.
Now, imagine if the chopsticks were long. The booster wouldn't have to land at one specific point, but it could now land on a line. One degree of freedom.
Now replace the long chopsticks with cables, and then add another pair of cables perpendicular to them. So you have a pair of parallel cables perpendicular to a second pair of parallel cables. Now the booster doesn't have to land on a line, but can land anywhere in the grid that's covered by the cables. Two degrees of freedom.
Pushing this thought leads to having a sort of iris diaphragm, like the ones in optics, but an iris diaphragm of cables. The diaphragm is open when the booster is about to land, then closes in quickly. Imagine this[1], but it's cables cinching in.
Now, it's a diaphragm of cables, not a diaphragm of rigid beams, so I imagine the deceleration to be even smoother as the cables elongate, and an additional system of springs and dampers to counter the weight of the booster.
The booster is vertical and stays vertical. Granted, an unstable equilibrium, but it beats doing the SnakeX maneuver to get to the chopsticks, and that's another story.
Now, imagine the iris cable diaphragm can move up and down like equipment handling containers, and now you have three degrees of freedom. That's less control to worry about on the booster's side at the worst possible moment, landing, where you can't make adjustments anymore.
This not only means being more forgiving on mistakes related to position, but also on speed and angle. The diaphragm catches the booster at any angle, and given that it cinches way above the center of gravity, the booster goes back to a more stable vertical position.
For the fire, maybe you just need a big hole down there.
- [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arresting_gear
- [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Iris_Diaphragm.gif
SpaceX likes to simplify and not to complexify things. And they demonstrated they can do landing accurately.
Moreover I think Elon discusses the mechazilla arms in one of Tim Dodd interviews. They dont want longer arms, ratger shoeter.
Think about physics involved for longer arms and how much more stress you will putt on the connection points.
>SpaceX likes to simplify and not to complexify things. And they demonstrated they can do landing accurately.
Yes. Something falling into a web of cables. I'd say it may be simpler than optimally controlling that last SnakeX maneuver to be hugged by a short-armed T-Rex.
>Think about physics involved for longer arms and how much more stress you will putt on the connection points.
That's why I wasn't talking about arms, but cables, as explained by most of the reply.
Did you think about how you support the cables ? Surely they must be tensionned or else they will hang. How do you tension them ? Of course you know that the more the cable is tensionned, the more force you need. So you need a big-ass structure to hold all of these cables. They must be able to circulate around the perimeter, while being in tension, while not collapsing the structure that holds them, etc..
I'm sure you think it's easy, but I'm sure some people thought a bit more
>Did you think about how you support the cables ? Surely they must be tensionned or else they will hang. How do you tension them ?
Mechanical advantage. The booster weighs 250 tons. A 40' shipping container has a max payload of about 30 tons. There are cranes that can lift 250 tons, and it won't be one, but many. Have you seen gantry cranes?
>So you need a big-ass structure to hold all of these cables.
Similar to the big-ass structure holding the 250 ton booster with the T-Rex arms?
>They must be able to circulate around the perimeter, while being in tension, while not collapsing the structure that holds them, etc..
Not circulate, but translate. The cinching in is a result of them translating. Again, see cranes and gantry cranes. Or, just see the actual chopsticks: circulating, not collapsing the structure that holds them, while being in tension, holding the booster at the free end.
Are you seeing the shear and moment diagram of that cantilever beam with point load? (I know, it's an extension of a supported beam, but still cantilever).
>I'm sure you think it's easy
I'm not sure I think it's easy, I can't see how you're more sure than I about my own thoughts.
>but I'm sure some people thought a bit more
You are people, too. Nothing prevents you from thinking as well, if for nothing than to have a civil conversation on a forum.
Now, that's all fun. Imagine they keep it the way it is, but they duplicate the setting to make a circle, so the booster lands in the middle of many chopsticks... What do you think about that?
The crane lifts on the same axis as gravity, so the force is the same as the object. If the cable is horizontal-ish the the force is X/cos(a), which can be many times higher than the object
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mechanical_advantage
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crane_(machine)
https://archive.org/details/constructioncra00markgoog
> so the booster lands in the middle of many chopsticks...
And how exactly this requires less precision? I see multiple issues:
- No way to escape/last second abort away from tower once you dipped into that net.
- The booster arms must be longer/heavier, the tower support structure need to support more weight.
- Cables have a lot less thermal mass than the tower/arms - if the torch coming out of raptor engines will touch the cable, it may either cut or soften the cables and they will behave in a different way.
I mean we could have had this discussion previously but now they demonstrated on the first try that they can catch the booster... why bother?
>I mean we could have had this discussion previously but now they demonstrated on the first try that they can catch the booster... why bother?
Because these things must work every time, not just the first time. Because why not talk about it, it's an interesting topic and musing about it is amusing. Because it's not a bother. I'm surprised one needs a reason, but here are three already.
Good luck not ruining rocket with that cable web. Now you got other problems to target into some cell. Moreover cables could be lingering depending on thrust. Or maybe thrust will just cut em easily.
>Good luck not ruining rocket with that cable web.
What do you mean?
>Now you got other problems to target into some cell. Moreover cables could be lingering depending on thrust. Or maybe thrust will just cut em easily.
It's an iris diaphragm that's open but cinches on the booster.
This is a solution for a problem that's already solved, that is, booster maneuverability and accuracy. But they've just demonstrated that the booster is accurate and controlled enough to land on the chopsticks, and they have over a decade of experience in making rockets land accurately in a specific zone.
Next year, China says it will be testing a concept very similar to what you've described, with its Long March 10A rocket:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=27TvGDpPLNw
It will be interesting to see how these two approaches fare vs. one another.
That's exactly it, thank you! What worries me with the current one that landed is the gradient: because the arms are short and the spot is tight, the burden is on the booster to make very sharp corrections (especially on pitch) to get caught when there's literally a few meters left, with an increased risk at the worst time (no altitude, and structures around), as opposed to leaving the pitch as is and landing vertically. In other words: the possibility to screw a perfect launch by introducing irremediable risk in the last few seconds and meters.
Then again, I just watched the launch and that was the first thing that popped into my mind, and the first "design" that popped into my mind as I was replying to the thread, so not much thought went into it.
That's how the Chinese are planning to do it:
https://youtu.be/OYWBmu6H0ik?feature=shared&t=35
One thing to note is that the "Snake" maneuver was designed to keep the tower safe during the test, and not forced on the rocket by the chopsticks.
The rocket was set to come down on the pad just in front on the tower and launch mount until the final 3-engine landing burn started. This kept the infrastructure safe until the last moment, but also required that lateral translation you referred to.
They showed 4 streams at once during some of the reentry. One view of each control surface. They may have had still more views but just that 4 was a first.
Wait, that was 5 views no? Facing four fins, plus one fin from the front.
Imagine, linking that video into a 360° virtual cockpit As if you were inside a booster made from glass.
What’s the advantage of catching the booster over landing it in the ground? Catching it seems like an extra complication.
I can speculate ...
I think the primary reason would be that landing legs are heavy, and it wastes performance to carry them. If your landing mechanism is mostly on the ground, you get that performance back.
Secondary reasons might include that it's simpler to get the booster right back to the pad. Once things have settled into an operational cadence, it's likely feasible to lower and lock the booster onto the stool, stack a ship on top, refuel, and relaunch -- no more messing around with barges, transport, weather issues, etc.
Your primary reason matches what SpaceX themselves have said. You either need to be strong enough to handle the shock of inpact, or need to spread the impact over time. Building either into the rocket adds a lot of mass.
Landing on a device that spreads out the shock moves that weight to the static landing platform.
To my knowledge, you're right, but in reverse order. I believe the driving force is time, rather than mass overhead, but certainly both play a large part.
It's worth noting that at least 1 Falcon 9 core probably got trashed not from the landing, but from rough seas - so cutting out the ground logistics chain adds resiliency.
Falcon 9 can land on land just fine (and it was done multiple times on less demanding missions). Landing on barge gives it extra performance.
The reflected sound of the engines is enough to destroy the engines, ironically. That's also why the launch mount is so high. You'd need truly enormous legs, which wouldn't work for weight.
The load for landing and almost empty booster would be less, but otherwise yes, it would be much more than the single Merlin engine on the Falcon 9, with all associated issues (local scorching/spalling of the pad, acoustic issues, extra weight, longer turnaround, etc.).
The rocket equation implies that if you want to maximize the delta-v a rocket gets out of a certain amount of fuel, then you should get the dry mass as close to zero as possible. Eliminating landing legs helps a lot.
You save the mass of the landing systems, you get to have all that mass on the ground and not have to lift it into space. Dramatically improves the performance of the rocket.
1) legs are heavy 2) empty rockets are stronger in tension than compression 3) the booster is large enough to make (1) and (2) matter more than they did for Falcon 9.
I thought it was so they can name make the booster body thinner relying more on the fuel for structural rigidity.
Why send the landing mechanism to space when it isn't needed there? Whatever kit you put on a rocket has to be brutally miniaturized to limit how much you eat into the payload mass. Also has to be rugged enough to withstand tremendous vibrations and thermal stresses. That adds cost and more points of failure. You want to move as much of the complexity off the rocket as possible. Then doesn't matter if the catching mechanism on the launch tower is big and heavy.
>The 'chopsticks catch' was amazing to watch. Seems like it adds a lot of risk and clearly the booster needs additional fire suppression systems :-) perhaps the tower could mount something that sprays the booster like the barges have for the F9 boosters.
There's no reason to reinvent the airport firetruck.
Unless you're gonna make it fully automated, it's not gonna work here as it can't be within kilometers of the landing site during landing in case there's a catastrophic failure.
> no reason to reinvent the airport firetruck.
There is. The booster is high above, and is larger than basically any aircraft. There's no flat concrete airfield around either.
I would suggest blowing CO2 or nitrogen through pipes positioned at the right height on the tower.
It’s not going to burn like that in production.
Why would you use a firetruck if you could also run a hose up the tower and get it right where it's needed?
The airport fire truck can’t control fires 250ft in the air
It's pushing the limits but it's close enough to existing capability to be a pretty easy ask.
>The heatshield held out for a much longer time, the asymmetric heating on the flaps was interesting. I had guessed that all four flaps would have equivalent heating based on an approach that was basically that side of the rocket perpendicular to the flow but it seems like that isn't the case. Still it seems like they are close to having something workable here.
Heat shielding didn't look relevant at this section of the flight at all. The booster didn't have any shielding.
The booster actually does have heat shielding behind the engine bells, to protect against aerodynamic heating on the return. In some of today's footage you can see it glowing yellow.
However, Raptor 3 is supposed to obviate the need for this shielding.
Where did it glow yellow? What time in the video?
The booster doesn’t travel fast enough to need heat shielding ever.
It makes zero sense to use heat shielding behind the engine bells. Why? Think about it. If the booster renters the atmosphere engine bells first the engine bells would burn up BEFORE the air even touches the heat shield. If there are actually tiles there it’s just there to protect the booster from the heat of the exhaust.
> However, Raptor 3 is supposed to obviate the need for this shielding.
Not completely getting this. So there’s a case for the booster entering the atmosphere at orbital velocity engine bells first? I would think if they did this then THEY want the booster to burn up. Anything entering the atmosphere at that velocity needs to be made aerodynamically stable as it will be traveling faster then the speed of sound. This is what causes the heat. If you send something at the speed of sound engine bells first that’s not stable and is unlikely they will do that at all, with or without heat shielding.
I don’t think parent knows what he’s talking about.
> Where did it glow yellow? What time in the video?
This is a better view than the sibling comment linked. It's a greater close-up and you can clearly see the yellow glow behind the engine bells. This view is from Cosmic Perspective, a partner of Everyday Astronaut, whose video is linked:
https://www.youtube.com/live/pIKI7y3DTXk?si=LI4-xQ7UhnvITTiG...
In case you get confused due to lack of context, the booster shot is a replay. When Tim goes to split-screen view, the right-side image is a live view of the second stage ("Starship") as it re-enters from orbital speed. It is not a different angle on the booster that is shown on the left.
Later commentary explains that the heating behind the engine bells is due to atmospheric compression and SpaceX specifically orients the drop of the booster to focus heating in this spot.
You ought to do some basic research before making a post like this. Honestly might be the most baffling comment I've ever seen on HN---what kind of mindset does it take to have this kind of overriding confidence in one's own lay speculation?
The engine bells are made of different material than what's behind them (a material that has to directly withstand hot exhaust) and the aerodynamics of the ass end of the rocket are complex; some combination of these factors means this heating isn't an issue for the bells but is a concern for what's behind them. The booster does not re-enter from orbital velocity, but does come down engines first at supersonic speed. Stability in this orientation throughout the descent is a problem SpaceX solved with Falcon 9, and SH works the same way.
See the other reply to your comment for timestamped video of aerodynamic heating behind the engine bells.
Is it possible you're confusing the booster with the second stage (Starship)? They are not the same thing.
>You ought to do some basic research before making a post like this. Honestly might be the most baffling comment I've ever seen on HN---what kind of mindset does it take to have this kind of overriding confidence in one's own lay speculation?
Don't appreciate this at all. I can be wrong, but there's no need to make personal comments on my mindset.
I agree that HN etiquette is generally more polite. However, this was in direct response to your comment to him/her:
> I don’t think parent knows what he’s talking about.
We can all do better.
Here's a timestamped link to Scott Manley's commentary video where he points out that the yellow glow at the bottom of the booster is the heat shielding behind the engines.
https://youtu.be/Ysx4t7ICO58?t=550
They're talking here about Starship, not the booster.
How does this logically make sense? They said "it looks like the heat shield held out".
Where was a heat shield holding out?
On starship. Believe it or not, Chuck’s comment was about both booster and starship
And I’m saying he’s wrong no heat shield held out to anything.
The booster never travelled fast enough to need heat shielding ever. Only the starship needs it.
If chuck is talking about both likely he doesn’t know what he’s talking about.
Nothing could have prepared me for how that catch looked. I was sure the rocket was careening into the tower at the last second before it straightened out. The control algorithms must be incredible for the landing system to work within those small tolerances.
MIMO and nonlinear control theories are probably some of the hardest topics in all of engineering. SpaceX control system also has to compensate for the fuel moving inside their rockets so the control algorithms probably involve some kind of fast numerical fluid simulation.
Another interesting thing SpaceX is doing is to use consumer-grade chips in triple redundancy configurations instead of using $100,000+ radiation-hardened aerospace/defense grade chips.
> control system also has to compensate for the fuel moving inside their rockets
My stepfather worked as a programmer on the Apollo program, and the thing he always talked about as his biggest accomplishment was working on the "slosh problem" -- so yeah, props to the SpaceX team for managing that landing. And props to my stepdad for managing it on hardware that was... a billion times less capable? :-)
I might be misremembering but I think slosh was the failure cause for one of the three failed Falcon 1 flights. It was number 11 out of a pre-flight list of top 10 most likely failure scenarios. Definitely a difficult problem.
Did he get a chance to see any of the recent SpaceX accomplishments?
Nope, died fifteen years ago.
> Another interesting thing SpaceX is doing is to use consumer-grade chips in triple redundancy configurations instead of using $100,000+ radiation-hardened aerospace/defense grade chips.
This has been known in the high availability and safety systems industry for a while and a good book to learn these reliability engineering techniques is "Reliability Evaluation of Engineering Systems".
The book is available on amazon: https://a.co/d/1nH824K
One downside of using non-rad hard parts is degradation from TID (gamma) and latch up effects. You can have chips monitoring other chips to reset whenever they latch up but TID is mostly permanent. The good thing is that TID in LEO, where SpaceX mostly operates, is relatively lower than GEO so they can get by with mostly commercial parts. It's not like the big defense contractors haven't figured out the same thing, they do fly stuff using commercial parts as well, they are just slower to adopt the same culture. SpaceX and the companies that built components using commercial parts are building the new-space industry.
Could you surround your components with gamma-shielding materials and get away with off-the-shelf parts deeper in space?
"To block gamma rays completely, you need about 13.8 feet of water, 6.6 feet of concrete, or about 1.3 feet of lead."
https://www.epa.gov/radiation/radiation-basics#:~:text=Gamma....
I would wish you would use proper units. ;-)
But would using redundant systems separated in space connected with each other not offset the chance that they all would be affected at the same time? This is actually not rocket science .. just hard engineering and hardware/software design for redundant systems which is also usable on the ground.
Would they need to be blocked completely? Maybe a much thinner shielding would still produce a significant benefit?
(Though likely not of course ;)
High energy gammas have a relatively low cross section, most are going to pass right through the chip. If you add a too little shielding, or don’t layer shielding appropriately you are going to stop more gammas but produce lower energy x-rays from the shielding, which have a higher cross section, potentially increasing your chip dose.
Would it be possible to create a "skip" EM shield that does the opposite - increasing the energy of the gamma rays thereby reducing the likelihood of stopping them?
No idea how. Energies of most chemical bonds / electrons around atoms are not very high, not sufficient to emit proper gamma rays AFAICT. High-energy gamma rays are produced in nuclear reactions. While "clean" nuclear reactions that emit only gamma rays and not neutrons do exist, they are very high-energy and thus hard to initiate, and I don't think it would be easy to capture the energy of incoming gamma efficiently enough.
Yes, you can attenuate TID effects with reasonably thin aluminum shielding
Can it even be blocked completely? Every layer of material geometrically reduces the proportion of rays going through. Or am I wrong about that?
No, that's correct. Of course there's still some level of reduction beyond which the gamma rays don't matter, but where you want to place it is somewhat arbitrary.
A box with 1.3’ walls seems doable, actually, depending on how small the chips are. Might still be cheaper and more effective than specialized chips. But I know nothing, so am probably wrong.
I think the trouble is such a cube would weigh 12,400 pounds (a sphere maybe more reasonable at 6,510lb - without any room for electronics inside)
https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=+lead+cube+with+side+le...
Hah, beat me to the nerd snipe. Moreover, that sphere would cost $10k to make and, at a launch price of $1500/kg, cost $4.5 million to launch into orbit.
The aim for the launch price of the entire rocket is to be around 5 million (once it's fully re-usable and in production). Basically the price of fuel and maintenance.
So something might be off with your assumption of 1500 usd / kg.
IIRC the CPUs are much less susceptible to damage when powered-off ? So have a bunch of them in cold standby or even as additional pluggable modules on missions with humans on board & swap to good ones when needed? :)
How long until they can build that massive box, stage it in orbit, and pick it up/put it down as needed?
I can't decide if I'm joking or not.
Lead is extremely dense so carry 1.3' walls of lead is probably more expensive than just having more redundancy or using better quality chips.
If the only thing that effectively shields these processors from radiation is lead, concrete etc (per earlier comments), what design changes / quality improvements can compensate?
Does liquid fuel protect as well as water? Suspend the computers in the center of the fuel tank.
Just put the electronics in the middle of the header tank.
You don't need to block gamma radiation completely to increase the electronics reliability :)
Maybe you could improve the system availability considerably by a bit of gamma radiation protection combined with some more parallelism of the components ..
Usually partial blockage is worse, because you end up with a spray of secondary particles instead of a single ray.
Maybe the secondaries could be blocked by different/lighter materials ? Basically a Whipple Shield for radiation. :)
Stopping power is basically correlated with mass.
This may be true for high energy particles, but the majority of TID damage is done by higher flux lower energy, for which shielding is often viable!
The point is that shielding turns a single high energy particle that would otherwise strike and probably destroy a single transistor, into a veritable spray of lower energy particles causing bit flips or worse all over the circuit. This spray of particles can be stopped... with 1.3 feet of lead shielding.
Makes intuitive sense, thanks for the insight.
A second layer blockage for the secondary particles wouldn't have to be as dense or am I missing important physics?
(I guess a lot of gamma radiation would still reach this second layer so please ignore my question :)
Keep adding layers until you get to 1.3 feet of lead and it’ll work.
haha thanks for the correction - I was under the Turtles All the Way Down mindset :)
Isn't that more like how you make bombs than armors more effective - with backside spalling and secondary fragmentations?
can you block a hemisphere? the other 2pi steradians are shielded by the earth...
More water in orbit sounds like a good idea to me
In reading Musk's biography,
"Hollman also found that creativity got him a long way. He discovered, for example, that changing the seals on some readily available car wash valves made them good enough to be used with rocket fuel."
"Elon Musk" by Vance pg 123
Considering the political views of Elon Musk, it might be worth noting that his biographer is not the same Vance who is currently running for election as vice-president of the USA!
There's a Lowes across the street from 1 Rocket Rd in Hawthorne.
I doubt any Lowes parts made it to space, but you know some went into test articles
I have seen some people who decide to keep moving forward with whatever they have at the time. Sure what they produce is way less than perfect, but what they produce is way ahead of what everybody else is doing.
Perhaps the key is to be relentless, and resourceful.
From an article for this I remember one more interesting side effects of this approach - the flight computer ends up as a generic x86/ARM board that the engineers can just have on their desk during development. Previously the dev boards would use the same rad hard chips and would be as expensive and scarse as flight hardware, resulting in much harder development & engineers having much less experience with the real hardware.
Aviation pioneered the use of redundancy in order to survive failures.
The Fukushima and Deepwater Horizon disasters show that this knowledge has not penetrated other industries.
Plenty of industries know about redundancy.
But it turns out, it doesn't matter how many redundant backup diesel generators you've got if a 45-foot wave comes along and they're all left underwater.
... and you put all of them in the basement :/
Thank you very much for the reference!
You're welcome :)
I always thought the liquid sloshing would be one of the hardest to simulate (considering how chaotic fluid mechanics is). Interestingly, I think this caused the 2nd Falcon launch to fail (the LOX sloshing).
It is difficult, but there are modeling approaches that work, such as VoF (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volume_of_fluid_method). Basically, in addition to velocity, pressure, temperature, etc., you store an additional scalar in each cell of your computational mesh representing the liquid's volume fraction. Then, you solve an additional equation to transport that scalar.
Solving the Navier-Stokes equations numerically in 3D is very time-consuming, even on HPC clusters, not to mention the additional modeling required for multiphase flows. Your answer implies that the solutions are obtained almost instantaneously, which is not the case.
Oh no, apologies if that was the impression I gave!! I actually perform CFD simulations in HPC clusters, and in fact I'm an admin of the small cluster at my research institute =)
These are indeed heavy computations. What I meant is that VoF is one additional equation to be solved besides the N-S equations (either filtered as in LES or Reynolds-averaged as in RANS), the energy equation, your turbulence model equations, and so on. Certainly, not instantaneous at all, but simply an additional "simple" model that we can hook into our current way of doing CFD.
So, my point was, sloshing is a problem that we know how to simulate, although certainly you need HPC resources. Though, looking at those 100k NVIDIA H100 Elon has, I guess they have them! :P
I'm curious, how long time wise do these type of "heavy computations" take on clusters of HPCs?
It really depends on the problem to be solved (domain size, complexity of physical phenomena such as turbulence model, heat transfer, acoustics, multiphase flows, combustion, etc., number of time steps required...). In our case we perform for instance simulations of turbomachinery acoustics that can take 3-4 weeks running in a few hundreds of CPU cores, combustion acoustics simulations that can take a week or two running in 1k-2k cores...
what if you had 100k H100s
In reality few codes are capable of effectively parallelizing to so many computing processes. But, how cool would it be?
I think the reason these kind of simulations are fast enough is because they are very coarse and approximate. Don't think of asking how exactly the foam swirls around the individual longerons, more like a very rough estimation of which side of the tank the liquid is slumped to. Remember it doesn't have to be "exact" just close enough to be useful.
By their very nature model predictive controllers operate in a world where not everything is perfectly modelled. Engineers do their best and whatever is left is the "error" the controller is trying to deal with.
Or you compute variations ahead of time and do a situation based lookup, hoing through loops if a situation ressembles another one.
Maybe they don't need to model the fluid dynamics, they just need to detect the mass movement / acceleration forces caused by it, and use those sensor inputs to inform a picture that's fed into their correction thursting.
Sort of like how you can balance a few pitchers of beer on a tray in your hand by remaining aware of the weight, even when people remove one! hahaha :)
Still if there indeed is "free" mass moving about, you need to make sure your control inputs don't make it slosh harder, so you compensate for that, so it sloshes even harder, etc - basically avoiding oscilation. :)
Yeah..ah, control theory. Heh :)
They don't need to solve the Navier-Stokes equations, they don't care how the fluid is actually behaving, they just need to approximate how the mass is moving within a margin of error that the control system can handle.
Maybe the tank is just not a large hollow structure but contains fins/compartments/whatever to restrict the sloshing motion and it's not that big a contribution to the overall motion.
If it's no stronger than a sudden wind gust, it's just something the controller has to be able to take care of without a heads-up.
These are indeed part of the solution and are known as baffles. They have risks of their own, e.g.: https://wccftech.com/baffling-baffles-musk-explains-why-spac...
In the first spacex rocket Musk thought that it was a good idea to not install baffles. He learned from experience that they are indeed needed.
I remember a very similar anecdote about Von Braun & the early Juno/Jupiter rockets - with someone pointing out issues with sloshing on a press conference & Von Braun brushing it off as insignificant.
Then the next launch crashed due to slosh induced oscillation - and the one rocket after that had anti-slosh baffles. ;-)
That’s how tanks in race cars are made. Another solution is fill the tank with some kind of sponge-like material.
Sometimes… the baffles break off, and then become surfboard projectiles inside the tank.
More fluid dynamics
That would be far too heavy in this case. :)
That is how they build the tank in Formula One Racing (and probably many other race cars, I guess)
They probably pre solved a bunch of scenarios and interpolate between them known solutions
That usually doesn't work for chaotic systems.
If the computation is too difficult, another approach is build a test stand and try methods until it works.
Which is why we use wind tunnels, for example.
Wouldn't it burn most of the fuel to mitigate the effect?
At least for the retro-propulsive landing burn, I think the modeling problem is probably aided by the high G-forces that must keep the fuel very close to the bottom of the tank. Even before re-light the booster is falling near terminal velocity (I think?), so the fuel is likely sitting at the bottom.
I think it's a huge problem when re-lighting the engines in orbit, though.
Also IIRC the massive main tanks in Super Heavy should be basically empty at landing & the landings propelants come from a set of small header tabks that are near the central axis of the vehicle & arr completely full. This should reduce or even fully remove sloshing issues at landing time.
Iirc cold gas thrusters are used before ignition to provide some acceleration to force the fuel to the bottom of the tank.
The technical term for that is 'ullage'.
See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ullage_motor
I think some Kerbel Space Program players have attempted to approximate the liquid sloshing as an inverted single or double pendulum problem inside the rocket that the control algorithm has to take into consideration in addition to the primary control of the rocket.
Has it been considered to spin the fuel via some centrifuge mechanism as a way to remove sloshing from the equation, or is that more complex/expensive/error-prone than just predicting it via simulation?
I'm thinking we will eventually end up with "active fuel management" techniques like this for in space vehicles.
Bug tanks make sense there & they might not be always full. So I can imagine all kind of interesting ways you can work with the fuel in zero go to avoid not only slosh but also the need for ullage thrusters. Eq. some programmable nozzles using in-tank gas to nudge liquid fuel blobs to move in the right direction. Or even some nets or bags that herd in the fuel in the middle of the tank + prevent it from directly touching the side, reducing boil-off or refrigeration requirements. :)
Maybe they just use pressure sensors to tell where the fluid is within the tank.
Even a real-time simulation should have some measurements to self correct to some degree. Otherwise it'll diverge.
There wouldn’t be a whole lot of fuel left by the time it’s back to land so likely an irrelevant factor.
Reminds me of the early days of Google File System.
They used trios of regular consumer grade disks/servers etc as a cluster and it looked like a single node.
They had to replace a LOT of hardware but this was still cheaper than big iron industrial grades servers.
Interestingly cheap redundancy is also how life does things for the most part. Most biological organisms just replicate a lot to guarantee success, so it's clearly a good strategy and an efficient use of energy.
Efficient as in evolution or in business: you just need to be more efficient than most of the peers
People don't realize how powerful applied math (especially in the areas you've mentioned) has become. Same tools can be applied to people in the ad tech/social media.
Just as a note, Space Engineers has a mod that accounts for fuel in the tanks and also various orbital mods. If one feels inclined to try it for themselves ;)
as someone who absolutely loves SE -- please don't.
the orbital and planetary mechanics kind of suck. They're meant to provide a decent 'arcade realism' for the sake of player/player interactions and pvp/pve.
if you want to experience fuel slosh/weight during a vertical ascent/descent go with kerbal. It models a lot of that stuff without mods -- and mods can make the model even more accurate.
Reliability is not based on a system that cannot fail. It is based on a system that can survive failure.
The canonical paper on handling software failures: https://erlang.org/download/armstrong_thesis_2003.pdf
There's much more to it than the programming language.
Algorithms can be faulty as well.
> There's much more to it than the programming language.
Which was never claimed.
That paper is a little bit about Erlang and a whole lot about OTP and other methodology and design technique.
It is still, very much "the paper" for distributed systems, though its applicability to this particular problem is limited.
A system (whole) that can survive the failure of (some of the) individual parts. Up to a limit.
… or cannot fail
"instead of using $100,000+ radiation-hardened aerospace/defense grade chips"
Well, that makes perfect sense considering that both the spaceport infrastructure, and the booster need to do their calculation on the ground level instead of the highly radiated environment that is space. However, for the rockets themselves, which happen to reach that harsh environment, they may use more resilient and expensive hardware in the future, after passing over the current "let it splash in the Indian Ocean" development and testing phases.
I know MPC takes a LOT of compute power. It's not like a finely tuned PID loop or even a cascade of PID loops, computationally.
Does anyone know (or have educated speculation on) what kind of hardware is running these algorithms? Like, do they have a linux machine that's running the control loops? Are we talking megabytes, gigabytes of SRAM?
I would think no -- you would definitely need hard real time for something like this. But my only experience with real time systems is in tiny MCUs with kb of SRAM. That's definitely too small for a controller like this.
Really curious about the nuts and bolts of this.
MPC doesn't need to take a ton of compute power. It all comes down to how sophisticated the underlying model is. You can have a MPC with 20 variables and run it at multiple kilohertz on a tiny microcontroller.
When you build something like this, you're torn between having a big model that represents everything and a smaller model that is easier to validate and reason about. Based on simulation, you might go for a smaller model that "knows" to stay away from operating areas where hidden variables (like really complicated tank slosh) invalidate the small model.
I doubt the actual control loop is too much processing, but it's certainly possible to build controllers with SDRAM, millions of variables of state, and hard realtime processing, though I wouldn't build it on top of preempt-rt. ;)
They have publicly discussed using Linux with RT kernel!
It would be a real time OS running it for sure. Which one I don't know.
how much liquid fuel is present when it lands? I assumed all the clouds it was giving off was it dumping fuel to make sure it was empty on landing
Less than 5% of a full load. Any extra fuel you brought to the edge of space and back is lost performance, so substantial efforts are made to minimize this lost mass fraction.
That's probably venting of excess pressurants and/or an engine purge.
I'm not an engineer, but is there a reason why they can't french press (sans filter) the fuel toward the bottom of the tank as it empties?
(Not an engineer either) My understanding is that it's been done before on smaller scales but having a giant piston in the tank requires a good seal, railings to keep it straight, and overall way too much mass and rigidity. Consider that the tank walls are only a few millimeters thick.
Instead, it's more common to use gasses injected at the top of the tank to push the liquid to the bottom. Falcon 9 uses helium. Starship uses https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autogenous_pressurization as well as small header tanks for the landing propellants.
https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/19700023342/downloads/19... (search for "slosh" or "shaping network")
I never thought of using fluid dynamics in the rocket stabilization algorithm—maybe it's something that could be useful to prevent many of the accidents involving liquid-transport trucks
I have been told by people who worked on them that you get radiation hardened aerospace/defence grade chips by backing off the clock speed about 20% to give signal stabilization slightly longer time. I can understand the population being confused about this but industry being confused seems to have more to do with regulatory capture and beaurocratic moats which SpaceX does seem to be bypassing.
I'm sure there are many hardening processes - from the modified COTS parts, all the way to presumably much more expensive custom substrates like: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silicon_on_sapphire
You also have to add massive amounts (relatively) of static sink by approaches like ‘silicon on insulator’ to prevent energetic electrons from hopping into the transistor layer.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Model_predictive_control
http://cse.lab.imtlucca.it/~bemporad/publications/papers/ecc...
I spent 2 semesters covering controls and I barely felt like I learned anything.
> MIMO and nonlinear control theories are probably some of the hardest topics in all of engineering.
I am curious but clueless about these problems, can you expand more?
Google is a good place to start. https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Control_Systems/MIMO_Systems
> SpaceX control system also has to compensate for the fuel moving inside their rockets so the control algorithms probably involve some kind of fast numerical fluid simulation.
Surely this isn't necessary with a small enough sensor granularity or whatever the terminology is. You can have very dumb software if it reacts quickly enough to changes in perception.
Here’s a video from a farther vantage point that gives a better perspective on the landing process:
https://x.com/shaunmmaguire/status/1845444890764644694
The little boy who was lifted on his dad’s shoulders got me emotional.
Wow, those pressure waves! Didn't see them yet, on all the close up footage. Thx for posting
That's amazing footage, and you're right about the perspective: from the official feed the distances seem compressed compared to what we see in this footage.
That was one of the greatest things I've ever seen.
Literally brought me to tears, watching that happen.
Can you explain why? I don't understand why this is so important
I certainly can explain it, I'm just not sure I can do it in a way that you could understand. If you yell me what's one of the greatest things you have seen and why, I might be able to better relate.
I know the control algorithms are the mind-blowing part here but,
does anyone have any literature about how the Rocket localized itself with respect to the chopstick arms? It must've been some combination of GPS and Radar pings to the arms?
And then the onboard IMU to make sure it hits it straight.
Great question! Could just be Real-Time Kinematic (RTK) GPS like someone mentioned. Essentially the landing arms know their position very precisely and they measure the tiny errors in GPS data, and send that correction data live to the rocket in real-time as it's landing. Once the rocket gets very very close it could also just be using vision systems to zero-in on exactly where the chopsticks are.
To speculate more, they could also be using something like ultra-wide band positioning. This relies on the same time-of-flight principle as GPS but instead of using satellites in orbit to provide the precise time information you rely on various nearby ground stations. Would only be useful right at the final approach, the last couple hundred meters, but it's another way they could get very very precise position information. (fun fact: Ultra Wide band positioning is also how iPhones can locate AirTags with centimeter accuracy)
ooooo Yea forgot about RTK GPS. I’ve always found them to be so brittle but that’s because I’m in a city.
In the wide open sky, I’m guessing it’s pretty reliable.
Vision systems would be pretty useless with the low visibility of the smoke and fire. So I thought maybe it was some kind of radar configuration.
Anyways, I’d pay a lot of money to pick the brain of the GNC team here.
Why bother with GPS or other "absolute" coordinate systems? Once the rocket's in close, all that matters is relative position and orientation of the rocket with respect to the landing apparatus. Eg, if you had many sensors in known locations on the rocket and many sensors in known locations on the landing apparatus, and you could measure relative positions between all pairs of these sensors, you could get extremely precise relative position/orientation information without beaming information to satellites or whatever.
From the control point of view, isn't this exactly the same as F9 landing on a pad, except the pad is virtual, floating in between the chopsticks and the ground? Or course one difference is that the approach needs to be from the correct direction.
A major difference is that F9 (landing on a wide flat pad) had a quite wide acceptable horizontal error, 10 meters or more, whereas I think this (landing between two chopsticks) needs like ~1 meter accuracy in the radial direction.
I seems to remember some article mentioning the Falcon 9 using radar (+ presumably other sensors) & even having a landing site map uploaded (mainly for the return to launch site scenarios) with prioritized exclusion zones in case of a landing failure.
Hans Koenigsmann alluded to mapping during the CRS-16 post-flight press conference.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tVSPCPoc8hs&t=373
Could just be differential/rtk GPS. You can get incredible precision with that.
super good question, especially with all the tilting involved, which would make visual servoing difficult. Maybe some form of beacons on the ground?
The booster was falling at 4500 Km/h 30 seconds before the catch with 2-3% fuel left. How is that amount of fuel remotely enough to stop the downward momentum?
First off, the booster was going about 1250 km/h when it started its landing burn, it relied purely on drag to get it slowed down to that speed.
Going by the telemetry of the seconds before the landing burn and noting the speed vs time, it seems drag was around 40 m/s^2 when it was going at around 3000 km/h. Since drag depends on velocity squared though, it had reduced to just above 10 m/s^2 just before the engines lit at 1250 km/h, and so would quickly become negligible once the engines lit.
Going by Wikipedia, the Super Heavy[1] has 3400000 kg of fuel at launch, so 3% of that is about 102000 kg. For the landing burn, it used 13 Raptor v3 engines[2] to scrub speed. Each Raptor flows about 650 kg/s max, so 3% fuel is enough for about 12 seconds for the 13 engines.
The empty mass of the Super Heavy is about 275000 kg, so about 377000 kg before the landing burn with 3% fuel.
Using the sea-level vs vacuum performance of the Raptor v2 engines, one can estimate that each Raptor v3 produces about 2.45 NM of force at sea-level. So 13 of them would produce about 31.85 MN of force.
Using Newton's second law, F=ma, this gives an initial deceleration of about 84 m/s^2 and about 104 m/s^2 when empty. If we do a rough spreadsheet integration, we get that a burn of roughly 4 seconds is needed to scrub the speed assuming no other forces.
Now, comparing this with reality, the full 13 engines were lit for a little over 5 seconds.
In my simplified calculations I was assuming full throttle the whole way, which obviously isn't realistic, and I also assumed 3% fuel. So over all I think that's a pretty decent estimation.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX_Super_Heavy#Engines
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX_Raptor
"... Super Heavy[1] has 3400000 kg of fuel at launch ..."
So, 34M kg of fuel has to be burned (in this booster alone) to facilitate a flight ... and I see that the propellant is CH4 / LOX[1].
Burning methane is much, much better than simply releasing methane but the release becomes CO2 instead ...
What is the back-of-the-envelope conversion of 34M kg CH4 vs., for instance, 34M kg of kerosene/JP ?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX_Super_Heavy#Engines
Methane has 28% more energy per kg than kerosene and also produces slightly less CO2 (2.75kg CO2/kg burned vs 3.00 for kerosene) when burned [1]. SpaceX uses a 78:22 LOX to CH4 ratio, so for 34M kg of fuel burned, 20.57M kg of CO2 are produced (34×0.22×2.75).
[1] https://www.engineeringtoolbox.com/co2-emission-fuels-d_1085... [2] https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1298426245991063554?lang=en
Somewhat tangential, but as far as rocket fuels go energy per volume is also an important metric to consider. It's one of the (several) reasons hydrogen isn't quite as good for rockets in practice as it is in theory - while hydrogen has tons of energy per unit mass (120-142 MJ/kg for hydrogen vs. 50-55 MJ/kg for methane and 43.1-46.2 MJ/kg), it has a far lower density (70.85 kg/m3 vs. 422.8 kg/m3 for liquid methane and 820 kg/m3 for kerosene). As a result, you need quite a bit more tankage for a given amount of energy from hydrogen compared to what methane/kerosene requires.
IIRC there's a tradeoff between efficiency and thrust as well. Heavier fuels aren't quite as energy-efficient, but it's easier for them to develop a lot of thrust, which is important for the initial stages of launch. If I'm remembering events described in Ignition! correctly this led to "thrust density" being something that was optimized for - to the point that there were experiments with mixing mercury into the fuel!
[0]: https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/facts-and-figu...
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kerosene
Correction (can't edit the post anymore): As another commenter pointed out, the rocket can carry 3.4M kg of fuel, not 34M kg.
3.4 million, not 34 million. And that includes the weight of the liquid oxygen, which is heavier than the methane.
What kind of work do you do that you're able to understand this stuff? Genuinely curious. I'm way beyond my depth trying to follow
Just a programmer, though been interested in physics since I was a teen and did take a bachelor degree in simulation (mainly physics).
Long ago though so rusty, $dayjob doesn't involve any advanced math at all.
edit: To expand, the "rough spreadsheet integration" was just the Euler method[1] assuming a constant acceleration. So
The acceleration comes from F=ma as mentioned, where F is the force of the engines (Newtons), m is the mass of the rocket (kg) and a is the acceleration (m/s^2). Solving for a we get a = F/m and we get To make things easy I assumed the weight of the rocket was constant at each timestep, but if we take dt to be small enough it's a decent enough approximation. For each timestep I also updated the mass using the estimated mass flow: I started with m(0) = 377000 kg, v(0) = 1250 km/h = 347 m/s, and a constant -31850000 N force from the engines.Using dt = 0.1 seconds, I got almost exactly 4 seconds until the velocity reached zero.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euler_method
> 650 * dt
That should of course be 13 * 650 * dt.
Newton's laws of mechanics are high-school physics IIRC; my son studied them at 8th grade or so. They are really simple; an evening with Wikipedia or 3blue1brown or whatever floats your boat will let you get sufficient understanding, provided you're also comfortable with high-school math.
this is ap hs physics or uni 1st year physics
You can do a lot with basic physics if you understand it well
That's excellent work, only nit is I think these were not the v3 raptors. I think they're just now starting production of those, so they still have a bunch of earlier ones they need to use up in these early test flights. This actually makes your calculation more accurate, as earlier versions will need a slightly longer burn time.
Ah, good catch, I must have misread the Wikipedia page. I misread that they were included in the rocket in August. Reading the Raptor page more closely I also see that the 2.75 MN of the Raptor V3 are supposed to be at sea-level.
Anyway, plugging in the Raptor V2 thrust numbers the approximation increases to 4.25 seconds. This is in line with the thrust I used for the V3 being ~8% higher than the V2 thrust figures.
Because the rocket weighs a small fraction of what it did at launch, specifically because it only has 2-3% fuel left.
Fuel is the vast majority of the vehicle weight at launch, kind of like an empty vs full can of soda.
The atmosphere does its bit to slow down the booster as well. It’d be interesting to see a plot of the power output over time on reentry but I’ve always assumed the motors aren’t doing a lot of work other than keeping the booster stable, until the very end.
Yes, for most of the booster return it’s ‘gliding’ with the rocket engines completely shut down.
They ignite a subset of engines just a few seconds before landing for the final slowdown and maneuvering.
Edit: here is a video from further away that shows the rocket gliding in under control of the grid fins before the engines light and execute the final landing maneuver:
https://x.com/shaunmmaguire/status/1845444890764644694
> Yes, for most of the booster return it’s ‘gliding’ with the rocket engines completely shut down.
Watching the video, it looked like the bottom of the rocket was glowing hot, but the engines were cool. I imagine that means they were probably running some amount of methane through the engine bells to cool them.
Super heavy probably makes certain aspects (unrelated to the tower catching the booster) of landing much easier, by virtue of its greater mass. Timing with the Falcon 9 was always essential, because the minimum thrust (with one motor, throttled all the way back) of one of the engines was enough that if you left the motor running, the booster would start to rise. Time the beginning of the final burn incorrectly and you had a real problem, with the booster either crashing or rising at the end and... then crashing, but with Super Heavy, it might simply be a matter of having to compute a slightly different sequence for shutting off the engines.
They sure made it look easy...
Super Heavy is easier to control on landing because it's using 3 engines so has better directional control, and it can throttle those engines down into a sustained hover, which is what it does before being "caught" by the arms.
Surprising to see this work first time though - I don't recall them doing any hover and lateral movement tests, but I assume they must have done.
What's also wild is that the booster isn't being caught/supported by those giant grid fins, but rather by small lifting pins just below them, and seems to only have two of these (one on either side), so it also has to get it's rotational position right so those pins engage with (are supported by) the arms.
Yeah, but even without fuel the booster weighs 200 tons. It's pretty wild to have 200 tons of steel incoming at supersonic speed, then nailing a gentle pinpoint landing like that !
Yeah if the engines didn’t light and it hit the launch facility that whole place would be a crater. The whole thing was shocking to me but how fast it was coming down was extra shocking haha. I wonder what deceleration forces were at play because when the engines lit the booster slowed down very fast.
It weighs about 10% of what it did at liftoff, but half of the engines fire to slow it down.
Also I don't think the telemetry on the feed is that accurate, so with all of the atmospheric braking, it was probably going a bit slower than the 1200km/h at engine reignition.
Note that the energy of 3% of the propellant (~100 GJ) could theoretically get the empty booster (100,000 kg) to a little over 5000 km/h if properly applied.
Watched several times, amazing stuff.
Had flashbacks to playing Jupiter Landing on the C64!
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jupiter_Lander
Edit: SpaceX should create a simple 'catch' the rocket game. Play in browser style. Just for kicks and marketing.
> SpaceX should create a simple 'catch' the rocket game. Play in browser style. Just for kicks and marketing.
They did: https://starshipthegame.spacex.com/
I succeeded with a High Score of -287!
> Edit: SpaceX should create a simple 'catch' the rocket game. Play in browser style. Just for kicks and marketing.
there is, it was discussed in the FAA thread.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41821220
This is a pretty fun game. Not so easy. Good job to the creator for having added some mechanics that make it work.
This one is not from SpaceX, but gives way more fun: https://mechazilla.io/
That's great, really shows how they are "threading a needle" on the control side of things.
Shameless plug for my own project with a similar bent - write your own lunar lander autopilot in browser
lunar.unnecessarymodification.com
Very cool :) I got a good enough score in the basic scenario by playing around a bit but it would be cool if you could link some kind of tutorial (e.g. to a digital PID video or something like that).
very fun got 51! with fuel limit + mass enabled.
so now managed to save 63% fuel, but score doesn't seem to take this into account (still 51)..
Felt special witnessing history, was delighted my kids and their friends all were glued to the TV for it also.
I thought the same, screamed out "ouch that doesn't look good!" right before the catch.
The last part of the live stream they showed footage from a different angle and there it didn't look too bad though! For sure controlled.
Scott Manley put out a tweet that they went down towards a non-tower position until they were at three engine controlled burn, and only then did the side shift.
Timestamp of the different angle?
https://youtu.be/eXsT2HT171o?si=gUmdFvU4l-9ZiWrv&t=4237
A clip from some news program popped up on YouTube, just a two minutes clip of the catch, I was convinced that it was reversed. The fact that this is possible, that they made it work is nothing short of amazing.
Prior launch landed 0.5cm away from the target location. This is equivalent to landing a 25 story building right on the foundation.
Absolutely impressive accuracy and precision.
timestamp for "catch" is around 40:00 for those curious
Yes, indeed. But I will add that the sheer size of the rocket helps in this regard. I think it is rather hard to appreciate the massive scale of the feat by watching videos.
There's also a very impressive sensor and actuator story.
The simulation they show at 21 min into the video is almost exactly like it happend in the end, to it seems it went perfectly as planned.
When Musk first proposed this, I thought he was crazy. It seemed like something a school boy would draw up. Now I think this will become routine and forgettable after a few more successes. Is there a word for that - something out of fiction becoming mundane?
2 related expressions: 1. Creeping Determinism - the idea that even magical leaps forward were somehow inevitable and were anticipated. 2. Nihil Admirari - the idea that wisdom is anticipating every possible thing that could happen, therefore a wise person would never be surprised.
But I lump both these together as the *"Wiseass Movable Feast"*
I thought it was plausible given the accuracy of F9 landings, though I still wonder how it will work at scale if one failure destroys the landing site. That could ruin the cost benefits.
Where his vision hit a lot of speed bumps is second stage reusability. Starship is a beautiful second stage to throw in the ocean. They’ll probably get it landing but the heat tiles will require a lot of refurbishment between flights. They’re going to have to figure something else out.
It took months to more than a year to repair shuttle’s heatshield in some cases. SpaceX replaced the entirety of the heatshield with a new design and a new ablative underlayment in a matter of weeks. I suspect they will be able to do it even quicker with design and process improvements. Small scale repairs of the heatshield between flights probably wont be all that big of a deal.
The fact that Starship is unmanned probably helps expedite the change process quite a bit vs. the manned Space Shuttle. If you want to "just try something" the most you can lose is money, and not create a national political scandal.
I think the problem with shuttle was more fundamental. most of the tiles for Shuttle were custom cut to fit exactly one spot on one orbiter. I've read that NASA replaced about 75 tiles per mission, and that 2/3rds of the cost of refurbishing a shuttle after flight was the TPS. so the cost of trying something out was massive.
I really don’t think it will ruin the cost benefit as much as you suggest, especially when they have multiple sites and multiple locations. It wound be catastrophic, but they are presumably building Tower like the rest of their hardware, and every time they launch it represents a $100M saving compared to the competition.
I'm expecting that SpaceX will have lots of towers, not just one (currently) or 3 or 4 (under way). It won't just be for redundancy. The duty cycle of a tower might simply not allow for the cadence that SpaceX wants to maintain. With Falcon 9 they currently have a 3x weekly launch cadence (which is unbelievable enough). With full reusability they might be able to get to daily and better cadence, so if the duty cycle of one tower does not support that (I assume right now it does not) then they'll need more towers.
A flight to Mars is currently going to require 10 tanker flights just to get enough fuel into orbit for 1 Starship trip. Containing liquid fuel for long in orbit will not be easy.
This likely means they are targeting 10 flights in a day at least. They've mentioned 1000 trips to Mars during one transit window, which means ~10000 Earth launches within 3 months, or >100 per day.
iirc they plan on making multiple launch sites so one getting damaged wont grind operations to a halt.
This happened with LLMs in a big way. Basically humanity surpassed some kind of AI milestone and we zoomed past the turing test in a big way. But thanks to social media everyone is sort of rolling their eyes at it.
"When Musk first proposed this, I thought he was crazy."
"Is there a word for that - something out of fiction becoming mundane?"
Musking?
Do the control algorithms use AI?
Actually this is a good question - there's a lot of control engineering research on Data-Driven Control Systems.
Check Steve Brunton youtube channel, he is one of the leaders in this area: https://youtu.be/gb_C9LcjDSI?si=xUjqUZ9-0MIFohX6
If I had to bet, I would bet against it. Boston Dynamics for example, for the longest time, didn't use anything other than Model-Predictive Control. Only recently have they started using RL
No. Way too hard to validate.
I think that catching a grain silo in mid air that fell in a semi-controlled way from effin low earth orbit is undeniably incredible.
SpaceX continues to blow me away with these unbelievably lofty ideas. I remember seeing their "grasshopper" flights years ago and they blew it up because they couldn't land it at the time, who knew within a few years they'd be doing this.
I think they still have "Grasshopper" (the custom test unit) sat outside at McGregor, it was F9R Dev1 (a modified F9 booster) that they had to destruct after one of the engines failed mid-hop.
They were originally going to do high-altitude tests with an "F9 dev2" (similar to some of the early starship test launches) - but they gave up and just did some testing with real landing Falcon 9s instead.
Video of the catch
> Mechazilla has caught the Super Heavy booster!
https://x.com/spacex/status/1845442658397049011
A phone video[1] from Mexico, with nice plume refraction of the Sun.
[1] https://x.com/Cosmo_556/status/1845554958604657051
10 minutes from 3h25m of this video shows launch and catch.
Historic viewing :)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YC87WmFN_As&t=3h25m14s
This angle is even more impressive IMO https://x.com/kimbal/status/1845451222750306344
It's very impressive to see the buildings next to it, the original video lacks any sense of scale
You can hear Elon Musk in the background.
Ha!
> Holy flying fuck, look at that thing!
Gold.
Naive question: I obviously expect there to be flames from the engines, but there were flames on the lower sides for quite a while after the catch – is that expected?
It is common for Starship prototypes to have uncontrolled fires, but it is obviously not a good thing.
For example, prototype number 10 exploded 8 minutes after landing [1] because of a seemingly insignificant fire at the bottom.
After today's flight there was a long lasting fire in the engine section, with occasional flaming pieces of plumbing raining down from the rocket. Examining the aftermath should help SpaceX to understand what improvements need to be made to prevent this from happening.
[1] https://youtu.be/XOQkk3ojNfM?t=38346
This highlights another thing I love about watching SpaceX's unprecedented rate of progress. They're managing the complex balance of risk, learning, time and budget extremely well. I'm not an expert in the relevant domains but even I've noticed and appreciated that the typical SpaceX development test always manages to get big chunks of new data, while still having some notable things not quite working.
It's an object lesson in rapid engineering development. If everything goes perfectly in a development test, it's a sign you're not moving fast enough (meaning not taking enough risk per increment to maximize learning). As valuable as Falcon, Starlink and Starship are, the biggest near-term value of SpaceX may be providing such a clear demonstration of well-executed "fail fast, learn fast" engineering that even politicians and bureaucrats can understand it.
Scott Manley said it was a purposeful flare off of methane to prevent over pressureization.
Maybe the flare on the side started as purposeful. But there was also a fire inside, between the engines, with flaming pieces of some pipes or cables raining down from the rocket. You can see one example of this just after this timestamp: https://youtu.be/YC87WmFN_As?t=12928
Yeah i see what you are talking about now.
This same issue was common on early Falcon 9 landings and took a while to fully eliminate.
Probably not expected, but the nice thing is that they don't have to pull the vehicle off the bottom of the ocean to study what happened there.
You usually see some down near the engines after a Falcon 9 landing.
The vent out the side before touchdown didn’t look right, though. Something blew, but non-critically.
It does look like venting, but on the Everyday Astronaut video feed it also looked like a COPV inside one of the strakes looked like it exploded as well.
It looked to me like the fire was on the fuel intake valves and if you watch carefully that area was scoured by the nozzle output when it was first slowing down so it probably blew through the shutoff valves or something
My guess is that it's venting out the system pressure, and it's safer to burn it.
If not an intended vent, probably some methane leak. Given that they have the first stage intact, they will know exactly what happened very soon. Yet another advantage of having the rocket returned instead of sinking it in the ocean.
In some of the views of the landing it's clear that the flames are from a methane vent. I.e., it's really not a problem.
I'd love to see followup analysis of what that fire was all about.
Desirable? Probably not. Expected? Yeah. Especially given that is the was pretty unexpected to work on the first try.
who cares... they did it and it didn't burn up or destroy the platform. rest is just nitpicking
> who cares...
I bet SpaceX does. They've solved the big problems, now it's time to solve the small problems and make reuse a reality.
Isn’t this a forum of hackers caring about the news? Everyone seems excited here and that excitement naturally leads into curiosity for many who identify as hackers.
Outside of maybe Boeing "who cares..." isn't a valid answer in engineering.
It's a prototype.
That's why it's not a catastrophe that something was unexpectedly on fire, not a reason to dismiss the question.
So the whole purpose of it is to identify issues to be resolved.
[flagged]
Please don't respond to a bad comment by breaking the site guidelines yourself. That only makes things worse.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
It's an interesting engineering question, not a slight.
Obviously the primary mission was successful, in spite of anomalies (good system design!), but people are and should be curious about this aspect.
There’s a bunch of people crapping on you who clearly haven’t been through a flight test campaigns.
100% with you. The teams I’ve worked with would be celebrating and trying to figure out what’s burning at the same time. And especially trying to figure out if there’s anything that they need to do to collect evidence for that investigation (eg zooming the remote PTZ cameras in on specific areas or things like that)
They have mission goals which were achieved (booster was caught). Goals that they didn't think they could do (Starship being within the buoys). While there was flames and those could be dangerous you judge the mission based on the planned outcomes but they will try to eliminate the anomalies to improve the next mission while still achieving the goals.
The thing is that no one is judging the mission based on this imperfection. It's just intellectual curiosity, which is a good thing. The comments that are getting down voted are all assuming some negative motive that just isn't present.
I wonder what will happen when they get to 99% reliability? They clean up and rebuild the Mechazilla every once a hundred catches, on that occasion that one fails?
I suspect there's already a whole "refurbishment" process for the crane even for non-reusable launches, and once it's working darn reliably, they can just have a bunch of them ready to go, and cycle once in a while.
The next one is already mostly built and very different from this one. They move fast.
I also expect if something fails a test in the way down you crash in the water rather than splat your catcher
The booster aims towards the shore until the landing burn starts, only then does it swing towards the tower. So, for the most part, failures should mean that the booster safely crashes into the water.
The plan is to have many, many Mechazillas.
They've landed over 300 Falcon boosters and haven't wrecked their barges yet I expect that this won't be a major issue.
That, and redundancy. The amount of cash you save allows you to do that.
Amazing achievement.
I'm just so happy to see this level of progress. This another big step for opening up space. To think that one day this will be considered normal. 150 Metric tons sent on a fully reusable rocket.
Thats like a 747 to space.
So, reusable is supposed to reduce the cost. But the space shuttle was reusable and it has been shutdown because it was too expensive. What is the differences between the two?
> space shuttle was reusable
SpaceX builds vehicles. The Shuttle was “reusable” because they needed a term between the default for transportation capital expenditures (e.g. trains, planes, cars and ships) and the modified missiles that defined post-War spaceflight. “Reusable” in the Shuttle’s context meant months of specialist overhaul time and the cost of a Falcon 9 launch in SRB booster replacements alone [0].
At the end of the day, in 2010, “the incremental cost per flight of the Space Shuttle was $409 million, or $14,186 per kilogram” [1]. ($591mm and $20,512 in 2024 dollars, respectively [2].) SpaceX’s prices per kg are around $3,170 on Falcon 9 [3] and $1,520 for Falcon Heavy [4]. Starship should bring those costs below $1000.
[0] https://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?topic=51959.0
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_program
[2] https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/
[3] https://www.spacex.com/media/Capabilities&Services.pdf LEO
[4] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falcon_Heavy LEO, theoretical
> Starship should bring those costs below $1000.
It might even bring the costs below $100/kg.
It might, but it's also at a scale where people can dust off the old plans for orbital rings and ask if this time the economics work out.
(My guess is the economics are fine, but the politics would kill it on earth, so the moon or mars will get one, but that's just an interested amateur opinion).
Once you put something big in the LEO, you'll have to be able to boost its orbit indefinitely, because the orbit will otherwise slowly decay.
If you have the infrastructure to build an orbital ring, you have the infrastructure to keep it supplied too
There is some SciFi story about civilization collapsing and the survivors worrying that the sky will fall on them hidden in there.
Already exists, Chasm City by Alastair Reynolds. They absolutely trash orbit by planning very badly and over-packing habitats.
Gotta make the individual pieces small enough to mostly burn up completely on rentry.
Term of art for this is "design for demise", i.e. make everything of pieces small enough and materials ablative enough that there's less than 1 in 10k chance that any debris will survive to the surface.
https://www.esa.int/Enabling_Support/Space_Engineering_Techn...
Planned obsolescence but in a good way.
There are relatively stable orbits over the equator.
Contiguous rings filling an entire orbit don't have much air resistance, and what little they do have is small in comparison to their momentum.
But yes, eventually things decay.
Presuming it’s in LEO. When and if we ever get around to building these things they probably won’t be in LEO at least not for long. Some of them might not even be constructed from materials launched from Earth.
That depends on how high the orbit is. If it is high enough, the decay will take centuries.
The L in LEO means we're talking about orbits that are not very big.
By definition, LEO extends up to 2,000 km. At that altitude orbital lifetimes can exceed 10,000 years.
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Orbital_Debris_Lifet...
IIRC, above something like geostationary they tend to decay upwards? Though the old orbital ring white paper wasn't suggesting anything like that, this was an alternative to needing to go so high in the first place.
(I may be misremembering or getting confused with a thing specific to tidal locking?)
That is indeed what you get with tidal forces - bodies closer than geostationary orbit lose angular momentum and decay inward, bodies further out steal angular momentum from Earth and move outward.
I suppose the same effect is there with satellites much smaller than the moon, but it would be tiny.
I wonder if they could have an orbit high enough to move away from earth with some kind of drag cables dangling from them into low orbit to counter the outward movement. Would that work?
These orbits have vastly different speeds though. Consider a high geosynchronous orbit vs. something like ISS which goes around the Earth in an hour or two.
but you are towing the cable and you'd only get so far down for the counteraction of force from gravity to pull on the cable. Would speed or friction on a cable be a problem.
You mean something like a skyhook?
Yes but no hook or anchor needed I'd assume. The cable alone in lower orbit would weigh enough to be pulled by gravity.
How does the orbit or an orbital ring decay?
[dead]
The main difference is that this is built by a private corporation who can't afford to throw money away, while the Space Shuttle was build by the government, and moreover it had to fulfill a number of conflicting requirements, and commercial profit was not one of them.
But on a more technical level. I think the vertical landing is the main difference. Vertical landing was obviously known and done by NASA, this is how the lunar modules landed on the Moon. But doing it on Earth, with vehicles weighing hundreds of times more, I don't think the world had that technical readiness a few decades ago, when the space shuttle was designed.
And another major difference is the mass manufacturing idea. From the start SpaceX planned for getting to mass manufacture its rockets. The Falcon rockets are much cheaper than any other alternatives even if you remove the reusability.
Then it's the methane burning engines. This was pure old fashioned engineering progress. SpaceX's engines are miracles of rocket engineering. Aside from that, the fuel choice is extremely smart. Methane is better than all other fuels, except for hydrogen. Hydrogen was the fuel of the space shuttle, but it's very tricky to work with. It has very low volumetric density, so the tank of the space shuttle was absolutely humongous. Hydrogen needs to be stored at an absurdly low cryogenic temperature, so this adds to the complexity. And that tank was not reusable, so it adds to the cost.
In order to land as a glider, you'll need wings, landing gear, doors, rudder, stabilizer, flight controls, streamlining, all the structure needed to support it, and a heat shield for all of it. All that complexity has to work reliably, too.
All of that adds tremendous weight, complexity, and cost.
> Methane is better than all other fuels
There are better fuels in terms of Isp and density. They have some downsides such as being corrosive or having highly toxic exhaust.
https://x.com/ToughSf/status/1453391050681327622
Yeah, methane is kind of second best (or worse) in many parameters, but most importantly, it's cheap, abundant, and easily and safely storable and transportable, and it does the job.
Also chosen as it may be possible to synthesize on Mars.
And while not the reason, also on Venus! Venus seems like a very interesting colonization target - gravity almost like on Earth, and there is a place in Venus atmosphere where temperature is around 30 degrees Celsius and pressure is 1 atmosphere (Earth); and human air is a lifting gas in Venus atmosphere. As a bonus, interaction of Venus atmosphere with the Sun produces a magnetic shield.
> temperature is around 30 degrees Celsius and pressure is 1 atmosphere (Earth)
And unbreathable and full of sulphuric acid. You may as well just stay in orbit.
Staying in orbit means risk of catastrophic failure on puncture and doesn't provide access to the heat of lower layers of Venus atmosphere that can be used as energy source or carbon source. You also have to think about heat management - big colony means gigantic radiators. And most importantly no gravity and no magnetic shield - these make Venus imho better colonization target than Mars.
On Venus, a puncture doesn't immediately destroy anything - because of equal pressure on each sides of the balloon wall. You have more than enough time to put on a protective coat and fix it.
And building more living space is much easier + you could source the material (carbon) on site.
I'd be a bit boring in your balloon above Venus though. At least on Mars you could wander around and check out the rocks or something.
You are going to have hundreds of years of fun terraforming Venus... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terraforming_of_Venus#/media...
> and commercial profit was not one of them
But it's high cost was the end of it.
Its high cost would (should!) have killed it regardless, but its low reliability was going to be a huge problem too, and arguably it's the lack of reliability that finally killed it.
The high cost should have killed the project before it ever flew, but that's not how governments behave.
What is all this rocketry doing for climate change if they're burning methane? Hopefully it's methane from landfills etc?
burning methane turns it into much less damaging CO2. They probably get it from Natural Gas that the US produces.
I did the math, and the impact is not negligible. One single launch releases the equivalent of 5000 tons of CO2. Elon wants to get to the point where there are thousands of Starships, each doing a few trips to orbits per day. That would be more than one millions launches per year, or more than 5 GT of CO2-equivalent. That's about 10% of the worldwide emissions today.
One million launches per year seems to be adequate trade for 10% global emissions. This level of technology implies we are able to reduce emissions elsewhere.
I think it’s ludicrously optimistic to think that this would substitute for reductions elsewhere. What possible mechanism could reduce 10% of global co2 emissions when many of these launches will be tourists and starlinks?
1 million launches per year implies at least a decade or two of development. There is a lot that can change in that time - for example energy production can move towards renewable and nuclear. Few decades more and we might get fusion too.
I agree with you. I was just stating a fact, not criticizing.
If we actually get to that point, we'll eventually be doing a lot more activity and manufacturing off the Earth where the CO2 emissions don't matter.
Presumably co2 emissions in LEO would end up in the atmosphere though?
The limiting effect for Starship launches won't be CO2 (direct air capture could counter that), it's injection of water into the stratosphere. Ballpark I think the limit would hit at about 100,000 launches/year.
Spacex might be a private company, but this project is funded by NASA, meaning the American taxpayer. Approved by a person whose last act was this approval before leaving NASA and joining Spacex (effectively putting money in their own pocket).
It is also yet to be seen how Starship will ever be profitable (outside of spending government money), who is going to pay for those launches and for what purpose. Other than Starlink, of course.
> this project is funded by NASA
Partially. They have a fixed-price contract to land humans on the Moon, and notably got that contract because they severely undercut the other bids and were the only bid that actually fit within the available budget: they bid $2.94B, while Blue Origin bid $5.99B and Dynetics $9.08B.
That 3 billion is also much less than what they're spending on the project.
With a payload volume of 8m diameter by 22m height you could fit a James Webb size telescope inside with minimal folding. The sunshield (21.2 m by 14.2m) would only need to fold along one axis and the mirror (6.6 m) could be monolithic instead of having to fold, probably only requiring the mounting points for the primary and secondary to be hinged. This shouldn't be discounted because it makes telescope design much simpler and less expensive.
It also allows for launching individual space station modules that have almost the same volume as the entire ISS in one launch.
Their plans for refuelling on orbit with tanker versions of the starship open up the entire solar system to unmanned missions with much shorter timelines and much higher payload size and weight.
The fact the entire system is re-usable will make it both cheaper and faster to use than any other launch system.
All of this combined mean that it won't just be countries and space programs bidding for space on launches, it puts space within reach of many corporations and some private individuals. This isn't conjecture, it's already happening with the Falcon 9. Starship will make it even more accessible.
> With a payload volume of 8m diameter by 22m height you could fit a James Webb size telescope inside with minimal folding.
Of course, that means you could also fit a James Webb-folded telescope except make it a lot bigger :-)
Probably need on-orbit refueling to work for that to happen, but they're working on it.
Just park the starship as the sun shield. Or two starship, or an origami starship that unfolds for more surface area, your own personal sun umbrella made from a starship.
Yes! that too.
> It also allows for launching individual space station modules that have almost the same volume as the entire ISS in one launch.
My favorite related thing is that the Starship itself could serve as a large space or moon station.
> but this project is funded by NASA
About 10% funded by NASA. Starship is a >$10B program; SpaceX is getting $3B for Artemis of which >2/3 is for operational tasks and moon-specific stuff that SpaceX aren't relevant for SpaceX's goals of LEO and Mars.
The Artemis money could evaporate and Starship would still make commercial sense and likely be a successful product.
The federal government smartly invested in SpaceX after being sued by SpaceX to fix rigging (things what the system working looks like).
Now taxpayers have a 10x return on investment.
The problem is that launch costs went down fast but satellite costs haven't gone down as fast and still have long development timelines. The other problem is the market for satellite services hasn't developed as fast as anticipated, except for starlink.
Starlink for all intents and purposes is the market for satellites now. All the other launches are nice to have extras.
Now personally I’m looking forward to NASA, ESA and JAXA to launch outer solar system probes like new horizons but with tons of fuel left in the tank to safely make orbit around there.
Having enough lift capacity to take a shot at putting a pair of telescopes out far enough to exploit solar gravitational lensing to resolve exo-planet surfaces would be a hell of a thing. Orbital refueling would mean we could reasonably build something big enough to be able to boost out that far (would still take decades to arrive).
Isn't that 500 AU out?
Yes, but the trick with getting there is building the vehicle. Time takes care of the rest (you'd do it using ion thrusters).
The whole design process for them is based around launches being expensive and taking a long time to plan. It will be very interesting to see what happens when the whole process gets used to launches being relatively cheap and frequent. No need to spend years making sure the design is perfect and will definitely last a long time if you can launch a new one in a week if you make a mistake.
Starlink is predicted to have something like 6.6B in revenue. SpaceX isn't a rocket company they are an ISP that launches rockets.
Is that long term or this year? Because honestly 6.6B is not a lot for their scale of operations.
That is projections for this year only with a target closer to 10 billion revenue next year.
SpaceX is profitable from that income alone, even allowing for starship development costs.
Things can only be cheap if you mass produce them. That tends to require standardization of components, and inevitably standardized components are a compromise between requirements, where up until now, saving mass was a critical requirement. If you don't have to care nearly so much about mass and volume, then that opens up many avenues for much cheaper standard satellite components.
I'm disappointed that you still can't order ten cubesats from Shenzen Satellite Supply Co via AliExpress.
> Spacex might be a private company, but this project is funded by NASA, meaning the American taxpayer.
So was the space shuttle, so that's not a difference between the launch costs of the two vehicles.
The purpose of funding SpaceX with taxpayer money is to make competitors that can launch rockets to space so that it is cheaper.
Exactly. Private companies like space X would not exist if NASA didn't deliberately make the market for Private space companies. That's what governments do, make markets.
Elon founded SpaceX w/o an expectation of subsidies.
And yet, without the funding for CRS from NASA Spacex would’ve gone broke or at least wouldn have built F9 much much later.
Think of the word ‘reusable’ in this case as less a binary descriptor but more of a scale of reusability.
Yes, both systems are reusable, but there are key differences in the refurbishment of the systems that partly explains the cost difference. It took more labor, resources and time to refurbish the shuttle. Also consider rapid reusability was a stretch goal when it was being designed, but we have come a loooong way since, spacex in particular has had it as a driving competitive differentiator for years now.
Another big difference is that NASA post Cold War was a skilled jobs program, with an incentive to do distributed, high overhead work to appease their bosses (congress), while SpaceX has the opposite.
> Yes, both systems are reusable, but there are key differences in the refurbishment of the systems that partly explains the cost difference. It took more labor, resources and time to refurbish the shuttle.
Starship uses essentially the same ceramic heat shield tiles as the Space Shuttle, so the fact the Shuttle had so much trouble with refurbishment doesn't mean that SpaceX has solved these refurbishment issues with the Starship upper stage.
Though the Starship lower stage, which contains the most expensive engines, doesn't have this problem. Since it doesn't need a heat shield. So partial reusability should be pretty realistic.
Shuttle's tiles were each unique. Starship is mostly clad with identical hexagonal tiles which can be mass produced and eventually refurbished by machine. A robot already welds on the tile fittings.
That was 24,300 unique parts rather than 1!
Now that's an exaggeration
More of an ignorant assumption. I asked ChatGPT now, and got this:
> In terms of shapes, the tiles were not uniform. In fact, there were over 17,000 different shapes used to fit specific areas of the shuttle's body. Each tile had to be individually manufactured and shaped to fit a precise location due to the complex curvature of the shuttle's surface. The unique shapes were necessary to ensure that every part of the shuttle received the proper protection against the extreme temperatures during re-entry.
Please don't cite LLMs for factual questions. They are prone to confabulation. Why not type the question "How many heat shield tiles did the Space Shuttle use?" into Google?
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b&sca_esv=11e08...
This gives a direct answer (24,300) while citing a NASA source.
Since I mentioned I got the info from ChatGPT, people can decide for themselves how much they trust it.
Note that the question here is how many uniquely shaped tiles there was, not the total number.
This is interesting because if you have to manufacture and keep in stock 17,000 separate tile shapes, that will be vastly more expensive than SpaceX who, from what I hear, only uses a singe hex shaped tile everywhere.
The tiles are very similar; the attachment system is very different (a big part of why Shuttle's were a pain to maintain) and Starship's simple shape means most of the tiles are the same (the ridiculous number of SKUs was another factor in Shuttle TPS costs).
Shuttle itself was refurbishable, but not rapidly re-usable. It was also incredibly expensive to build and refurbish. A shuttle launch also utilized boosters that were not re-usable.
Starship is supposed to be (and clearly well on the way to being) fully rapidly re-usable. That means all stages (in this case two) are re-usable, and that the capital and time required to get either stage flight ready again after a flight should be minimal.
Said another way – it is cheaper for SpaceX to build an entirely new Starship + Booster than it was to refurbish a Shuttle between flights, by a factor of about 4x ($90M for a Starship+Booster / $400m for Shuttle refurb).
The boosters for the Shuttle were reusable, but it turned out the cost of refurbishing them was similar if not higher than simply building new ones. Plus it contributed to the Challenger crash, see "Mr. Feynman Goes to Washington", https://calteches.library.caltech.edu/3570/1/Feynman.pdf
Economy of scale: starship can be "mass"-produced
Material: stainless steel is much cheaper
Percentage of reusability: boosters of shuttle cannot be reused, maintenance of shuttle itself is also very expensive (heat shields were pricey). whereas the starship stack has higher reuse percentage and allegedly cheaper to maintain.
The shuttle was not even reusable by any modern metric, the main tank was always expended, the boosters had to be recovered, fully disassembled and cleaned.
I'm not even sure the SRM case segments could be easily reused, given the tremendous stress. They were made of a very high strength steel (maraging steel, with a yield stress of something like 250,000 psi) operated with a safety factor of 1.4.
You've got a lot of responses on the difference of reusability, but the shuttle was also more expensive because it had to carry a lot of capabilities with it every time. If you were launching a satellite, you were carrying along the crew compartment and a couple astronauts. If you were bringing a few astronauts to the space station, you brought a cargo bay. And in either circumstance, you brought big wings. Starship can be filled with all cargo. And if you're just changing crew on the ISS, you could... not use Starship and launch a Falcon 9 instead. One of the mission profiles required by the Air Force for the shuttle was that it be able to rendezvous with a satellite, put it in the cargo bay, and return to Earth, all under 2 orbits and along a path that avoided flying over the Soviet Union, which required a rather large turn in-atmosphere to make it back to landing on the west coast.
One of the drivers was the need to Abort Once Around on a polar orbit launch from Vandenberg. The launch site rotates to the east during the orbit so cross range was needed. No such polar orbit launch (abort or otherwise) ever occurred, though.
> What is the differences between the two?
More than 40 years and many lessons learned.
SpaceX took advantage of tech from both the US and Russia, including the experience with the Space Shuttle. They have better computers, better metallurgy, advanced 3D printing and their own experience with the Falcon 9.
There is no guarantee that it will reduce the costs that much, but will all that experience, the chances are success are higher than with the Space Shuttle.
One big issue that isn't talked about much and that SpaceX takes very seriously is simply a lack of demand. There is only so much stuff you want to put in space. Satellites are expensive, and even with disposable rockets, the launch is only a smaller fraction of the cost. It is already a problem with the Falcon 9 as they have a bunch of rockets and not much to do with them. Starlink, orbital refueling, and crazy ideas like earth to earth transport are all ways to address this problem.
It was a problem for the Space Shuttle too, they couldn't achieve the economies of scale they planned it for. It was supposed to fly for routine maintenance missions but it didn't work out.
> lack of demand
What this also means is that if you want to get into the space economy, work on things to do in space, not yet another launch vehicle startup.
No one has answered with one of the biggest issues with the shuttle: each one was extremely custom. Every single heat shield tile was unique to a specific position and a specific shuttle. There were probably over a hundred million individual components in the Shuttle, and with many critical ones being custom, the time to refurbish it for a new launch was much longer.
This is in contrast to something like the falcon, which has a very standardized mfg process and components, which allows for really rapid iteration
Reusability increases costs if you don't reuse often enough.
The shuttle would have been much, much, cheaper per launch if it had flown more often. The expected costs for the shuttle included a range based on how often it flew which turned out to be reasonably accurate. They were much worse at predicting which end of the range they would be flying in. At the rate they ended up flying they had the extra costs of reusability without any of the benefits.
Starship is ludicrously expensive, but still much cheaper than even the best case for the Shuttle, and it has a guaranteed source of launches to help it benefit from resuability.
I’ve read that a shuttle refit after landing was so expensive and time consuming to render it useless…. Feel free to correct if wrong.
And, the market projections that indicated there would be enough payloads for large amounts of launches were also basically fraudulent.
The Space Shuttle was not fully reusable as the biggest single part, the orange tank, was destroyed every time. But more importantly, the orbiter and boosters needed 2+ months of refurbishment/rebuilding after every flight.
One of the design goals of Starship is for the booster and ship to relaunch with zero refurbishment. To literally land over the launchpad, refuel, and go back to orbit within hours without people even approaching them. The heat shield is the biggest risk to that goal IMO, and we saw today that it definitely sustained serious damage despite improvements. But if they ever get there then per-launch costs will be a tiny fraction of the Shuttle with 6x the payload.
Falcon 9 has already proven that partial reusability is economical. SpaceX has dominated the entire worldwide launch industry and their competitors are nation states with no need to make a profit.
The difference is that they have already proven to be the lowest cost and most reliable launcher due to reuse. This is them lapping the industry with second stage reusability.
SRB and tank were not re-usable. That’s the equivalent of the first stage you just saw getting caught
Shuttle SRB segments were fished from the ocean and refilled.
Yeah but salt water makes it about as difficult as building from scratch.
Then why didn't they stop?
> why didn't they stop?
They did [1].
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_retirement
Beyond the fact that they eventually did quit, the shuttle program was the public face of the US space program, and part of having more than one way to launch military stuff.
The military rapidly gave up on the Shuttle after the first accident. No shuttle was ever launched from the pad on the west coast at Vandenberg (plenty of F9s have been, though.)
SRBs were in fact reusable.
They were but the cost of refurbishment was almost more than just building new boosters. Thats why SLS is currently using Shuttle Derived Boosters but not worrying with reuse.
The Shuttle consisted of the shuttle (orbiter) itself, the external tank (not reusable), and the two boosters which could be reused after ocean recovery. The orbiter itself was slow and expensive to reuse since (among other things) all the heat shield tiles were inspected and 30-100 replaced between each launch. I don't know how much work was done to the engines between launches, but SpaceX's parts and cost reduction on the Raptor engine have to give it an advantage there.
StarShip consists of the Super Heavy booster that we saw "caught" today, and the StarShip (orbiter) itself. Having the booster return to launch site vs requiring ocean recovery should potentially increase cadence and reduce cost of reuse. StarShip is also meant to be reusable, although it remains to be seen how that will pan out. On the previous flight there was burn through from inadequate heat shielding - maybe we'll see an improvement with today's vehicle. I'd expect SpaceX to iteratively arrive at a quicker and more cost effective orbiter reuse procedure than NASA had with the shuttle, but how quick remains to be seen. Of course they are planning many of these to go on one-way trips to Mars rather than being reused.
> The orbiter itself was slow and expensive to reuse since (among other things) all the heat shield tiles were inspected and 30-100 replaced between each launch.
Worth noting that Starship's heat shield is very similar to the one of the Shuttle. They actually got the manufacturing method from NASA.
That's why I remain very skeptical about the easy refurbishing of Starship. Initially, way back around 2016, the plan was to vent liquids to create a cushion around the ship. That sounded more easily reusable.
Yeah. I think they originally planned to use ceramic tiles only for certain spots and still transpiration cooling for the rest. Then they fully switched to ceramic tiles. In an interview with Everyday Astronaut on YouTube, if I recall correctly, Elon Musk said they first believed the ceramic tiles to be lighter.
The main thing is... Space shuttle wasn't all that reusable. It had to be launched with a massive rocket and two massive boosters that just fall into the ocean.
The majority of damage to shuttle's TPS apparently came from foam strikes from the external fuel tank. Superheavy's optimized profile certainly helps here, since there are no large cryogenic tanks hanging ominously over the TPS while being shaken violently by solid rocket boosters.
Early designs of the shuttle were fully reusable. That was quickly dropped due to costs and requirements. The final shuttle design was also unsafe.
The shuttle wasn't fully reusable, just for starters. The boosters were reusable with a lot of refurbishment work. The center tank was expended every time. It was very expensive. Only five shuttles were ever made, which means that no effort was put into automation of production of engines etc., everything was custom, and everything required great care to save the sunk costs.
Starship is supposed to be fully & rapidly reusable. Neither adjective applies to the space shuttle.
Massive. The designers of Starship studiously avoided all the problems that made Space Shuttle expensive to refurbish:
a. Cheaper, more durable material (stainless steel).
b. Cheaper, easier to manufacture engines.
c. Easier to use fuel (methane is much "tamer" than hydrogen).
d. Standardized heat shield with much smaller requirements for manual work.
> d. Standardized heat shield with much smaller requirements for manual work.
We'll have to see how it works out.
The way they are going they can try 5 different ones that fail until they find one that doesn't.
Contrast that to the Space Shuttle which required a human crew to flight test anything.
It is a very daunting problem no doubt, maybe the hardest one, but I also don't doubt that the end form of Starship will require way, way less than 20 000 man-hours per turnaround (as the Space Shuttle required) to refurbish the heat shield. They simply cannot afford that.
The boosters were not (or at least not with the quick turnover and lower costs like the ones from SpaceX)
the space shuttle was "reusable". It had to be taken apart and meticulously cleaned and tested and basically had to be rebuilt after each flight, in a process called turnaround. SpaceX's rockets are much closer to what you'd consider reusable.
I wonder how much of that difference is because the space shuttle was human rated from the start: F9 eventually got there, but only after plenty of "testing in production" with disposable payloads.
The other big difference, an elephant in the room grade difference I think, is that SpaceX reliability was developed with memories of a reusable vehicle failing mostly due to turnaround costs and risks on everyone's minds. That clearly wasn't the case when the space shuttle was designed, they were the first and enjoyed the privilege of making all the beginner mistakes.
I had an email exchange with Homer Hickam, before SpaceX existed, where I remarked that the shuttle design looked like a giant kludge, and a winged reentry vehicle was a fundamentally bad design, for various reasons which I enumerated elsewhere in this thread.
He emailed back that he agreed with my reasons and had argued that case with NASA in the early stages of the shuttle program.
So NASA was aware of this at the time.
I was under the impression tha they also thought this themselves but got "persuaded" with the prospect of more money if it could handle certain payloads of use for defense?
Shuttle was a jobs program just like the SLS is.
The case for the Shuttle was so marginal they needed every prospective customer they could get. The military was dragged into it unwillingly, but did give their requirements when forced to commit. They backed out as quickly as possible after the Challenger disaster.
Yeah the right word is refurbishable, plus the main tank was not reused and the solid boosters got a salt water bath each launch.
This is significantly less expensive
Read the article "SpaceX flight Ops"
Estimated costs of the fully loaded cost of the shuttle program ended up at $600 million to $1 billion per flight. The refurbishment costs per flight and man hours/staffing were astronomical.
It actually would have been a lot cheaper if they had gone for serialized, mass assembly line production of Saturn V class disposable rockets to launch piece of space stations, satellites and manned missions into low earth orbit.
To answer this oversimplified question with a simple answer, the Space Shuttle couldn't be a more different vehicle than this one. It truly is a comparison between apples and oranges.
Let's start with the fact that it was designed in the 1970's. If you had a Cadillac DeVille from 1970 it would get 8-12 miles per gallon. Just the mere fact that the design is about 70 years old makes that vehicle too expensive to operate, and that's before we even start talking about other issues with the design (performance, safety, reliability, etc).
The difference is only a small part- the shuttle itself- was reusable. The booster that put it into space was scrapped every time.
Because people are reflexively averse to government spending unless there's a billionaire making profits on the way through thanks to 100 years of academic capture by Austro-libertarian economists.
This is an anti-intellectual conspiracy theory. Mainstream economics no longer operate using schools of thought: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskEconomics/comments/quxwl5/how_is...
No, if anything it’s an anti intellectual conspiracy
Manufacture and maintenance contracts for the Shuttle were deliberately spread out across many companies and states, especially in key congressional districts. It was a jobs programme; waste was a feature not a bug.
Same thing for SLS.
More fundamentally, there were contracts. SpaceX does things itself; there's no legal friction internally. This gets back to the "Theory of the Firm" for why firms exist in the first place (transaction costs).
The need to codify what work is to be done in contacts is antithetical to SpaceX's rapid development processes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_the_firm
s/contacts/contracts/
Is that 150t of payload or total? What’s the cost in fuel alone (let’s ignore maintenance and operations costs for now)? I’m trying to get a feel for the relative scale compared to today’s commercial flight.
They previously threw around a number of around $1M per flight, as mostly fuel costs.
Also, while 150t is the target payload capacity, the current test vehicles are closer to 50t in payload capacity, there are revisions in the pipeline based on data from these test flights which will bring it up to 150t.
None of the vehicles have demonstrated any payload capacity yet. 50 tons is the on-paper capacity only, and seems quite high given how little fuel is left when the bring an empty starship to orbital altitude. I assume that as the engines and launch procedures get more efficient, they will start being able to bring stuff to orbit (and quite a bit of stuff, too).
They've actually been having to dump propellant in order to more accurately test what a Starship in orbit would be like, given they're not flying with a payload that would consume that propellant on ascent, but that they still want to launch with a full tank.
The dumping of this excess propellant actually caused an explosion and loss of vehicle on the second test flight.
That's what they said about the second test flight (and the third), but the webcast recordings looked a lot more like fuel leaks to me, and that is in line with Starship and early Falcon's past issues. I'm going to press X to doubt that the dumping narrative is the truth, since a nice face-saving white lie is in every corporation's handbook.
To put this in perspective: at 150t/launch, if a launch is $1M, then for the cost of an SLS launch (at least $2B) Starship could launch 300,000 tons, about the mass of three Nimitz-class nuclear aircraft carriers.
We could use a few of those in orbit.
America funding the literal eye of Sauron 2.0
Methane is about 900-1500$ / ton. About 1000 tons is used for the launch in addition to 3600 tons of lox. That should be a bit cheaper than methane per ton. Ballpark, the propellant might cost around 2M$.
A modern airliner on a long flight might burn around 80 tons of kerosene. It's slightly cheaper than methane. Call it 75-80K$.
That's $7 of fuel per pound of payload, that is not bad at all.
Indeed. You sometime see an argument that launch to space is expensive because of the propellant and therefore energy required. And as you note this argument is utterly wrong.
not sure how anyone can miss the "throwing away the airplane" part as being the cost driver.
It's the same cognitive error as thinking nuclear energy must be cheap because the fuel is cheap.
>And as you note this argument is utterly wrong.
Am I mistaken, or are there distance/payload combinations for which Starship is cheaper per pound on a point-to-point basis than air transport, even setting aside 30 minutes versus 12 hours? Isn't that the non-intuitive outcome of ballistic trajectories?
No. But it gets within an order of magnitude, which is remarkable. Economy class on starship could be priced similar to first class tickets on transoceanic flights.
Is the $1000/ton a law a physics, or could that ever possibly scale up and come down an order of magnitude?
Just the current market price for fossil methane, which of course goes up and down. But I'm assuming SpaceX gets their methane on the open market.
It's quite possible that SpaceX has access to some cheaper methane source. Texas produces a lot of it.
And SpaceX has speculated about eventually switching to some renewable source by e.g. synthesizing methane. In which case that would boil down to cost of electricity and carbon. I don't see that becoming cheaper short term but that could happen long term.
There are no dollars in the laws of physics. It's connected ultimately to productivity of all the activities involved, and there's no obvious upper bound to productivity.
There's the rocket equation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsiolkovsky_rocket_equation
Which doesn't have dollars anywhere in it.
The point of the rocket equation is there are hard physical limits on what rockets can do, and dollars won't change it.
That's nice. It doesn't imply a lower bound for costs, just of ratios of costs.
It was just a quick google. 150t reusable.
No idea about the other costs.
This opens up immense possibilities for exploration
I’d love to see a probe catch and examine ʻOumuamua.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ʻOumuamua
Where is the progress if they're 2 years behind their schedule? In Q1 2025 they should already be launching the HLS according to the timeline.
Falcon 9 is still the most advanced rocket flying real missions to date. The only thing close to it is Blue Origin, which didn't even have their maiden flight yet.
Is their timeline too optimistic? Yeah, but if the industry still catches up with F9 and they are close to having something a lot more advanced it really doesn't matter.
Even without reusability nothing comes close to Starship's cargo capacity. If you don't have to put a lot of engineering into getting things as small and light as possible you can put things in space a lot faster.
And, eventually, if it becomes cheap enough to put people in space for the task, you can plan to actually maintain things there rather than design for extreme reliability.
My wife asked "Why is this a big deal?", so I gave her a link to Handmer's 2021 explanation: https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2021/10/28/starship-is-st...
She's not an enthusiast; she's got an impression from SciFi that going to mars shouldn't be that hard.
Robert Zubrin's Mars Direct would have got "flags and footprints" on Mars without needing something like Starship. He worked on a version of SLS in 1989 in Martin Marietta that would have cost $1B and been ready in the second half of the 90s and would be retiring soon after many successful flight to Mars (and to the Moon), but instead we got SLS and Orion so we need Starship to get anything done.
The Mars Direct book is worth reading not only for things like transport and mission design but also a wealth of other good ideas about how to “live off the land” when we get there too. Truly worth reading for anyone remotely interested in space exploration
How does this differ from his other book The Case For Kats?
The Case for Mars is the book about Mars Direct
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Case_for_Mars
Can recommend the book as well - its still not that dated and provides a very good overview of how not just a real missing to Mars, but also a sustainable settlement might look like. :)
Typo?
Didn't Von Braun have a plan too? Nuclear rockets or something.
The difference is that Mars Direct was a conservative plan, wrt rocket technology. It just used existing Shuttle parts and was meant to fly from Shuttle pads in between Shuttle flights. It didn't require developing anything new, that's why they were sure it would be cheap and fast, and flight rate would make it possible for it to be reliable. SLS is that idea turned into a jobs program.
Regulations are hard enough just using methane, I wouldn't want to be the one filling out the paperwork if that was a nuclear rocket.
That seems like way too long an article for a non-enthusiast.
good point. we're geeks and do this kind of thing to each other. among normal people it might be rude.
she got me a while back with ink solvents. Monks may have been more illuminated making those pretty manuscripts than we appreciated.
If you toss it into Google’s NotebookLM, it’ll probably produce a much more accessible version of the blog that’s succinct and easier to parse in a few minutes.
That’s exactly what I did, and it seemed to do a good job of hitting the main points in about 13 minutes (which is much quicker than how long it would take a slow reader like me read this article).
I’m sure it still didn’t do the article justice, though.
Well I mean going to Mars isn't that hard per se, a fair few countries have done it... but carrying enough supplies and shielding to last people 2 years until the return trip and then actually getting back are way harder problems.
Seeing Starship get burnthrough on these suborbital launches really shows how hard it'll be to do Mars return entry with a fair few extra km/s.
Getting to Mars is hard but not that hard compared to getting a large payload to Mars surface and back to Earth. Some people may assume Mars return is around twice as hard but it's orders of magnitude harder. And that's before even contemplating doing so with a cargo of humans and the necessary tonnage for them to survive on Mars at least 26 months.
Only the US and China have landed successfully on Mars. China achieved this in 2021. Russia/USSR tried multiple times and didn't succeed.
Other countries have sent satellites to orbit around Mars, which is not the same thing.
> Russia/USSR tried multiple times and didn't succeed.
Pedant mode: the USSR did land softly on Mars, but the lander got caught in a dust storm and was not able to transmit back the data ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_3 ).
The european Beagle 2 probe apparently survived as well, but failed to deploy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beagle_2
But other than that, yeah, there are two Schiaparelli craters now on Mars. :P
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schiaparelli_EDM)
I think that the number of countries reaching Mars (lander or orbiter) is in single digits and thus when talking about how hard it is to reach Mars and then come back, both of the scenarios kind of hold similar weights.
Going to Mars is relatively easy compared to setting up a self-sustaining human civilization on Mars, which will be thousands of times harder. Many people don't understand the scale and scope of the biosphere services the Earth provides to humans free of charge, though, and forget that little of that exists on Mars, other than gravity.
It's difficult to overstate how important the milestone of catching the booster is. Now we have a reusable rocket an order of magnitude larger than anything we've had before, and the cost of kg to orbit just nosedived.
Second stage reuse seems the far more challenging problem. Other companies should have reusable boosters soon but if significant amounts of Starship continue to ablate on the way down they could be faced with a disposable Starship competing with smaller and cheaper second stages that are well sized for typical payloads. We already knew boosters can be flown back to launch sites reliably with high accuracy. We don't know if it is possible to make rapidly reusable thermal protection systems that can operate on an orbital vehicle of Starship's size until it is demonstrated.
> Second stage reuse seems the far more challenging problem.
Sure, SpaceX has been doing first stage reuse for a long time now. But they have demonstrated landing the second stage successfully at sea twice now with the same sort of smoothness that they demonstrated once for the booster before they then caught the booster on the first real try.
A partial list of unbelievably hard things that SpaceX has so far made seem easy:
Catching the booster is really just like landing a Falcon 9 booster w/o legs, but clearly much harder.Anyways, if they can do all those things then it's pretty clear that they can catch-land the ship.
There's still a huge list of crazy-difficult things that SpaceX say they want to do that are hard to believe are possible, except for the fact that SpaceX has already done so many unbelievably difficult things already.
They have a history of pursuing solvable problems and abandoning those that were not working out or had better alternatives. Parachute recovery of the booster was abandoned in favor of propulsive landings. Catching fairings was abandoned for water proofing. Proposed Falcon and Dragon variants were abandoned as was Dragon propulsive landing. They abandoned carbon fiber construction and multiple concepts for Starship/Heavy.
The tiles in combination with ablative materials and the insane robustness of a steel vehicle is sufficient to get Starship through re-entry and soft land in the ocean. We know ceramic thermal tiles worked on Shuttle and X37B and presumably will on Dreamchaser so while the success was an awesome achievement it wasn't unlikely given time to refine their methods.
SpaceX are limited by the properties of real materials, not their ambitions, and we still don't know if rapidly reusability is possible with ceramic tiles or if their fragility will require inspections and refurbishment. They can't do it with ablatives and there aren't many other options. I am optimistic but also realistic about the difficulties of what they are attempting. Sometimes risky projects run into brick walls and you don't know what is possible until you try.
If the ceramic tiles aren't working out, I think they could try transpiration cooling (previously planned for Starship) or a metallic heat shield (was planned for VentureStar). Or some combination. There seem to be quite a few options.
They landed an earlier version of the second stage on the ground a few times as well. It's the atmospheric reentry from orbital velocity that currently necessitates the safety of a splashdown: they're not going to risk bringing a damaged and potentially uncontrollable vessel down over land, even if they could nail the landing with an undamaged ship.
The hard part of 2nd stage reuse is surviving entry at orbital speeds. They are close to having that solved.
I would say they are there. Sure, they're having some burn through on the flaps, but they managed to hit their virtual landing spot anyways, and if they caught a slightly damaged ship they could study that damage better, repair it, and refurbish the ship.
But I imagine that by IFT6 they'll have nailed the flap burn through problem.
They can't have burn through like that and achieve the kind of rapid reuse Starship needs to be useful outside low to mid Earth orbit, to go outside of there it requires a large number of flights to refuel the one Starship that will go on to Moon/Mars. Without the ability to refuel for Moon or beyond trips Starship is trapped in LEO/MEO because it's hauling around so much extra mass for it's own reusability.
IMO a better use for it might be to ferry up large pieces of purpose built craft with less excess dry weight. A single reusable Starship launch can put the entire mass of the Apollo craft needed to make it from LEO to the Moon and back into LEO. Put a craft in two launches and dock it in orbit and you've got a huge capability to put a lot of mass onto the moon and still use the cheap cost to orbit Super Heavy gives.
At the rate at which SpaceX makes progress, that flap burn-through is a non-issue.
Yeah, I would say they already made a lot of progress - looked a lot less crazy now compared to the previous flight. :)
With F9, they piggybacked refining S1 recovery/reuse onto commercial launches. This was a big help in reducing development cost.
They could do the same thing with S2 recovery here.
I found Jeff’s Bezos interview with everyday astronaut really illuminating on this topic.
Supposedly they’re working on both a reusable and cost optimised non-reusable second stage at the same time. And they don’t really know yet which one will end up being cheaper.
You also see this kind of thinking with Rocket Labs neutron rocket. Where they focus on making the reusable booster do more, while making the second stage smaller, cheaper and simpler.
I think if it wasn’t for the rocket engine this wouldn’t be a question at all. The tank doesn’t have much value. It’s just a thin shell and probably a fraction of the cost of the fuel.
So I’m thinking, perhaps the optimal solution is something like this: the bottom part of the second stage with the engines separates, and a small engine and fuel tanks places the engines in a stable orbit. The tank itself is deorbited and burns up.
At some point later something like the Starship collects several second stage engines and deorbits them safely to be reused.
Or perhaps just the engines can be immediately deorbited with an inflatable heat shield and parachutes.
> Other companies should have reusable boosters soon
You're way too optimistic. Starship will deliver commercial payloads, with SpaceX phasing out Falcon 9 outside of ISS launches, before anyone has a reusable Falcon 9 equivalent.
It pains me to say this, but SpaceX is in a class all its own.
New Glenn finally has flight hardware undergoing pre-flight testing. I think they're pretty likely to manage to fly in early/mid 2025, and they do aim to recover the booster in their first try.
The Chinese could have a reusable booster before then. One of their companies is doing 10 km hop tests.
SpaceX couldn’t manage the first Falcon 9 landing until 2015. The first Falcon 9 reuse wasn’t until 2018, so 3 years to achieve reusability. The Chinese prototype hasn’t yet succeeded at sub-orbital landing. I wouldn’t be surprise if it’d take them longer than 3 years to have a reusable rocket. Starship would have been routine at that time.
Blue Origin plans to launch New Glenn in a month, with landing planned. They are a wild card.
Chinese startups have historically been the only ones to be able to move as fast as Musk. One very underrated ability of Tesla is they can develop new products in 2-3 years from conception to market. The only other car companies to do it at scale is BYD, Nio and Xpeng. The company he is talking about is probably LandSpace. They got from conception to hop test in what seems to be 5, maybe 4 years. SpaceX took 7.
I think China has about 5 companies working on reusable launch and it is part of a national government strategy. People can argue about the timeline but it is inevitable.
I’m not saying they stole the plans through industrial espionage, I’m just wiggling my eyebrows suggestively while glancing in the direction of the suspiciously similar looking booster.
I promise you the fancy technology is in the electronics, software, and implementation, and not the fact that the cylinder with legs looks like another cylinder with legs
It’s a literal clone of starship, down to the flaps and grid fins.
Is this the same company that had their booster fly into the air when they were trying to static fire test it?
Well, that kinda shows a potentially another speed "advantage" - less paperwork and reduced safety requirements.
They must have forgotten to steal the plans for the hold down clamps.
Why does it pain you? Musk's SpaceX has produced several enormous advancements in space technology.
SpaceX is one of the greatest, if not the greatest, private technology company in history.
I think it pains some of us to say it because of the person Musk has turned out to be, which is the opposite direction I think many of us were hoping his character development would take him.
What terrible thing has Musk done?
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You'll have to indict more than half of the country, then.
Fascism is bad.
Even when millions are suckers for it and think others will be the ones to suffer.
More than half? Source?
Trump may well win this election. But there’s no scenario under which he’s going to also win the popular vote while doing it, at least none that I’ve heard of. If you have credible information that says otherwise I would be interested in reading it.
Definitely less. Trump has never had the support of more than half he country. Even when he won.
Absolutely false. Trump got 74M votes in last election in 2020. US population was 330 millions. Today US population is ~340M. I seriously doubt that more than 170M people support a convicted felon for president. I bet that he will get less than 170M votes in less than a month. Do you want to take the other side of the bet to back up your provably wrong assertion?
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Someday in a land far away people would be mature enough to spot complexity instead of judging people as purely "right" or "wrong". I think the best way to explain Elon is... he is a complicated individual and has some really good parts and some really not so good parts. And you know what, that is just fine.
This manufactured, polarized "us vs them" thing on the internet is toxic corrosive goop. People are complex and that is fine.
no, he says retarded and cringe things on twitter, which is embarrassing for such a titan of industry.
Using ableist language on Hacker News, however, is alright? I dislike Elon too, but this comment feels a little out of place and date, especially for the point it's trying to make
Doesn’t everyone know that people are like this, but those that put on a show as if they aren’t like this are just putting on a show?
Supported Trump.
The Democrats have a sad history of denigrating Musk, which is likely why he changed from being a Democrat to a Republican.
I think that is only part of it. Musk gave an interview where he talked about how the woke medical establishment trans'd one of his kids. They falsely told him to do the transition or his child's death was a near certainty. European countries are now restricting this "treatment" for children. The US has been slow to follow. There is a lot of money and political pressure from the left to keep the medical intervention industry alive.
Are you aware of what you're doing: you're removing agency from that person who transitioned. They're abundantly public about how their transition was appreciated and needed. Do you ultimately care more about the feelings of your own dad over yours?
You don’t spend that kind of money and risk alienating your entire customer base (and future workforce!) just because of a slight.
Musk is getting something from Trump: most likely protection from some legal issue.
It was more than a slight. Biden pointedly ignored Tesla when conducting an EV summit and handing out subsidies. Then there was the FCC fiasco where the FCC snubbed Starlink.
> Then there was the FCC fiasco where the FCC snubbed Starlink.
You mean that time that the FCC removed Starlink from the broadband problem when they couldn't deliver the speeds that they had committed to, as defined very explicitly in the program?
What subsidies did Tesla not get?
Musk has never, no matter what he claims, ever a progressive democrat. He would be at best, someone who believed in the liberalization of certain drug policies. His economic beliefs have always been max pro business (aka, hands off, anti labor). He solidly fits under libertarian like the rest of the tech billionaires. Republicans, if it weren't partly driven by Christian fundamentalists, would be libertarian. The conservative GOP party of the 70's hasn't existed in decades.
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A few things that I (as someone who doesn't follow Twitter) have heard about from anecdotes and from the news about why people dislike him:
- He called some guy who worked for him a pedo for no reason, which he was sued over
- Took over Twitter and promoted right wing tweets to everybody, unbanned far right accounts and sued critics who said he did so
- Started promoting far right ideas, like when he retweeted "Interesting" to some tweet of a 4chan post saying that high-status, high-testosterone males are the only ones who can think freely and should be the only ones who can vote
- Took the side of the right-wing rioters who attacked mosques in the UK, saying civil war is inevitable
- Just seems to insult companies for little reason - advertisers who leave him, and Apple
There has been kind of a slow back and forth. Some people who liked him were miffed about the pedo thing, but they didn't hate him. But he has just kept doing things that some people hate.
> Took the side of the right-wing rioters who attacked mosques in the UK, saying civil war is inevitable
Leave out the part where the riots were started because someone with an immigrant background killed a bunch of kids at a Taylor Swift concert and police were withholding the identity. Along with your other 'anecdotes', can you make your political position any more transparent?
I see I accidentally came off implying that I'm disaffected and take no sides - most of the time, right wing politics seems abhorrent to me. Those are the main things I remember because left-wing spaces tend to hate him, and I dislike him because of those things, but no more than CEOs of companies like Nestle, which has engaged in things like slavery and child trafficking.
> because someone with an immigrant background killed a bunch of kids at a Taylor Swift concert and police were withholding the identity.
It might be somewhat justified if they burnt the house down of the murderer, or those who assisted him. They didn't - they burnt down houses, shops, and mosques, because they wrongly assumed the guy was Muslim and decided that was just cause to target any Muslim. His identity was hidden because he was a minor at the time of the attack.
Yeah, he's like a cross between Henry Ford and Werner Von Braun...
and coincidentally he makes cars and rockets too!
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Wildly incorrect. New Glenn is already here.
No it isn't. It might be soon in some early way: "the first launch is expected to take place no earlier than November 2024", "The booster for the flight is named So You’re Telling Me There’s a Chance, alluding to the difficulty of landing a reusable booster on the first attempt." -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Glenn
Didn’t they look at all kinds of ideas earlier like squirting some propellant or water out over the skin on the way down, and wasn’t steel chosen for its thermal robustness? Did they get into the problem and realize it’s a lot harder and abandon those things for tiles?
Maybe they will have to sacrifice more payload mass for active or passive shielding or more fuel for powered deceleration. That would yield a less impressive lifter but with full reusability.
Interestingly, the inside surface of a rocket nozzle is covered with tiny holes. Fuel is circulated in a jacket around the nozzle both to pre-heat the fuel and to cool the nozzle. Additional cooling of the nozzle comes from fuel leaking into the combustion chamber through those holes, carrying away the heat so it doesn't melt the nozzle. It's called boundary layer cooling.
It was one of the technological breakthroughs of von Braun's team with the V2.
They already plan refueling infrastructure in orbit. That would include stuff to "squirt" on the way down if necessary. If they can use one extra launch to reuse 5-10 starships that might be interesting. Noone knows yet if it's actually needed.
They dropped transpiration cooling, at least for now.
Yeah for rapid reusability tiles aren’t going to work, too fragile. Iirc it was with a lot of reluctance they went with tiles and will have to make breakthroughs on the heat shielding to get where they want to be.
Inspection might be easier with computer vision advances since the space shuttle.
Also with a saner design. The shuttle had a complicated shape with every tile being almost unique. It was nuts.
I think starships are too now to save weight where they get different thermal loads.
IIRC they still have most of the tiles be the same, with just a few variants for tricky places.
I'm not sure how critical "catching" the booster is to reusability, but it does save weight by not needing legs for landing, and perhaps the booster suffers less stress this way?
Note that the booster is not really being "caught" although this is the word it seems we're stuck with. It's really more like landing on the arms, since it throttles to a hover at that point.
> I'm not sure how critical "catching" the booster is to reusability
Not necessarily for reusability, but it helps significantly for rapid reusability: it eliminates the need to transport the booster from the landing site to the launch site. Given that it's 9m x 70m and weighs 270 tonnes, that's not an easy process.
I think saving weight is definitely one of the main issues, see those proportionally large legs on Falcon-9, I guess it simply doesn't scale on bigger vehicles like Starship / Heavy booster. Also, by catching the booster on site, they can even save the transportation and do the refurbishing on site, so even shorter turnaround time I guess.
Another way to save weight would be to make the booster out of carbon fiber instead of steel. I wonder whether they will do that eventually.
Also, saving on damage to the landing pad.
That’s a good point, they used the sprinklers on landing to mitigate damage to the pad and the booster was caught well off the ground.
> but it does save weight by not needing legs for landing
That was the exact reason they went this way.
Efficiency and cost are the goals, reusability is just one way to do that. Moving big heavy things less is another.
They're still having some significant burn through problems on the upper stage fins during reentry it looks like. Way better than last time but the top part of the fin was glowing far a while after the main reentry finished.
Even with a disposable upper stage, I believe Starship would be cheaper per kg than F9 or FH.
Maybe. Kind of impossible to know until we see launch costs but you could make a much cheaper upper stage than they have if you wanted disposable. Trick with that is you need a payload heavy enough to justify it. Has SpaceX talked much about a disposable upper stage version of the system?
It's a game change
They're a long way from having a reusable super heavy booster. It's still copping a lot of damage on the landing.
true but don't forget this is test flight #5
Strategically this is huge for the US and NATO. Being able to put orders of magnitude more payload in orbit at a fraction of the cost of the competition is a huge advantage in controlling space. Starlink and starshield are already years ahead of what china and russia has, starship is going to widen that gap even further.
Amen! If it turns out we can’t make humans a multiplanetary species in any reasonable timeframe, at least we can make the last few decades of livable earth climate a friendly atmosphere for US business interests.
Even the worst expected impacts of climate change will leave earth tremendously more habitable than anywhere else in the solar system.
Even a nuclear war would have that outcome. Even a KT boundary scale asteroid impact would have that outcome. The rest of the solar system is just hell.
There are plenty of imaginable events where being multiplanetary would help.
Like what? Gray goo?
The most expensive part is to support the risk and cost of research & development. Sure, that renders you the first place for a while, but expect others to move easier (and thus faster) after you marked the trail.
Well if US would deploy global kinetic bombardment system that would def. be a game changer.
To get an inert object through the atmostphere and do real damage it has to be very large. That's a very inefficient way to use mass that you've boosted to orbit, even if it's relatively cheap to get there. So any weaponary they put up there will likely look fairly conventional. The speed of deployment and difficult of intercept would be the game-changer.
But why not a kinetic weapon though? 1000kg tungsten rod coming at 5 km/s and 3000K will sink any ship.
A bit tricky to aim though - basically the moment you initiate the burn for re-entry, you give 15 minute warning.
Well you answered it yourself, anyone competent can dodge that. It's useful for attacking existing installations, but well, you can do that with any weapon.
Plus it's easier to intercept orbital bombardment since you know where it is ahead of time and have plenty of time to intercept.
But it’s true for any orbital-based weapon that needs to de-orbit for striking. Once it starts retro burn you know it’s going for strike and know where it’s going to strike.
it takes few minutes for it to reach target so no it's not easy to intercept also what exactly are you planing to use to intercept a solid tungsten rod with exactly?
You could also just put a ballistic missile on a satellite, then you'd have a guidance system.
Any warhead needs guidance system. The question is if passive kinetic payload is enough or it should be something with explosives.
Or a GPS guided bomb. Just fire it from a small rocket and let gravity do its thing.
It needs to re-enter, i.e. have the thermal shield, etc. This is what this Starship thing is all about - re-entry is really hard. Regular guide bomb is just going to burn or re-entry into atmosphere.
I've wondered about that. In a series of sci-fi books (the lost fleet series, starting with Dauntless), our intrepid heroes bombard military bases with BFRs. Big fucking rocks. Which are tungsten slugs coated with ceramic I think.
These are fired from light hours away at approximately 0.2 to 0.3 c. I had assumed that something going so fast would just disintegrate if it hit an atmosphere head on? The projectiles are described as "increasing velocity" as they approach, and they strike with gigaton effects. I remember reading an xkcd that showed something traveling so fast in atmosphere would cause huge explosions from air turned into plasma.
Depends on the mass of the object, of course, but at at this speed (i.e. energy) it will become a stream of particles going through atmosphere and vaporizing anything in it’s way.
My understanding is that rods from god are not easily detectable during reentry the way an ICBM's warhead is.
I don't see why that would be.
Aim it at something that can’t move
a 20 foot long Tungston rod hitting at 10km/s would release 416 gigajoules of energy. Pretty much a small nuclear bomb or about 100 tons of TNT.
It's impossible to intersept something going 10km/s.
Wow, I knew they were going to try to catch the booster this time but I really didn’t think it was going to work on the first try, I was just hoping they didn’t destroy the launch tower in the process. Congrats to the SpaceX team, absolutely amazing! Hope y’all are celebrating
All the renders in the world couldn't have prepared me for how crazy the actual catch looked!
ok now they have an actual reference and can animate it better haha.
Just to nitpick, perhaps it would be nicer to have a link that has the info visible without a login...
Random link with the actual 10 minutes of magic:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b28zbsnk-48
That was crazy, 50% of me thought as it was coming in, especially as it pitched towards the tower, "they've overcompensated and are going to bring the whole tower down" but they absolutely nailed it.
Even without the catch step, I always feel like their boosters are coming down way too fast way too late, with engines reigniting startlingly close to surface. Never ceases to surprise me.
Every moment your engines are burning at anything less than maximum thrust, you are wasting fuel. You want to relight as late as possible with as high thrust as possible for maximum efficiency. But that it actually works is nuts.
I remember playing KSP, I had used some mod to program a moon lander to do a suicide burn, a maximum thrust burn to land. I did the maths myself and when it actually came to the landing I was 100% certain I had either a bug in my code or did the math wrong because I was coming in way too fast, or so it seamed, but to my surprise the thing slowed down in time! Mind you ksp is way simpler than the real world and the spaceship could handle some… error, the landing was hard but successful
Point is it always seems like you’re coming in too fast
PEDANTIC - max efficiency isn't necessarily tuned to max thrust.
The math is pretty intuitive; every second you're burning is another 9.8 m/s of delta V you have to spend counteracting gravity instead of slowing the craft down (minus air friction) so minimizing deceleration time cuts your fuel expenditure massively. It also means you have to carry less fuel so you weigh less and you spend less fuel for the same acceleration. It's the inverse of the rocket equation really, less mass is easier to slow down and you waste less energy (ie fuel mass) decelerating faster.
The higher the thrust, the lower the gravity losses. Gravity losses go down as you approach orbital speed but they aren't zero until you're in orbit. And when boosting out of orbit, the higher you are the less benefit you get from the Oberth Effect, so you want to do the burn before you rise too much, which implies sufficient thrust.
Exactly. In addition, by delaying the relight as long as possible you're giving drag as much time as possible to do the work for you (assuming you're not at terminal velocity, so not applicable for the ship.)
I have the same feeling watching Starship when the telemetry on the bottom right of the screen showing “0km” but landing burn hasn’t started. Later did I know that it was meant to start the burn only a few hundreds _meters_ from the ground
It may also be that the video feed is delayed (e.g. due to compression) relative to the telemetry.
Prior to today the only landings you've seen are Falcon 9, which has to do a "hoverslam" because it can't throttle low enough to actually hover.
Even just one engine in minimum thrust would make the rocket go up when empty.. so the computer lights the engine at the precise right moment so it will have 0 velocity at 0 altitude, then it cuts off the engine. "Hoverslam".
The Starship booster is different, it can actually hover.
Yeah, it also always catches me off guard how late they reignite, while at the same time I'm always surprised by how slow the liftoff is even though all the boosters are on full throttle. Of course both things make sense given the respective mass at both points in the process, but given that it looks like the same rocket from the outside, a bit unintuitive.
Yeah but they did pass some flame down much of the tower. Pretty quick though, probably just cleaned it with fire.
Saving up those refurbishment costs, cleaning the tower ahead of time!
Yeah it definitely looked sketchy for a sec but was probably fully as intended
Although this is by far not the first landing of SpaceX boosters I've seen, this looked like scifi to me even in 2024.
What does Starship reusability mean for $/kg to LEO? I know there are longer term targets of $10/kg but that supposes efficiencies that aren’t here yet. Would be helpful to understand before Starship reusability where the state of the art was in terms of $/kg to LEO and where we would be with impending Starship reusability.
I don't think we have a number for it yet. But it will definitely be the cheapest launch system at the time of launch.
People say 200$/kg just with booster reuse, and 20$/kg with full reuse. Of course this might be too optimistic, but I truly believe we might reach under 50$ in this decade.
Even $50 is within "going to the moon for my honeymoon" range. Wow.
$50 is a number for LEO (Low-earth orbit). $/kg to a Moon orbit (or flyby) might be significantly more expensive. Not only that, because it is further so it needs more fuel, but also it is a few days trip which would need a bunch more kilos in provisioning food, water and other things. So yeah, unfortunately not that cheap to have a honeyMoon in the moon (heh)
There is a lot of possibilities to make a trip to the moon cheaper though. If we make LEO that cheap, we can build a lot of infrastructure in the space that would make the tourism to moon more affordable. Like keeping a few starships always in orbit as some kind of space-hotel-metro system.
This will probably take a few more decades, though.
Even if it cost 10x as much to reach the Moon it would bring the costs within range of mere multi-millionaires instead of billionaires.
Artemis by Andy Weir dwells a lot on this kind of infrastructure, but I never could understand the orbital mechanics described in the book.
Yeah it wasn't explained well in the book, but I did some reading of third-party sources and diagrams about the Uphoff-Crouch Lunar Cycler orbit, which helped (Wikipedia and the like).
Only if you don't care about coming back!
This might be the best time to get into cubesat development as a hobby, lol.
What is a good estimate of the number of times these boosters and engines will be reusable?
Everyone gets this wrong, cost is not price. SpaceX themselves launch Starlinks at about $1,200/kg but they charge customers closer to $12,000/kg. Do the math. Costs coming down are increases in SpaceX profits, not decreases in customer prices.
Over the extremely long term in competitive industries, prices asymptote at ~costs. So it's still a generally useful measure, and in ~all cases, it's at least a directional indicator.
Sure but currently this is not a competitive industry because nobody else can do this.
Besides what 55555 said, in the near term SpaceX has indeed passed at least some of the cost savings onto customers. NASA administrator Bill Nelson quoted a member of the Joint Chiefs as telling him that SpaceX had saved the US government $40 billion for just launching military payloads. <https://www.fool.com/investing/2022/06/05/did-spacex-really-...>
On the civilian side, SpaceX saved NASA $2 billion for just one payload, Europa Clipper <https://arstechnica.com/space/2023/10/a-year-from-launch-the...>, so who knows how many billions more from other launches.
Sounds like those savings exceed the subsidies that some love to point out SpaceX has gotten from the government.
If only the military budget went down by 40b in response to these new cost savings.
The dominant variable is how often they can reuse the stages. Last I heard Musk was targeting dozens of reuses for the upper stage and hundreds for the booster. If they are short of the cost per kg goes up.
https://www.reddit.com/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1bgmsm9/cost_...
> What does Starship reusability mean for $/kg to LEO?
All we can say is under $1,000/kg. Which is conservative, that limit being about two thirds that of Falcon Heavy’s theoretical cost to LEO in a reüsable configuration.
We can't give any estimate. The costs depend on how many times the stages are reused. They have targets but we don't know what will actually happen.
Ryan Hansen had an incredible (although unofficial) 3d modeling video of the mechanism. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ub6HdADut50
The catch looks amazing, but one thing I don't understand is why SpaceX needs the technology to catch a booster they've already demonstrated the ability to land boosters on barges. Is the arm more cost effective to scale compared to a barge?
This booster is much, much larger than the Falcon 9 first stages that land on barges. It's ~70 metres high, versus ~40 metres for the Falcon 9 first stage, and weighs about 275 000 kg compared to the ~20 000 kg of the Falcon 9 first stage.
In short, it would require such huge and heavy landing legs and landing barges that it probably wouldn't be feasible.
Holy shit I didn’t realize it’s an order of magnitude heavier
The square-cube law strikes again!
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Square%E2%80%93cube_law
https://www.reddit.com/r/space/comments/exvu55/size_comparis... https://www.visualcapitalist.com/comparing-the-size-of-the-w...
FYI that first link is showing a previous, larger, concept iteration of Starship (then known as ITS) which would have had a 12m diameter, versus the 9m version that SpaceX ended up building.
The second link seems to show a version of Starship that's relatively up-to-date.
Yup. Someone should make a new graphic.
The argument is that you don't need to spend the vehicle mass on legs, so you get performance.
On the other hand, I imagine you could wipe out any benefits to $/mass launched pretty quickly by blowing up the tower.
The landing legs are heavy. SpaceX would rather have more payload than carry legs to space on every launch.
Also landing on the launch pad means you don’t have to transport the rocket. Just have the arms set it down and you’re ready to launch again.
Maybe the goal is to refill and relaunch immediately?
This. You can lower the rocket back on the launch base, refill, and launch again within hours.
After checking if everything is okay with the vehicle. And of course the government agencies must determine that frequent sonic booms (there is one per booster landing) are acceptable for the public.
Weight. Legs weigh a lot. That's dead weight for a launch system, and it serves only to reduce payload to orbit.
For Falcon 9 that's not that big a deal because they're NOT trying to reuse the second stage. Whereas with Starship they need more fuel to recover the ship, and that means they need to save weight elsewhere to avoid losing too much payload to orbit.
SpaceX is also not very happy with the pair of forward flaps and 10 ton thermal protection needed as control surface and re-entry.
It takes time for the barges to return the booster to the launch pad. They want to be able to launch Starship, have the booster land back at the launch pad, have the arms set it back down on the ground, and recycle the booster for another launch in just a few hours. Then the arms can be used to stack the booster and the next payload on the launch platform.
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Awesome achievement. Watched it with my sister at home and brought back memories from the 60s in front of the B&W TV watching some of the early amazing flights and landings.
Question for hackers: How does this reorient space programs world-wide? If I were a politician or technocrat in China, Russia, or the EU this would feel like an inverse and intense Sputnik moment — “holy sh—- we have to up our game!”
Eventually it convinces everybody that "quantity in space" is possible. Moving to projects where you don't have to count every ounce. It opens the path to wild schemes, in amount of weight that could be moved.
And why "eventually"? SpaceX should have already convinced people of that. Yeah it's not yet in production, but the momentum and progress have been amazing to witness.
(The previous one was convincing everyone that there was lots of space for tech improvement. Wake up call achieved just a few years ago also by SpaceX.)
See also this blog post: https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2021/10/28/starship-is-st...
An interesting question (because all the others will probably be too slow) is what does that change for SpaceX itself (which can be fast)?
It gets to complete and upgrade Starlink. Sure. And that keeps it busy for what? Two years? At most. Sure. Done. Just kidding, that provides some background launches as a guaranteed customer going forward. But nowhere near enough to make a dent in what will be the new SpaceX launch capabiity.
So what else can it do, that exploits its own launch capability?
Going to Mars is not an obvious commercial venture - not at first - not until some government somewhere convinces itself to fund that.
So what else? What can SpaceX do on its own with this launch capability?
> So what else? What can SpaceX do on its own with this launch capability?
Apart from Starlink, not much I believe. The main thing will be the Artemis contract with NASA, which requires two figures worth of Starship flights to LEO to refill the Starship tanker to get the HLS Starship to land a few people on the moon.
So I do think Starship will mostly generate money through NASA contracts, Starlink, and commercial launches. Though there aren't that many commercial launches currently. Perhaps there will be more once the launch prices drop due to reusability, though that remains to be seen. Developing a satellite is already more expensive than launching it.
We saw that solar power venture unveil their idea. With lower cost/kg, there might be quite a few flights just to deliver piles of hardware in various new orbits. And these might require refueling launches as part of that process. Some delivered all in one place, some in separate locations.
Yeah, there are some very speculative markets. Solar power from space, commercial space stations etc. The chances seem relatively low that those would develop into a big market and require a lot of Starship launches. I currently don't see a big space economy on the horizon. Space (LEO) tourism perhaps could be thing to some extent when Starship gets human rated for both launching and landing. Because a Starship could actually deliver larger quantities of people, unlike Dragon or Starliner capsules, but this is still many years away.
One answer might be "infrastructure". Infrastructure in space will become big if space becomes big (beyond launching telecom, observation and science - which are small for now, compared to their launch potential.) SpaceX will need infrastructure itself - like refueling, landing stuff in exotic places, cargo delivery to other spacecraft, de-orbiting stuff, spacecraft to spacecraft networking, bringing cargo back to earth, carrying / delivering crew around, spacecraft repair, emergency access, etc.
A bit like Amazon then: if SpaceX needs some capability in their grand plan to Mars or whatever, they could try and package that as a commercial service after using the bare bones version for themselves.
thankfully elon has hundreds of billions of dollars and presumably will spend most of that sending shit to mars, either before he dies or as part of a trust. most of what we need to send there isn't expensive - electronics and steel and composite materials. the limiting factor isn't going to be the cost of stuff we send there, it's only going to be how many starships we can get flying and how often they fly
In Europe, ESA has been pretty open about trying to copy and play catch-up to SpaceX:
> Q: Callisto looks very much like Grasshopper, the SpaceX Falcon 9 first stage reuse prototype.
> A: Callisto is Grasshopper. The Chinese are also building a similar prototype, I have no problem saying we didn’t invent anything.
https://satelliteobservation.net/2018/06/02/cnes-director-of...
It doesn't. It makes one or two mega-constellations cheaper for their operators and therefor more profitable, but no one except telecom and sensor platforms really want orbit. It's useless for most things, far worse than working on the planet's surface where all the labor and materials already are.
The SpaceX engineers are incredible for being able to pull this off.
When I was visiting the space center in Huntsville, Indiana, I had a chance to talk with one of the volunteers. His name was Brooks Moore (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O3hudRA3yL8), and he had been the director of navigation systems for the Apollo (and other) projects.
The first SpaceX barge landing had just taken place, and I asked him what he thought. He got a faraway look in his eyes, and agreed that it had been spectacular. For those guys, it must have seemed like all of their dreams were coming true.
I believe you meant Huntsville, Alabama?
Incredible achievement, my American friends! Congrats! We, Europeans, can only feel jealous, but hey at least we have free [but comically broken and dysfunctional] healthcare, so, there's that. I hope you'll bring a lot more progress to humankind beyond space exploration!
The long-term goal is becoming a multi-planet species, so in that context it's not about countries. Go Earth!
(also, while NASA has been generally helpful to SpaceX's efforts, American FAA bureaucrats have managed to inject unnecessary delays and uncertainty into the process (in addition to some necessary delays).
SpaceX is really incredible in how regular the improvements are coming. Something in their structure is well balanced.
It has to be Elon, he is focusing a lot of energy on the company right now.
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Historically speaking, fascism and rockets are like peanut butter and jelly
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I think the guy is an idiot
You've got to work really hard to maintain such an opinion, given that:
1. Musk arrived in the US with a couple suitcases, and had so little money he stayed at a hostel
2. Musk worked low wage dirty jobs for a while
3. Musk started multiple industry leading companies, becoming the richest man in the world
The US could use a lot more idiots like Musk!
Without denigrating his achievements, which I can recognise and respect despite my distaste for his recent politics, that's not quite true. Musk came from a fairly wealthy and very well-connected family and was able to draw on those connections to secure opportunities that most others would not have had. That really helped when it came to sourcing funding for Zip2, and later in terms of getting someone like Bill Harris to be CEO of x.com.
Errol Musk (his dad) invested $28,000 in zip2, about twice what a new car cost. This is hardly out of reach for middle class people.
> later in terms of getting someone like Bill Harris to be CEO of x.com.
Musk was the richest man in the world when he acquired x.com. He didn't need family connections for that.
Errol Musk was one of several investors, and in any case the vast majority of people aren’t in a position to have their parents invest $28 000 (nearly $60 000 today) in an uncertain business venture.
> Musk was the richest man in the world when he acquired x.com. He didn't need family connections for that.
Source? Zip2’s sale only brought in $300 million. That’s not richest man in the world stuff.
You edited your comment to remove the bit about living in youth hostels and working menial jobs, this was my reply to it:
A rite of passage. It was quite common for upper middle class and wealthy South African kids to spend a year working menial jobs and living in hostels as a way to build character and find themselves. I know, personally, people who worked in tree clearing in Canada, picking fruit in Australia, manual labour at ski resorts in New England, and living in youth hostels all before going to university to start the courses their parents were paying full tuition fees for. All of the people I mentioned are doing well in their careers, because none were actually poor despite working manual labour jobs for a year.
> All of the people I mentioned are doing well in their careers
"Doing well" is nothing compared to what Musk has done.
He has done well financially, but catastrophically personally. I'd prefer to do well in the latter.
> Errol Musk was one of several investors,
His biography doesn't mention any others, and did go on about how they barely had an office.
> and in any case the vast majority of people aren’t in a position to have their parents invest $28 000 (nearly $60 000 today) in an uncertain business venture.
Sorry, $28,000 is not restricted to wealthy investors. You can't buy much of a business for $28,000. Business ventures are always uncertain. The median house in 1995 was $140,000. The median salary then was $27,845.
The idea that $28,000 was some stratospheric investment in 1995 is simply not true.
Musk himself has said that he started Zip2 using money from himself, his brother Kimbal, Greg Nouri, and Silicon Valley angel investors.
Errol invested a bit later.
I didn’t say that $28 000 was a stratospheric amount, I said it’s something the vast majority of people don’t have access to, let alone the angel investors. They also don’t have access to the doors that were opened by his family’s connections.
Again, I’m not saying Musk was merely gifted his success. Clearly that’s not true, there were hundreds if not thousands of others with similar connections and opportunities who didn’t achieve anything near his success. But your assertion that he started from rock bottom and was entirely self made is far from an accurate representation of events.
Convincing people to invest in your company is not easy. It still makes him self made.
If you believe I'm wrong about that, try starting a company and getting friends and family to invest in it.
I thought he bought twitter for $34 billion.
I’m referring to the original x.com, the bank that merged with PayPal.
Musk was already a very successful businessman by then - selling zip2 for $300,000,000. $22 million was his cut. Successful businessmen attract investors.
If you aren't born in South Sudan in a trash during a civil war and a hunger epidemic, you don't deserve credit, you are privileged and you should feel bad. That seems to be a mentality of people that want to claim Musk didn't do anything.
Was Musk more likely to be successful then a trash-can baby in the South Sudan? Yes of course. But to make it out that Musk success is some inevitable outcome of his upbringing as if he was the son of a hereditary king is also a idiotic claim.
Musk most important help from his family was really his mothers Canadian passport.
That straw man you’re arguing against might be convenient, but it does not represent the argument I made.
I merely said that Musk didn’t start from ‘nothing’ and complete poverty, as the OP’s post was claiming.
He is a grifter and made that shit up. The guy has never been disadvantaged.
> Musk came from a fairly wealthy and very well-connected family and was able to draw on those connections to secure opportunities that most others would not have had.
What connections are these? I've heard them alluded to a couple of times but never heard specifics.
I wonder when he stopped having any value at his companies ("if ever" might add some)
It's hard to tell, I really can't believe the guy I see on TV lately has anything to do with any of this stuff, kind of makes me wonder if he is even real.
It's a really unfortunate situation in my opinion.
I wonder if we'll ever know the truth of what happened to him?
He seemed to lose a large part of his outward filter since the joe rogan "elon smokes pot!" interview.
Given his completely horrible jerk personality, I'd expect the opposite.
It still blows my mind how the landings are more exciting than the launches.
I'm completely mind-blown that not only can they do this, but we get 1080p video for almost the whole time.
What cameras do they have that can look at something 30 KM up in the air that well?
Usually it is a small telescope on a nice motorized mount weighing a ton. NASA had several of those around Cape Canaveral [1].
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xig3sL_rRH8
The thing that impresses me even more is the kinds of cameras they mount on the rocket. How do they shield it from all the heat and debris with a material that's optically clear?
Sapphire glass windows: they're good for up to 2000 C, mechanically strong and chemically resistant, and remarkably cheap.
Sapphire is Aluminum Oxide. Transparent Aluminum basically.
It's an amazing material that is not used as much as it should be.
They put it in places the heat and debris don’t go.
At one time they were using gopros.
As in life, when a person is on a road to nowhere, it’s the homecoming that’s sweet. The only thing more exciting than an Earth landing will be a moon or Martian landing. Or the in-orbit fuel consolidation docking, if only because it will be a huge milestone.
https://open.spotify.com/track/7wFmJxJfGCN6DM5913y7pr?si=-Uo...
Closeup of chopsticks as they were catching the booster, best clip from Everyday Astronaut's livestream: https://x.com/kagurazakimoto/status/1845447451592765820
I'd never considered a 70m tall chunk of mostly metal "agile", but the way it's controlled into the arms so precisely is something to behold.
Do you know what the entire booster is hanging off of? It can't be the fins. How is the load transferred to the arms?
The booster landed on "pins" that are structural load points and designed to support it's weight.
Here is a brilliant profile shot looking down one of the "arms" after the catch today, you can clearly see it resting on the "pins", not the grid fins.
https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2F7...
They also use those "pins" to raise/lower it with a crane when they need to during construction and during transport to the launch tower. It's the primary mode of lifting the thing
There are two lifting points on opposite sides just below the fins.
The grid fins are what it's hanging off of.
https://x.com/marionawfal/status/1845351598874120662
I dug into it, found this clip. Elon says that it’s those two tiny knubs! Saw a few pictures and yes, I confirm, it’s not the grid fins.
Great find. Still image from the video: https://imgur.com/a/3VHsZV9
that is a ridiculous amount of weight held by such a small thing
Small is relative. They’re about 7 inches in diameter: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ub6HdADut50
The SpaceX clip is better https://x.com/spacex/status/1845442658397049011?s=46
Better than both, NSF's stream: https://x.com/nasaspaceflight/status/1845442658203734384
And here is the most beautiful shot: https://x.com/Cosmo_556/status/1845554958604657051
It genuinely was. Thanks for that!
Insane!
Magnificent, it's hard to image what we'll be able to do once these do roundtrips daily. For those are not aware, that booster is 71 m (233 ft) tall!
Improvements that make space flight more sustainable are welcome ... unless that means an order of magnitude more pollution in a less controllable form, like emissions. [Due to more frequent flights]
Daily trips to space likely also mean more debris in space and falling to earth.
I hope there is a balance that includes the lives of people near these sites and all of us sharing the same atmosphere.
I hope this is not going to be used for 'Earth point A -> Earth point B' travel.
SpaceX proposed it but I doubt there is any chance of this architecture ever achieving the airliner-level reliability needed for people to accept routine Earth-to-Earth passenger service. That's several levels beyond what you'd need to fly astronauts.
Maybe a future architecture with more redundancy could get there someday.
They have a contact to investigate point to point delivery of cargo for the military.
Proposed 7 years ago - go anywhere on earth in an hour: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2tf2KpCG2fM
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Please don't use ChatGPT as a primary source. There's no way to tell if it's making up those facts or not.
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What kind of credible evidence can you bring that "main stream media" are making up facts?
I never said that, please reread my post.
> Considering the safety and prosperity that can be brought online from 1,000 launches / 150,000 tons in orbit, that’s the deal of the century.
Regardless of the (in)accuracy of ChatGPT, you're assuming a lot can be accomplished with those flights. I strongly suspect 600K cars getting people where they need to go has far more utility than 1K flights of anything into / out of NEO.
> Debris is an absolutely non-issue.
Astronomers probably don't want 1000x (or even 10x) as many satelites obstructing their view.
> There is zero environmental downside, only Luddite foot stomping.
Name calling isn't going to help your cause. And the luddites had a good point, they didn't mind innovation. They minded being cut out of the benefits of innovation without any say in the matter.
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Please avoid tit-for-tat spats on HN—they're nasty and boring. And please don't post in the flamewar style to HN—it's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
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Please avoid tit-for-tat spats on HN—they're nasty and boring. And please don't post in the flamewar style to HN—it's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Right on target, next to their buoy! Insane achievement!
At a buoy, SpaceX.
NSF video: https://x.com/nasaspaceflight/status/1845442658203734384
Truly incredible. A day for the history books.
> NSF is not affiliated with NASA, but the initials in the URL are used with permission from NASA.
They should just rename themselves to NSF Space Flight, or NSF for short.
Here is Scott Manley's summary and analysis of flight 5:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=Ysx4t7ICO58
I just quit my job at a SaaS. What am I doing with my life... The SpaceX team just caught the biggest rocket in history with a giant arm, we all need to dream bigger!
https://x.com/mytechceoo/status/1845573520035577925
This got me as excited as the original Falcon 9 landing in 2016! Now I got to share this with my kids! So incredible...
Update: SpaceX has set the booster back down on the launch mount and reconnected the "quick disconnect" hoses that fill it with propellant before launch. If they refilled it with propellant they'd be close to launching it again! Presumably they will be draining it instead.
Apparently the rails that catch the booster can translate in and out relative to the "chopstick" arms so the booster can be positioned and rotated to match the launch mount after landing.
This is a very important update. Where would we find out more about this? Was this in a YouTube video somewhere?
I wonder if they recover the helium used to pressurize the propellant tanks.
They caught it! Holy sh*t!
Very inspiring, glad I woke up to watch it. Congratulations to the SpaceX team. This is what competition looks like. It’s funny how last decade SpaceX had to sue the government to get more launches.
California officials reject more SpaceX launches, with some citing Musk's X posts
https://twitter.com/shellenberger/status/1845131546501734440...
They don't actually have any jurisdiction in this case. Launches from Vandendberg are from a military base and while they do try to work with the California commission they ultimately are the ones that decide what does and does not get launched.
That's madness. And unconstitutional.
It’s funny how much illegal stuff gets done by leadership. Sue to fix. Lawyers always win.
Musk tweeted that he's filing a lawsuit Tuesday morning.
The California Coastal Commission has no authority over a Federal (Military) launch range so there's no need for real concern. Yes using people's personal opinions for denial is illegal, but it's moot regardless. So I'm not sure SpaceX could sue for any damages.
Well that may still continue to happen. The wonderful and competent state of California is literally trying to block SpaceX launches over Musk’s constitutionally protected political speech:
https://www.politico.com/news/2024/10/10/california-reject-m...
I cannot remember a more explicit case of authoritarian government abuse in a developed nation in recent memory, and it’s especially infuriating given SpaceX and Musk are one of the most important and innovative companies and leaders of all time. No other country would think to look at such accomplishments and try to undermine themselves through petty politics and lawfare.
But Starship launches from (checks map) Texas.
It is a state commission composed of political appointees. It's unlikely it has the jurisdiction over Vandenberg to ban any activities, except when such activities violate state environmental laws. Even then, the federal government might be able to override them. It will be interesting to see what comes of this.
Ideally, the commission will withdraw its objections and allow the launches; SpaceX obviously chose this site both for its proximity to the Pacific Ocean and for redundancy in case of poor weather in Florida (like this past week for example).
Vandenberg does not provide redundancy. It accesses completely different orbital inclinations. You cannot launch east from there but you can launch south. The opposite is true in Florida.
Seems like it nonetheless provides redundancy. Also, one site can only handle so many launches per day. If SpaceX gets really busy, it will need multiple launch pads to handle the traffic, both launches and landings.
But then, there may be military missions that require launching from an air force base.
It has jurisdiction over Vandenberg for private launches, and there is debate over what counts as private versus federal. However, regardless of possible environmental concerns, they’ve already explicitly said they’re targeting SpaceX because of Musk’s political speech, which is morally reprehensible and also illegal per the constitution.
Can the federal government override them if the launches are purely commercial. Presumably that would be the case eventually, so I think it’s something that needs to addressed sooner.
I don’t understand how this is a constitutional violation like you claim. Let’s pretend he posted something absurd on Twitter for arguments sake, like “I’m going to use my rockets to kill every endangered bird on every California beach”, do you think that should not be considered when evaluating the request for more launches?
Therefore, for a California state government agency to punish SpaceX for its founder's speech is unconstitutional.
Title 18 USC section 232 lays out criminal penalties for violating a citizens civil rights, thus unconstitutional acts can be and often are criminal acts.
It’s straight up unconstitutional. It doesn’t matter what the speech is, the government cannot make rules that discriminate on the content of the speech.
The FAA needs more funding at this point. They're not staffed for the rate of launch requests which commercial space has grown too.
More money would make the situation worse. They need competent leadership. Everyone like to just say “add more money” because it means no actual operational change to the status quo.
You are right they are already trying to slow SpaceX as much as possible. More people in their hands more people finding ways to decelerate SpaceX
Hardly, the FAA is handing permits out the instant the mandated waiting time is up. They couldn't go faster without a literal act of congress.
It's not a mandated "Waiting time". It's the max amount of time that they have to respond. And they wait until the very last day.
The FAA already has competent leadership and staff. They don't have the budget to handle the increasing number of tasks they have been given to manage.
The FAA manages more flights and space launch operations than it did in the 1980s, when it had a budget more than quadruple the size.
To put it bluntly: you get what you pay for.
You get what you incentivise, not what you pay for.
Yeah in my area govt. officials can be incentivized to say no to prove they are doing the job. Adds massive amounts of delay.
We're going to need a dedicated FSA (federal space agency) at this rate, which should do most of the heavy lifting (ha) for the FAA and just use them for NOTAMs and TFRs.
It seemed to not be FAA here, but the several other agencies that all had 60 days to respond. FAA fast-tracked it but couldn't fast track it past the other guys' 60 day allowed time.
Need to remove regulations instead and fast track SpaceX.
Every fucking time we don't need to increase the size of the Government. It only gets bigger. Never smaller.
No, launching big heavy explosive things into space shouldn’t have fewer regulations. That’s insane to think they should be able to just do it without much oversight.
Sure the safety part of it is something that should be verified before launch. But when they are launching multiple of these things and the variables are all mostly the same you don't need to do the same analysis over and over again.
A prime example is the environmental impact stuff. They have already done that multiple times. Nothing really changed. If it succeed and doesn't blow up the impact is X, if it blows up the impact is Y. Yet these approvals take weeks and months.
There are also multiple agencies that put their foot down. Famously fish and wildlife was worried starship would crash in the water and hit a shark/whale. No seriously. https://youtu.be/kS8G5D9fg3g?t=21
Then there is the story that at Vandenburg air base, they had to strap a seal to a board and play rocket noises through headphones to see if it was distressed. Keep in mind Vandenburg has been a military rocket launch site for decades. But only now when its SpaceX do these agencies put up road blocks. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3SvJP5wfN4k
> Keep in mind Vandenburg has been a military rocket launch site for decades.
Not one of which ever returned to base with a sonic boom.
I assure you, the folks who tried to kill goats via mental powers and staring at them have required weirder tests than the seal.
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Isn’t this exactly what happened with Boeing, where the FAA delegated its authority, on the assumption that Boeing knew what it was doing?
Regulations probably are not going to fix the rot that's inside Boeing. It's like putting water in groundhog tunnels, clamp down on one area and it will pop up somewhere else.
They need to die off and get replaced by better competition when they mess up. And their market centralization ground to a halt instead of encouraged by the gov because of jobs and total risk aversion.
Boeing is publicly funded though, which means crazy incentives take over that are out of whack.
If by the size of government you mean the budget, there have been multiple instances of the government shrinking. As a percent of GDP the 90s saw cuts to federal spending, the 2011 sequestration saw a drop in spending even in nominal terms, and obviously the end of WW2 saw a massive collapse in government spending and the end of multiple different programs
What makes you think the issue is funding?
Oh idk maybe picking up just about any recent history book? ie, the goals and effects of austerity politics?
perhaps we need less thorough reviews
Not sure why this is downvoted.
Our risk-to-regulatory oversight cost benefit analysis seems extremely off - we overregulate small things that do not have large-scale meaningful impact while basically grandfather in stuff like depleting the Great Salt Lake, coal emissions, etc. which have vastly less regulatory $ spend per environmental impact.
Ideally, if we could quantify all environmental impacts into a single number (ie. CO2 emissions but also wildlife impact, etc.), the $/impact spent across different fields would be equal.
Currently, however, we are likely spending 100x+ on a per-impact basis on SpaceX regulation.
>while basically grandfather in stuff like depleting the Great Salt Lake, coal emissions, etc.
Gee, almost as if decades of austerity politics, lobbying by financial interests, and regulatory capture has malformed a well intentioned regulatory apparatus? Seems like we need more regulation that's less interested in what "united citizens" have to say. (read lobbyists)
How are you arriving at that assessment of regulation of spaceX? i'd be interested in reading more.
Austerity politics? I don’t agree, we have record spending as a percentage of gdp and are rapidly approaching sovereign debt crisis levels of mismanagement. We aren’t Europe, we never really had an austerity moment.
> How are you arriving at that assessment of regulation of spaceX?
I mean, SpaceX launches simply do not have a large impact on the environment compared to say, all cumulative coal emissions in the US. The FAA AST budget (which is for SpaceX launches) is about 60 million. Total EPA budget is about 9 billion. That’s about 160x the size of the FAA launch regulatory budget, but the environmental impact of things the EPA covers (and mostly fails to cover) is much much much more than 160x the impact of spacex launches.
What evidence do you have to disagree?
Reagen's and thatcher's whole agenda can be summed up by: "the biggest lie is 'i'm from the government and I'm here to help'"
Have you not paid much attention to politics since Reagan and Thatcher? Their whole objective was to hollow out the government piece by piece, then point to its declining performance as justification for getting rid completely, or to gut further. Repeat. This has been the modus operandi for conservative parties since at LEAST thatcher and Reagan.
>we have record spending as a percentage of gdp and are approaching a sovereign debt crisis
Yeah, it's those pesky regulatory agencies riding up that tally I'm sure, not the almost 1 trillion we spend a year perpetuating apartheid states or our military bases all over the world while 3 americans hoard more wealth than 50% of all americans combined. Silly, patently false defense for an already silly position.
Couldn't be the trillions we spent on the war on "terror". Or the trillions we spend on futile measures like the war on drugs. It's def the ftc and the epa. Those lot. That's who's causing our problems. Yep. That makes sense.
Are you serious? Either you're not a student of history or we have drastically different readings of the past 40 years of american government.
>We never really had an austerity movement
Patently false, dishonest rewriting of history. Did you not pay attention to Reagan actually did?
Reagan's whole thing was the whole govt helping is a lie.
Reagan cut food stamps and almost all other spending while drastically increasing the military budget, cut taxes on the wealthy, deregulated in the name of austerity, got the war on drugs going to villainize his political opponents.
You simply can not be serious. Maybe read Reagan's wiki page before writing such demonstrably revisionist history.
Or dismantled, lol
They have the experience and control systems to do this reliably with Falcon 9 so it seemed doable in time but seeing it on a new vehicle on the first attempt was still surprising. Really impressive engineering.
I would like to shake the hands of the steeley eyed rocket men and women who just landed a skyscraper with centimeter precision. Respect.
This one's for you. Hit it Perry. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_VJlHWESyLI
Can I hijack this thread for an almost completely unrelated question that I have observed in nearly every simulation of movement in space, even from sources like NASA and SpaceX which “should know better”?
And I’m mostly asking this out of scientific curiosity, not as a criticism.
Why do they always portray movement in space by showing stars moving past the view at variable rates, or even at all?
The opening screen of this video while you’re waiting for the feed to start shows stars moving that seem to be only feet away, and only a few inches in diameter. Like little orbs of light just passing outside the window.
Isn’t this highly unrealistic, for even extremely fast travel in space?
I would imagine at most you would see very slow movement of a very static field of stars. But every depiction in sci-fi, video games, and other simulations like in this video insist on making it seem like space is full of tiny 6-12” stars floating only feet away from each other.
Is there any explanation where this could actually be considered realistic that I’m not thinking of?
I’m just a lowly software engineer, so my expertise in this area is null. But from a basic understanding of stars and physics, this seems unrealistic.
Admittedly, I guess it wouldn’t be very exciting to view movement in space in a way that I’m imagining would be realistic, and maybe that’s the only explanation there is/needs to be.
But I guess I’m thinking that there would be enough people at SpaceX (for example) to scream “this is not even close to realistic!” for something like that to not make it to production, even if it is more exciting to watch.
As others have said, you're correct. But one reason for doing this, beyond just looking cool, is to give a visual cue for motion. The aim isn't primarily to look realistic, but to make it as easy as possible to interpret the outputs. Motion cues help with this.
As an example, if you're watching an airshow against a clear blue sky, especially filmed with a long lens where you can't see the ground, it is very hard to understand what's actually happening because you can only see attitude changes, but not the velocity vector. Add just a few clouds in the background and the impression is very different.
I’m guessing when making an artistic depiction of something going very fast in space, that sort of parallax helps? The goal of consumer content (including the ones by spacex) isn’t to be realistic, it’s to entertain
That said, “the expanse” is an exception here - they make it look as realistic as possible, including the battles where ships don’t even see each other. Stars barely move on it too
You're correct, it's hilariously unrealistic (IIRC requires actual superluminal speed), but people have been conditioned to accept it by various scifi media.
Imitating science fiction is great marketing for a space company.
Brand association with familiar depictions of “the future” is the goal, not realism.
> Is there any explanation where this could actually be considered realistic that I’m not thinking of?
You could record the full trip, and then speed the record up. What the point to watch at thousand years of the record with slowly changing picture, if you can watch it in a few minutes.
That’s what I was wondering — even if you sped up a realistic capture from space, wouldn’t it still just look like stars moving at about the same speed?
There might be small variances in velocity, but it seems like not near to the extent we see in these simulations.
Again, this was mostly a theoretical/scientific curiosity — I understand why they do it like this, I’m mostly trying to figure out what real movement might look like, even at nX speed.
If they were truthful, you'd think the picture was frozen, signal issues etc.
Coolest video by far, but this still places 3rd for me behind F9’s first landing, and the dual heavy landing. The future is bright!
anybody not watching these live better be delivering a baby,or saving someones life its a very short list of things that should take precidence over what are the most astounding things happening for our species,ever
Giddy and crying.
I turned 50 yesterday and it feels a bit like the future I dreamed of as a child.
I also cried watching this
This made me happy
We live in a day and age where it seems that all the innovations we see now are new tech that has to do with electronics.
Good to see some good ol hardware breakthroughs in another industry.
The engineers at spaceX are amazing, and I'll admit I envy their tenacity and genius.
The amount of progress we have seen in rocketry and space travel in the last decade is mind blowing, I never thought I would see this in my lifetime.
Edit: Decided to give it a shot and applied for a backend software engineering position at SpaceX. I'm not sure if it will be noticed, but its worth a shot. I may not be a rocket scientist, but it would be great to contribute using the knowledge I do have.
We could have had this all along.
That isn't exactly true though. For example, the neural net models that are used today in various GenAI startups were invented in the 1980s. But we couldn't have LLMs "all along" because we couldn't store the models, the training sets, or do the training compute with the computer hardware we had at the time. Similarly with rocketry there many technologies that have only been available in the last 10 - 15 years that make Starship possible. A sampling;
First there are solid state inertial motion sensors[1]. Those combined gyros, accelerometers, and magnetometers that way just a few grams. Those bad boys weighed a couple hundred pounds in the Apollo rockets. We put the equivalent up in a $100 quadcopter these days.
Second there is 3D printing of rocket engine alloy, this allows SpaceX to 3d print a raptor engine[2] both faster, lighter, and without error than any engine we could have built before 2010.
Third was the development of fracking which created so much methane availability [3] that using it for rocket fuel became cost effective.
Fourth and fifth changes were three decimal orders of magnitude on the ability of computers to compute with a commensurate drop in cost, and with that an explosion the the ability to use high frequency radio to do things that used to be done by cable harnesses and wiring. (sorry no citation, general knowledge)
I can appreciate that it is really really hard to internalize how much as changed and improved since Apollo and can strongly recommend a trip to one's local science museum if you have one to get a visceral sort of amazement at what Apollo engineers did with the technology available to them at the time.
So it isn't accurate to say we could have had this all along, although if one of the 'big' players like Lockheed Martin or Grumman Aerospace had continued investing even after the 'Star Wars' program was cancelled I do agree we would have had it sooner than we did. How much sooner? Maybe 5 years? But it is important to realize that at that time (late 80's early 90's) they didn't know that the Internet was going to be a thing and so they didn't have a built in "market" for all of that launch capability. Even with Teledesic[4] which tried to go there, you needed someone who like Musk who was too ignorant of what "could be done" to push a bunch of really smart people beyond what they thought they were capable of.
[1] Apollo PGNCS --- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_PGNCS
[2] SpaceX simplifies Raptor engine: Has it used additive manufacturing? --- https://www.tctmagazine.com/additive-manufacturing-3d-printi...
[3] The U.S. fracking revolution has caused natural gas prices to drop 47 percent compared to what the price would have been prior to the fracking revolution in 2013. --- https://www.brookings.edu/articles/the-economic-benefits-of-...
[4] Teledesic -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teledesic
Not to mention solving the landing algorithm using work done for the Mars rovers.
No. It all depends on cheap computation, reliable/free satellite location systems, and other stuff that weren't things in the (60s, 70s, 80s - pick your own starting point for "all along").
It's as much the economics as it is the technology. It took a ton of private investment, and government investment to get here.
A rocket a day keeps the cost away.
Found the Factorio player.
We just needed more people like Elon.
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Sure. As a human he's (at best) a deeply-flawed agent of chaos (aren't we all to some degree?)... but at the same time we DO need a lot more people like him to put blinders on and act as undeniable agents of change.
For better or worse, he's single-handedly facilitated watershed progress in more areas than just about any individual we can name from recent times. All the "cringe" and human shit he does that we hate and clown on will be erased by history and forgotten when the stuff that -other people- create, as a byproduct of him starting and funding these companies, pushes us forward and eclipses the clickbait and/or questionable personal behavior of the man himself.
Teamwork makes the dream work, and I believe sometimes we need gigantic egos to set the ball firmly in motion.
Boeing does much much more of that.
Why don’t they deliver, in spite of them being decades more experienced in this area? Why don’t they deliver in spite of getting much more money from the government and from your mentioned complex?
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Outstanding engineers care of doing engineering and making progress. And having a leader they can see burning for a mission and a goal. A leader who gets down and dirty with them.
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I don't get this hero worship. Elon Musk didn't build and launch this rocket. Thousands of engineers, scientists and technicians did. Elon wrote their salary checks, but anyone with gobs of money could do that.
People are prone to either giving Musk too much credit or too little.
Musk isn't Tony Stark, single-handedly building everything. But then again, that's not how most innovations work.
Engineers who worked directly with Musk, such as Tom Mueller, have spoken about Musk's technical acumen and involvement in managing projects.
There have been many rocket programs, both public and private, that have accomplished less with more money. Bezos's Blue Origin, for example, started earlier than SpaceX and had a much richer backer for most of its existence, but is only now hoping to launch its first orbital rocket (and I hope they succeed).
There's more to it than just writing a check.
He did so so much more than writing their checks. But what am I doing here, who am I seriously talking to?
They could. But they didn’t.
He’s a twat. But he has vision longer than the next quarter and can inspire / coerce people into delivering.
Around the board, including at X.
“Never been done before – xAI did in 19 days what everyone else needs one year to accomplish.”
He’s a twat? What are your credentials?
> “Never been done before – xAI did in 19 days what everyone else needs one year to accomplish.”
It's a lot less impressive being the second person to fly a plane. Grok was released in November 4, 2023; Llama was released freely in February 2023. They had plenty to build off.
> He’s a twat? What are your credentials?
What credentials would be relevant to determining that?
I credit Musk for a lot of the vision behind SpaceX, but I'm glad he seems a bit distracted from it right now with X etc. It's possible to be both visionary and a twat simultaneously. Howard Hughes serves as a similar example.
> I credit Musk for a lot of the vision behind SpaceX
For sure. Outstanding vision. I'll give him credit. But vision doesn't launch a rocket or finance a business. There are probably thousands of people out there with sufficient "vision" to build a space program, but only one of them is a billionaire willing to finance it. Musk is not some one of a kind unique person. He just happens to be one of the few who have the means ($$) to hire people who can actually bring his vision to life.
"There must be a beginning of any great matter, but the continuing unto the end until it is thoroughly finished yields the true glory." -- Sir Francis Drake
Eh, maybe. There’s a lot of computing and telemetry going on that benefits from the last twenty years of miniaturization and performance. The iPhone seemed impossible when announced to BlackBerry; tech has gone crazy fast.
You should take a look at what Von Braun was planning for the Saturn V by the mid 1970s.
IIRC they were talking about 100+ Apollo launches to get a real space station, moon base, and expedition missions to Mars by 1980 and with that would have come a real drive to innovate and improve on the Saturn V.
Without the computational power that we take for granted today they would have definitely brute forced their way to elegant solutions and got somewhere close to where we are by the mid 90s.
This would have lead to tremendous innovations in solar panels, batteries, and metallurgy much sooner than we ended up getting to them.
Instead we chose a different path and made ourselves completely dependent on oil.
I guess the main problem was nobody had a budget for those plans. ”Technically speaking we can do it but we can’t afford it” unfortunately still means ”we can’t do it”.
Now only if Project Orion had not been canceled due to international treaties banning nuclear testing we’d be on the moons of Jupiter by now (sigh).
A lot of those plans were just plain goofy. The Shuttle was supposed to generate the same sort of awesomeness, too.
Apollo was pretty goofy if you think about -- Yeeting a couple of dudes to the moon in a giant ass rocket so that they can tool around in a little electric-go cart with lawn chair seats and play some golf but it worked.
I think that the Saturn V was a solid platform that was robust enough to do the kinds of things that Von Braun and others had in mind as well as versatile enough to be improved upon.
They would have done it with sufficient budget but the political drive wasn't there. The politicians were more concerned with killing Vietnamese and Cambodians and then selling out American interests to oil companies.
It’s a lot easier to model and simulate too.
NSF video: https://x.com/nasaspaceflight/status/1845442658203734384
Moon by 2030 and Mars by 2040 seems like a winning bet lately
The Delta-V is comparable since you can aerobrake on mars. It's only the difference between the time.
Earth to moon without Aerobraking is a delta v of around 13k/s, mars is 13.3
An additional advantage is that it’s theoretically possible to make fuel for Starship on Mars. The Luna lander will need to bring enough fuel for the return trip.
What is the object beside the rocket at 37:49 to 38:02 ? Is that debris ? It seems to be falling with, then away from the rocket. (it looks like a small glowing ring to the right)
It’s the hot staging spacing ring. They didn’t call it on the feed but it is an expendable part that ejects after separation.
thank you!
Hotstaging was added quite late so they need to jettison in order to land, but it should be permanently integrated in the later variants.
interesting, thank you for the extra info
"Incredible!" in the voice of my 3 year old who just saw it :)
What an incredible achievement. Huge congratulations to the team at SpaceX! Still have chills.
Anyone know whether the fire toward the bottom of the booster during/after the catch is normal?
I suppose they were venting off and burning some remaining fuel in some conduits.
When KSP becomes reality, 275 tons falling from space caught by some metal struts…
And here I thought nothing would top the double landing view from Falcon Heavy...
That was such a magical moment
People on earth are experiencing the Jetsons and the Flinstones at the same time
Food for thought:
Maybe 'the Jetsons' and 'the Flintstones' aren't as far apart as we think, us being people who like to think we are witnessing 'the Jetsons' now. Maybe that is just a relevant distinction.
Maybe those two descriptors are much closer than they would appear to some outside observers. Maybe it's really just 'Flintstones part 1;' and 'Flintstones part 2', right now.
Or...
Our 'Flintstones' was already 'Jetsons' compared to everything else in this observable universe, which winds up mostly being just peat bogs on Dagobah, comparatively, and we're just inching out the icing on the cake at this point.
Who knows.
This is what makes it bittersweet. So many comments here talking about this being progress for 'humanity'. I may be cynical, but most of humanity will get no benefit from any of these accomplishments. This is technology owned by and ultimately in service of a minuscule fraction of humanity.
The launching of Starlink will absolutely improve the quality of internet to underserved countries and rural areas. Quality internet is a game changer.
Agreed. Even if it takes a long time for us to be riding rocket ships to visit our grandparents, we'll be benefiting from this technology way faster than that
better weather forecasting (launching and replacing the existing old satellites) seems useful. starlink has already been a game changer in communities experiencing natural disasters and is now coming to commercial airplanes.
so there’s something at least. :)
Driving around Africa basically every village had solar panels, a huge number of people had smart phones and internet.
The least developed country on earth is currently developing faster than any country ever has at any time in history.
Read the book “factfullness”
This is truly an amazing feat! Congratulations to the SpaceX team.
Can someone explain to me exactly WHY it's such a big deal though? Like subjectively I can see it's incredible but while watching the video there were enormous applauses at points I knew were a big deal but I lacked the understanding of physics to truly appreciate.
The current Falcon rocket always expends a stage and lands a stage. Starship will land both stages. Also Starship is far larger and in rocketry there is something called the square cube law that means bigger is better. So its far more efficient. That leads to far cheaper mass to orbit costs.
In order to land not just the first stage but also the second stage more fuel will have to be carried on the ascent phase just to enable the recovery phase. This then necessitates weight savings elsewhere to avoid payload to orbit being cut way back. SpaceX chose to remove the landing system from both, the first and second stages (both because, after all if you can eliminate the landing system from one stage then you can eliminate it from the other).
This and other weight savings will enable high payload to orbit in a fully reusable launch platform.
Landing without legs requires something like this catch system -- something never done before, and clearly very difficult to do.
For humans to have any reasonable presence somewhere else in our solar system (moon, mars, etc.) we need the ability to launch tons (literally tons) of stuff to orbit and to the destination. and we need to launch it often to do anything in a reasonable amount of time. the only way to do that is to make reusable launch systems. SpaceX's Falcon 9 has aced that for satellites (see Starlink and everything else they've launched). The Starship launch system is capable of launching a significantly larger payload, ~20 times more. What they demonstrated yesterday is that a launch system that is capable of getting us anywhere in the solar system can be reusable. Huge accomplishment.
Ok. I will admit this. SpaceX Engineering is making me feel regret for not choosing Aerospace Engineering back in Undergrad. Oh well, That Tower is almost within Civil-Structural Engineering.
Everyday Astronaut Stream: https://youtu.be/pIKI7y3DTXk
During/before the water landing of Ship, the telemetry indication for the rocket motors stayed off.
Does that mean the landing burn was unsuccessful? Or was that just a glitch in the telemetry?
In the video you can see the engines light (reflecting off the metal control flap and water) and the ship make a soft touchdown on the water. It then tips over and the tanks pop from the force of smacking the water sideways.
So the landing burn seems to have been a success.
It's weird, that happened last time too so you'd think if it was a glitch they would have fixed it.
Imagine the number of amazing space telescopes that we are going to get! When it's cheep to launch a 10m diameter object into space, so many possibilites open up.
For things like that, they could build special versions of the star ship which remain in orbit as the housing. They would need no flaps, no tiles, just the 6 engines and the fuel tank. The body of the starship itself would be the telescopes tube.
You could do that, you could also use it to transport pieces of massive telescope arrays that self assemble in space.
Sure, thats what they did with the JWST. But that ist complex and expensive. A custom Starship could be the cheapest way to get telescopes up to 9m mirror size into space as you can assemble everything on the ground and you don't need a separate housing.
Based on this conversation, how many of y'all are actual rocket scientists? I'm blown away by the expertise in some of these comments
And here I was blown away by the ignorance of many of the questions. Why no landing legs? Why is this more impressive than the other rocket landings? What’s the thingy that fell off during separation? Sometimes I need to remind myself that other people have lives, I guess. XD
Couldn't watch the livestream on X because it was erroring out. We live in a world where you can't stream a video or Chromecast on X but you can catch a damn rocket...
I wouldn't bother with X. There were dozens of YouTube channels with the live feed.
Live scams too.
X has proven time and time again that it just cannot handle live feeds well.
Damn what a time to be alive! Amazing
Does anyone know of a live map where we can see the trajectory of launches? Wondering if starship went above my head during reentry, but I can't find the info
SpaceX has done it again! (defying status quo, not the catch :p)
One of the biggest steps forward in the space industry since the first landing of Falcon 9.
Great success!!
Happy Birthday! SpaceX lit a mighty big candle for you :)
Thanks! And they sure did!
This chopstick catch was really impressive. I had my money on them managing it the first time. I haven't been so excited since the dual landing of their Falcon 9 boosters.
Question I can't find the answer to anywhere: considering that SpaceX already had other ways of re-using boosters, why are they doing this?
Is it to explore more options? Or because it's faster to re-use the booster if it's already in place? Were the other approaches not satisfactory, perhaps? Or no longer applicable due to size?
First because the rocket is lighter without landing legs. Second because they're aiming for rapid reusability, they want to tower to catch the rocket, lower it to the launch mount, and get another Starship stacked on it.
mass that's on the tower that was moved to the rocket is no longer on the rocket, which means the rocket can carry more fuel/payload. hence the tower catching the rocket instead of the rocket having heavy landing gear.
Another great view: https://youtu.be/Vzyaud250Xo
Can someone explain to me why this is more impressive than landing the rocket? To a layman like me, it looks very similar - the thing looks just like a rocket but without a pointy tip, and on the way down I don't understand why difference that matters.
(I mean I still think it's mind blowing, because I think landing a rocket is also mind blowing)
(1) Much larger than any previous rocket landing, (2) This rocket carried no landing gear (more efficient - landing gear is heavy), (3) This rocket landed right back at the place it needs to be to launch again - right on its launch tower - which in a routine situation might make it much faster to prepare it for the next relaunch. (4) It's yet another step in control prowess - impressive in itself.
I must say though "right on its launch tower" is fun and all...
but things would have to get pretty extreme in the "routine" dimension for that to be very useful. If there are 20 first stages and 5 land/launch towers, for a first stage that only spends an hour in flight in between inspections.... well are you going to keep them parked on a scarce launch tower for maintenance? The towers with fill/launch infrastructure (such as reinforced concrete, fuel tanks, cold filling system, deluge water system) become the bottleneck. It's more likely then that the 1st stage lands, is safed, then is taken a couple hundred yards away for inspection and maintenance while the next in line is moved to be stacked for the next launch. The inspection / maintenance would have to be truly minimal (think airliner) to keep it right there on its own relaunch tower.
"No landing gear" is more key, compared to Falcon 9 - because of the effort toward minimal launch cost.
> The inspection / maintenance would have to be truly minimal (think airliner) to keep it right there on its own relaunch tower.
That's what they are aiming for, eventually.
Thanks!
It is a rocket. The biggest difference with the Falcon 9 first stage is that this one is about 6 times as big (diameter of 9m vs 3.7m), and that catching it with the tower requires a much higher precision in landing location. The drone ships that Falcon 9 lands on are about 90 x 50 meter. To catch it with the tower, they need to be accurate to within a few meters.
The big advantage of catching it with the tower is that it'll (eventually) allow them to put another Starship on top, refuel and launch again within hours, as opposed to the weeks it currently takes for Falcon 9.
The critical differences between Falcon 9 first stage and the Starship booster is that Starship booster lands using 3 engines rather than 1, and can throttle them down much further. 3 vs 1 gives Starship more directional control for precise landing (critical for this "catch" maneuver), and throttling allows it to hover, as it does right before the "catch".
Falcon 9 also lands using 3 engines on its most demanding missions. The throttling is definitely an advantage.
But as far as I know, one Merlin engine produces more thrust than the empty booster weighs which means they have to time things perfectly to get to zero velocity exactly at the ground.
Super heavy can hover and even go down by throttling down more. This gives them more control for the landing and don’t have to time it exactly perfectly
Thanks!
The tower is also how they plan to perform maintenance and re-staging for another launch. The tower can place it back on the launch structure or lower it down to the ground if it needs to be transported back to an enclosure for extensive repairs but a lot of work is just done with it at the tower. I imagine the goal is to eventually get to an automated system that catches the booster, inspects it for damage, clears it for relaunch, positions it on the launch structure, grabs another Sharship second stage and stacks it and then refuels the whole system and launches as soon as possible.
Plus it's really big https://images-bonnier.imgix.net/files/ill/production/Starsh...
This booster is significantly larger than anything landed on an orbital launch before. Here is a size comparison, previous largest landed orbital rocket stage is the SpaceX Falcon 9 (three of them launch together as Falcon Heavy) on the left. Starship is on the right.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/7b/SuperHea...
Landing via tower catch versus on a pad is advantageous because the weight of adding retractable landing legs to such a large rocket would be significant.
Thanks!
This method doesn't require landing legs on the rocket, allowing their weight to be used for payload instead
It’s also already on the tower that it launches from, which drastically reduces the expense and complexity of setting it up for its next launch, making it easier and faster to reuse.
To expand on this, landing legs of Falcon 9 weigh two tons. Landing legs of SuperHeavy booster would have to be even more formidable.
Which means that the weight savings are nontrivial with the "catch the rocket!" landing method.
From what I understand, it reduces the turnover dramatically. In theory the booster should be refuelled, new second stage mounted on top and ready to go for another flight. So could cut down from weeks to days/hours. That's significant.
It's more precise than landing on the ground, there is coordination with the tower required, it is way bigger than Falcon 9.
This video goes into details pretty well: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=OYvWYp0--bQ&t=832s
I think landing a booster is just as impressive. It's just that nobody's done this before, so it's exciting! Plus it's a lot bigger and part of a fully reusable config which has huge implications for space travel.
This one seems way harder than the others which land on legs and on a relatively larger circular landing pad, this one needs to nail the tower and its arms.
Amazing achievement, but also reminds me that what NASA and its contractors accomplished during the 1960s still stands with current day systems engineering.
The 3rd Saturn V launch put three men into orbit around the Moon. The 6th landed two of them there.
Sorry for the newbie rocket question: Blast off happens around 33:00 in that video. The rocket appears to be vertically still (does not move) for the first 4 to 4.5 seconds. Is it held in place, or are not enough engines burning (yet) to induce take-off?
While I cannot say if it moves immediately, it definitely moves within 2 seconds. It does not appear to move because it is so massive at more than 100 meters.
THEY REALLY CAUGHT IT!
Seems impossible honestly. Like the Jetsons
Wow, that’s amazing. Didn’t think something like that would be possible.
Great launch! Would be nice if the starship itself would be landing on the chopsticks next time and land during day time instead of dark Australia.
This was insanely cool to watch. And on the first try!
As a complete lay person with little to no physics knowledge: what stops the use of something dumb like a parachute, or even wings and landing gear, to "land" the booster? I assume it is impractical (since they don't do it), but what are the actual particulars that stop it from working? While super cool to watch, it seems crazy that plucking it out of the air like that is the best way to preserve the booster for reuse.
Parachutes give little or no control over where and how the rocket lands, are unreliable (unfurling fabric behaves chaotically; modern spacecraft still don't have 100% reliability on their parachutes), and are surprisingly heavy.
Wings and landing gear are useless extra weight during launch, and excess weight on the booster has a super-linear reduction weight delivered to orbit. (the Tyranny of the Rocket Equation)
During the 1960s, NASA investigated using inflatable Rogallo Wings (basically hang gliders) to land the Gemini capsule. It worked fine, but was more complicated than parachutes, and re-use was not one of the goals of the Gemini or Apollo programs.
None of those give much margin for error on landing. Without any kind of propulsion, there's no option to come to a hover or do another go-around if the landing isn't going well. Space Shuttle pilots had to do extensive training in simulators for the landing because they only got one shot at it during the mission.
Propulsive landing doesn't require any hardware that isn't already on the launch vehicle, only a little excess propellant. (And it is a small amount; Super Heavy is like a soda can that's full of liquid at launch and only has a swig at the bottom during landing.) Propulsive landing gives Falcon 9 and Super Heavy the ability to overcome wind and other weather conditions to make pinpoint landings. Engine throttling gives Super Heavy the ability to hover, so it has a huge margin for error when coming in for a landing.
Super Heavy could have had legs, like Falcon 9, but it has such a huge payload capacity that they can simply choose to always launch with enough propellant to come back to the tower, and it saves a lot of flying weight and complexity by simply not having them. The arms on the tower can be massively overbuilt to ensure however much reliability SpaceX wants.
> As a complete lay person with little to no physics knowledge: what stops the use of something dumb like a parachute, or even wings and landing gear, to "land" the booster?
The main advantage is that you don't need to spend any of your payload mass budget on a parachute, or wings and landing gear. The secondary advantage over a parachute is that you don't need to fish it out of seawater and make your refurbishment process more of a pain in the ass.
At the very least, reducing the number of concerns on the rocket is definitely worthwhile. They are going to have an engine in any case, and using just that and nothing else on the rocket itself simplifies testing and reduces risk. The tower can have a separate testing and there's no way something that happens on the way to orbit and back breaks the tower.
Wings, parachute, etc... All very easy to break or burn at hypersonic speeds, and very chaotic to control. It probably (very probably) wouldn't be possible to land back exactly where the rocket launched on wings or chutes - that would probably need an extremely long and wide runway, but compare the size of Starship to the Space Shuttle... It's like braking a toy car vs braking an actual truck.
The Starship second stage is surprisingly not all that heavy compared to the 78t Shuttle orbiter dry mass, despite the many-fold difference in volume and payload, plus Starship needing to be a legitimate second stage rather than just an orbiter.
It mostly comes down to reducing extra weight. You have to carry those wings and landing gear upwards, which reduces useful payload weight. But having the booster right where it started also helps with reusability. No need to transport the booster from a landing strip back to the starting table
physics?
After watching this the project of changing brakes on my old car doesn't feel like that big of a project anymore.
Anyone knows how the landing is guided? Is it just really precise GPS/altimeter or does it use computer vision?
Falcon-9 relies on GPS and a couple of altimeters. (Filtered, as others have already said, with the help of data from the inertial sensors.)
Compared to Falcon-9, Starship/Superheavy additionally has a command link from the ground. Whether it is used to coordinate the movement during the catch is not publicly known, but it is easy to imagine how this could be useful.
Likely a mix of GPS, inertial guidance, vision and radio/laser beacons/ranging.
I would bet in the traditional sensors.
I'd imagine a combination of inertial and GPS, combined with a Kalman filter. Inertial handles short term estimation; GPS correcting drift in the inertial system. But they could roll in other information sources at the end.
For the centimeterish precision needed to hover into the chopsticks, they also have the opportunity to use signals from the tower area for final alignment. I'm thinking riding a beam like aviation ILS. Just speculating but it would be easy to implement.
Optical/camera alignment is probably out of the question due to fire and smoke.
The arms themselves could have sensors on them. Inductive loops sensing the presence of the stainless steel structure?
Also, I doubt centimeter scale precision would be needed; the arms have some compliance in them, I'm sure, as well as the ability to control how far in they swing.
Yeah really - it's half centimeter nav according to BG. Ctrl-f for centimeter:
https://arstechnica.com/space/2024/10/spacex-catches-returni...
Surveying GPS can do that with WAAS and a bunch of integration time and extra receivers, but not in real time:
https://www.gps.gov/systems/gps/performance/accuracy
So that's why I think they need to have a high resolution, close range, 3d positioning method for the final seconds.
yea this seemed like simple PID control to me, nothing impressive yawn
What parts of this can be reused? I bet the engine is OK, but seems like the sides of the ... tube ... were pretty roughed up. I guess that's probably the cheapest part of the assembly though.
All of it can be reused. Their plan is for the tower to set the booster back down and immediately relaunch it.
Everything except the stage connector ring (which uses pyro bolts I believe) should be directly reusable, after an inspection, light brushing, and refueling / recharging.
Maybe the bottom uses some ablative material, then a new coat of it needs to be applied / attached.
All the internals should have enough resource for likely dozens of launches, if Falcon-9 is any indication.
Nothing short of inspiring. Moving humanity forward. Well done to the SpaceX team.
Congratulations. This is a Sputnik-level event, opening a new era in the history of civilization. Amazing.
The contrast between SpaceX's success at creating reusable rockets and Tesla's failure at FSD is pretty stark.
To be honest FSD is way harder. The platform doesn't occasionally have a road closure sign or a new traffic light or a guy unloading his van or an emergency vehicle with its hazards on.
Don't get me wrong the engineering and physics are crazy ugly, but it's at least consistent within a range. Humans are messy, unpredictable, unreliable and chaotic.
Holy hell, they caught the booster!
Landing from space during sunrise while your rocket is on fire is as dramatic as it gets!
An incredible achievement. I'm honored to be part of this moment in history.
Highlights in a YouTube video:
https://youtu.be/b28zbsnk-48?si=JamDRMuN07oWlcZi
As an ME/AE, I can say this is an astounding engineering achievement. And on the first try! Well done, SpaceX!
Do they recover whats left of the ship from the Indian Ocean?
They can probably go fishing, but anything that sunk is gonna stay sunk. That ocean is not shallow, and deep submarine operations are expensive…
They did pull the bottom of the previous booster out. On the webcast they mentioned adjusting the landing maneuver for the ship to be a bit softer in case they decide to recover it too.
The previous booster landed in the golf of Mexico.
This starship landed in the Indian ocean a bit west of Australia, it's like 3x deeper.
↑ That.
For extra context: that "3× deeper" makes costs seriously explode. People do know how to engineer for that depth, but it's a lot of effort and there's pretty much no commercial market. For shallower stuff there's oil rigs, deep-sea cables, seafloor mining, even just tourism… but at some point it just peters out and only research vessels tackle the depth.
(source: friend of mine works at a UK university doing deep-sea vehicles)
>(source: friend of mine works at a UK university doing deep-sea vehicles)
As in he works on their development? That sounds exciting, do you have something like the name of one of the vehicles?
> As in he works on their development?
Yes, she works on their development.
> That sounds exciting, do you have something like the name of one of the vehicles?
No vehicle name, but this is the university department/lab: https://www.southampton.ac.uk/research/facilities/maritime-r...
(Their vehicles don't even go that deep, but again that was the point I was trying to make… even in research, the very deep stuff is rare and a "big project" that ends up fanned out ⇒ MRIL made only the cameras for a 4km vessel…)
Do they worry about any issues of the debris winding up in the hands of China or Russia? I would imagine the raptor engines are mostly intact.
Was the explosion intentional? I thought they were hoping it would float for recovery but if not I makes sense to sink it.
You think there are Russian submarines in the gulf of mexico?
They splashed down in the Indian Ocean, not the Gulf of Mexico.
Also noone mentioned submarines, debris can just float and drift around (sometimes even at some depth below the surface).
Starship landed in the Indian Ocean, not the Gulf of Mexico.
I mean, yes [0]. It's probably the main reason SpaceX went to effort to recover [1] all the engines of the previous booster (IFT-4), which landed in accessible, shallow water in the Gulf of Mexico. The Raptor engines hold valuable secrets, particularly to China who are trying to clone a lot of SpaceX things.
The CIA did something very similar to this in the Cold War [2], though they used a boat instead of a submarine.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akula-class_submarine#Operatio... ("In August 2012, the news media reported that another Akula-class submarine operated in the Gulf of Mexico purportedly undetected for over a month, sparking controversy within U.S. military and political circles...")
[1] https://old.reddit.com/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1fvdekt/more_... ("More images from B11 recovery + new info "26 of the Raptors have been recovered but they are trying to get all 33")
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Azorian
Do they have the ability? Russia couldn’t get Kursk back. Not clear they could even do it if we left it there.
It's more of a financial question, do you want to shell out for some chance at it. And Russia and China can build their own engines, SpaceX is very good but not like a century ahead good.
(If anything, I'd be more worried about North Korea or Pakistan getting their hands on stuff…)
Either way the risk is the shit that's left floating, if they don't fish it out it'll randomly wash up in Madagascar or so…
Absolutely incredible achievement, I'm still shaking!
I was sure they were going to lose one of the fins at "max q part 2".. Looked like it burned through near the hinge.
If anything, the last 2 flights have shown how good a decisions it was to go with steel. The thermal reserves seem to be really large. While not as bad as with the previous flight, there was still significant leakage of hot air between the starhip and the flap. But it didn't seem to cause significant damage, at least as far as for the landing. For complete reuse, they probably have to still improve that a bit.
Do we know how much more efficient/cheaper landing by booster catch is compared to landing on a platform?
It's not just cheaper, it's preserving capacity. Every pound of landing gear you carry has to be offset with fuel to lift it, and then that fuel has to have fuel to lift it and on and on.
What is the advantage of catching the booster vs letting it touch down?
You don't have to send most of the landing hardware into space.
That makes sense, thank you!
Why can only Elon do stuff like this and not BlueOrigin or the hundreds of other aerospace startups? Does he just have a 1/100000000 combination of intelligence, tenacity, and directionality that can't be matched by anyone, even those trying to emulate him as closely as possible?
Isn't BlueOrigin going after at totally different market segment, I thought it was focused on things like space tourism and more "space base" type stuff? Also pretty sure BlueOrigin is almost all funded by Jeff B, SpaceX has a lot of external funding and focused on tangible markets vs just "people will want to do stuff in space" - I think it was only very recently they started to work with NASA.
> Isn't BlueOrigin going after at totally different market segment, I thought it was focused on things like space tourism
They have New Shepard, a crew-rated suborbital spacecraft, primarily targeted at tourism, but it has also done some science payloads for NASA, university and commercial clients.
But they also are doing a lot of non-tourism stuff: they designed and manufacture first stage engines for ULA’s new Vulcan launch vehicle; they have their own reusable orbital launch vehicle (New Glenn) due to launch soon (planned for next month, but might slip to early next year); they have a contract with NASA to build a lunar lander to compete with SpaceX’s; they are part of one of the teams NASA has chosen to compete for the contract to build a commercial ISS replacement.
And SpaceX is involved in space tourism too: both directly, and indirectly via resellers such as Axiom.
It is just that the most publicly noticeable thing Blue Origin has achieved is space tourism, which makes people think it is primarily a space tourism company; meanwhile, SpaceX has had numerous publicly visible achievements other than tourism, so people view tourism as just another thing they do, not their main thing.
Why do we think its Elon 'doing' this? Just curious, since it could just as well be that its the engineers and other leaders who could be the differentiator.
Because it's Elon who said "ok, build it." There's no one else except him with that power and/or the guts. Even landing a rocket the government had given up on, and no company was even trying until he did. People were calling the 'chopstick' landing system a dumb idea until today.
It's not like engineers don't come up with wild ideas all the time to their leadership, but is the leadership good enough to understand the good ideas from bad ones? Take the risk, spend billions to actually execute?
Elon has enough of a physics/engineering background to ask the right questions, understand the trades engineers put in front of him, and make the risk/reward calculation to make the right decisions the ends up winning.
To get what SpaceX has you need strong technical leadership all the way up the chain. Many companies don't. Their CEOs are experts in legal, PR, finance, etc... They make poor technical decisions.
I would agree with that if it weren't the case that the collection of engineers and other leaders working under Elon consistently outperform their competition in multiple domains.
Because he is the kingpin. He chooses the staff, he guides them, he does everything at a high level.
You can hire new executives, you can't easily find a new Musk, and then you will fail.
See the problem?
Congratulations to those working at SpaceX!
In addition to the other ways this is incredible, it is a stunning achievement in software development.
Do we know if there was a test payload?
Yes, there was none.
I grew up playing Halo, and this was purely fiction at that point.
Unbelievable. Amazing.
First attempt!
I can't believe what i just saw!
Humanity has reached a milestone.
We have done much, but there is much to be done.
I don’t understand, the starship has to stand on something, and what ever that is in contact with ( arm or barge or land or whatever ) , needs to be as heavy, how they are saving weight ?
The catch somehow absolutely demolished the amazing FH dual landing
Holy shit. I almost had a heart attack when it looked like the booster was about to slowly careen into the tower
> I almost had a heart attack when it looked like the booster was about to slowly careen into the tower
Same but it looks more dramatic on the feed we all got: on other vids the angle is different and although close it doesn't look it's going to crash into the tower.
Still: feels pretty close.
The joy on the faces of all the employees is infectious, congrats!
The video looks like it's being played in reverse
This is incredible!
Very difficult to enjoy with all the screaming
For some reason, the spacex screams sound nightmarishly terrifying to me.
Congratulations.
Now go back 7 years and watch the proposal for 1 hour flight anywhere in the world - https://youtu.be/2tf2KpCG2fM?si=EfDUcL4x7MpGt51C&t=27
Crazy that the chop stick catch was originally eye rolled by the engineers and then when he pushed for it they realized he was serious.
Does anyone know what this circular thing is at 5:36 mark in the below video under the booster? It's like a piece which separated and keeps falling off.
https://i.imgur.com/z6PH2Jw.png
https://youtu.be/b28zbsnk-48?t=336
Code name: Danielsan.
Does each engine have 6 degree of freedom to point its jet?
No, each individual engine has 2 DoF (x-axis and y-axis rotation) which correspond to torque on x and y plane to the rocket. They need to use more than one at once (three in starship's case) pointing in different directions to get z axis torque.
SpaceX's Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy have already revolutionized the space industry with their reusable first stage boosters and rocket engines. This advance in rocket design has resulted in the cost to launch one kilogram of payload to orbit from approximately $15,000 in the pre-SpaceX era, to around $1,400 with the Falcon Heavy. This graph shows the incredible impact of SpaceX on the volume of rocket launches, with an exponential rise in recent years:
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/yearly-number-of-objects-...
With Starship, SpaceX is striving to make rockets fully reusable, which, if they succeed, will transform human civilization by radically reducing launch costs and enabling large-scale space exploration and industry. The kinds of possibilities this opens up include economically viable permanent lunar bases, Mars colonization, and revolutionary industries like asteroid mining.
Stage 1 sucessfully caught. That was pretty incredible. I remember watching the Falcony Heavy launch when both boosters landed in sync.
It's hanging pretty high in the air, I assume so the engines do less damage to the pad. One wonders how they're going to get it down. Do the chopsticks lower on the tower?
They'll lower it to the launch mount... the catch arms are effectively a crane. But I wonder if it's more "toasty" than they were expecting? There were some fires going at catch (those look out, at least on external camera views) and the engines are still a bit.... smokey. Don't know if that's normal... or if they were expecting it.
My hunch is that they don't put it down for awhile. If there's still an issue were there are fires lingering inside, my hunch is they want that as far from the ground infrastructure as possible.
Either way incredible progress.
From the replay, it seems that the fire comes from methane from the RCS thrusters burning, so it seems normal
The fire I mostly saw was coming from the quick disconnect ports and related plumbing. Also, there was fire on the other side, close to where there was part of a chine was clearly missing. There were a couple other things, too.
Wasn't perfect, some things to work out... but still pretty damn good.
Remember on the first launch when, on the way up, there were hydraulic units exploding off the side and the engines started exploding taking out more hydraulic units? Heh that and all the concrete flying up on ignition was like watching a heavy metal music video.
There was a lot of smoke coming out of the bottom after the catch. I was worried about an internal fire but it’s since stopped. The glow from the engine mount on re-entry was amazing. The fire on landing had me worried too I was expecting it to grow but put itself out eventually.
What an amazing morning!
Yes, the chopsticks lower and raise. They will lower the tower onto a transport vehicle and send it back to the bay for examination, and then possible reflight.
Yep, they handle all the mounting/demounting ops on the launch mount, so they have to be able to move along the tower.
Yes, the chopsticks are attached to one giant lift.
That was craaaaaaaazy!
That was impressive.
That was soooo good!
I am absolutely flabbergasted at this. Wow. Jesus christ.
Awesome. Incredible. Inspiring. Words fail me.
Heartfelt congratulations to the folks at SpaceX!
I went to follow this on the SpaceX YouTube channel since it is usually closer to real time.
It seems someone hijacked and played a video of the previous launch. Just as we got to launch time it cut to a fake badly dubbed speech by Elon Musk going on about Bitcoin, with a handy QR code.
This was a bit confusing but since it was 10 minutes in advance I managed to switch to another channel.
Still amazing, even if the video glitched at the key capture point.
And an hour later the Starship itself re entered to soft salty sea landing.
I don’t know how many prototype runs they need to do, I’m guessing they could stuff a shed load of Starlinks into the next one.
You need to look closely at the channel name in a URL and not just the branding signals on the page itself (logos, "presentation name"), etc. What you'll find is that the on-page channel name can be made pretty much anything as well as logos, banner's etc. But when you look at a URL that leads to the channel page, it's not the same and it doesn't have the verification check.
There is a real SpaceX channel: https://www.youtube.com/spacex
Note that it's just "spacex" and does have the verification mark. Also, SpaceX doesn't stream anything there (anymore): it's all just promotional videos... some of them are cool, but that's all they are. Nothing real-time. SpaceX only streams on X now, so I'd recommend one of the third party Youtube channels like https://www.youtube.com/@NASASpaceflight (which isn't NASA) if you'd prefer to stick to Youtube for such things.
This was on the YouTube appleTV app
I don't have any Apple products, so I couldn't give you any advice here.
My experience is that, while YouTube has a lot of content creators that I very much enjoy... I enjoy YouTube stewardship of the platform... less so.
I have an admittedly old Chromecast Ultra and Pixel Pro 8 phone which I usually use to control it. As they continue to upgrade the app and the service, they steadily make it worse and worse. Damn thing is almost unusable.
In the end, I think they may well be poorly product managing themselves into a position where they could be vulnerable to a more able, savvy, and competent competitor.
All this is to say you're probably just out of luck on being able to see these sorts of scams if you aren't already hip to them existing.
Sounds like you were on a scam, fake version of the channel.
This is why Musk is silly when he claims fear over what certain possible gov administrations would do to him if elected.
He's allowed to believe whatever he wants. He's too valuable to the United States. Imagine what a BRICS country would pay for his talent? Worth his weight in gold wrapped platinum.
It’s justified. https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2024-10-11/la-me-sp...
They did it!
So funny that they had a little buoy water ready to film the explosion. I want to see the views of that camera from the landing itself.
the starship hit the target!
What an inspiring team SpaceX has.
This is amazing. What an incredible technological feat!
SpaceX has unbaked bread
Now we have no excuses
basically they transfer equipment from the rocket to the landing tower so that the rocket can be lighter which is why they have to catch the rocket instead of the rocket landing by itself.
Speaking as a non-American. SpaceX just made one of the most significant technological leaps in the last decade. This is obviously hugely significant in many ways, including retaining the US military edge.
Yet the US administration hasn't congratulated SpaceX. Incredible.
https://x.com/SenBillNelson/status/1845461454977196294
What counts?
The current head NASA admin (a political appointee) did it a few hours ago and it's retweeted on the official @NASA account.
(not linking as peer comment already did)
It's unfortunate that Elon has made himself so visibly political, it casts a dark shadow on the great work of the people at his companies.
Hard to stay apolitical when the government excludes you from an EV summit and calls your competition the market leader, a bold face lie.
There has been some kind of beef between Elon Musk and the Biden administration even before Musk's public right-wing turn. For example Biden has given speeches praising US EV vehicle manufacturers and not mentioning Tesla but mentioning all their competitors.
Yeah stuff like this - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s9ZmdIh1qpI
Unions told Biden to ignore Tesla. https://www.wsj.com/politics/elections/how-elon-musk-broke-w...
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What did the post(s) say?
https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1240754657263144960?lang=en
https://www.theverge.com/2020/3/20/21187760/twitter-elon-mus...
https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2020/04/29/tech/elon-musk-twitter-co...
Lots of examples. And I’m not just talking about his general opinions on government response, but actual misinterpretations and misstatements of data that were straight-up wrong.
It was also a clear breaking point between Elon and local and state government in California over how local restrictions were going to affect Tesla’s factory in Fremont.
So the claims were:
1. That they will probably get to 0 cases. (he was wrong, but this prediction was made fairly early on when the data looked like this: https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1240767096104972289)
2. Kids essentially immune but elderly with existing conditions vulnerable, so family gatherings with close contact are risky. (https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1240758710646878208) ... seems correct?
3. He said "the coronavirus panic is dumb". (perhaps downplaying it too much, but in 2024 I think most people would say that the societal response such as not being allowed to go to a beach or park was absurd)
4. He wanted to keep factories open and for people to be allowed outside their homes. (similar to 3)
5. He posted: "Yes, reopen with care & appropriate protection, but don’t put everyone under de facto house arrest" (https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1255386895145672705) ... which also seems reasonable.
6. He had Tesla working on making ventilators but didn't think they would be needed in the end. (https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1240770010747830272)
Did I miss anything or were his posts relatively uncontroversial with the benefit of hindsight? Personally, I was more concerned about covid than he was at the time, but I would say that his approach to it was more reasonable.
> That they will probably get to 0 cases. (he was wrong, but this prediction was made fairly early on when the data looked like this:
This was an incorrect interpretation of data that did not account for reporting lag in case numbers, which were actually increasing. It was a bad statement, a bad interpretation of data, and poor judgement to post it.
"Kids are essentially immune" and "Kids seem to be less affected" are two different statements. There are thousands of child deaths associated with COVID-19.
In March of 2020 we had very little characterization of this virus and its effects. Whether predictions were mostly right or mostly wrong, I think a prominent public figure making definitive statements about probably trending to zero or kids being "immune" was irresponsible. If nothing else, to me it makes him look dumb considering how much he downplayed the impact of the virus itself, how much he vilified the 'panic', and how many millions of deaths followed those statements.
> He wanted to keep factories open and for people to be allowed outside their homes.
Most people (in the US at least) were not trapped in their homes, that is an exaggeration. He wanted his factory to be kept open. I'm not sure whether he was right or wrong on that, but given that his opinions were based on at least some bad interpretations of data from above I don't think it was well considered. Basically all of his statements on COVID seem to correlate with a personal motivation to keep his factory and business running, rather than a consideration of actual public health impacts.
Anyway, my point above was not really to legislate what he was and was not correct about. My point was to highlight that his public "turn" into making strong political statements and clashing with government administration was not a new thing that started recently during the Biden administration. Right or wrong he very much clashed with the government response to COVID in 2020 and there's a fairly direct line you can draw between that clash and many of his current statements and positions.
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This was “actual facts” that came to light later?
https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1240754657263144960?lang=en
"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." and what we have witnessed is magic.
I was watching a youtube stream with tens of thousands of viewers and 20 seconds before launch it switched to an AI generated video of Elon on stage talking about his "crypto currency program". It was so well executed and generated, it nearly felt real.
The violent anger I felt and still feel for scammers has ruined my day.
Same here. I was actively showing the (scammed) live stream to my 4yo daughter, and had to switch back to the live version for yet another 10minutes of wait.
Quite the embarassment, I think I begin to understand how my parents feel when they are completely unaware of some technical aspects I try to explain, and how easy it would be to scam them. Seems like it is getting easier to scam me, too.
To be fair, once they switched to Fakelon, it was quite clear. But I started the same stream again later as the YT app does not properly highlight the channel's name before clicking.
They do this every launch unfortunately. Youtube seems completely inept at stopping them. They make enough money to hire hundreds of thousands of fake accounts to subscribe.
Musk choosing to abandon YouTube to push his other company didn’t help.
True, but even before that there were fake spacex streams (complete with a 'verified account' symbol) with 10k+ alleged viewers.
These are reruns.
They run even on daya when there's no launch or Elon presentation, I've watched one because I thought I missed some announcement.
YT and Google has a vested interest to defame Elon.
It’s very clear — all the MSM are top of the list for anything Trump related, and for Elon it’s all crypto scam channels
It’s intentional folks
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At this point I am finding it hard to hate Elon Musk.
For everything he does that has annoyed me (like Gloating at people being bombed in the middle east) — his business acumen has completely unlocked for people what they we thought was impossible.
People are complex. This is nuance.
There should be nothing wrong with recognizing that any individual is a mix of things you're going to like and things you're not. That could be judged all the way to a mix of things which are morally correct, amoral, or immoral... but the reality is probably a mix.
It should be OK to praise the guy for those good traits and in turn to criticize the guy for what he does wrong: both in turn calling out the specific actions and less "the person". Its rare that demonizing someone is really appropriate or anything other than self-serving and we should see those that make that effort in that light.
Completely agree. But regardless of if we criticize or praise. He is gossip worthy. Going from being in a Marvel Movie as the architype of Iron Man, all the good things he has done, to recently jumping around at a rally of a madman, and kind of looking nuts himself.
It does beg comparison to the typical evil genius. He could literally be a villain from a Bond Movie, funding Specter. It's all fun and games. But just on surface, it is hard not to talk about him. He embodies too many sci-fi tropes.
On days like today, that was amazing to see. I'd like to think all the bad is overblown.
You should be glorifying Shotwell, not Musk. Yes Must helped give her room to build but she's the genius and deserves the credit.
Is there any source for first-hand specifics of what she does?
I used to argue in reddit (same username as my HN) basically calling Musk a fraud and Gwynne Shotwell being all the brains 6 years ago, but I've since changed my position after seeing engineers in spaceX give props to Musk at podcasts, twitter, and various interviews.
Yes he’s amazing and we’re lucky to live in a time and place where he can lead thousands of people that can do these things. He’s an example of what’s possible by a capitalist and how capitalism empowers individuals to shape the world and make it better for everyone. So naturally there’s a group of people trying to stop him due to envy and other copes.
Think you are confusing capitalism with variety of other political fields.
Capitalism does nothing to ensure personal/individual freedoms. There is no 'empowering'.
Technically slaves were also a valuable part of the capitalist system at the time. They were integral to the flow of capital, as they were an asset.
You can have Dictator/Authoritarian governments also be capitalist. Huge misunderstanding these days is thinking China is communist. They stopped being communist decades ago and are not as Capitalist as the US. But that doesn't help individuals that much.
Even today, Human Resources, is about 'humans' as capital, how to manage the human assets. Capitalism doesn't help the individual, the induvial is the resource to be mined.
China stopped being real communist because they were tired of starving. They are the proof that a centralized managed economy only leads to stagnation at best and mass death more commonly. Today they are a very competent cartel that takes a big on all free market production. Deng was mainly a genius and saved the country from Maoism.
Slavery existed well before capitalism and is economic system independent. Slavery occurs across a wide spectrum of economic systems today. It will always exist. It’s up to governments not capitalists to outlaw it. Capitalists need rules to play by.
Human Resources are the socialist/communist/leftist contribution to our economic system. They can’t actually contribute anything useful but they can deploy commissars to ensure the humans in the organization have right think. HR and all the associated schemes are simply leftist grift that infects everything.
>>>China stopped being real communist because they were tired of starving. They are the proof that a centralized managed economy only leads to stagnation at best and mass death more commonly. Today they are a very competent cartel that takes a big on all free market production. Deng was mainly a genius and saved the country from Maoism.
Doesn't change my statement that they aren't communist anymore, now. You are just agreeing. I didn't make any statement that was pro-communism.
>>>Slavery existed well before capitalism and is economic system independent. Slavery occurs across a wide spectrum of economic systems today. It will always exist. It’s up to governments not capitalists to outlaw it. Capitalists need rules to play by.
Yes. That was my statement. That capitalism alone does not lead to individual rights. I guess you agree again. I miss-understood your previous statement that seemed to imply capitalism had lead to individual flourishing, and thus SpaceX.
>>>>Human Resources are the socialist/communist/leftist contribution to our economic system. They can’t actually contribute anything useful but they can deploy commissars to ensure the humans in the organization have right think. HR and all the associated schemes are simply leftist grift that infects everything.
HR has nothing to do with socialism. It is clearly a Risk Management department. They are just as likely to fire victims as the guilty. The only calculation they use is the risk/cost to the company. If it is more expedient to get rid of a victim they will do it. They are not on the employee's side. If HR fires you for hanging a noose on your coworkers locker, that is minimizing the risk from someone unhinged.. That is not being socialist.
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The only 'grift' that holds up is about FSD. Everything else is nonsense. They are making Boring tunnels, the costumer paid and they delivered. The company didn't take off as much as Musk hoped but calling it a 'grift' isn't accurate.
Hyperloop was never promised, that's literally just people who don't like Musk made up. In fact he EXPLICITLY said 'I'm not gone build Hyperloop, its just an idea I had', and then people who don't like him 10 years later 'where is the promised Hyperloop'. How does that make sense? Musk never received a single $ for Hyperloop, but somehow this is a 'grift'.
> how many billions of dollars in government subsidies?
They are big cooperation's in capital intensive industries. When you build big investments, you get government tax reduction and other things, this is literally normal. If you don't like it, that's fine, but that how it works. Its not a 'grift' unless you want to go down the 'modern capitalism is grift' route.
Outside of that, most subsidies he got, were just universal subsidies that anybody could get. The US government gave the same amount of subsidies to foreign companies selling EV cars in the US. This was a plan to increase EV adoption in general. And arguably it worked. How is again is this a 'grift'.
And for SpaceX, I think its pretty clear that the government got much, much, much more then it ever paid for when they paid SpaceX. I would argue SpaceX has already saved the US government more money then they ever paid for SpaceX development. Just Clipper going on Falcon Heavy is billions in savings.
There are plenty of reason to dislike him but those aren't really good ones. Except the FSD one, that one I think is quite bad. At least they finally allowed moving the FSD from one car to the next, but that's not enough.
How many billions in subsidies has he had?
He said about half of what Boeing had.
Are you against subsidies in general? Or just against someone you don't like getting them to actually develop new technology?
Neither. I'm replying to another comment my friend.
Amazing days ahead of us - if we can avoid blowing ourselves up over pathetic patches of land, we could have the entire solar system under our feet...
Agreed, but I'm concerned that humans being humans, we'll have the entire solar system to blow ourselves over.
In The Expanse (which I highly recommend), they give a new lease on life to that quote attributed to Einstein "I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought with, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones" - hurling asteroids towards a planet. I really hope humanity's real future will play out in accordance with some of the more optimistic elements in The Expanse.
> pathetic patches of land
It's always funny seeing people pretend they live in a world where small issues like land or food don't affect them, even though they only have that privilege because a larger military says they should.
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[stub for offtopicness]
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No, it's that you started a massive offtopic generic flamewar tangent on perhaps the single most repeated topic of the last couple years, nothing new or interesting can come of which. That's exactly what we're trying to avoid on HN; we want curious conversation about interesting things, and this is the opposite of that on all counts.
Not that your comment was by any means the worst example of this! But it was guaranteed to spin off into the off-topic flamewar that it did.
(We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41830516.)
Honestly, I didn't realize how fast and far it would go off. Maybe I'm out of touch.
I was actually just wondering if Musk didn't care about Politics and all the political maneuvering was still with the goal of getting to Mars. Space and Politics are like peanut butter and jelly. Hard to separate these subjects.
It's hard to understand why people care so much about someone's personal political opinions.
This is especially prevalent when working in places like Seattle and SF. People ostracizing their coworkers because of wrongthink.
MDS like TDS is real. It's extremely toxic and it needs to stop. People's political beliefs are their own and connecting that to work is a recipe for disaster.
> It's hard to understand why people care so much about someone's personal political opinions.
People care because he has power and money, which he uses to shape the world in alignment with those political opinions.
The same is true of anyone else with power - Xi, Putin, Gates, Thiel, Zuck, and the countless others with influence over business and government. A lot of money is spent to analyze and alter their political opinions.
What's hard for me to understand is why this isn't plainly obvious to you.
We've had decades of absolute liberal control of tech companies but you don't see threads like this every time Google announces something. Some 25% of tech is conservative, it shouldn't be that weird that a few of the billionaires are too.
You've never seen someone question the motives of the leaders of big tech on HN?
The man in question personally has more wealth than many nations, co-opted one of the most popular American social media networks in the country and is a massive hypocrite when it comes to free speech.
Musk isn't just some guy near your cubicle complaining about Mexican cooks.
Is it so hard?
See if you can try and steelman the argument as to why people care about the political opinions and actions of the world's richest man.
He isn't a co-worker. He's a billionaire that can fund entire campaigns. It is a lot more like if my co-worker was really my boss, and he really cares about my political leanings during a performance review.. Thus I also care about his.
"Metastable deexcitation spectroscopy (MDS) and thermal desorption spectroscopy (TDS)"
I really don't know what you are talking about.
Musk and Trump
Derangement Syndrome
Is what the acronyms refer to. Its a meme for the obsession around them specifically.
My two cents is that there are other billionaires doing significantly more harm than those two. They just keep quiet or own news media platforms.
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No there isn't. This is just unsubstantiated democratic fan fiction. Please stop spamming this link.
Both. A single person can be great in some areas and a malicious loon in others. In fact, great success in one field can provide the self-confidence and capital to be a catastrophe in others.
But also keep in mind that Musk isn't personally designing and building everything SpaceX does. The staff at SpaceX deserve more credit than they get, especially Gwynne Shotwell.
It's become an absolute meme on the left-leaning internet to say SpaceX isn't Elon and Shotwell is doing all the work. You can't go to a thread on this site or reddit etc without it being brought up.
Really I am pretty sure it is just coping to deal with the uncomfortable fact that Elon (bad guy) is doing something great and clearly is skilled. Ask anyone at SpaceX or Shotwell herself and they will all say Elon is very important to its success.
Maybe that's a meme, but obviously I'm not saying that.
The problem is that people watch these videos and it's all ELON ELON ELON. Most of them don't even know Shotwell's name.
Everyone who cares about SpaceX, and not Elon-hating, know Shotwell's name. My nine year old does, and he knows that Gwynne got into engineering because she liked another engineer's shoes!
That is true, but it’s also true of Blue Origin who are far behind spacex in so far as flying real hardware. The difference is Musk maniacal zeal and yes leadership. I’m frustrated with Musks politics too, but his drive can’t be denied.
But why are you frustrated with Musk’s politics? The fact that one of the smartest people chooses to demonstrate their view is very remarkable. It does warrant critical thinking and examination. After all he could have kept quiet and ponder to both parties equally.
Elon is into politics because it’s politics who stood in his way of progress first.
He’s imho afraid and rightfully so, Twitter was a clear example of why.
Nonsense. Governments been very kind to Elon. For years Tesla subsisted on selling regulatory credits.
How does your argument counter what I wrote? Nonsense is sometimes but only projecting onto a mirror.
I never knew the name Tim Cook before Steve Jobs died.
The general public does not know the layers of corporate staffing and their names. That doesn't mean they don't realize there are a lot of people at the company contributing. Nobody thinks Elon is in the back room doing drafting, and doing every job.
Yes. Musk is complicated person. Maybe that is what I was trying to ask. Does anybody have any credible insight into where is head is at. Is he turning into a wing nut, or is this all just a ploy to have more control over the government to further his goals of getting to Mars. Like if Trump wins, he can just phone him up and say, lets put a man on Mars.
The general public generally does, in fact, massively overestimate the importance of the CEO to the company, especially celebrity CEOs.
> Is he turning into a wing nut
Back in 2018 the "cave diver pedo" incident made it abundantly clear that Musk, while possessing many admirable qualities, is also a malicious clown.
Why is it hard to reconcile that he’s both extremely intelligent/driven, and believes free speech is critical to democracy and at risk?
SpaceX is not Musk. It may be executing his vision, but it's a team of thousands of skilled and hard-working people, all eager to work on a Sunday for a chance to pull something like this off.
But he’s the catalyst for it all. There are other billionaires in this game too, why can’t they replicate his success? Why can’t they hire his engineers? Why can’t they deliver the results?
And Apple isn't Steve Jobs? Apple would have turned around on its own without Jobs?
I think we all know these big companies have thousands of people working for them, and a lot of them are pretty smart.
That doesn't change the influence the top guy has.
Twitter is not Musk. It may be executing his vision, but it's a team of thousands of skilled and hard-working people, all eager to work on a Sunday for a chance to create a propaganda arm of Trump party.
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Yeah, Exhibit A is that religious zealot Trump . . .
while a big chunk of the world is still under the influence of religion its been a while that the west worst extremism is not religious. you can turn on any mass media and then you will notice another kind of extremism. this is musk point and he is right about it. I can’t fathom how anyone educated cannot see it. It has to be political bias and dishonesty. be cartesian if you are an engineer.
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Ironically, Goldwater was branded as an extremist in his time.
Yeah, that is the scary part, the extremist complaining about the other extremist . Goldwater: "Yeah, those guys are really out there".
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Please stop posting political/ideological battle comments to HN. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
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Please stop posting political/ideological battle comments to HN. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
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Your link is broken
works here
Had no idea that founders of Space X were also Heritage Foundation.
Musk bought SpaceX and Starlink just like Twitter.
This technical term for this is "false".
Where did this meme come from? I’ve seen it twice in 2 days and it’s categorically false. Has the left wing echo chamber really brainwashed itself into believing Musk purchased all his successes and deserves no credit?
Even the “he bought Tesla” meme is lame. He invested in a tiny electric car startup and built it into the massive success it currently is.
Are you perhaps thinking of Tesla? SpaceX was founded by Musk.
Musk is just a front man. He's just an actor like Trump. God knows who is behind them. Banks, "The Matrix" , can anyone fill it in ? The front men are certainly just reading scripts, it is obvious.
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You’re repeating a flagged comment [1] that’s already been rebutted [2].
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41828032
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41828048
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FYI, This is a five-time flagged comment [1][2][3][4][5] that’s been rebutted [6].
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41828032
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41828151
[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41828151
[4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41828468
[5] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41828616
[6] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41828048
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You’re spamming a twice-flagged comment [1][2] that’s already been rebutted [3].
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41828032
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41828151
[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41828048
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> you’re spamming a reply
They’re still going [1] and it appears to be a common thread across their recent commenting.
But they’re getting flagged, so no need to continue. (EDIT: It’s still getting traction.) It’s a tempting (and in my opinion mean-spiritedly preyful) conspiracy theory on an ephemeral topic. I always appreciate folks with domain experience similarly flagging nonsense in other threads.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41828380
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This is the third time you’ve spammed the same flagged comment [1][2][3] that’s already been rebutted [4].
If you want to discuss this, consider putting forward better sources or at least new thoughts. Just because it’s wrong doesn’t make it not worth discussing.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41828032
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41828151
[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41828151
[4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41828048
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A so-called iron curtain like that seems like it would end the mutually assured destruction game.
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FYI, This is a four-time flagged comment [1][2][3][4] that’s been rebutted [4].
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41828032
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41828151
[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41828151
[4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41828468
[5] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41828048
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This is a nonsense conspiracy theory. It popped up based mostly off conserving a single man’s connection to 2001 SpaceX.
Does Starship enable brilliant pebbles? Sure. But that’s because it provides easy access to space. Starlink could be described as a network of communication ‘pebbles’, as could Starshield, SpaceX’s actual military contract [1].
(Starship provides a technology platform for rapid launch. That’s more valuable for missile defence than orbital nonsense for intercepting warheads by way of predictable and observable plane-change manoeuvres.)
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX_Starshield
It's probably nonsense, but the latest versions of the starlink satellite are significantly heavier than prior generations.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starlink> probably nonsense
It’s definitely nonsense. As in if they are attempting it it’s virtually fraud on the American taxpayer.
Barring a sci-fi breakthrough in propulsion technology (or vacuum directed energy weapons), it cannot work. (And even if you have that propulsion technology, its existence obsoletes the concept again. You’d need to rewrite orbital physics to make plane changes a better idea than new launch from the ground. It’s just a phenomenally fucked idea.)
> the latest versions of the starlink satellite are significantly heavier than prior generations
This is in the same calibre of evidence as that for more planes meaning chemtrails are real.
> You’d need to rewrite orbital physics to make plane changes a better idea than new launch from the ground.
Namely, the plane change from the pre-positioned orbit to one that intersects with the target? Sorry if this is a dumb question, but is it really that bad? No way to get the loitering orbits closer to an interception than launching from the ground? (Ed: well, those definitely wouldn't be the orbits starlink is on, I think I can see that at least)
(The guy you're responding to has mostly deleted their posts, so I'm missing context, but I did get as far as the wiki page for brilliant pebbles.)
> the plane change from the pre-positioned orbit to one that intersects with the target? Sorry if this is a dumb question, but is it really that bad?
Yes. The closer you get to the surface the faster the orbit which means while you have less orbital energy to kill on approach you need more birds to cover a given area. (To communicate how unintuitive orbital mechanics can be, consider that thrusing "up" or "down" (radial in or out) doesn't actual increase or decrease your mean altitude [1]. You have to fire retrograde, which means a long, swooping, predictable, observable (and thus avoidable) approach to intercept unless you're Project Orioning it [2].)
> guy your responding to has mostly deleted their posts
They were repeating a conspiracy theory around SpaceX's actual purpose being to create a space-based missile defence system. The proof being there are senior people who were involved with the latter who have been around SpaceX. It's total nonsense somewhat orthogonal to why space-based missile defence is between difficult and stupid.
The core concept of boost-stage (i.e. in the atmosphere) space-based intercept isn't physically fucked. It's just that every case where one presents it, ground-based interception--including at the boost phase--does better. You can hide your interceptors better. For any given cost, you can deploy more of them (and more early-warning/targeting satellites). And even primitive ASAT can reliably punch a hole in it.
The only benefit is political/PR, because it sounds cool--that doesn't rule it out. But it isn't something SpaceX is working on much less was founded for.
(Space-based midcourse (i.e. in vacuum, while the warhead coasts) interception is stupid on all levels. It's a slightly more difficult version of blanketing the skies in drones for intercept--except you have more volume to cover and have planes which send off a screaming signal every time they change course.)
[1] https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/44608/what-happens...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Orion_(nuclear_propuls...
I see you started writing this before I ninja-edited my comment to fix the "you're" typo. Thanks for the details.
> if they are attempting it it’s virtually fraud on the American taxpayer.
So, any secret military project is effectively fraud?
> any secret military project is effectively fraud?
No. A project based on bunk science is a fraud.
To be clear, space-based boost interception isn't impossible. You can do it. But in practically every case it's inferior to ground-based systems (with space-based early detection). The only case where it has merit is in containing a specific, small adversary with very few missiles, e.g. North Korea or Iran. But even there, a ground-based solution is superior in stealth, numbers and cost.
Space-based missile intercept is a political project. That doesn't mean it won't be done. But it's not something SpaceX is working on, or would work on without first cashing a substantial cheque.
You sure have the numbers to back your statement. Otherwise, it's hardly 'debunking'.
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> you're wrong
Nope. And I can say this with more authority than almost anything on HN.
> Trump & Elon literally discussed it on X a few weeks ago
One, they discussed a lot of things. Two, they discussed capability. As I said, any launch system provides this capability theoretically. But (a) the capability is based on the faulty premise that pre-positioned orbital interceptors are superior to stealthy ground-based ones. And (b) it’s going to be true for any cheap space-launch system. (I say cheap because economies of scale mean cheap and frequent are virtually redundant.)
This entire theory comes out of people with no military background, no political experience and no aerospace engineering training wanting to feel special about being “in the know.”
> no military background, no political background and no aerospace engineering background
You're presuming a lot there.
No, I’m not.
If you can do orbital math, you can verify the plane-change economics. If you’ve even talked to anyone in ABM, which granted requires clearance, you understand why the actual spending in ABM—globally—goes into ground-based interceptors.
This is a tailor-made conspiracy theory for someone who substitutes doing the damning math for connecting bits of string between people and tweets. If you have any domain experience or connections, it’s trivially excludable. That’s why I can shoot it down (hehe) with unique confidence.
> If you can do orbital math, you can verify the plane-change economics. If you’ve even talked to anyone in ABM, which granted requires clearance, you understand why the actual spending in ABM—globally—goes into ground-based interceptors.
Boost phase interception using a constellation of several thousand hypersonic glide vehicles circumvents the plane-change problem; I'm sure you know that. I'm sure you also know that the reason nobody has seriously pursued such a solution before is because putting tens of thousands of interceptors into orbit is absurd.
Was absurd.
Unless you think you know better than the National Academy of Sciences. Cost of launch is the only recognized limitation (in 2012)
https://nap.nationalacademies.org/read/13189/chapter/4?term=...
Your question about delta-V is answered in that same report a few pages above.
> Cost of launch is the only recognized limitation
That’s how you read “in principle” and “in theory”? The cost of launch is used, in the third bullet, to justify not analysing the idea further. Not as the “only…limitation.”
As your source says, even a working space-based boost-phase interceptor is trivially defeat-able with “primitive” ASAT capabilities.
Brilliant pebbles are a fucked concept. You’re citing a no-math NAS paper for good reason—it’s good to speculate about it in case we learn something new about how gravity works. Barring that, it’s well-recognised nonsense.
You're making a lot of alts.
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Given the proliferation of ballistic missiles that’s not a bad thing…
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It's about time. Not sure why people present it like it's a bad thing.
The conclusion doesn’t seem to follow?
It assumes that decision makers elsewhere in the world can’t get forewarning.
But it’s impossible to hide any project development on that scale from spies, or even just plain corruption, so now that decision makers across the world know that at least the launch mechanisms are possible… the moment such program preparations are detected on a scale that can’t be explained away as noise will result in them activating every panic button they have.
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Immanentization.
Hopefully not of the eschaton, though. Because that trick never works, Bullwinkle.
I hate to bring politics into such a momentous occasion, but as a lifelong Democrat, I think Trump might get my vote because of his alliance with Elon. Elon clearly is a once-in-a-century human who has progressed humanity more than anyone else in history. I think we need to let him achieve his goals without being burdened by government bureaucracy. Unfortunately, the Democrats have aligned against Elon. It didn't have to get this way, but it has. A Trump presidency will allow Elon to progress more, bringing humanity with him. I hate Trump and I think he is a narcissistic idiot, but he supports Elon more than Kamala.
Elon will be able to achieve his goals just fine under the Democrats.
Trump will run so much stuff into the ground nobody will be able to achieve anything.
The great dichotomy of man. Elon is a hardheaded questionable fellow who stops free speech on his platform if it doesn't suit the agenda and is supporting Trump who literally spurred an insurrection.
But Elon also started one of the greatest revolutions mankind has ever seen, up there with the Apollo project, which one can say is mankind's greatest achievement.
What do you do with that dichotomy is up to you to resolve.
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We've banned this account for breaking the site guidelines. You can't post like this or https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41829541 here, regardless of how wrong someone is or you feel they are.
If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
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We've banned this account for breaking the site guidelines. You can't post like this or https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41830050 here, regardless of how wrong someone is or you feel they are.
If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
Edited: Was asking what were all these deleted comments.
Got my answer: it's a theory that SpaceX is a partner for the US DoD and is not just an internet provider.
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I’m just talking totally out of my A S S. Wouldn’t it be cool if this starship launch somehow utilized starshield for grabbing starship, like proof of concept to the military of some kind of hyper accurate military grade GPS that can pinpoint a rocket and control it to the accuracy of between two chop sticks?
> What the f is going on in this
Genuinely curious if you find an answer.
My first thought was nuclear anxiety; it’s nice to feel like we have a secret shield in space. Then I saw Trump talked about it, so my current hypothesis is the partisan parroting that happens on both sides. (Or if someone doesn’t like military spending, maybe it’s an anti-Musk thing?)
That said, the three accounts that have been posting about it seem to really like this topic [1][2][3], so maybe it’s a niche thing. They all seem to really like one Reddit thread.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=forgot-im-old
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=tbone902
[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=georgeg23
I recommend emailing hn@ with your questions, even if you don't currently see any obvious reason to.
Guessing the massive flag storm will ruin someone’s Monday.
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If elon can do everything he’s done with an increasingly hostile govt, imagine what he’ll be able to so with a supportive one
It's a joke to think trump cares about taking care of his own after all the evidence to the contrary. He throws everyone under the bus the first chance the gets.
> When Elon Musk came to the White House asking me for help on all of his many subsidized projects, whether it's electric cars that don't drive long enough, driverless cars that crash, or rocketships to nowhere, without which subsidies he'd be worthless and tell me how he was a big Trump fan and Republican, I could have said, "drop to your knees and beg," and he would have done it,"
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/its-time-trump-sail-into-su...
Trump is pro big oil, not electric, so Tesla wouldn't be getting any more favors/subsidies under Trump, and with all the NASA money currently flowing to SpaceX, no strings attached, I doubt they would benefit from Trump either. Money coming from Trump will always be conditional on him getting something back.
I don’t disagree with your overall point, but I’m sure there are significant strings attached to the money from NASA. Like, successfully launching lots of things into space for them. And developing a new human-rated space capsule, giving the US and NASA that capability again after a long time relying on Russia. And developing a totally new rocket system, together with a version that can take NASA back to the moon.
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If SpaceX is overly hindered by regulation/lawfare, then there'll be competition from China before long.
I don't think so; there remain few economic reasons to go to space and spacex's customer isn't going to rely on a Chinese company.
Burt Rutan, one of the most legendary aerospace engineers of all time used to do regular long presentations to people on why global warming was not man made. Some of them are archived on youtube. And there's many other cases of otherwise smart people having bonkers opinions in areas outside of what they are experts in. If anything, successful people are significantly more likely to do this. It rarely results in their downfall.
SpaceX will do just fine.
See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobel_disease
“You are a genius!” messes with the brain if heard enough.
Why?
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So you don't consider Elon Musk to be part of the engineering team at SpaceX?
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He's being sarcastic because the standing theme on the internet for most of the last decade is that Musk is an idiot who only got where he is because his parents are rich or he stole from other smarter/harder working people. SpaceX tends to put a hole in this idea since he founded and funded it himself, and they've made more progress in space travel in the last two decades than all existing government organizations and contractors have since the 70s.
The people that dislike Musk (or are afraid of the mob that will go after them if they say something positive about him) can’t deny the amazing things he is accomplishing and so when anything good happens, they are quick to farm karma with thanking and congratulating everyone who isn’t Musk. It is intentional.
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Please don't take HN threads on generic ideological tangents.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41827736.
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Please don't perpetuate generic ideological tangents. They're repetitive and therefore boring, and usually turn nasty.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
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Please don't perpetuate generic ideological tangents. They're repetitive and therefore boring, and usually turn nasty.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
>please don't perpetuate generic ideological tangents
Where did I do that? I tried to discredit an example of that which you are lamenting. Seems odd to reply this to my comment, though I understand flagging it.
What was the correct behavior when the notion I replied to is posed? Report it? Ignore it? Is there any reply to that comment you would not have flagged? Earnest questions.
As anyone can hopefully see from my follow up comments in this thread, I have no desire to be nasty nor any intention to degrade the quality of discussion here.
> is a ridiculously plain falsity.
It's well known in government that if you don't spend all your budget (meaning you were successful), your budget gets cut.
It is indeed ridiculous, but true.
Guess we're using different measures of "success" - in my book any govt program that nets more revenue than than it costs taxpayers or provides more value than it costs (harder to verify) (irs and usps respectively, for instance) is a "successful" program - Thus the irs is a "successful" govt program that is not getting its budget cut because it's successful, and socialist systems would still have an irs... That's kinda where I was coming from
> Have you ever looked up a definition of socialism or read a book from their proponents?
Yup. Which one is your favorite?
Have you ever read "Road to Serfdom" by Hayek? How about "Free to Choose" by Friedman? Anything by C. Northcote Parkinson? "Nothing Like It In The World" by Ambrose? "Monetary History of the United States" by Friedman?
Thanks for the reading recommendations. Sunkara's manifesto for me is the best put case with the most brevity.
I haven't read those, I've mostly read stuff like Piketty and Sunkara, or smaller more focused stuff like Zuboff's surveillance capitalism or Rifkin's green new deal , caste, Harvey's history of neoliberalism, or Hannah Arendt's work that generally rebukes capitalism more than it does fundamentally bolster the ideas of socialism - You do make me reflect I haven't read much that's meant to be anything other than stuff from my side though
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Sounds like you didn't live through the Microsoft product launches of the late 1990s. Developers, developers, developers, developers. Same stuff, different day. You might enjoy this reminiscent remix, which also features a SpaceX-ish rocket as well (not bad foresight for a video created in 2009): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rRm0NDo1CiY&t=106
The SpaceX engineers did a great job, as did NASA.
The media needs to stop blindly attributing this to "Elon Musk". He did well taking the risks NASA was not allowed to take at the start. But these days he is toxic to the media and toxic to reporting, so for that reason alone the media could smarted up a little. Well done SpaceX and NASA engineers.
Elon is the guy who said, "that is the craziest idea I've ever heard, here's billions, let's build it"
It's 100% Musk that this happened, literally no one else would have done it. Everyone thought it was dumb until today. No company, no government or sci fi movie for that matter had even thought of it in the first place.
SpaceX engineers given the green light by Musk, not NASA, made it a reality. That's not to say Elon didn't make many decisions along the way in the design and development of both Starship, the launch towers and everything else.
The point is, Elon deserves a hell of a lot of credit along with everyone else. Everyone has their part to play in the success of the mission.
Correct, and that's why NASA outsourced funding.
Because if NASA risked billions on "crazy ideas" they'd get shut down, being a government agency.
No point pretending it's all Elon.
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>The media needs to stop blindly attributing this to "Elon Musk".
Musk's biographer tweeted the pages from his book <https://x.com/WalterIsaacson/status/1844870018351169942> discussing how in late 2020 Musk suggested, then insisted against considerable opposition from his engineers, that Superheavy be caught with chopsticks instead of landing on legs like Falcon 9.
(If this sounds familiar, also according to the book, Musk is the person who suggested and, against considerable opposition from his engineers, insisted on Starship switching to stainless steel instead of carbon fiber.
Hint: Musk was right and his engineers were wrong. Both times.)
Doubtful it was Elon against hundreds of engineers diametrically opposed . He'd of surfaced it as a viable option, great.
Musk is the one who makes this possible. There's a reason why neither Bezos, Gates, nor Branson are anywhere close to this achievement, despite also having vast financial resources. I strongly dislike this attempt to erase Musk from the history of what's happening (mostly because people disagreeing with him politically). It is an absolute achievement of all the scientists and engineers at SpaceX. It is also a huge victory and validation for Musk and his way of leading. Both of these statements can be true simultaneously.
You can dislike it all you like but he's erasing himself via Xitter.
Imagine not being Team Elon.
Would this get the “Elon musk is not very bright because I don’t like his politics” crowd to finally STFU? Rhetorical question, of course not.
The V2 was also revolutionary and also developed by fascists. https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2024/10/donald-...
I still think the Space Shuttle was more impressive.
Uuuh the first stream on YouTube was Musk giving a speech, so I was waiting for the launch but turns out it was on another stream? So I just missed the whole thing, great.
They don't do lives on youtube, those are scammers. it is always on x.com
Well it shows like SpaceX on mobile with 150k viewers, maybe YouTube could use some brain power to fix that.
This has been going on for many years now, YouTube doesn't do anything about it.
Youtube simply doesn't care about their platform being used for scams. There are very simply very basic things they could do, but they simply don't.
They're quick to demonetize people though. Anything to make an extra buck.
Youtube is an incompetent organization. I've seen it take them nearly 48 hours to restore channels stolen by scammers to their rightful owners (all the while allowing the crypto scammers to continue streaming.)
Sorry, too busy selling ads.
Would be great if I could stream to my Chromecast or AppleTV from X without using airplay streaming my whole browser...
There used to be a Twitter AppleTV app and I recently saw an X app for TV platforms has been brought back, but I don’t know if the AppleTV version is out yet.
Of course I’d rather they just stream to YouTube in 4K.
There were multiple streams on youtube who rebroadcast that you can use.
Those are deep fake crypto scams that YouTube does not pull down. My father was scammed by one for over $2000.
The older we get, the likelihood that we get scammed approaches one. Be weary.
Youtube has a terrible problem with scammers. I don't know why they don't do anything about this.
And yet all MSM channels are the first thing u see when u query certain topics and people.
It’s intentional
https://twitter.com/i/broadcasts/1RDGlyognOgJL
Here. Or try Space Affairs on YouTube
There was an AI crypto scam channel. Musk is so scammy that it looked feasible and was shared widely by the looks.
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Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments and flamebait? You've unfortunately been doing it repeatedly. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.
Personal attacks in particular will get you banned here, so please don't post like this.
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
Taking it off YouTube and not having their main YT account at least show a “redirect” video is strange.
They don't have a YT account. Are you talking about the "@musk-spacex" channel which stylizes itself "SpaceX"?
They used to have an official YouTube channel where the launches were broadcast. Now it's on Twitter.
It's not about falling for the crypto scam, but realizing that it is that before you already lost half the launch
It's like a rite of passage, I imagine most people looking for a SpaceX launch fell for it once
I watched it on Twitter. Two idiots sent me the crypto scam link separately.
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What does this mean for the Kessler syndrome? Does reusable rockets speed up our potential for lock-in or slow it down?
If twitter is x, does that mean spacex is space twitter? Twitter was rebranded after elon bought it.
Why don't they mount moving video cameras? I mean, the second part of the fly is pretty boring. They shows us a view from 2 static cameras. Is it so difficult to make one camera moving? With 360 degrees view. Show us the shape of the earth the full circle, show us the moon. Is it so hard?
Yes what you’re describing is nearly impossible.
I don't think they'd need to actually have moving cameras (I think this is what the poster meant) to give a 360 degree view, but 360 degree cameras (well, 180 because they're right next to an obstacle) that could be reprojected to 2d.
The primary purpose of having those cameras is to gather test data, not provide entertainment.