SpaceX Completes First Stacked Starship Fueling Test (engadget.com) 58
On Monday, SpaceX fueled a fully stacked Starship for the first time. Engadget reports: The "wet dress rehearsal" saw the company load the vehicle's Super Heavy and Starship stages with more than 10 million pounds of liquid oxygen and methane fuel. Additionally, SpaceX ran through some of the countdown procedures it will need to complete on launch day. "Today's test will help verify a full launch countdown sequence, as well as the performance of Starship and the orbital pad for flight-light operations," SpaceX posted on Twitter. As Space.com notes, Monday's test means SpaceX is on track to complete an orbital flight of Starship sometime in the coming months.
Allow me... (Score:5, Insightful)
Monday's test means SpaceX is on track to complete an orbital flight of Starship sometime in the coming months.
s/complete/attempt/
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Yep, and not that I want it to happen; but just imagine what it would be like if all that fuel went BOOM!
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Unscheduled rapid disassembly.
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I know it's Slashdot, News for Nerds, but I don't think we really need to tongue Musk's arsehole every time SpaceX fuels up a rocket. Get back to us when it launches.
I'm guessing you're not one of those current "extremely hardcore" Twitter employees ... :-)
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Oh, still feeling salty about Musk buying your precious echo chamber? Dry your eyes, mate.
Re:Allow me... (Score:5, Insightful)
It's Slashdot, News for Nerds, the fuelling of the largest rocket evah is News for Nerds.
Hand in your badge.
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> There is a difference between a Muskovite and normal nerds though.
Maybe so.
But the fuelling of the largest rocket evah is News for Nerds.
Re:Allow me... (Score:4, Insightful)
What Starship is, a reboot of the old Soviet N1 Rocket.
What?!???
No.
Starship has almost nothing in common with the Soviet N1 design other than "they both have a lot of engines". Doesn't even use the same fuel.
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What Starship is, a reboot of the old Soviet N1 Rocket.
What?!???
No.
Starship has almost nothing in common with the Soviet N1 design other than "they both have a lot of engines". Doesn't even use the same fuel.
Oh, if you insist. What the lot of engines rocket has in common, is a huge increase in complexity. And in a Rocket, that is a really big problem.
That's why Archenemy NASA's Artemis has less engines, and uses Solid Boosters.
Let's take the old Saturn V and it's F1 engines. Watch the old Moon launches, then watch the Shuttle. The Saturn V took over twice the time to clear the tower. That's because there was so darn much weight it was trying to lift. The thing was burning ~18144 kilograms per second of fu
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The big-ticket items that the N-1 does not have in common with Starship are:
1. the Soviets didn't want to spend the several years it would take to build a test stand for the first stage. They didn't take JFK's announcement seriously for several years, so they didn't start work on the N-1 until 1965.
That meant they would have to test the first stage by launching it. They fully expected to need up to 14 test launches.
2. The NK-15 was not restartable, at all. This means they could not test individual engines.
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I don't have an issue with doubting Starship. It's the breathless detractors who have NO idea what it is, if it will work or why it is revolutionary.
Ya wanna talk rockets? Use the big words - I'll understand all of them. If you do understand and know, let's chat.
I love to talk rockets in depth.
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Okay, having read the above, I now accept that you have good knowledge of rockets, or you're using GPT-4(*)...
My apologies.
But that doesn't make this:
"What Starship is, a reboot of the old Soviet N1 Rocket."
any less of a silly thing to write.
(*) joke.
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Okay, having read the above, I now accept that you have good knowledge of rockets, or you're using GPT-4(*)...
My apologies.
I use Grand Theft Auto for my rocket knowledge! 8^)
But that doesn't make this:
"What Starship is, a reboot of the old Soviet N1 Rocket."
any less of a silly thing to write.
(*) joke.
People seem to be thinking I am saying they are identical. Of course not.
But I am saying that they are both very complex designs. It is hard to deny that.
And very complex designs often suffer from complex problems. The N1 suffered greatly from it's complexity.
Regardless, we shall soon see. There is a lot more that has to go right on StarShip than it's engines. And some of those things that have to go right are pretty critical.
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The Raptors engines are - inevitably complex - but have been iterated for simplicity and the latest iteration has been, I believe, thoroughly tested outside Starship.
Having 33 of them is only complex in terms of the piping and the interaction between engines. I assume these have been modelled to kingdom come. Maybe tests will show problems there, but I don't think the problems will be insolu
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Most failures here, I think, will mean a delayed and not a failed mission, but the single most likely thing in Stage 0, that I can think of, that could cause a disastrous failure is a clamp not releasing.
But I also believe the clamp release - and all Stage 0 - has already been well tested, as much as possible.
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I don't think the Starship ship is a complex design. Lots of welded rings, the intertanks, the header tank, the flaps.
The type of complexity I'm speaking of is the many many points of potential failure. Think of it as trying to launch many rockets at the same time. The chances of failure go up because of the many more components and connections.
And this is the components on the rough and tumble end of the rocket. We often speak of the Space Shuttle as the most complicated machine ever built, but that was more in the orbiter.
The Raptors engines are - inevitably complex - but have been iterated for simplicity and the latest iteration has been, I believe, thoroughly tested outside Starship.
This is true. They are also en
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Yes, a lot of things have to work.
But your "many many points of failure", where are they then, apart from the areas I outlined that are being minimized by modelling and testing ?
> > One complex part of Starship is the flap control, bellyflop, engine relight and landing, but that has been tested and debugged in surprisingly ( to me ) few iterations.
> > And Starship will be better than SLS and a success even without that ever working.
> >
> > Another complex part
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Yes, a lot of things have to work. But your "many many points of failure", where are they then, apart from the areas I outlined that are being minimized by modelling and testing ?
> > One complex part of Starship is the flap control, bellyflop, engine relight and landing, but that has been tested and debugged in surprisingly ( to me ) few iterations.
Every weld is a point of failure, every connector, my dear greytree/poptodrop. Every tile is a point of failure. "Pores" are a point of failure - if they are still used. Landing or catching is a point of failure.
I recall Spacex fans bragging about how the StarShip had no need for the stupid tile system used on the Space Shuttle. Your cult leader must have had a bad day when he had to decide to go to something that NASA used.
No, by the above I meant that if Starship is used as a single-shot disposable r
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Your post started out rational, if badly formatted, but turned into a rant.
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And you don't have to like Musk to appreciate the incredible fruits of his labours and investments.
To me that is what distinguishes decent people from evil people: I can look at a painting by Hitler and judge it on its artistic qualities ( or lack thereof ). Hitler could only burn Jewish books and art.
The hateful woke need to learn this.
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Slashdot posted several stories ([1 [slashdot.org]], [2 [slashdot.org]], [3 [slashdot.org]]) when the SLS was undergoing its wet dress rehearsals (more than one, because there were...issues). The comments in those stories were mostly gripes about how much of a waste of taxpayer money SLS was, and that Startship would make SLS obsolete.
Some folks are just hard to please.
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I know it's Slashdot, News for Nerds, but I don't think we really need to tongue Musk's arsehole every time SpaceX fuels up a rocket. Get back to us when it launches.
Heck, we get breathless reports every time one of his Falcon Rockets land. Each one setting a new record for Falcon rockets landing!
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Heck, we get breathless reports every time one of his Falcon Rockets land. Each one setting a new record for Falcon rockets landing!
Which 'we' are you referring to? It does not seem to be Slashdot.
The last seven Slashdot stories about Falcon 9 launches:
December 30th - story on the last launch of the year and how that was more orbital launches in a year than any other entity in history
December 28th - 1st launch of gen2 Starlink satellites
December 14th - SWOT
November 26th - ISS resupply launch
October 20th - 100 mission from Florida
August 5th - Korea's moon lander
July 22nd - breaking record for number of SpaceX launches in a year
Three st
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Heck, we get breathless reports every time one of his Falcon Rockets land. Each one setting a new record for Falcon rockets landing!
Which 'we' are you referring to? It does not seem to be Slashdot.
No not Slashdot. There are a lot of sycophant level Youtube channels and press reportage that get happy wood every time one of his candles land.
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Agreed. I can find them if I go hunting. Along with a horde of SpaceX is a fraud/failure/tool of the Illuminati/responsible for my Aunt Martha's bunions. Tis the glory and the failure of the Internet. Every point of view from sane to fanboy to hater to wacky is out there in spades.
Full disclosure, I am far closer to SpaceX fanboy than neutral party. My money says Starship makes it to its planned quasi orbit by end of March. Less sanguine about its odds of reentry or of the booster making a soft splas
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My money says Starship makes it to its planned quasi orbit by end of March. Less sanguine about its odds of reentry or of the booster making a soft splashdown. More money says both of those milestones will be achieved by the end of the calendar year.
Your first assessment is pretty reasonable. The second as well. The last of having this all succeeded by the end of CY2023, well, we'll see.
It lot depends on if it survives or not, because in the case of a rapid disassembly event, there is a whole lot of rocket to rebuild.
Re:Allow me... (Score:5, Insightful)
Jeeze, man, tough crowd. I mean, I'm not a Musk fan by any means. The guy's a serious egotistical, arrogant, ass with zero concept of how to interact with the public without making himself look like a giant douche, but... seeing an article about one of the companies he runs doing something interesting hardly brings me to the brink of hurling insults and wanting to hold my hands over my ears / eyes and scream, "NO NO NO NO NO!" A little impartiality would have most of us nerds say, "SpaceX has done some cool shit, and I'd like to see more," without any feelings about Musk being a part of it whatsoever.
Decry Musk all you want, I'll never defend the guy's public discourse. But SpaceX is nerd-fodder no matter how you slice it. And the Starship, for all the delays and foot-dragging all around it, is still one of the coolest space vehicles our species has developed. My personal feelings about Musk have nothing to do with my feelings about SpaceX and their accomplishments. It's cool nerdry from the ground up. And will be even cooler once we see it fully developed and capable of orbital launches and landings. While I know that's a ways off, I would hope most nerds would get at least at tiny little tingle of enjoyment out of it.
Not just Musk [Re:Allow me...] (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm annoyed at the fact that I keep having to mention this, but "SpaceX" is more than just Elon Musk. It's success is the product of a bunch of very brilliant engineers who seem to be forgotten in the media's zeal to put a single charismatic face on every story.
These days, SpaceX's work should be much more credited to Gwynne Shotwell [nae.edu], SpaceX's President and Chief Operating Officer, than to Elon Musk. But Musk likes to be in the news, while Shotwell just likes to get things done, so it's Musk you hear about.
and (Tom Mueller [wikipedia.org] also doesn't get enough credit.)
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There is a substantial chance the Starship will achieve orbit on the first attempt. Or at least the almost-orbit that is planned. The earlier Raptor flights were OK until the landing :) ...
The hard parts come after that: reentry, landing, orbital refuelling, rapid reuse,
Re:Allow me... (Score:5, Insightful)
And whichever part fails or does not fail, it will be exciting viewing.
Everyone who wished they were alive to enjoy the Apollo missions: This Is BIGGER !
Re:Allow me... (Score:5, Interesting)
And whichever part fails or does not fail, it will be exciting viewing.
Everyone who wished they were alive to enjoy the Apollo missions: This Is BIGGER !
And having watched all the Apollo activity back then, what today's young whippersnappers fail to appreciate is the wealth of real-time video today's missions provide. We see stage separation today from the orbital stage itself, seeing the booster separate, dangling lines flapping in the slipstream as the booster descends, then split screen of the booster landing while the second stage is firing. What we saw in the time of Apollo were the launches from a faraway ground point at KSC. Staging was a distant blur separating from another wobbly blur. This was followed by cartoony simulations of what was going on during docking and orbital reconfiguration, interspersed with long shots of engineers smoking up a storm in Mission Control.
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> long shots of engineers smoking up a storm in Mission Control.
Nowadays they just do meth in the bathroom ( also out of camera range ).
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Looks like I picked the wrong week to quit smoking.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
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I was alive to enjoy the Apollo missions. And, yes, this is bigger. Looking forward to the third flight, I am. Once is chance, twice is lucky, three times is starting to look like a lot of things becoming obsolete overnight (like SLS, for instance).
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OP here. I suspect you're right. I, personally, think that they will make orbit. Whether the booster lands successfully, or Starship lands successfully is an open question.
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Most of your claims you speak of, happened after the overall success of SpaceX.
According to the man working 22 hours a day sleeping on manufacturing floors in his companies, he was the Chief Engineer of the rocket in the early days because he couldn't convince any of the "good ones" to come work for him. He literally attributes the multiple failures in the beginning to this very unique problem, admitting that if he could have just hired the best people, maybe it wouldn't have taken so many failures to achi
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Did they finally get their FAA compliance signoff to launch? It seemed like the feds were burying them in red tape in order to give SLS a head start to launch first.
10 million (Score:2)
10 million pounds of fuel? That number seems excessive
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10 million pounds of fuel? That number seems excessive
Value measured in English Pound notes /s
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10 million pounds of fuel? That number seems excessive
4500 is a better number :), as in tonnes. I can't imagine why they used such a small and archaic unit.
But that is propellant, of which only 20% is fuel and the remainder liquid oxygen.
So "only" 900 tons of fuel. On the plus side, methane is very cheap compared to hydrogen or kerosene.
Obligatory ? (Score:2)
It's not heavy. It's my Starship.
I'll see myself out.
10 million pounds (Score:2)
Ten million pounds. That's really hard for me to imagine. How many Olympic swimming pools is that?
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It's 770 African elephants or nearly 11 Boeing 747 planes (fueled).
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At 4 African Elephants / pool, that's 192 and a half Olympic swimming pools. You may be able to fit more than 4 in a pool - I believe they have to lay down so they are not sticking up over the lip of the pool (which would spoil the conversion factor).
Anyone know the official conversion factor? It appears I finally found something Google *doesn't* know.
I looked at the picture (Score:2)
Ok, so what media company owns the old Republic serials... and when are their lawyers going to sue for violation of copyright and trademark, given the design is straight from old Flash Gordon, I think, serials?
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Nevermind that. How many libraries of congress is it?
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Meh its Texas (Score:2)