SpaceX Launches Debut Flight of Starship Rocket System (reuters.com) 177
SpaceX on Thursday launched its next-generation Starship cruise vehicle for the first time atop the company's powerful new Super Heavy booster rocket, in a highly anticipated, uncrewed test flight from the Gulf Coast of Texas. From a report: The two-stage rocketship, standing taller than the Statue of Liberty at 394 feet (120 m) high, blasted off from the company's Starbase spaceport and test facility east of Brownsville, Texas, on a planned 90-minute debut flight into space. A live SpaceX webcast of the lift-off showed the rocketship rising from the launch tower into the morning sky as the Super Heavy's 33 raptor engines roared to life in a ball of flame and billowing clouds of exhaust and water vapor. Getting the Starship and its booster rocket off the ground together for the first time represents a milestone in SpaceX's ambition of sending humans back to the moon and ultimately on to Mars - playing a pivotal role in Artemis, NASA's newly inaugurated human spaceflight program.
To quote South Park (Score:2)
And... it's gone.
RUD (Score:3)
5 engines out on the first stage, separation didn't work. I'm happy they got this far, but they have a few problems to sort.
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One of the center three engines failed. I'm wondering if the flip maneuver was done using just the center engines, which would explain why that failed.
I'm also surprised they didn't separate before the flip. Perhaps they'll plan it differently next time.
No word on whether they reached the needed velocity despite the failed engines.
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From what I saw, it 'flipped' completely over 3 or 4 times so rotation didn't seem to be the issue.
The flip is supposed to impart the separation force ... i believe in lieu of separation/ullage motors. They have multiple engine-out capability with a longer burn. While 5 may be pushing it, achieving orbit was a very low probability chance anyhow. Would have been nice to see a successful separation and ignition of SS either way...next time!
What is Concerning to Me.... (Score:3)
Re:What is Concerning to Me.... (Score:5, Informative)
Falcon Heavy has 27 engines. They've done something like a hundred flights of Falcon 9 without losing an engine, so they may be approaching 1000 successful engine ignitions in a row (more if you count the boostback, reentry, and landing burns).
It's a new engine design, so they have some flaws to work out. These were likely not even the latest Raptors they have.
Also, with reusable rockets, once they start recovering them, they will be able to closely examine the used engines to find flaws that didn't get detected or explained by sensors. An engine may perform nominally but still have issues that can only be found in inspection.
Re: What is Concerning to Me.... (Score:4, Insightful)
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They could build things next to the launch pad for movie studios that want new footage instead of using the same ancient nuclear test footage over and over again. That scene of the house being blown apart must have been used in hundreds of movies.
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33 engines working in a confined space, only 5 failed. Obviously that CAN function as designed within that enclosed space as 28 continued to do so for the entirety of the planned first stage. So there is no "fundamental problem", but as we know rocket science is difficult and spacex doesn't necessarily "over engineer" their solutions rather they try to cut things close and iterate until they are good. I would expect they quickly get these engine failures under control.
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15% of the engines failed. Is that really an acceptable failure rate?
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A big problem with the Soviet N1 rocket was that they only used a mechanical computer to control the engines until the very last test flight. The mechanical computer was simply insufficient for the task of controlling that many engines. The final flight that used a digital computer was the most successful (lasting almost as long as the latest Starship attempted), and the problems that occurred on that flight could almost certainly have been solved had the team been given more opportunities to test (the fina
Re: What is Concerning to Me.... (Score:2)
Re: What is Concerning to Me.... (Score:2)
4/20 (Score:2)
It is not a coincidence that Musk lit the biggest rocket ever built on 4/20. Then, when they were scheduled to flip for stage separation, it just kept flipping until they blew it up. Thinking like Musk, that could have always been the plan. The primary purpose of this launch was to collect data on flight performance, etc, etc. But I wouldn't put it past Musk to have an almost bigger mission to just launch and explode the biggest rocket in history on 4/20 as a pure stunt. The man acts like a kid sometimes.
RE: 4/20 (Score:2)
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It's somewhat possible that was why they went for today for the second attempt instead of yesterday, but in general SpaceX is much bigger than just Musk. Operationally, it's more Gwynne Shotwell than Elon Musk.
As a practical matter, they've been wanting to do this launch for over a year, and they schedule the first attempt immediately after getting the license. I heard a rumor that they wanted to launch before anyone contested the license in court, so they weren't going to risk losing their window by dela
Explosion highlights the reason the shuttle sucked (Score:5, Insightful)
Starship lost: Next flight scheduled for a few months from now.
The shuttle not having an unmanned test version caused the death of 14 people and set the US space effort back by 30+ years.
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Re:Explosion highlights the reason the shuttle suc (Score:5, Informative)
If the shuttle disasters have been on the early launches, I would agree. But instead they were well into the operational period. And the failures were due to circumstances that had happened before without loss of the orbiter, but the NASA culture got in the way of properly fixing the issues.
The SRB burn-through was a known issue before Challenger.
The second mission after Challenger was almost lost on reentry due to damage to the heat shield from debris from the nosecone of one of the SRBs. They got lucky with exactly where the damage was, and they redesigned the SRB nosecones but didn't do a full evaluation of they system to find the same issue from the fuel tank.
Re:Explosion highlights the reason the shuttle suc (Score:5, Interesting)
An interesting question is where we would be today if the shuttle problems had been found and fixed without disasters?
The shuttle program may well have been extended, and could even still be flying now, likely having had a major update with new flight computers and things like that, perhaps even a new fleet of orbiters. But we would still be using essentially 70s technology for sending people to space, with perhaps four to six launches a year. NASA would never have issued private contracts for launching supplies to the ISS. SpaceX would have gone bankrupt before achieving orbit with the Falcon 1. Reusable rockets would still be the realm of science fiction.
The shuttle disasters were horrible, but they set us on a new path, and we're a lot further along now because of that path.
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An interesting question is where we would be today if the shuttle problems had been found and fixed without disasters?
The shuttle program may well have been extended, and could even still be flying now, likely having had a major update with new flight computers and things like that, perhaps even a new fleet of orbiters. But we would still be using essentially 70s technology for sending people to space, with perhaps four to six launches a year. NASA would never have issued private contracts for launching supplies to the ISS. SpaceX would have gone bankrupt before achieving orbit with the Falcon 1. Reusable rockets would still be the realm of science fiction.
The shuttle disasters were horrible, but they set us on a new path, and we're a lot further along now because of that path.
The ironic thing is the shuttles were supposed to be cheaper because they were reusable.
Now after a bunch of years going back to cheaper disposable rockets we're finally ready to try cheaper reusable rockets again.
Re:Explosion highlights the reason the shuttle suc (Score:5, Interesting)
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It was only through sheer luck that the first shuttle launch didn't kill the crew. The prep for the mission also accidentally killed 3 ground crew.
Re:Explosion highlights the reason the shuttle suc (Score:5, Interesting)
The shuttle not having an unmanned test version caused the death of 14 people and set the US space effort back by 30+ years.
No,
* Challenger wasn't a design problem, it was a compliance problem. The contractor that didn't comply with the specifications they were given caused the failure of the Challenger.
* Columbia was a human problem because despite grave warnings, management was confident that the damage was too minor to matter
Overall there were 133 successful shuttle missions.
What's really changed in the design process is our ability to compute absurd amounts of information. Our exponential computational trajectory has allowed for detailed simulations that would otherwise be impossible. This computational ability was instrumental in furthering our understanding of all the physics involved.
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No the main reason the shuttle became too expensive was the number of maintenance and checklist items that needed to happen between launches. I mean like disassembling, inspection, and reassembling the RS-25 engine was almost as costly as buying a new engine.
KSP (Score:2)
I sometimes get my staging wrong too. They should hire me, I've dealt with this sort of problem before.
That tall, huh? (Score:2)
The two-stage rocketship, standing taller than the Statue of Liberty
How many Libraries of Congress is that?
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That comparison is so funny, because how many people have actually seen the Statue of Liberty in the flesh? Well, in the bornze? When you do see it, all you can think of is "that shrimpy thing?"
Was it a success? Yes (Score:5, Interesting)
https://www.laughingwolf.net/2... [laughingwolf.net]
Just a guess, but it looks like they had several issues. Several of the engines failed early. The complex separation maneuver did not go to plan. Obviously the stage separation systems did not work to plan. We will learn more in the days ahead, as it takes time to go through the massive trove of data from a test like this.
And that’s the point. That’s what makes today a success. The data gathered today is worth the cost of losing five Starships. With that data, good analysis, and good engineering, you redesign, refine, retool, and relaunch. Then you take the data from that launch and do the dance over and over again. It is an iterative process and if you think they aren’t doing it Falcon and other things, I’ve got a bridge for sale, cheap. It is the smart way to do it, and Elon is a pretty smart guy who also hires a lot of smart people to work for him.
People in debt for gender studies degrees ... (Score:3, Insightful)
People in debt for gender studies degrees are mocking a man who just launched a 40 story building into the air
Exploding engines? (Score:3)
On the SpaceX stream, it looks like there are potentially two explosions
One around 8 seconds, as the rocket is clearing the pad, there are huge chunks of debris that don't seem normal.
And around 30 seconds, there's a shower of debris. It's impossible to know whether the other inactive engines were deliberately off or suffered damage
Visual inspection of the central inactive engine, to my eye, showed damage (potentially a gaping hole) and a reddish glow. There also appears to be a big drop in LOX level around 1 minute. Seems to me that the stack had no chance of hitting its flight profile for stage separation, so they chose not to fire off the upper stage in an uncontrolled way, tried the unseparated flip maneuver for a little more data, and then blew the whole thing up.
Re:But the Starship is inside out! (Score:5, Informative)
To be more precise:
* Liftoff and tower cleared. Three engines appeared to be out, though it can tolerate failures. ... and it just kept flipping. No separation.
* Rocket proceeded to stage separation and initiated the flip maneuver designed to impart separation force to Starship.
*
* When it became clear it wasn't going to separate, the flight termination system was activated, deliberately destroying the rocket.
Good thing they've really been churning these things out and there's more waiting in the wings. On to the next victims ;)
Re:But the Starship is inside out! (Score:5, Informative)
Three engines appeared to be out, though it can tolerate failures.
From the diagram on the livestream before the scheduled first-stage shutdown, it was five that were out -- the outer ring showed two dark together, a third about a quarter of the way around the ring, one more roughly opposite the first two, and one in the inner cluster loosely a further quarter of the way around, leaving the thrust reasonably balanced. Put me in mind of the similar problems the Soviets had with the N-1 and its 30 engines.
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Three engines appeared to be out, though it can tolerate failures.
From the diagram on the livestream before the scheduled first-stage shutdown, it was five that were out -- the outer ring showed two dark together, a third about a quarter of the way around the ring, one more roughly opposite the first two, and one in the inner cluster loosely a further quarter of the way around, leaving the thrust reasonably balanced. Put me in mind of the similar problems the Soviets had with the N-1 and its 30 engines.
Yeah - 5. I get downmodded when I note that StarShip is an N1 reboot.
We do have better control electronics today, but 30 engines is not a good setup IMO.
I watched and listened to the fans cheering when the rocket was destroyed, and was a bit appalled by the lady announcing bragging about the excitement. This is entertainment, I guess, like a fireworks display.
In a bit of oddness, I had a discussion with some Spacex fans who were making fun of the "failure" of the Artemis mission because the launch da
Re:But the Starship is inside out! (Score:4, Informative)
I wonder how much the loss of six engines contributed to the problems they had later in the flight.
From watching the livestream, it looked as if the problem forcing the RUD was a failure of the upper stage to separate, and the lower stage tried to follow its programmed flipover and back-burn, with the additional mass of the upper stage confusing the software enough that the program crashed while the rocket was rotating, leaving it doing end-overs until they used the range-safety. Depending on the mechanism used to hold the upper stage in place and ensure a clean stage separation, the unbalanced thrust could well have torqued the mechanism, preventing the release of the upper stage. Unfortunately, barring access to the telemetry data, there's no way to tell for sure, and the use of the range safety pretty well negates any chance of analyzing the wreckage.
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initiated the flip maneuver designed to impart separation force to Starship. ... and it just kept flipping. No separation.
*
You are saying that tumbling was intentional? I thought it was because of too many rocket engines failing.
A disappointment that they did not get the second stage burning, but at least some good data for the booster, and the launchpad is not a smoking crater. So 3.6 on the Roentgen scale.
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I'm wondering if the loss of one of the center engines was a problem for the flip maneuver. They may have shut down all but the center three, and then they only had two and were unable to counter the flip. Just a guess.
Re:But the Starship is inside out! (Score:5, Informative)
It is intentional, not an accident. Indeed, they even talk about the "flip maneuver" in the livestream. The booster has to flip back anyway, so they designed it to have the centripetal force of the flip separate Starship, thus avoiding the need to carry the mass of a pusher mechanism.
Continuing to flip endlessly, however, is not intentional.
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It is intentional, not an accident.
No doubt we will hear soon. But it seemed to happen way too low. I think people were calling stage separation based on the clock, but the craft was nowhere near the right altitude, due to reduced thrust.
Re: But the Starship is inside out! (Score:2)
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But what about always twirling toward freedom [youtube.com]?
Re:But the Starship is inside out! (Score:4, Insightful)
The flip was too early, before MECO, too low and too slow. I believe that the rocket was underpowered due to the engines being out (possibly damaged from the destruction of the concrete pad below the launch mount), with asymmetric thrust. As the rocket emptied from fuel this moved the centre of gravity relative to the centre of pressure, which was in turn significant enough to spin the rocket due to it being lower in the atmosphere than planned when having that little fuel. With the lost engines and asymmetric thrust the rocket couldn’t gimbal enough to correct any more.
Still I reckon that was a successful flight for them. Subsequent rockets already have hundreds of design improvements, and will improve further over the 4 - 6 months it’ll take to repair the pad and prepare for the next test flight.
The best news is the production cadence of the rockets and engines. As they refine the design and operations Starship will obliterate the competition.
Bolts? (Score:2)
Are they sure the explosive bolts fired correctly to separate the stages? This is critical on any multistage.
Re: Bolts? (Score:2)
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Even more important is having the minimum number of engines firing! Apparently they were not dissatisfied fir 6 out or would have aborted earlier.
Re:But the Starship is inside out! (Score:5, Funny)
Spaceship Gets Really High on 4/20!
You misunderstood something (Score:5, Interesting)
and, to be fair, you were not the only one. A person on the livestream was clearly winging it and did not realize what he was seeing as well.
The booster was indeed supposed to do a flip maneuver... but AFTER stage separation. When the narrator saw the rotation, he clearly just assumed things were nominal and that the booster was doing its flip as planned and in his script. In truth, watching the ground-based video, you could see the thrust imbalance not long after it left the pad, and when the rocket was higher up and the views allowed you to see the engines it was clear that a center engine and probably five or more outer engines were out... and that this was assymetrical. The rocket had a rather obvious yaw which increased through the flight, and given that the booster was rapidly becoming lighter as it burned propellant and the starship remained heavy, I was surprised to see it make it though MaxQ without already being sideways. Most rockets in such a situation would have already disintegrated from that initial yaw and long before a "flip" - the structure is clearly over-designed and can be lightened (remember: mass is critical in flying machines and none are generally designed so heavy that they would stay intact that far out of a nominal flight envelope). In the end the thing was doing loops, doubtless bent metal structures with the strain, probably distorting the stage separation mechanisms, and had they tried separating the upper stage, the booster and starship probably would have collided assuming separation was even possible.
Today's vehicle was already one generation obsolete - there are newer designs of both Starship and the SuperHeavy booster already fabricated and over at the production site, and Elon has already announced a yet a newer Startship design iteration which is stretched another 10 meters and has 3 more engines - so the Starship itself was possibly two generations obsolete already. If his obsolete junk performs this well on its maiden launch attempt, I think we'd all best start thinking about what cities on Mars will look like...
The pad will doubtless need repairs (they all do after large rocket launches) and it looks like SpaceX is planning to add a water deluge system to further protect it on future launches, so we'll probably not see another launch attempt for a few months, but they do already have more boosters and starships both constructed and in various stages of construction. Unlike traditional rocket builders who build each new rocket as needed, by hand, and like it's a bit of unique and rare art, SpaceX has built a production line and is gearing up to colonize worlds. This launch signals the beginning of a whole new era of space exploration, and the old ways of doing rockets are headed the way of the buggy whip.
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This is not correct. It starts the flip maneuver, then separates. The rotation is what pushes Starship away from Super Heavy (centripetal force), while simultaneously reorienting Super Heavy for its boostback burn. Starship has no hydraulic pusher system for stage separation. The timing for the flip maneuver was also correct. There was no "obvious yaw", and indeed, the repeated reports were that telemetry was nominal.
Bu
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It was also WAY too low (~35km) compared where it was suppose to be (80km) so there was likely too much air pressure
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This is not correct. It starts the flip maneuver, then separates. The rotation is what pushes Starship away from Super Heavy (centripetal force), while simultaneously reorienting Super Heavy for its boostback burn. Starship has no hydraulic pusher system for stage separation.
It's worth mentioning why Super Heavy has no hydraulic pusher system, or a traditional spring-loaded pusher system. Starship is heavy. The spring-loaded system used in small rockets can't be scaled up enough to do the job, and the scaling up required for a hydraulic system makes it so big and heavy that it starts making a noticeable dent in the mass fraction of the rocket. SpaceX wasn't just saving complexity of fabrication and operation. They were also saving a larger amount of mass than people might t
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been churning these things out and there's more waiting in the wings. On to the next victims ;)
I think Musk really missed out by not calling his company Kerbal Space Program. At least I get to watch the game play out in real life, without people becoming spaghetti anyway.
Re: But the Starship is inside out! (Score:4, Interesting)
OTOH, they have very little digging to do, to add the deluge trench.
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Thanks for the info, since popular press only says it exploded. they hate musk, of course.
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* When it became clear it wasn't going to separate, the flight termination system was activated, deliberately destroying the rocket.
Good thing they've really been churning these things out and there's more waiting in the wings. On to the next victims ;)
This was my thought but I also saw it referred to as an "unscheduled disassembly", which sounds less like self destruct and more like a spontaneous earth shattering kaboom.
(considering that explosives were probably involved in the separation a failed separation causing an eventual kaboom is not unlikely)
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Did we honestly expect it to end any other way. I'm sure SpaceX will nail this and it will eventually work out, but lets admit it. They have a track record of blowing shit up till they get it to work. Mind you, I'm not against this approach its very entertaining and does work. I would rather see a test rocket explode than a manned rocket.
Re:But the Starship is inside out! (Score:5, Insightful)
Yep. Better to get flight hours (erm.. minutes) on every single part and all the data on how they can be improved, and keep launching and gathering more data until it works, than to spend years trying to ensure that everything is perfect (but could still go wrong) and lacking all that flight data.
So long as your design is cheap, it's a good strategy. Doesn't work for NASA, though, which faces immense critical scrutiny if anything isn't picture-perfect. Actaully it's more reminiscent of the Soviet approach, whose answer to the "public scrutiny" issue was simply, "if it works, it's in the press, and if it doesn't, then it never happened" ;)
Re:But the Starship is inside out! (Score:5, Insightful)
I'd argue this is also why SpaceX is private. If it were public there'd be different pressures on how to do things. Right now the only person that the company directly answers to is Elon. So if he wants to launch 10 times to have 1 success (during development at least, as I think Falcon 9 has a better launch ratio than any other orbital-class rocket in history), that's OK. Every other launch company (ULA in particular) can't have that kind of public failure rate during development, because they're concerned about "image" because of stock price.
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Nasa failure rates are not great. Expensive and prone to failure. SpaceX is launching dozens of rockets each quarter at this point. This is a brand new design and failure was pretty much expected, except for the people who only recently jumped on the bandwagon and saw a long series of launches, and successful captures of primary boosters on both land and sea, appearing nearly routine. Some of their rockets are a half dozen missions at this point.
No Doubt, there will be failures in the future, and eventually
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Nasa failure rates are not great. Expensive and prone to failure. SpaceX is launching dozens of rockets each quarter at this point. This is a brand new design and failure was pretty much expected, except for the people who only recently jumped on the bandwagon and saw a long series of launches, and successful captures of primary boosters on both land and sea, appearing nearly routine. Some of their rockets are a half dozen missions at this point.
No Doubt, there will be failures in the future, and eventually SpaceX will sort out this new platform.
Ever since Challenger disaster, NASA have been very skittish, preferring to simulate everything to the nth degree. Here, they try something that didn't work (using the flip maneuvering of Super Heavy to induce separation of upper stage, and when that didn't work, FTS activated to end the mission). I don't think this is something anyone can simulate.
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Reminds me of early NASA tests. Even the Atlas was a failure right up till it was a success.
Practice. Discover the unpredictable. Fix and iterate. The SLS is not doing any better.
Re:But the Starship is inside out! (Score:5, Insightful)
They have a track record of blowing shit up till they get it to work. Mind you, I'm not against this approach its very entertaining and does work.
This strategy enables far faster progress. "Move fast and break things" is usually the best strategy for early, rapid progress in any engineering discipline. The schedule and financial cost of making sure you don't break things is very high. Eventually, of course, you learn how to build stuff that works without breaking, and that's when you're ready to go into production -- or in the case of spaceflight, that's when you're ready to start thinking about putting valuable cargoes on board, possibly including people.
That SpaceX is able to make the whole process work is borne out spectacularly well by Falcon 9. Their early iterations had plenty of Rapid Unscheduled Disassemblies, but at this point they're launching and reusing rockets at a phenomenal pace and arguably have the safest and most reliable [arstechnica.com] orbital-class launch system ever built. And they got there by building rockets they knew were likely to blow up, just like Starship.
Also, yeah, watching giant rockets explode is great fun!
From the SpaceX live video (Score:3)
"...this does not appear to be a nominal situation."
Re:Riding a Molotov cocktail (Score:4, Interesting)
Fuel is a minuscule fraction of the cost of spaceflight.
(That said, I'm 100% in favour of advanced propulsion systems development)
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The problem is that what's called the "tyranny of the rocket", not the cost. The exponential dependency of the amount of fuel from the mass of the payload.
Re:Riding a Molotov cocktail (Score:5, Interesting)
Do you mean the "tyrrany of the rocket equation"? Said fuel costs mentioned by me are accounting for that.
Propellant is cheap. Disposable rockets (or rockets that need a major overhaul each time, or have huge amounts of ground staff in the programme) are expensive. If you get capital costs even remotely near propellant costs, you've utterly transformed the industry.
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Except that fuel is something like 90% of the weight during lift off which adds to the overall cost. You have to lift not only the rocket and payload, but the fuel itself.
Figure a way to limit the amount of fuel and your liftoff becomes faster or you can lift heavier payloads.
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Why do you care about that when, again, accounting for having to lift more fuel, it's still a minuscule fraction of the cost?
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I don't think fusion is going to help us with surface-to-orbit vehicles. You need a huge amount of thrust in a very short period of time. Getting from Earth to Mars is a whole series of other problems, and while some sort of fusion-based engine would obviously be desirable since output would be high, we're a long ways away from that. As it is, we have flown quite a few vehicles to Mars, and the chief problem from a thrust point of view is that we would need to load up the hypothetical Mars vehicle here on E
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Not necessarily. You can lift to space with a walking speed. It's a matter of propulsion technique. Chemical rockets require a lot of fuel so the only way is to quickly gain 8 km/s.
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Not necessarily. You can lift to space with a walking speed. It's a matter of propulsion technique. Chemical rockets require a lot of fuel so the only way is to quickly gain 8 km/s.
So, um, technically if you stretch things a lot "you're not wrong" ... but then you'd immediately fall right back down. Even climbing a space elevator imparts velocity tangential to the surface of the planet.
You need to achieve orbital/escape velocity to STAY off the planet which is *slightly* more than walking speed. GP is correct - you need a large amount of thrust in a short time. Low thrust options don't work below orbit as they can't overcome atmospheric drag.
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While it's not within our current or near future capabilities, a space elevator is a way to get there without having to do it really fast. It would go there a lot more slowly of course, and it is actually less efficient, but it's certainly a lot easier to generate a smaller amount of power over a much longer period of time than it is to generate a large amount of power over a very short period of time.
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While it's not within our current or near future capabilities, a transporter pad is a way to get there without having to do it really slow. It would go there a lot more quickly of course, and it is actually less efficient, but it's certainly a lot easier to generate a large amount of applied phlebotinum over a much shorter period of time than it is to generate a large amount of power over a very long period of time.
My point is that at the moment the Space Elevator is still in the realm of Science Fiction, a
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Sure but the difference is we can run the math on a space elevator and describe the physical principles on which it would operate, but we certainly can't do that with a science fiction transporter.
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It's not even clear that the materials are even physically capable of bearing space elevator loads on Earth, let alone with a reasonable safety margin, let alone with dealing with all of the technical challenges (lightning, micrometeorites, free oxygen, oscillations, etc). Even measurements of individual nanotubes have been disappointingly weak, let alone macroscopic materials.
There are alternatives, mind you. The Lofstrom Loop (Launch Loop) doesn't get enough attention. Instead of passive structures lik
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I think that there is a requirement to get to the orbit quickly, or it becomes very inefficient. With rocket engines. Or you think about something else? How else would you get up there?
There are other potential options. Some just won't work, like spinlaunch which does not have any method to prevent your space capsule from exploding when it hits the atmosphere unless you mount the whole thing on a giant, high-altitude dirigible or something like that. It also can't launch people unless we find some way to make people less likely to liquefy under super high g-forces (might actually be possible by exploiting diamagnetism and extremely strong magnetic fields, but probably not practical). Anot
Re:Riding a Molotov cocktail (Score:5, Interesting)
bigger chemical rockets brings us nowhere. You can't be serious flying people to Mars with this thing. No fusion = we are stuck forever on our rock.
Are you confusing fusion with fission? A nuclear-powered fission rocket with hydrogen propellant is the most sensible way to put man on Mars, but a fully reusable methalox rocket still looks like the best way to reach LEO (low earth orbit). Nuclear rockets have poor power-to-weight, but high specific impulse, so are best used after LEO.
You could have a nuclear booster that pushes a fully-fuelled startship from LEO to trans-Mars-injection, before doing a boost-back to LEO, where it is reloaded with hydrogen propellant from a Starship.
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I am not. And fusion rocket still remains conceptualized science fiction. But it's the only way, at least according to our understanding of physics.
Re:Riding a Molotov cocktail (Score:4, Informative)
And fusion rocket still remains conceptualized science fiction. But it's the only way, at least according to our understanding of physics.
Fission, in the form of nuclear-thermal-propulsion is plenty good enough for interplanetary travel. Faster trips to Mars, or direct trips to the gas giants without the need for multiple gravity assists.
But interstellar flight can be done without any new physics, just good ole 1960s thermonuclear technology.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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People need to move on from Orion. Not only is it just one of dozens (if not hundreds) of nuclear propulsion technologies, and a rather awkward one at that... it's not even the best design for "pulsed nuclear propulsion with atomic bombs". A much more modern design, for example, is Medusa, which inverts the design: the bombs go out the *front*, toward a giant parachute far ahead of the craft (structures in tension rather than compression). Captures more of the energy, is lighter, much lower radiation loa
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Fusion may still end up better - but not by a big margin
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Fusion yields nearly 4x more energy per unit mass as fission. Far better mass ratio to store liquid hydrogen in tanks (whose mass is a tiny fraction that of the fuel), and stage the tanks.
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That's obviously wrong. We can just scale up what we did with the moon landings, which is essentially what the Starship program is doing. A bigger rocket means more space for crew, food, water, etc., so going to Mars is just like going to the Moon, only longer.
Now for interstellar travel, we obviously do need different technologies. Use of fusion would be awesome, putting the "star" in "starship." :) Lots of theoretical designs have been proposed. But they aren't necessary for Mars.
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We send probes to Mars all the time. Sending people means sending enough food, water, and oxygen with them to keep them alive during the trip (likely after already sending the food, water, and air for the return trip separately, as well as pre-landing the same for exploration).
The fuel requirements depend on the speed of travel as well as the mass of the rocket. It's not clear to me that stopping at the Moon first or even a Moon station actually gains you anything. More likely you would do a tight buzz b
Re: Riding a Molotov cocktail (Score:2)
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Except there was no intention of reusing anything from this, so they're not out millions. They did fail to get any data on the heat shield, but they still learned a lot, which was the whole point.
I'm just glad it cleared the launch area so that there was no environmental impact in the immediate area, which was one of the big licensing concerns that held it up this long. That also means no damage to stage zero (the ground facilities).
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There's guaranteed to be some damage to stage zero with 33 engines firing at them. Even when they were firing only 1/2 of the engines they had significant damage to the base structure. Hopefully after all the mitigation and iteration work done after previous booster firings it's much less now than when they initially started testing.
Every previous firing has lead to launch area damage which they've been working to mitigate, and this one will be no exception.
They are a long way from being able to turn arou
Re: Part and parcel of new designs (Score:2)
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I missed that. Thanks.
I expect they rather expected it to do something of the sort, though they may have been hoping for better.
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All that is needed now, is build out the trench, add shooting water, and above all, add a thin layer of steel on top of the pad, unless they can develop a concrete that can survive that kind of blast.
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The first flight of SLS sent a capsule around the far side of the Moon. All of the Saturn V missions achieved stage separation and orbit.
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So what SpaceX accomplished here is 675% more impressive.
Still work to do to get all the engines firing successfully though.
With that pinwheel maneuver, it almost seems like it was triggered by time after launch while the stage release was looking at altitude. But I wouldn't expect SpaceX to goof up like that.
Nope. Try paying attention next time. (Score:5, Interesting)
Starships and boosters are [in spaceflight terms] cheap. The launch pad in Boca Chica is far more valuable than today's entire vehicle, and the single most critical thing today was clearing the pad before exploding.
This booster was booster #7. It was already very obsolete (there are a couple more advanced boosters sitting just down the road in the hangar). Its engines were already obsolete, and the booster's engine steering systems (hydraulic on booster 7) have already been redesigned and are electrical on boosters 9 and beyond. Had Elon not decided to fire this booster and gain data from it flying, it would have been rolled back down the street to the scrap yard. It was a pathfinder that experienced many tests and even had to be repaired multiple times after tests. The plan was to destroy it by crashing it into the Gulf at the end of this flight. It was essentially a write-off, but he squeezed more value out of it by flying it and destroying it than by just destroying it in the scrap yard.
This Starship was #24. It also was a very obsolete pathfinder that was used both to work out the production issues and to do many tests. Like the booster, this Starship would have gone to the scrapyard as obsolete junk had it not flown, and like the booster its flight was planned to end with a destructive crash (in this case into the ocean near Hawaii). Flying Starship 24 was just a way to squeeze even more value out of a bunch of welded steel and some obsolete Raptor engines and then cheaply dispose of it rather than paying people to cut it up and dispose of it.
This was bargain-basement rocketry. SpaceX doubtless gained huge piles of invaluable data on this flight - flying the largest and most powerful rocket in world history and doing it with methane and an architecture designed to be as reusable as an airliner, and all from a vehicle that would otherwise have been scrapped and replaced with the more modern vehicles which are already fully-built and sitting in the hangar awaiting their flights.
Oh, and this proves that a rocket this massive can indeed be built, can actually be flown, and that SpaceX can do it. That's certainly not nuthin'
Congrats to Elon Musk and the entire SpaceX team on a job brilliantly done.