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.
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.
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.
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.
The most challenging axis in my opinion is the roll axis of Super Heavy, if there is a roll angle error, the pins could not sit properly on the chopsticks and the whole booster slides off.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
Yup, the rocket equation is truly brutal. Anyone who thinks legs are superior to a tower hasn't played Kerbal Space Program--and remember that stock KSP is easy mode. You don't need anything like the mass ratio that Earth rockets need.
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.
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.
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.
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'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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
>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.
Yes, it's based in the real world. This was the Falcon 9 launch price that I could come up with in the amount of time I was willing to spend on a shitpost. I agree that launch prices will continue to come down, but launchers will always be mass-constrained and launching lead spheres into orbit will never be a practical solution.
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."
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.
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!
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.
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. :)
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...
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.
>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
> 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.
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.
(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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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"*
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.
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.
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
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
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.
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
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.
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
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.
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 turnaround time for Shuttle was 2-3 months, while building a brand new rocket takes like 1-2 years. Although for the cost of Shuttle, we could have built a whole bunch of expendable rockets, pipelined with a regular launch cadence, and probably also gotten some cost savings through economies of scale.
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.
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.
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 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.
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 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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
To put this in perspective: at 150t/launch, if a launch is $1M, then for the cost of an SLS launch (at least $2B) Starship could launch 300,000 tons, about the mass of three Nimitz-class nuclear aircraft carriers.
None of the vehicles have demonstrated any payload capacity yet. 50 tons is the on-paper capacity only, and seems quite high given how little fuel is left when the bring an empty starship to orbital altitude. I assume that as the engines and launch procedures get more efficient, they will start being able to bring stuff to orbit (and quite a bit of stuff, too).
They've actually been having to dump propellant in order to more accurately test what a Starship in orbit would be like, given they're not flying with a payload that would consume that propellant on ascent, but that they still want to launch with a full tank.
The dumping of this excess propellant actually caused an explosion and loss of vehicle on the second test flight.
That's what they said about the second test flight (and the third), but the webcast recordings looked a lot more like fuel leaks to me, and that is in line with Starship and early Falcon's past issues. I'm going to press X to doubt that the dumping narrative is the truth, since a nice face-saving white lie is in every corporation's handbook.
Methane is about 900-1500$ / 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
> 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.
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
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 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.
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?
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.
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
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?
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.
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.
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?
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 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.)
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.
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
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.
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-...>
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.
Why would the extremely long term be a useful measure, when we have no way to know how long that will take to happen, and no way to know what will happen in the meantime to disrupt it?
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?
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.
> 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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
Everyone is a self-made man. You’re responsible for your own shortcomings and successes. Life is a single player game, since you only have access to your own thoughts and actions.
Musk was already a very successful businessman by then - selling zip2 for $300,000,000. $22 million was his cut. Successful businessmen attract investors.
> 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.
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.
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.
We got to our current prosperous world by roflstomping the interests of one special interest group after another. Sorry, Luddite-like groups, the Care Meter is reading zero, and you don't have a right to the comfort of your current way of life.
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.
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
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!
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).
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.
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.
An orbit from there is useless for a mission profile that was slated for Florida. It costs more fuel and has completely different ground tracks.
The sats that spacex launches for Starlink, which are about as interchangeable as you can get, are less valuable in polar orbits because they spend significantly less time over population.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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...
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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
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 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.
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.
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.
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…)
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…
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...")
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 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.
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.
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 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.
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.
> Elon’s “turn” included posting a bunch of COVID misinformation in early 2020
And by "misinformation" you mean actual facts that came to light a few years later? Because virtually all of the "misinformation" surrounding covid turned out to be true and will continue to be.
Maybe it was you who got it wrong, ever consider that?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)"
> 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.
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.
I give you dick cheney and the biden admin those are the ones that waged wars. trump for all his mandate did nothing but de-escalate conflicts. facts again.
You can just list wars and blame anybody now, I guess. If you are just going to make things up, then anybody can do that.
Trump Started lebanon, palestine, ukraine, you are welcome.
See how easy it is.
De-escalate? Think you are forgetting Trump fired missiles into Iran. And they in turn Fired missiles that hit a US Base, and Trump was like "YOLO, JK, just a little fun and games. Didn't think you'd take that seriously".
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.
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.
What the f is going on in this thread and what the hell are you even talking about? Starshield is just Starlink built for (and controlled by) the DoD. It's their own, smaller, military version of the bigger commercial constellation. It's old news. It was announced like a year ago or more. Starshield launches are not any more interesting than any other Starlink or NRO (spy satellite) launch.
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.
The GP was definitely starting a generic ideological tangent ("boo socialism", basically) and by pushing back on that ("nuh-uh", basically) you perpetuated it.
Yes the correct behavior would be to not feed it by replying, but instead to flag it as off topic.
I definitely believe you that you don't intend to be nasty and I don't think I saw any nastiness in your posts, so that's great! But your comments (in this thread at least) have definitely been in the "generic ideological battle" category. Examples:
I'm not saying you're wrong or disagreeing with you—it's just that this sort of generic ideological argument isn't the intellectually curious conversation we're looking for here, and we can't have both.
I want and recommend that people focus on interesting, curious conversation, motivated by the desire to learn about the world and relate to others. This requires letting go of the feeling that you have to battle opposing positions that are wrong and bad. (Why? Because the two states are mutually exclusive.)
I know it's super hard to disengage from the latter, but we should, because (a) it spoils this site for its intended purpose, and (b) it's really an illusion—it's not true that the world will be a worse place if you don't conduct ideological battles on internet forums. In fact it will be a better place and HN itself will be a better place.
I don't think you need to worry about the effect on HN of focusing on the delights of curious conversation. The distribution of commenters who come to that (happy) choice is pretty random across the ideological spectrum, in my experience. You needn't worry about ceding HN to the socialists or whoever.
The distribution of commenters who get stuck in the embattled state is also randomly distributed ideologically, in my experience. I don't know if it counts as ironic or not but the commenters who argue with each other most fiercely actually resemble each other much more than they resemble anyone else.
Of course, if other commenters continue to break the site guidelines by posting generic ideological battle-style comments, you can downvote and/or flag those comments and move on. In egregious cases, you can email us at hn@ycombinator.com and we'll be happy to take a look.
But please don't just flag or report the cases you disagree with—people tend to do this a lot (i.e. report cases where their enemies are misbehaving), which is really just a way to weaponize HN against their opponents. That's not using the site as intended, either—it just shifts the same problem to a different level.
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
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.
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.
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