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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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. :)
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...
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
>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.
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? :-)
> 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.
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.
A box with 1.3’ walls seems doable, actually, depending on how small the chips are. Might still be cheaper and more effective than specialized chips. But I know nothing, so am probably wrong.
Hah, beat me to the nerd snipe. Moreover, that sphere would cost $10k to make and, at a launch price of $1500/kg, cost $4.5 million to launch into orbit.
The aim for the launch price of the entire rocket is to be around 5 million (once it's fully re-usable and in production). Basically the price of fuel and maintenance.
So something might be off with your assumption of 1500 usd / kg.
IIRC the CPUs are much less susceptible to damage when powered-off ? So have a bunch of them in cold standby or even as additional pluggable modules on missions with humans on board & swap to good ones when needed? :)
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.
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 ..
"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."
From an article for this I remember one more interesting side effects of this approach - the flight computer ends up as a generic x86/ARM board that the engineers can just have on their desk during development. Previously the dev boards would use the same rad hard chips and would be as expensive and scarse as flight hardware, resulting in much harder development & engineers having much less experience with the real hardware.
But it turns out, it doesn't matter how many redundant backup diesel generators you've got if a 45-foot wave comes along and they're all left underwater.
I always thought the liquid sloshing would be one of the hardest to simulate (considering how chaotic fluid mechanics is). Interestingly, I think this caused the 2nd Falcon launch to fail (the LOX sloshing).
It is difficult, but there are modeling approaches that work, such as VoF (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volume_of_fluid_method). Basically, in addition to velocity, pressure, temperature, etc., you store an additional scalar in each cell of your computational mesh representing the liquid's volume fraction. Then, you solve an additional equation to transport that scalar.
Solving the Navier-Stokes equations numerically in 3D is very time-consuming, even on HPC clusters, not to mention the additional modeling required for multiphase flows. Your answer implies that the solutions are obtained almost instantaneously, which is not the case.
Oh no, apologies if that was the impression I gave!! I actually perform CFD simulations in HPC clusters, and in fact I'm an admin of the small cluster at my research institute =)
These are indeed heavy computations. What I meant is that VoF is one additional equation to be solved besides the N-S equations (either filtered as in LES or Reynolds-averaged as in RANS), the energy equation, your turbulence model equations, and so on. Certainly, not instantaneous at all, but simply an additional "simple" model that we can hook into our current way of doing CFD.
So, my point was, sloshing is a problem that we know how to simulate, although certainly you need HPC resources. Though, looking at those 100k NVIDIA H100 Elon has, I guess they have them! :P
I think the reason these kind of simulations are fast enough is because they are very coarse and approximate. Don't think of asking how exactly the foam swirls around the individual longerons, more like a very rough estimation of which side of the tank the liquid is slumped to. Remember it doesn't have to be "exact" just close enough to be useful.
By their very nature model predictive controllers operate in a world where not everything is perfectly modelled. Engineers do their best and whatever is left is the "error" the controller is trying to deal with.
Maybe they don't need to model the fluid dynamics, they just need to detect the mass movement / acceleration forces caused by it, and use those sensor inputs to inform a picture that's fed into their correction thursting.
Sort of like how you can balance a few pitchers of beer on a tray in your hand by remaining aware of the weight, even when people remove one! hahaha :)
Still if there indeed is "free" mass moving about, you need to make sure your control inputs don't make it slosh harder, so you compensate for that, so it sloshes even harder, etc - basically avoiding oscilation. :)
They don't need to solve the Navier-Stokes equations, they don't care how the fluid is actually behaving, they just need to approximate how the mass is moving within a margin of error that the control system can handle.
Maybe the tank is just not a large hollow structure but contains fins/compartments/whatever to restrict the sloshing motion and it's not that big a contribution to the overall motion.
If it's no stronger than a sudden wind gust, it's just something the controller has to be able to take care of without a heads-up.
I remember a very similar anecdote about Von Braun & the early Juno/Jupiter rockets - with someone pointing out issues with sloshing on a press conference & Von Braun brushing it off as insignificant.
Then the next launch crashed due to slosh induced oscillation - and the one rocket after that had anti-slosh baffles. ;-)
At least for the retro-propulsive landing burn, I think the modeling problem is probably aided by the high G-forces that must keep the fuel very close to the bottom of the tank. Even before re-light the booster is falling near terminal velocity (I think?), so the fuel is likely sitting at the bottom.
I think it's a huge problem when re-lighting the engines in orbit, though.
Also IIRC the massive main tanks in Super Heavy should be basically empty at landing & the landings propelants come from a set of small header tabks that are near the central axis of the vehicle & arr completely full. This should reduce or even fully remove sloshing issues at landing time.
I think some Kerbel Space Program players have attempted to approximate the liquid sloshing as an inverted single or double pendulum problem inside the rocket that the control algorithm has to take into consideration in addition to the primary control of the rocket.
Has it been considered to spin the fuel via some centrifuge mechanism as a way to remove sloshing from the equation, or is that more complex/expensive/error-prone than just predicting it via simulation?
I'm thinking we will eventually end up with "active fuel management" techniques like this for in space vehicles.
Bug tanks make sense there & they might not be always full. So I can imagine all kind of interesting ways you can work with the fuel in zero go to avoid not only slosh but also the need for ullage thrusters. Eq. some programmable nozzles using in-tank gas to nudge liquid fuel blobs to move in the right direction. Or even some nets or bags that herd in the fuel in the middle of the tank + prevent it from directly touching the side, reducing boil-off or refrigeration requirements. :)
Interestingly cheap redundancy is also how life does things for the most part. Most biological organisms just replicate a lot to guarantee success, so it's clearly a good strategy and an efficient use of energy.
People don't realize how powerful applied math (especially in the areas you've mentioned) has become. Same tools can be applied to people in the ad tech/social media.
Just as a note, Space Engineers has a mod that accounts for fuel in the tanks and also various orbital mods. If one feels inclined to try it for themselves ;)
as someone who absolutely loves SE -- please don't.
the orbital and planetary mechanics kind of suck. They're meant to provide a decent 'arcade realism' for the sake of player/player interactions and pvp/pve.
if you want to experience fuel slosh/weight during a vertical ascent/descent go with kerbal. It models a lot of that stuff without mods -- and mods can make the model even more accurate.
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. ;)
>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.
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.
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.
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
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.
The booster was falling at 4500 Km/h 30 seconds before the catch with 2-3% fuel left. How is that amount of fuel remotely enough to stop the downward momentum?
First off, the booster was going about 1250 km/h when it started its landing burn, it relied purely on drag to get it slowed down to that speed.
Going by the telemetry of the seconds before the landing burn and noting the speed vs time, it seems drag was around 40 m/s^2 when it was going at around 3000 km/h. Since drag depends on velocity squared though, it had reduced to just above 10 m/s^2 just before the engines lit at 1250 km/h, and so would quickly become negligible once the engines lit.
Going by Wikipedia, the Super Heavy[1] has 3400000 kg of fuel at launch, so 3% of that is about 102000 kg. For the landing burn, it used 13 Raptor v3 engines[2] to scrub speed. Each Raptor flows about 650 kg/s max, so 3% fuel is enough for about 12 seconds for the 13 engines.
The empty mass of the Super Heavy is about 275000 kg, so about 377000 kg before the landing burn with 3% fuel.
Using the sea-level vs vacuum performance of the Raptor v2 engines, one can estimate that each Raptor v3 produces about 2.45 NM of force at sea-level. So 13 of them would produce about 31.85 MN of force.
Using Newton's second law, F=ma, this gives an initial deceleration of about 84 m/s^2 and about 104 m/s^2 when empty. If we do a rough spreadsheet integration, we get that a burn of roughly 4 seconds is needed to scrub the speed assuming no other forces.
Now, comparing this with reality, the full 13 engines were lit for a little over 5 seconds.
In my simplified calculations I was assuming full throttle the whole way, which obviously isn't realistic, and I also assumed 3% fuel. So over all I think that's a pretty decent estimation.
Methane has 28% more energy per kg than kerosene and also produces slightly less CO2 (2.75kg CO2/kg burned vs 3.00 for kerosene) when burned [1]. SpaceX uses a 78:22 LOX to CH4 ratio, so for 34M kg of fuel burned, 20.57M kg of CO2 are produced (34×0.22×2.75).
Somewhat tangential, but as far as rocket fuels go energy per volume is also an important metric to consider. It's one of the (several) reasons hydrogen isn't quite as good for rockets in practice as it is in theory - while hydrogen has tons of energy per unit mass (120-142 MJ/kg for hydrogen vs. 50-55 MJ/kg for methane and 43.1-46.2 MJ/kg), it has a far lower density (70.85 kg/m3 vs. 422.8 kg/m3 for liquid methane and 820 kg/m3 for kerosene). As a result, you need quite a bit more tankage for a given amount of energy from hydrogen compared to what methane/kerosene requires.
IIRC there's a tradeoff between efficiency and thrust as well. Heavier fuels aren't quite as energy-efficient, but it's easier for them to develop a lot of thrust, which is important for the initial stages of launch. If I'm remembering events described in Ignition! correctly this led to "thrust density" being something that was optimized for - to the point that there were experiments with mixing mercury into the fuel!
Just a programmer, though been interested in physics since I was a teen and did take a bachelor degree in simulation (mainly physics).
Long ago though so rusty, $dayjob doesn't involve any advanced math at all.
edit: To expand, the "rough spreadsheet integration" was just the Euler method[1] assuming a constant acceleration. So
v(t+dt) = v(t) + a * dt
The acceleration comes from F=ma as mentioned, where F is the force of the engines (Newtons), m is the mass of the rocket (kg) and a is the acceleration (m/s^2). Solving for a we get a = F/m and we get
v(t+dt) = v(t) + F/m(t) * dt
To make things easy I assumed the weight of the rocket was constant at each timestep, but if we take dt to be small enough it's a decent enough approximation. For each timestep I also updated the mass using the estimated mass flow:
m(t+dt) = m(t) - 650 * dt
I started with m(0) = 377000 kg, v(0) = 1250 km/h = 347 m/s, and a constant -31850000 N force from the engines.
Using dt = 0.1 seconds, I got almost exactly 4 seconds until the velocity reached zero.
That's excellent work, only nit is I think these were not the v3 raptors. I think they're just now starting production of those, so they still have a bunch of earlier ones they need to use up in these early test flights. This actually makes your calculation more accurate, as earlier versions will need a slightly longer burn time.
Ah, good catch, I must have misread the Wikipedia page. I misread that they were included in the rocket in August. Reading the Raptor page more closely I also see that the 2.75 MN of the Raptor V3 are supposed to be at sea-level.
Anyway, plugging in the Raptor V2 thrust numbers the approximation increases to 4.25 seconds. This is in line with the thrust I used for the V3 being ~8% higher than the V2 thrust figures.
The atmosphere does its bit to slow down the booster as well. It’d be interesting to see a plot of the power output over time on reentry but I’ve always assumed the motors aren’t doing a lot of work other than keeping the booster stable, until the very end.
Yes, for most of the booster return it’s ‘gliding’ with the rocket engines completely shut down.
They ignite a subset of engines just a few seconds before landing for the final slowdown and maneuvering.
Edit: here is a video from further away that shows the rocket gliding in under control of the grid fins before the engines light and execute the final landing maneuver:
> Yes, for most of the booster return it’s ‘gliding’ with the rocket engines completely shut down.
Watching the video, it looked like the bottom of the rocket was glowing hot, but the engines were cool. I imagine that means they were probably running some amount of methane through the engine bells to cool them.
Super heavy probably makes certain aspects (unrelated to the tower catching the booster) of landing much easier, by virtue of its greater mass. Timing with the Falcon 9 was always essential, because the minimum thrust (with one motor, throttled all the way back) of one of the engines was enough that if you left the motor running, the booster would start to rise. Time the beginning of the final burn incorrectly and you had a real problem, with the booster either crashing or rising at the end and... then crashing, but with Super Heavy, it might simply be a matter of having to compute a slightly different sequence for shutting off the engines.
Super Heavy is easier to control on landing because it's using 3 engines so has better directional control, and it can throttle those engines down into a sustained hover, which is what it does before being "caught" by the arms.
Surprising to see this work first time though - I don't recall them doing any hover and lateral movement tests, but I assume they must have done.
What's also wild is that the booster isn't being caught/supported by those giant grid fins, but rather by small lifting pins just below them, and seems to only have two of these (one on either side), so it also has to get it's rotational position right so those pins engage with (are supported by) the arms.
Yeah, but even without fuel the booster weighs 200 tons. It's pretty wild to have 200 tons of steel incoming at supersonic speed, then nailing a gentle pinpoint landing like that !
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.
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)
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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
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.
I really don’t think it will ruin the cost benefit as much as you suggest, especially when they have multiple sites and multiple locations. It wound be catastrophic, but they are presumably building Tower like the rest of their hardware, and every time they launch it represents a $100M saving compared to the competition.
I'm expecting that SpaceX will have lots of towers, not just one (currently) or 3 or 4 (under way). It won't just be for redundancy. The duty cycle of a tower might simply not allow for the cadence that SpaceX wants to maintain. With Falcon 9 they currently have a 3x weekly launch cadence (which is unbelievable enough). With full reusability they might be able to get to daily and better cadence, so if the duty cycle of one tower does not support that (I assume right now it does not) then they'll need more towers.
A flight to Mars is currently going to require 10 tanker flights just to get enough fuel into orbit for 1 Starship trip. Containing liquid fuel for long in orbit will not be easy.
This likely means they are targeting 10 flights in a day at least. They've mentioned 1000 trips to Mars during one transit window, which means ~10000 Earth launches within 3 months, or >100 per day.
This happened with LLMs in a big way. Basically humanity surpassed some kind of AI milestone and we zoomed past the turing test in a big way. But thanks to social media everyone is sort of rolling their eyes at it.
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?
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.
It does look like venting, but on the Everyday Astronaut video feed it also looked like a COPV inside one of the strakes looked like it exploded as well.
It looked to me like the fire was on the fuel intake valves and if you watch carefully that area was scoured by the nozzle output when it was first slowing down so it probably blew through the shutoff valves or something
If not an intended vent, probably some methane leak. Given that they have the first stage intact, they will know exactly what happened very soon. Yet another advantage of having the rocket returned instead of sinking it in the ocean.
Isn’t this a forum of hackers caring about the news? Everyone seems excited here and that excitement naturally leads into curiosity for many who identify as hackers.
There’s a bunch of people crapping on you who clearly haven’t been through a flight test campaigns.
100% with you. The teams I’ve worked with would be celebrating and trying to figure out what’s burning at the same time. And especially trying to figure out if there’s anything that they need to do to collect evidence for that investigation (eg zooming the remote PTZ cameras in on specific areas or things like that)
They have mission goals which were achieved (booster was caught). Goals that they didn't think they could do (Starship being within the buoys). While there was flames and those could be dangerous you judge the mission based on the planned outcomes but they will try to eliminate the anomalies to improve the next mission while still achieving the goals.
The thing is that no one is judging the mission based on this imperfection. It's just intellectual curiosity, which is a good thing. The comments that are getting down voted are all assuming some negative motive that just isn't present.
I wonder what will happen when they get to 99% reliability? They clean up and rebuild the Mechazilla every once a hundred catches, on that occasion that one fails?
I suspect there's already a whole "refurbishment" process for the crane even for non-reusable launches, and once it's working darn reliably, they can just have a bunch of them ready to go, and cycle once in a while.
The booster aims towards the shore until the landing burn starts, only then does it swing towards the tower. So, for the most part, failures should mean that the booster safely crashes into the water.
I'm just so happy to see this level of progress. This another big step for opening up space. To think that one day this will be considered normal. 150 Metric tons sent on a fully reusable rocket.
So, reusable is supposed to reduce the cost. But the space shuttle was reusable and it has been shutdown because it was too expensive. What is the differences between the two?
SpaceX builds vehicles. The Shuttle was “reusable” because they needed a term between the default for transportation capital expenditures (e.g. trains, planes, cars and ships) and the modified missiles that defined post-War spaceflight. “Reusable” in the Shuttle’s context meant months of specialist overhaul time and the cost of a Falcon 9 launch in SRB booster replacements alone [0].
At the end of the day, in 2010, “the incremental cost per flight of the Space Shuttle was $409 million, or $14,186 per kilogram” [1]. ($591mm and $20,512 in 2024 dollars, respectively [2].) SpaceX’s prices per kg are around $3,170 on Falcon 9 [3] and $1,520 for Falcon Heavy [4]. Starship should bring those costs below $1000.
It might, but it's also at a scale where people can dust off the old plans for orbital rings and ask if this time the economics work out.
(My guess is the economics are fine, but the politics would kill it on earth, so the moon or mars will get one, but that's just an interested amateur opinion).
Term of art for this is "design for demise", i.e. make everything of pieces small enough and materials ablative enough that there's less than 1 in 10k chance that any debris will survive to the surface.
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?)
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?
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.
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.
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.
The whole design process for them is based around launches being expensive and taking a long time to plan. It will be very interesting to see what happens when the whole process gets used to launches being relatively cheap and frequent. No need to spend years making sure the design is perfect and will definitely last a long time if you can launch a new one in a week if you make a mistake.
Starlink 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).
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.
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
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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 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 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?
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.
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).
Manufacture and maintenance contracts for the Shuttle were deliberately spread out across many companies and states, especially in key congressional districts. It was a jobs programme; waste was a feature not a bug.
More fundamentally, there were contracts. SpaceX does things itself; there's no legal friction internally. This gets back to the "Theory of the Firm" for why firms exist in the first place (transaction costs).
The need to codify what work is to be done in contacts is antithetical to SpaceX's rapid development processes.
Is that 150t of payload or total? What’s the cost in fuel alone (let’s ignore maintenance and operations costs for now)? I’m trying to get a feel for the relative scale compared to today’s commercial flight.
They previously threw around a number of around $1M per flight, as mostly fuel costs.
Also, while 150t is the target payload capacity, the current test vehicles are closer to 50t in payload capacity, there are revisions in the pipeline based on data from these test flights which will bring it up to 150t.
To put this in perspective: at 150t/launch, if a launch is $1M, then for the cost of an SLS launch (at least $2B) Starship could launch 300,000 tons, about the mass of three Nimitz-class nuclear aircraft carriers.
None of the vehicles have demonstrated any payload capacity yet. 50 tons is the on-paper capacity only, and seems quite high given how little fuel is left when the bring an empty starship to orbital altitude. I assume that as the engines and launch procedures get more efficient, they will start being able to bring stuff to orbit (and quite a bit of stuff, too).
Methane is about 900-1500$ / 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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Didn’t they look at all kinds of ideas earlier like squirting some propellant or water out over the skin on the way down, and wasn’t steel chosen for its thermal robustness? Did they get into the problem and realize it’s a lot harder and abandon those things for tiles?
Maybe they will have to sacrifice more payload mass for active or passive shielding or more fuel for powered deceleration. That would yield a less impressive lifter but with full reusability.
Interestingly, the inside surface of a rocket nozzle is covered with tiny holes. Fuel is circulated in a jacket around the nozzle both to pre-heat the fuel and to cool the nozzle. Additional cooling of the nozzle comes from fuel leaking into the combustion chamber through those holes, carrying away the heat so it doesn't melt the nozzle. It's called boundary layer cooling.
It was one of the technological breakthroughs of von Braun's team with the V2.
They already plan refueling infrastructure in orbit. That would include stuff to "squirt" on the way down if necessary. If they can use one extra launch to reuse 5-10 starships that might be interesting. Noone knows yet if it's actually needed.
Yeah for rapid reusability tiles aren’t going to work, too fragile. Iirc it was with a lot of reluctance they went with tiles and will have to make breakthroughs on the heat shielding to get where they want to be.
I'm not sure how critical "catching" the booster is to reusability, but it does save weight by not needing legs for landing, and perhaps the booster suffers less stress this way?
Note that the booster is not really being "caught" although this is the word it seems we're stuck with. It's really more like landing on the arms, since it throttles to a hover at that point.
> I'm not sure how critical "catching" the booster is to reusability
Not necessarily for reusability, but it helps significantly for rapid reusability: it eliminates the need to transport the booster from the landing site to the launch site. Given that it's 9m x 70m and weighs 270 tonnes, that's not an easy process.
I think saving weight is definitely one of the main issues, see those proportionally large legs on Falcon-9, I guess it simply doesn't scale on bigger vehicles like Starship / Heavy booster. Also, by catching the booster on site, they can even save the transportation and do the refurbishing on site, so even shorter turnaround time I guess.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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 have the same feeling watching Starship when the telemetry on the bottom right of the screen showing “0km” but landing burn hasn’t started. Later did I know that it was meant to start the burn only a few hundreds _meters_ from the ground
Prior to today the only landings you've seen are Falcon 9, which has to do a "hoverslam" because it can't throttle low enough to actually hover.
Even just one engine in minimum thrust would make the rocket go up when empty.. so the computer lights the engine at the precise right moment so it will have 0 velocity at 0 altitude, then it cuts off the engine. "Hoverslam".
The Starship booster is different, it can actually hover.
Yeah, it also always catches me off guard how late they reignite, while at the same time I'm always surprised by how slow the liftoff is even though all the boosters are on full throttle. Of course both things make sense given the respective mass at both points in the process, but given that it looks like the same rocket from the outside, a bit unintuitive.
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.
It doesn't. It makes one or two mega-constellations cheaper for their operators and therefor more profitable, but no one except telecom and sensor platforms really want orbit. It's useless for most things, far worse than working on the planet's surface where all the labor and materials already are.
The 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").
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).
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.
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.
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
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?
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
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.
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).
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.
You're correct, it's hilariously unrealistic (IIRC requires actual superluminal speed), but people have been conditioned to accept it by various scifi media.
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
> 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.
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.
More money would make the situation worse. They need competent leadership. Everyone like to just say “add more money” because it means no actual operational change to the status quo.
The FAA already has competent leadership and staff. They don't have the budget to handle the increasing number of tasks they have been given to manage.
The FAA manages more flights and space launch operations than it did in the 1980s, when it had a budget more than quadruple the size.
We're going to need a dedicated FSA (federal space agency) at this rate, which should do most of the heavy lifting (ha) for the FAA and just use them for NOTAMs and TFRs.
It seemed to not be FAA here, but the several other agencies that all had 60 days to respond. FAA fast-tracked it but couldn't fast track it past the other guys' 60 day allowed time.
No, launching big heavy explosive things into space shouldn’t have fewer regulations. That’s insane to think they should be able to just do it without much oversight.
Sure the safety part of it is something that should be verified before launch. But when they are launching multiple of these things and the variables are all mostly the same you don't need to do the same analysis over and over again.
A prime example is the environmental impact stuff. They have already done that multiple times. Nothing really changed. If it succeed and doesn't blow up the impact is X, if it blows up the impact is Y. Yet these approvals take weeks and months.
There are also multiple agencies that put their foot down. Famously fish and wildlife was worried starship would crash in the water and hit a shark/whale. No seriously. https://youtu.be/kS8G5D9fg3g?t=21
Then there is the story that at Vandenburg air base, they had to strap a seal to a board and play rocket noises through headphones to see if it was distressed. Keep in mind Vandenburg has been a military rocket launch site for decades. But only now when its SpaceX do these agencies put up road blocks.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3SvJP5wfN4k
Regulations probably are not going to fix the rot that's inside Boeing. It's like putting water in groundhog tunnels, clamp down on one area and it will pop up somewhere else.
They need to die off and get replaced by better competition when they mess up. And their market centralization ground to a halt instead of encouraged by the gov because of jobs and total risk aversion.
If by the size of government you mean the budget, there have been multiple instances of the government shrinking. As a percent of GDP the 90s saw cuts to federal spending, the 2011 sequestration saw a drop in spending even in nominal terms, and obviously the end of WW2 saw a massive collapse in government spending and the end of multiple different programs
Our risk-to-regulatory oversight cost benefit analysis seems extremely off - we overregulate small things that do not have large-scale meaningful impact while basically grandfather in stuff like depleting the Great Salt Lake, coal emissions, etc. which have vastly less regulatory $ spend per environmental impact.
Ideally, if we could quantify all environmental impacts into a single number (ie. CO2 emissions but also wildlife impact, etc.), the $/impact spent across different fields would be equal.
Currently, however, we are likely spending 100x+ on a per-impact basis on SpaceX regulation.
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).
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.
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.
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?
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.
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)
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
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.
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.
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.
They have the experience and control systems to do this reliably with Falcon 9 so it seemed doable in time but seeing it on a new vehicle on the first attempt was still surprising. Really impressive engineering.
I 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!
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
I mean, yes [0]. It's probably the main reason SpaceX went to effort to recover [1] all the engines of the previous booster (IFT-4), which landed in accessible, shallow water in the Gulf of Mexico. The Raptor engines hold valuable secrets, particularly to China who are trying to clone a lot of SpaceX things.
The CIA did something very similar to this in the Cold War [2], though they used a boat instead of a submarine.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akula-class_submarine#Operatio... ("In August 2012, the news media reported that another Akula-class submarine operated in the Gulf of Mexico purportedly undetected for over a month, sparking controversy within U.S. military and political circles...")
It's more of a financial question, do you want to shell out for some chance at it. And Russia and China can build their own engines, SpaceX is very good but not like a century ahead good.
(If anything, I'd be more worried about North Korea or Pakistan getting their hands on stuff…)
Either way the risk is the shit that's left floating, if they don't fish it out it'll randomly wash up in Madagascar or so…
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.
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.
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.
Yes, the chopsticks lower and raise. They will lower the tower onto a transport vehicle and send it back to the bay for examination, and then possible reflight.
> I 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.
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.
Does anyone know what this circular thing is at 5:36 mark in the below video under the booster? It's like a piece which separated and keeps falling off.
No, each individual engine has 2 DoF (x-axis and y-axis rotation) which correspond to torque on x and y plane to the rocket. They need to use more than one at once (three in starship's case) pointing in different directions to get z axis torque.
SpaceX's Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy have already revolutionized the space industry with their reusable first stage boosters and rocket engines. This advance in rocket design has resulted in the cost to launch one kilogram of payload to orbit from approximately $15,000 in the pre-SpaceX era, to around $1,400 with the Falcon Heavy.
This graph shows the incredible impact of SpaceX on the volume of rocket launches, with an exponential rise in recent years:
With Starship, SpaceX is striving to make rockets fully reusable, which, if they succeed, will transform human civilization by radically reducing launch costs and enabling large-scale space exploration and industry. The kinds of possibilities this opens up include economically viable permanent lunar bases, Mars colonization, and revolutionary industries like asteroid mining.
basically they transfer equipment from the rocket to the landing tower so that the rocket can be lighter which is why they have to catch the rocket instead of the rocket landing by itself.
Speaking as a non-American. SpaceX just made one of the most significant technological leaps in the last decade. This is obviously hugely significant in many ways, including retaining the US military edge.
Yet the US administration hasn't congratulated SpaceX. Incredible.
There has been some kind of beef between Elon Musk and the Biden administration even before Musk's public right-wing turn. For example Biden has given speeches praising US EV vehicle manufacturers and not mentioning Tesla but mentioning all their competitors.
Lots of examples. And I’m not just talking about his general opinions on government response, but actual misinterpretations and misstatements of data that were straight-up wrong.
It was also a clear breaking point between Elon and local and state government in California over how local restrictions were going to affect Tesla’s factory in Fremont.
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.
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.
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.
> At this point I am finding it hard to hate Elon Musk.
Eh. There's really plenty of room to celebrate SpaceX and also still hate him.
It is often the case that the way the mega wealthy got there is through a pigheadedness that when it works out works spectacularly well. He's still demonstrably a shitty toxic human being who lives off the grift though (FSD when again? boring tunnels when again? hyperloop when again? how many billions of dollars in government subsidies? how many vehicles upsold on unfulfilled promises of next year next year next year?), and we can continue to wish for a world where someone with his resources and drive was also a grownup with functioning empathy instead of someone who consistently behaves like a petulant child.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Why don't they mount moving video cameras? I mean, the second part of the fly is pretty boring. They shows us a view from 2 static cameras. Is it so difficult to make one camera moving? With 360 degrees view. Show us the shape of the earth the full circle, show us the moon. Is it so hard?
I don't think they'd need to actually have moving cameras (I think this is what the poster meant) to give a 360 degree view, but 360 degree cameras (well, 180 because they're right next to an obstacle) that could be reprojected to 2d.
Pretty impressive. The engineering team at SpaceX is really something. Some thoughts;
The 'chopsticks catch' was amazing to watch. Seems like it adds a lot of risk and clearly the booster needs additional fire suppression systems :-) perhaps the tower could mount something that sprays the booster like the barges have for the F9 boosters.
The heatshield held out for a much longer time, the asymmetric heating on the flaps was interesting. I had guessed that all four flaps would have equivalent heating based on an approach that was basically that side of the rocket perpendicular to the flow but it seems like that isn't the case. Still it seems like they are close to having something workable here.
The detonation at the end was pretty spectacular too, but I suspect that structurally the tanks failed as the rocket hit the water vs anything that was an engineering failure. Engineering it to be strong enough to land on water would presumably compromise the cargo to orbit number.
The use of Starlink was really interesting. The ability to get live video for the entire re-entry is pretty game changing for engineering. I'd guess there are even more 'views' than they showed (there would be if I were running things :-)) but overall that capability is something that really helps evaluate the changes made.
I can easily imagine that flight 6 will be nominal end to end without any unintended damage. That would enable, perhaps, one of their 'massive' Starlink missions to test cargo delivery. It will also start to give us some better numbers on exactly how much cargo Starship can put in orbit in 'full reuse' mode which is essential if they want to create a fueling station on orbit for the Artemis program.
Again, hats off to engineering at SpaceX, y'all did good.
Seems like it adds a lot of risk
I'm actually wondering about that. If I understand correctly, the arms can move up and down, and pivot around the tower. This allows them to correct for some error in the rocket trajectory and also (presumably) "soften" the final contact. Between the nozzles and the arms, it gives SpaceX a lot of degrees of freedom in the final seconds (you can see how the booster kind of "hovered" right at the end) and in certain respects might even offer more forgiveness than the hard ground.
Could it smash into the tower? For sure. Would that be more dangerous than smashing into the pad? I don't know.
It's a new technique with which we don't have a lot of experience.
It helps enormously that unlike Falcon-9 this rocket can dial down the thrust of its engines low enough to be able to actually hover or to move arbitrarily slowly in the final meters before touchdown.
It can arrive to the designated intermediate point with some already good accuracy, and then take some time to trim the remaining errors to the noise level more slowly, possibly with feedback from the ground sensors.
The chopsticks also include rails with shock absorbers, the action of which can be seen in the view from the tower during the landing [1], so the required accuracy is probably relatively modest, provided one plans the maneuver carefully.
[1] https://youtu.be/Ysx4t7ICO58?t=678
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.
Understood, although weren't they out of commission for a really long time anyway the last time they damaged their launchpad?
> 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.
Why is SpaceX choosing to land the booster on the Mechazilla arms instead of performing a soft ground landing like the Falcon 9 booster?
> 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.
It landed right next to their own camera-bearing buoy. You can bet their own recovery ship was right nearby. And with access to radio control too. Likely with a couple US military ships on hand too.
It might not be that simple - I've read an article how they recovered one of the solid rocket boosters from the first successful Ariane 5 flight to check all was fine. IIRC it was a slog, they had to tow it back very very slowly, avoid it sinking, fighting all kinds of weather and tow line issues, etc. Have not found the article, but there is a picture how it looked like[0].
With Starship it could have been similar & possibly worse given the size and more complex shape (various voids that might fill/drain & the thing is not really built for floating). Also you are in the middle of an ocean (Indian in this case) with potential for all kinds of weather on the way. Towing might again be very slow, so you might need to stage a massive submersible transport ship or something similar to make a recovery successful. And then the thing might still tip over and explode anyway - meaning all this was in vain.
I think is most likely they won't bother and instead just stream as much data as possible over Starlink in real time (or heck, even via WiFi once the buoy is in range) for analysis. They want to catch the shop eventually anyway, so manual post flight analysis will wait.
They can now check all over the first recovered booster anyway. :)
[0] https://www.flickr.com/photos/europeanspaceagency/3700131835
But, couldn't they wait for like, 6 hours? Take a good look when it's cooled down a bit. Send some drones over to film it, and then sink it?
I get that towing is probably too expensive for what it's worth. But I'm surprised they don't even go pick up some tiles before kablooing it.
Attach a tether to one of the fin pods, then blow up the rest to sink it cleanly and bring back the important part.
Possible yes but still, this is a prototype with new fin configuration, materials and lots of detail to be understood from inspecting it in detail. An inspection would be very useful.
At the same time, this is SpaceX and they have a few others ready to launch already. Perhaps they indeed can keep it somewhat coarse and wait for detailed inspection until one of them makes it right back to solid ground?
The previous ship did not come down where it was supposed to. I don't think they wanted humans anywhere near where it was coming down, at least until they can reliably do pinpoint landings. Even the Falcon 9, as accurate as it is, doesn't have humans anywhere near the landing location.
I certainly hope so. Ocean are polluted enough and although such a ship is just a, well, drop in the ocean, the ideq of accepting to pollute more is unbearable to me, especially for a world class company like SpaceX...
correct me if I’m wrong but I don’t think the second stage is meant to be caught. It will have legs to land on Earth/Mars without any landing infrastructure.
It will have legs for Mars but they plan on catching it on Earth.
It is expected to land astronauts on the Moon as well this decade, which will certainly require legs.
That is a different version. The ones launching/landing on Earth are supposed to be caught by arms similar to the booster.
The ones for other celestial bodies are also planned to return to Earth... Being inside one as it does the belly flop will be quite the experience.
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.
What’s the advantage of catching the booster over landing it in the ground? Catching it seems like an extra complication.
I can speculate ...
I think the primary reason would be that landing legs are heavy, and it wastes performance to carry them. If your landing mechanism is mostly on the ground, you get that performance back.
Secondary reasons might include that it's simpler to get the booster right back to the pad. Once things have settled into an operational cadence, it's likely feasible to lower and lock the booster onto the stool, stack a ship on top, refuel, and relaunch -- no more messing around with barges, transport, weather issues, etc.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Imagine, linking that video into a 360° virtual cockpit As if you were inside a booster made from glass.
>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.
They're talking here about Starship, not the booster.
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? :-)
Did he get a chance to see any of the recent SpaceX accomplishments?
Nope, died fifteen years ago.
> Another interesting thing SpaceX is doing is to use consumer-grade chips in triple redundancy configurations instead of using $100,000+ radiation-hardened aerospace/defense grade chips.
This has been known in the high availability and safety systems industry for a while and a good book to learn these reliability engineering techniques is "Reliability Evaluation of Engineering Systems".
The book is available on amazon: https://a.co/d/1nH824K
One downside of using non-rad hard parts is degradation from TID (gamma) and latch up effects. You can have chips monitoring other chips to reset whenever they latch up but TID is mostly permanent. The good thing is that TID in LEO, where SpaceX mostly operates, is relatively lower than GEO so they can get by with mostly commercial parts. It's not like the big defense contractors haven't figured out the same thing, they do fly stuff using commercial parts as well, they are just slower to adopt the same culture. SpaceX and the companies that built components using commercial parts are building the new-space industry.
Could you surround your components with gamma-shielding materials and get away with off-the-shelf parts deeper in space?
"To block gamma rays completely, you need about 13.8 feet of water, 6.6 feet of concrete, or about 1.3 feet of lead."
https://www.epa.gov/radiation/radiation-basics#:~:text=Gamma....
Would they need to be blocked completely? Maybe a much thinner shielding would still produce a significant benefit?
(Though likely not of course ;)
High energy gammas have a relatively low cross section, most are going to pass right through the chip. If you add a too little shielding, or don’t layer shielding appropriately you are going to stop more gammas but produce lower energy x-rays from the shielding, which have a higher cross section, potentially increasing your chip dose.
A box with 1.3’ walls seems doable, actually, depending on how small the chips are. Might still be cheaper and more effective than specialized chips. But I know nothing, so am probably wrong.
I think the trouble is such a cube would weigh 12,400 pounds (a sphere maybe more reasonable at 6,510lb - without any room for electronics inside)
https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=+lead+cube+with+side+le...
Hah, beat me to the nerd snipe. Moreover, that sphere would cost $10k to make and, at a launch price of $1500/kg, cost $4.5 million to launch into orbit.
The aim for the launch price of the entire rocket is to be around 5 million (once it's fully re-usable and in production). Basically the price of fuel and maintenance.
So something might be off with your assumption of 1500 usd / kg.
IIRC the CPUs are much less susceptible to damage when powered-off ? So have a bunch of them in cold standby or even as additional pluggable modules on missions with humans on board & swap to good ones when needed? :)
Lead is extremely dense so carry 1.3' walls of lead is probably more expensive than just having more redundancy or using better quality chips.
Can it even be blocked completely? Every layer of material geometrically reduces the proportion of rays going through. Or am I wrong about that?
No, that's correct. Of course there's still some level of reduction beyond which the gamma rays don't matter, but where you want to place it is somewhat arbitrary.
You don't need to block gamma radiation completely to increase the electronics reliability :)
Maybe you could improve the system availability considerably by a bit of gamma radiation protection combined with some more parallelism of the components ..
Usually partial blockage is worse, because you end up with a spray of secondary particles instead of a single ray.
Maybe the secondaries could be blocked by different/lighter materials ? Basically a Whipple Shield for radiation. :)
Makes intuitive sense, thanks for the insight.
A second layer blockage for the secondary particles wouldn't have to be as dense or am I missing important physics?
(I guess a lot of gamma radiation would still reach this second layer so please ignore my question :)
Keep adding layers until you get to 1.3 feet of lead and it’ll work.
haha thanks for the correction - I was under the Turtles All the Way Down mindset :)
Isn't that more like how you make bombs than armors more effective - with backside spalling and secondary fragmentations?
can you block a hemisphere? the other 2pi steradians are shielded by the earth...
More water in orbit sounds like a good idea to me
Just put the electronics in the middle of the header tank.
In reading Musk's biography,
"Hollman also found that creativity got him a long way. He discovered, for example, that changing the seals on some readily available car wash valves made them good enough to be used with rocket fuel."
"Elon Musk" by Vance pg 123
There's a Lowes across the street from 1 Rocket Rd in Hawthorne.
I doubt any Lowes parts made it to space, but you know some went into test articles
From an article for this I remember one more interesting side effects of this approach - the flight computer ends up as a generic x86/ARM board that the engineers can just have on their desk during development. Previously the dev boards would use the same rad hard chips and would be as expensive and scarse as flight hardware, resulting in much harder development & engineers having much less experience with the real hardware.
Aviation pioneered the use of redundancy in order to survive failures.
The Fukushima and Deepwater Horizon disasters show that this knowledge has not penetrated other industries.
Plenty of industries know about redundancy.
But it turns out, it doesn't matter how many redundant backup diesel generators you've got if a 45-foot wave comes along and they're all left underwater.
... and you put all of them in the basement :/
Thank you very much for the reference!
You're welcome :)
I always thought the liquid sloshing would be one of the hardest to simulate (considering how chaotic fluid mechanics is). Interestingly, I think this caused the 2nd Falcon launch to fail (the LOX sloshing).
It is difficult, but there are modeling approaches that work, such as VoF (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volume_of_fluid_method). Basically, in addition to velocity, pressure, temperature, etc., you store an additional scalar in each cell of your computational mesh representing the liquid's volume fraction. Then, you solve an additional equation to transport that scalar.
Solving the Navier-Stokes equations numerically in 3D is very time-consuming, even on HPC clusters, not to mention the additional modeling required for multiphase flows. Your answer implies that the solutions are obtained almost instantaneously, which is not the case.
Oh no, apologies if that was the impression I gave!! I actually perform CFD simulations in HPC clusters, and in fact I'm an admin of the small cluster at my research institute =)
These are indeed heavy computations. What I meant is that VoF is one additional equation to be solved besides the N-S equations (either filtered as in LES or Reynolds-averaged as in RANS), the energy equation, your turbulence model equations, and so on. Certainly, not instantaneous at all, but simply an additional "simple" model that we can hook into our current way of doing CFD.
So, my point was, sloshing is a problem that we know how to simulate, although certainly you need HPC resources. Though, looking at those 100k NVIDIA H100 Elon has, I guess they have them! :P
I think the reason these kind of simulations are fast enough is because they are very coarse and approximate. Don't think of asking how exactly the foam swirls around the individual longerons, more like a very rough estimation of which side of the tank the liquid is slumped to. Remember it doesn't have to be "exact" just close enough to be useful.
By their very nature model predictive controllers operate in a world where not everything is perfectly modelled. Engineers do their best and whatever is left is the "error" the controller is trying to deal with.
Or you compute variations ahead of time and do a situation based lookup, hoing through loops if a situation ressembles another one.
Maybe they don't need to model the fluid dynamics, they just need to detect the mass movement / acceleration forces caused by it, and use those sensor inputs to inform a picture that's fed into their correction thursting.
Sort of like how you can balance a few pitchers of beer on a tray in your hand by remaining aware of the weight, even when people remove one! hahaha :)
Still if there indeed is "free" mass moving about, you need to make sure your control inputs don't make it slosh harder, so you compensate for that, so it sloshes even harder, etc - basically avoiding oscilation. :)
Yeah..ah, control theory. Heh :)
They don't need to solve the Navier-Stokes equations, they don't care how the fluid is actually behaving, they just need to approximate how the mass is moving within a margin of error that the control system can handle.
Maybe the tank is just not a large hollow structure but contains fins/compartments/whatever to restrict the sloshing motion and it's not that big a contribution to the overall motion.
If it's no stronger than a sudden wind gust, it's just something the controller has to be able to take care of without a heads-up.
These are indeed part of the solution and are known as baffles. They have risks of their own, e.g.: https://wccftech.com/baffling-baffles-musk-explains-why-spac...
In the first spacex rocket Musk thought that it was a good idea to not install baffles. He learned from experience that they are indeed needed.
I remember a very similar anecdote about Von Braun & the early Juno/Jupiter rockets - with someone pointing out issues with sloshing on a press conference & Von Braun brushing it off as insignificant.
Then the next launch crashed due to slosh induced oscillation - and the one rocket after that had anti-slosh baffles. ;-)
That’s how tanks in race cars are made. Another solution is fill the tank with some kind of sponge-like material.
Sometimes… the baffles break off, and then become surfboard projectiles inside the tank.
More fluid dynamics
That would be far too heavy in this case. :)
That is how they build the tank in Formula One Racing (and probably many other race cars, I guess)
They probably pre solved a bunch of scenarios and interpolate between them known solutions
That usually doesn't work for chaotic systems.
If the computation is too difficult, another approach is build a test stand and try methods until it works.
Which is why we use wind tunnels, for example.
Wouldn't it burn most of the fuel to mitigate the effect?
At least for the retro-propulsive landing burn, I think the modeling problem is probably aided by the high G-forces that must keep the fuel very close to the bottom of the tank. Even before re-light the booster is falling near terminal velocity (I think?), so the fuel is likely sitting at the bottom.
I think it's a huge problem when re-lighting the engines in orbit, though.
Also IIRC the massive main tanks in Super Heavy should be basically empty at landing & the landings propelants come from a set of small header tabks that are near the central axis of the vehicle & arr completely full. This should reduce or even fully remove sloshing issues at landing time.
Iirc cold gas thrusters are used before ignition to provide some acceleration to force the fuel to the bottom of the tank.
The technical term for that is 'ullage'.
See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ullage_motor
I think some Kerbel Space Program players have attempted to approximate the liquid sloshing as an inverted single or double pendulum problem inside the rocket that the control algorithm has to take into consideration in addition to the primary control of the rocket.
Has it been considered to spin the fuel via some centrifuge mechanism as a way to remove sloshing from the equation, or is that more complex/expensive/error-prone than just predicting it via simulation?
I'm thinking we will eventually end up with "active fuel management" techniques like this for in space vehicles.
Bug tanks make sense there & they might not be always full. So I can imagine all kind of interesting ways you can work with the fuel in zero go to avoid not only slosh but also the need for ullage thrusters. Eq. some programmable nozzles using in-tank gas to nudge liquid fuel blobs to move in the right direction. Or even some nets or bags that herd in the fuel in the middle of the tank + prevent it from directly touching the side, reducing boil-off or refrigeration requirements. :)
Maybe they just use pressure sensors to tell where the fluid is within the tank.
Even a real-time simulation should have some measurements to self correct to some degree. Otherwise it'll diverge.
There wouldn’t be a whole lot of fuel left by the time it’s back to land so likely an irrelevant factor.
Reminds me of the early days of Google File System.
They used trios of regular consumer grade disks/servers etc as a cluster and it looked like a single node.
They had to replace a LOT of hardware but this was still cheaper than big iron industrial grades servers.
Interestingly cheap redundancy is also how life does things for the most part. Most biological organisms just replicate a lot to guarantee success, so it's clearly a good strategy and an efficient use of energy.
Efficient as in evolution or in business: you just need to be more efficient than most of the peers
People don't realize how powerful applied math (especially in the areas you've mentioned) has become. Same tools can be applied to people in the ad tech/social media.
Just as a note, Space Engineers has a mod that accounts for fuel in the tanks and also various orbital mods. If one feels inclined to try it for themselves ;)
as someone who absolutely loves SE -- please don't.
the orbital and planetary mechanics kind of suck. They're meant to provide a decent 'arcade realism' for the sake of player/player interactions and pvp/pve.
if you want to experience fuel slosh/weight during a vertical ascent/descent go with kerbal. It models a lot of that stuff without mods -- and mods can make the model even more accurate.
Reliability is not based on a system that cannot fail. It is based on a system that can survive failure.
The canonical paper on handling software failures: https://erlang.org/download/armstrong_thesis_2003.pdf
There's much more to it than the programming language.
Algorithms can be faulty as well.
> There's much more to it than the programming language.
Which was never claimed.
That paper is a little bit about Erlang and a whole lot about OTP and other methodology and design technique.
It is still, very much "the paper" for distributed systems, though its applicability to this particular problem is limited.
… or cannot fail
I know MPC takes a LOT of compute power. It's not like a finely tuned PID loop or even a cascade of PID loops, computationally.
Does anyone know (or have educated speculation on) what kind of hardware is running these algorithms? Like, do they have a linux machine that's running the control loops? Are we talking megabytes, gigabytes of SRAM?
I would think no -- you would definitely need hard real time for something like this. But my only experience with real time systems is in tiny MCUs with kb of SRAM. That's definitely too small for a controller like this.
Really curious about the nuts and bolts of this.
MPC doesn't need to take a ton of compute power. It all comes down to how sophisticated the underlying model is. You can have a MPC with 20 variables and run it at multiple kilohertz on a tiny microcontroller.
When you build something like this, you're torn between having a big model that represents everything and a smaller model that is easier to validate and reason about. Based on simulation, you might go for a smaller model that "knows" to stay away from operating areas where hidden variables (like really complicated tank slosh) invalidate the small model.
I doubt the actual control loop is too much processing, but it's certainly possible to build controllers with SDRAM, millions of variables of state, and hard realtime processing, though I wouldn't build it on top of preempt-rt. ;)
It would be a real time OS running it for sure. Which one I don't know.
https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/19700023342/downloads/19... (search for "slosh" or "shaping network")
> MIMO and nonlinear control theories are probably some of the hardest topics in all of engineering.
I am curious but clueless about these problems, can you expand more?
Google is a good place to start. https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Control_Systems/MIMO_Systems
how much liquid fuel is present when it lands? I assumed all the clouds it was giving off was it dumping fuel to make sure it was empty on landing
Less than 5% of a full load. Any extra fuel you brought to the edge of space and back is lost performance, so substantial efforts are made to minimize this lost mass fraction.
That's probably venting of excess pressurants and/or an engine purge.
I have been told by people who worked on them that you get radiation hardened aerospace/defence grade chips by backing off the clock speed about 20% to give signal stabilization slightly longer time. I can understand the population being confused about this but industry being confused seems to have more to do with regulatory capture and beaurocratic moats which SpaceX does seem to be bypassing.
I'm sure there are many hardening processes - from the modified COTS parts, all the way to presumably much more expensive custom substrates like: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silicon_on_sapphire
You also have to add massive amounts (relatively) of static sink by approaches like ‘silicon on insulator’ to prevent energetic electrons from hopping into the transistor layer.
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
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Model_predictive_control
http://cse.lab.imtlucca.it/~bemporad/publications/papers/ecc...
I spent 2 semesters covering controls and I barely felt like I learned anything.
Here’s a video from a farther vantage point that gives a better perspective on the landing process:
https://x.com/shaunmmaguire/status/1845444890764644694
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.
Prior launch landed 0.5cm away from the target location. This is equivalent to landing a 25 story building right on the foundation.
Absolutely impressive accuracy and precision.
That was one of the greatest things I've ever seen.
Literally brought me to tears, watching that happen.
The booster was falling at 4500 Km/h 30 seconds before the catch with 2-3% fuel left. How is that amount of fuel remotely enough to stop the downward momentum?
First off, the booster was going about 1250 km/h when it started its landing burn, it relied purely on drag to get it slowed down to that speed.
Going by the telemetry of the seconds before the landing burn and noting the speed vs time, it seems drag was around 40 m/s^2 when it was going at around 3000 km/h. Since drag depends on velocity squared though, it had reduced to just above 10 m/s^2 just before the engines lit at 1250 km/h, and so would quickly become negligible once the engines lit.
Going by Wikipedia, the Super Heavy[1] has 3400000 kg of fuel at launch, so 3% of that is about 102000 kg. For the landing burn, it used 13 Raptor v3 engines[2] to scrub speed. Each Raptor flows about 650 kg/s max, so 3% fuel is enough for about 12 seconds for the 13 engines.
The empty mass of the Super Heavy is about 275000 kg, so about 377000 kg before the landing burn with 3% fuel.
Using the sea-level vs vacuum performance of the Raptor v2 engines, one can estimate that each Raptor v3 produces about 2.45 NM of force at sea-level. So 13 of them would produce about 31.85 MN of force.
Using Newton's second law, F=ma, this gives an initial deceleration of about 84 m/s^2 and about 104 m/s^2 when empty. If we do a rough spreadsheet integration, we get that a burn of roughly 4 seconds is needed to scrub the speed assuming no other forces.
Now, comparing this with reality, the full 13 engines were lit for a little over 5 seconds.
In my simplified calculations I was assuming full throttle the whole way, which obviously isn't realistic, and I also assumed 3% fuel. So over all I think that's a pretty decent estimation.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX_Super_Heavy#Engines
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX_Raptor
"... Super Heavy[1] has 3400000 kg of fuel at launch ..."
So, 34M kg of fuel has to be burned (in this booster alone) to facilitate a flight ... and I see that the propellant is CH4 / LOX[1].
Burning methane is much, much better than simply releasing methane but the release becomes CO2 instead ...
What is the back-of-the-envelope conversion of 34M kg CH4 vs., for instance, 34M kg of kerosene/JP ?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX_Super_Heavy#Engines
Methane has 28% more energy per kg than kerosene and also produces slightly less CO2 (2.75kg CO2/kg burned vs 3.00 for kerosene) when burned [1]. SpaceX uses a 78:22 LOX to CH4 ratio, so for 34M kg of fuel burned, 20.57M kg of CO2 are produced (34×0.22×2.75).
[1] https://www.engineeringtoolbox.com/co2-emission-fuels-d_1085... [2] https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1298426245991063554?lang=en
Somewhat tangential, but as far as rocket fuels go energy per volume is also an important metric to consider. It's one of the (several) reasons hydrogen isn't quite as good for rockets in practice as it is in theory - while hydrogen has tons of energy per unit mass (120-142 MJ/kg for hydrogen vs. 50-55 MJ/kg for methane and 43.1-46.2 MJ/kg), it has a far lower density (70.85 kg/m3 vs. 422.8 kg/m3 for liquid methane and 820 kg/m3 for kerosene). As a result, you need quite a bit more tankage for a given amount of energy from hydrogen compared to what methane/kerosene requires.
IIRC there's a tradeoff between efficiency and thrust as well. Heavier fuels aren't quite as energy-efficient, but it's easier for them to develop a lot of thrust, which is important for the initial stages of launch. If I'm remembering events described in Ignition! correctly this led to "thrust density" being something that was optimized for - to the point that there were experiments with mixing mercury into the fuel!
[0]: https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/facts-and-figu...
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kerosene
3.4 million, not 34 million. And that includes the weight of the liquid oxygen, which is heavier than the methane.
What kind of work do you do that you're able to understand this stuff? Genuinely curious. I'm way beyond my depth trying to follow
Just a programmer, though been interested in physics since I was a teen and did take a bachelor degree in simulation (mainly physics).
Long ago though so rusty, $dayjob doesn't involve any advanced math at all.
edit: To expand, the "rough spreadsheet integration" was just the Euler method[1] assuming a constant acceleration. So
The acceleration comes from F=ma as mentioned, where F is the force of the engines (Newtons), m is the mass of the rocket (kg) and a is the acceleration (m/s^2). Solving for a we get a = F/m and we get To make things easy I assumed the weight of the rocket was constant at each timestep, but if we take dt to be small enough it's a decent enough approximation. For each timestep I also updated the mass using the estimated mass flow: I started with m(0) = 377000 kg, v(0) = 1250 km/h = 347 m/s, and a constant -31850000 N force from the engines.Using dt = 0.1 seconds, I got almost exactly 4 seconds until the velocity reached zero.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euler_method
this is ap hs physics or uni 1st year physics
You can do a lot with basic physics if you understand it well
That's excellent work, only nit is I think these were not the v3 raptors. I think they're just now starting production of those, so they still have a bunch of earlier ones they need to use up in these early test flights. This actually makes your calculation more accurate, as earlier versions will need a slightly longer burn time.
Ah, good catch, I must have misread the Wikipedia page. I misread that they were included in the rocket in August. Reading the Raptor page more closely I also see that the 2.75 MN of the Raptor V3 are supposed to be at sea-level.
Anyway, plugging in the Raptor V2 thrust numbers the approximation increases to 4.25 seconds. This is in line with the thrust I used for the V3 being ~8% higher than the V2 thrust figures.
Because the rocket weighs a small fraction of what it did at launch, specifically because it only has 2-3% fuel left.
Fuel is the vast majority of the vehicle weight at launch, kind of like an empty vs full can of soda.
The atmosphere does its bit to slow down the booster as well. It’d be interesting to see a plot of the power output over time on reentry but I’ve always assumed the motors aren’t doing a lot of work other than keeping the booster stable, until the very end.
Yes, for most of the booster return it’s ‘gliding’ with the rocket engines completely shut down.
They ignite a subset of engines just a few seconds before landing for the final slowdown and maneuvering.
Edit: here is a video from further away that shows the rocket gliding in under control of the grid fins before the engines light and execute the final landing maneuver:
https://x.com/shaunmmaguire/status/1845444890764644694
> Yes, for most of the booster return it’s ‘gliding’ with the rocket engines completely shut down.
Watching the video, it looked like the bottom of the rocket was glowing hot, but the engines were cool. I imagine that means they were probably running some amount of methane through the engine bells to cool them.
Super heavy probably makes certain aspects (unrelated to the tower catching the booster) of landing much easier, by virtue of its greater mass. Timing with the Falcon 9 was always essential, because the minimum thrust (with one motor, throttled all the way back) of one of the engines was enough that if you left the motor running, the booster would start to rise. Time the beginning of the final burn incorrectly and you had a real problem, with the booster either crashing or rising at the end and... then crashing, but with Super Heavy, it might simply be a matter of having to compute a slightly different sequence for shutting off the engines.
They sure made it look easy...
Super Heavy is easier to control on landing because it's using 3 engines so has better directional control, and it can throttle those engines down into a sustained hover, which is what it does before being "caught" by the arms.
Surprising to see this work first time though - I don't recall them doing any hover and lateral movement tests, but I assume they must have done.
What's also wild is that the booster isn't being caught/supported by those giant grid fins, but rather by small lifting pins just below them, and seems to only have two of these (one on either side), so it also has to get it's rotational position right so those pins engage with (are supported by) the arms.
Yeah, but even without fuel the booster weighs 200 tons. It's pretty wild to have 200 tons of steel incoming at supersonic speed, then nailing a gentle pinpoint landing like that !
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.
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)
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.
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.
Could just be differential/rtk GPS. You can get incredible precision with that.
super good question, especially with all the tilting involved, which would make visual servoing difficult. Maybe some form of beacons on the ground?
Watched several times, amazing stuff.
Had flashbacks to playing Jupiter Landing on the C64!
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jupiter_Lander
Edit: SpaceX should create a simple 'catch' the rocket game. Play in browser style. Just for kicks and marketing.
> SpaceX should create a simple 'catch' the rocket game. Play in browser style. Just for kicks and marketing.
They did: https://starshipthegame.spacex.com/
I succeeded with a High Score of -287!
> Edit: SpaceX should create a simple 'catch' the rocket game. Play in browser style. Just for kicks and marketing.
there is, it was discussed in the FAA thread.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41821220
This is a pretty fun game. Not so easy. Good job to the creator for having added some mechanics that make it work.
This one is not from SpaceX, but gives way more fun: https://mechazilla.io/
That's great, really shows how they are "threading a needle" on the control side of things.
Shameless plug for my own project with a similar bent - write your own lunar lander autopilot in browser
lunar.unnecessarymodification.com
Very cool :) I got a good enough score in the basic scenario by playing around a bit but it would be cool if you could link some kind of tutorial (e.g. to a digital PID video or something like that).
very fun got 51! with fuel limit + mass enabled.
so now managed to save 63% fuel, but score doesn't seem to take this into account (still 51)..
Felt special witnessing history, was delighted my kids and their friends all were glued to the TV for it also.
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.
I thought the same, screamed out "ouch that doesn't look good!" right before the catch.
The last part of the live stream they showed footage from a different angle and there it didn't look too bad though! For sure controlled.
Scott Manley put out a tweet that they went down towards a non-tower position until they were at three engine controlled burn, and only then did the side shift.
timestamp for "catch" is around 40:00 for those curious
Yes, indeed. But I will add that the sheer size of the rocket helps in this regard. I think it is rather hard to appreciate the massive scale of the feat by watching videos.
The simulation they show at 21 min into the video is almost exactly like it happend in the end, to it seems it went perfectly as planned.
There's also a very impressive sensor and actuator story.
Do the control algorithms use AI?
Actually this is a good question - there's a lot of control engineering research on Data-Driven Control Systems.
Check Steve Brunton youtube channel, he is one of the leaders in this area: https://youtu.be/gb_C9LcjDSI?si=xUjqUZ9-0MIFohX6
If I had to bet, I would bet against it. Boston Dynamics for example, for the longest time, didn't use anything other than Model-Predictive Control. Only recently have they started using RL
No. Way too hard to validate.
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.
I really don’t think it will ruin the cost benefit as much as you suggest, especially when they have multiple sites and multiple locations. It wound be catastrophic, but they are presumably building Tower like the rest of their hardware, and every time they launch it represents a $100M saving compared to the competition.
I'm expecting that SpaceX will have lots of towers, not just one (currently) or 3 or 4 (under way). It won't just be for redundancy. The duty cycle of a tower might simply not allow for the cadence that SpaceX wants to maintain. With Falcon 9 they currently have a 3x weekly launch cadence (which is unbelievable enough). With full reusability they might be able to get to daily and better cadence, so if the duty cycle of one tower does not support that (I assume right now it does not) then they'll need more towers.
A flight to Mars is currently going to require 10 tanker flights just to get enough fuel into orbit for 1 Starship trip. Containing liquid fuel for long in orbit will not be easy.
This likely means they are targeting 10 flights in a day at least. They've mentioned 1000 trips to Mars during one transit window, which means ~10000 Earth launches within 3 months, or >100 per day.
This happened with LLMs in a big way. Basically humanity surpassed some kind of AI milestone and we zoomed past the turing test in a big way. But thanks to social media everyone is sort of rolling their eyes at it.
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?
Video of the catch
> Mechazilla has caught the Super Heavy booster!
https://x.com/spacex/status/1845442658397049011
10 minutes from 3h25m of this video shows launch and catch.
Historic viewing :)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YC87WmFN_As&t=3h25m14s
This angle is even more impressive IMO https://x.com/kimbal/status/1845451222750306344
It's very impressive to see the buildings next to it, the original video lacks any sense of scale
Naive question: I obviously expect there to be flames from the engines, but there were flames on the lower sides for quite a while after the catch – is that expected?
It is common for Starship prototypes to have uncontrolled fires, but it is obviously not a good thing.
For example, prototype number 10 exploded 8 minutes after landing [1] because of a seemingly insignificant fire at the bottom.
After today's flight there was a long lasting fire in the engine section, with occasional flaming pieces of plumbing raining down from the rocket. Examining the aftermath should help SpaceX to understand what improvements need to be made to prevent this from happening.
[1] https://youtu.be/XOQkk3ojNfM?t=38346
This highlights another thing I love about watching SpaceX's unprecedented rate of progress. They're managing the complex balance of risk, learning, time and budget extremely well. I'm not an expert in the relevant domains but even I've noticed and appreciated that the typical SpaceX development test always manages to get big chunks of new data, while still having some notable things not quite working.
It's an object lesson in rapid engineering development. If everything goes perfectly in a development test, it's a sign you're not moving fast enough (meaning not taking enough risk per increment to maximize learning). As valuable as Falcon, Starlink and Starship are, the biggest near-term value of SpaceX may be providing such a clear demonstration of well-executed "fail fast, learn fast" engineering that even politicians and bureaucrats can understand it.
This same issue was common on early Falcon 9 landings and took a while to fully eliminate.
Probably not expected, but the nice thing is that they don't have to pull the vehicle off the bottom of the ocean to study what happened there.
You usually see some down near the engines after a Falcon 9 landing.
The vent out the side before touchdown didn’t look right, though. Something blew, but non-critically.
It does look like venting, but on the Everyday Astronaut video feed it also looked like a COPV inside one of the strakes looked like it exploded as well.
It looked to me like the fire was on the fuel intake valves and if you watch carefully that area was scoured by the nozzle output when it was first slowing down so it probably blew through the shutoff valves or something
My guess is that it's venting out the system pressure, and it's safer to burn it.
In some of the views of the landing it's clear that the flames are from a methane vent. I.e., it's really not a problem.
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.
I'd love to see followup analysis of what that fire was all about.
Desirable? Probably not. Expected? Yeah. Especially given that is the was pretty unexpected to work on the first try.
who cares... they did it and it didn't burn up or destroy the platform. rest is just nitpicking
> who cares...
I bet SpaceX does. They've solved the big problems, now it's time to solve the small problems and make reuse a reality.
Isn’t this a forum of hackers caring about the news? Everyone seems excited here and that excitement naturally leads into curiosity for many who identify as hackers.
Outside of maybe Boeing "who cares..." isn't a valid answer in engineering.
It's a prototype.
That's why it's not a catastrophe that something was unexpectedly on fire, not a reason to dismiss the question.
So the whole purpose of it is to identify issues to be resolved.
[flagged]
Please don't respond to a bad comment by breaking the site guidelines yourself. That only makes things worse.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
It's an interesting engineering question, not a slight.
Obviously the primary mission was successful, in spite of anomalies (good system design!), but people are and should be curious about this aspect.
There’s a bunch of people crapping on you who clearly haven’t been through a flight test campaigns.
100% with you. The teams I’ve worked with would be celebrating and trying to figure out what’s burning at the same time. And especially trying to figure out if there’s anything that they need to do to collect evidence for that investigation (eg zooming the remote PTZ cameras in on specific areas or things like that)
They have mission goals which were achieved (booster was caught). Goals that they didn't think they could do (Starship being within the buoys). While there was flames and those could be dangerous you judge the mission based on the planned outcomes but they will try to eliminate the anomalies to improve the next mission while still achieving the goals.
The thing is that no one is judging the mission based on this imperfection. It's just intellectual curiosity, which is a good thing. The comments that are getting down voted are all assuming some negative motive that just isn't present.
I wonder what will happen when they get to 99% reliability? They clean up and rebuild the Mechazilla every once a hundred catches, on that occasion that one fails?
I suspect there's already a whole "refurbishment" process for the crane even for non-reusable launches, and once it's working darn reliably, they can just have a bunch of them ready to go, and cycle once in a while.
The next one is already mostly built and very different from this one. They move fast.
I also expect if something fails a test in the way down you crash in the water rather than splat your catcher
The booster aims towards the shore until the landing burn starts, only then does it swing towards the tower. So, for the most part, failures should mean that the booster safely crashes into the water.
The plan is to have many, many Mechazillas.
That, and redundancy. The amount of cash you save allows you to do that.
They've landed over 300 Falcon boosters and haven't wrecked their barges yet I expect that this won't be a major issue.
Amazing achievement.
I'm just so happy to see this level of progress. This another big step for opening up space. To think that one day this will be considered normal. 150 Metric tons sent on a fully reusable rocket.
Thats like a 747 to space.
So, reusable is supposed to reduce the cost. But the space shuttle was reusable and it has been shutdown because it was too expensive. What is the differences between the two?
> space shuttle was reusable
SpaceX builds vehicles. The Shuttle was “reusable” because they needed a term between the default for transportation capital expenditures (e.g. trains, planes, cars and ships) and the modified missiles that defined post-War spaceflight. “Reusable” in the Shuttle’s context meant months of specialist overhaul time and the cost of a Falcon 9 launch in SRB booster replacements alone [0].
At the end of the day, in 2010, “the incremental cost per flight of the Space Shuttle was $409 million, or $14,186 per kilogram” [1]. ($591mm and $20,512 in 2024 dollars, respectively [2].) SpaceX’s prices per kg are around $3,170 on Falcon 9 [3] and $1,520 for Falcon Heavy [4]. Starship should bring those costs below $1000.
[0] https://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?topic=51959.0
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_program
[2] https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/
[3] https://www.spacex.com/media/Capabilities&Services.pdf LEO
[4] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falcon_Heavy LEO, theoretical
> Starship should bring those costs below $1000.
It might even bring the costs below $100/kg.
It might, but it's also at a scale where people can dust off the old plans for orbital rings and ask if this time the economics work out.
(My guess is the economics are fine, but the politics would kill it on earth, so the moon or mars will get one, but that's just an interested amateur opinion).
Once you put something big in the LEO, you'll have to be able to boost its orbit indefinitely, because the orbit will otherwise slowly decay.
If you have the infrastructure to build an orbital ring, you have the infrastructure to keep it supplied too
There is some SciFi story about civilization collapsing and the survivors worrying that the sky will fall on them hidden in there.
Already exists, Chasm City by Alastair Reynolds. They absolutely trash orbit by planning very badly and over-packing habitats.
Gotta make the individual pieces small enough to mostly burn up completely on rentry.
Term of art for this is "design for demise", i.e. make everything of pieces small enough and materials ablative enough that there's less than 1 in 10k chance that any debris will survive to the surface.
https://www.esa.int/Enabling_Support/Space_Engineering_Techn...
Planned obsolescence but in a good way.
Contiguous rings filling an entire orbit don't have much air resistance, and what little they do have is small in comparison to their momentum.
But yes, eventually things decay.
That depends on how high the orbit is. If it is high enough, the decay will take centuries.
The L in LEO means we're talking about orbits that are not very big.
By definition, LEO extends up to 2,000 km. At that altitude orbital lifetimes can exceed 10,000 years.
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Orbital_Debris_Lifet...
IIRC, above something like geostationary they tend to decay upwards? Though the old orbital ring white paper wasn't suggesting anything like that, this was an alternative to needing to go so high in the first place.
(I may be misremembering or getting confused with a thing specific to tidal locking?)
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?
You mean something like a skyhook?
The main difference is that this is built by a private corporation who can't afford to throw money away, while the Space Shuttle was build by the government, and moreover it had to fulfill a number of conflicting requirements, and commercial profit was not one of them.
But on a more technical level. I think the vertical landing is the main difference. Vertical landing was obviously known and done by NASA, this is how the lunar modules landed on the Moon. But doing it on Earth, with vehicles weighing hundreds of times more, I don't think the world had that technical readiness a few decades ago, when the space shuttle was designed.
And another major difference is the mass manufacturing idea. From the start SpaceX planned for getting to mass manufacture its rockets. The Falcon rockets are much cheaper than any other alternatives even if you remove the reusability.
Then it's the methane burning engines. This was pure old fashioned engineering progress. SpaceX's engines are miracles of rocket engineering. Aside from that, the fuel choice is extremely smart. Methane is better than all other fuels, except for hydrogen. Hydrogen was the fuel of the space shuttle, but it's very tricky to work with. It has very low volumetric density, so the tank of the space shuttle was absolutely humongous. Hydrogen needs to be stored at an absurdly low cryogenic temperature, so this adds to the complexity. And that tank was not reusable, so it adds to the cost.
In order to land as a glider, you'll need wings, landing gear, doors, rudder, stabilizer, flight controls, streamlining, all the structure needed to support it, and a heat shield for all of it. All that complexity has to work reliably, too.
All of that adds tremendous weight, complexity, and cost.
> Methane is better than all other fuels
There are better fuels in terms of Isp and density. They have some downsides such as being corrosive or having highly toxic exhaust.
https://x.com/ToughSf/status/1453391050681327622
Yeah, methane is kind of second best (or worse) in many parameters, but most importantly, it's cheap, abundant, and easily and safely storable and transportable, and it does the job.
Also chosen as it may be possible to synthesize on Mars.
And while not the reason, also on Venus! Venus seems like a very interesting colonization target - gravity almost like on Earth, and there is a place in Venus atmosphere where temperature is around 30 degrees Celsius and pressure is 1 atmosphere (Earth); and human air is a lifting gas in Venus atmosphere. As a bonus, interaction of Venus atmosphere with the Sun produces a magnetic shield.
> and commercial profit was not one of them
But it's high cost was the end of it.
Its high cost would (should!) have killed it regardless, but its low reliability was going to be a huge problem too, and arguably it's the lack of reliability that finally killed it.
The high cost should have killed the project before it ever flew, but that's not how governments behave.
What is all this rocketry doing for climate change if they're burning methane? Hopefully it's methane from landfills etc?
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.
If we actually get to that point, we'll eventually be doing a lot more activity and manufacturing off the Earth where the CO2 emissions don't matter.
Spacex might be a private company, but this project is funded by NASA, meaning the American taxpayer. Approved by a person whose last act was this approval before leaving NASA and joining Spacex (effectively putting money in their own pocket).
It is also yet to be seen how Starship will ever be profitable (outside of spending government money), who is going to pay for those launches and for what purpose. Other than Starlink, of course.
> this project is funded by NASA
Partially. They have a fixed-price contract to land humans on the Moon, and notably got that contract because they severely undercut the other bids and were the only bid that actually fit within the available budget: they bid $2.94B, while Blue Origin bid $5.99B and Dynetics $9.08B.
That 3 billion is also much less than what they're spending on the project.
With a payload volume of 8m diameter by 22m height you could fit a James Webb size telescope inside with minimal folding. The sunshield (21.2 m by 14.2m) would only need to fold along one axis and the mirror (6.6 m) could be monolithic instead of having to fold, probably only requiring the mounting points for the primary and secondary to be hinged. This shouldn't be discounted because it makes telescope design much simpler and less expensive.
It also allows for launching individual space station modules that have almost the same volume as the entire ISS in one launch.
Their plans for refuelling on orbit with tanker versions of the starship open up the entire solar system to unmanned missions with much shorter timelines and much higher payload size and weight.
The fact the entire system is re-usable will make it both cheaper and faster to use than any other launch system.
All of this combined mean that it won't just be countries and space programs bidding for space on launches, it puts space within reach of many corporations and some private individuals. This isn't conjecture, it's already happening with the Falcon 9. Starship will make it even more accessible.
> With a payload volume of 8m diameter by 22m height you could fit a James Webb size telescope inside with minimal folding.
Of course, that means you could also fit a James Webb-folded telescope except make it a lot bigger :-)
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.
Probably need on-orbit refueling to work for that to happen, but they're working on it.
Yes! that too.
> It also allows for launching individual space station modules that have almost the same volume as the entire ISS in one launch.
My favorite related thing is that the Starship itself could serve as a large space or moon station.
> but this project is funded by NASA
About 10% funded by NASA. Starship is a >$10B program; SpaceX is getting $3B for Artemis of which >2/3 is for operational tasks and moon-specific stuff that SpaceX aren't relevant for SpaceX's goals of LEO and Mars.
The Artemis money could evaporate and Starship would still make commercial sense and likely be a successful product.
The 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.
The whole design process for them is based around launches being expensive and taking a long time to plan. It will be very interesting to see what happens when the whole process gets used to launches being relatively cheap and frequent. No need to spend years making sure the design is perfect and will definitely last a long time if you can launch a new one in a week if you make a mistake.
Starlink for all intents and purposes is the market for satellites now. All the other launches are nice to have extras.
Now personally I’m looking forward to NASA, ESA and JAXA to launch outer solar system probes like new horizons but with tons of fuel left in the tank to safely make orbit around there.
Having enough lift capacity to take a shot at putting a pair of telescopes out far enough to exploit solar gravitational lensing to resolve exo-planet surfaces would be a hell of a thing. Orbital refueling would mean we could reasonably build something big enough to be able to boost out that far (would still take decades to arrive).
Isn't that 500 AU out?
Yes, but the trick with getting there is building the vehicle. Time takes care of the rest (you'd do it using ion thrusters).
Things can only be cheap if you mass produce them. That tends to require standardization of components, and inevitably standardized components are a compromise between requirements, where up until now, saving mass was a critical requirement. If you don't have to care nearly so much about mass and volume, then that opens up many avenues for much cheaper standard satellite components.
I'm disappointed that you still can't order ten cubesats from Shenzen Satellite Supply Co via AliExpress.
Starlink is predicted to have something like 6.6B in revenue. SpaceX isn't a rocket company they are an ISP that launches rockets.
Is that long term or this year? Because honestly 6.6B is not a lot for their scale of operations.
That is projections for this year only with a target closer to 10 billion revenue next year.
The federal government smartly invested in SpaceX after being sued by SpaceX to fix rigging (things what the system working looks like).
Now taxpayers have a 10x return on investment.
> Spacex might be a private company, but this project is funded by NASA, meaning the American taxpayer.
So was the space shuttle, so that's not a difference between the launch costs of the two vehicles.
The purpose of funding SpaceX with taxpayer money is to make competitors that can launch rockets to space so that it is cheaper.
Exactly. Private companies like space X would not exist if NASA didn't deliberately make the market for Private space companies. That's what governments do, make markets.
Elon founded SpaceX w/o an expectation of subsidies.
Think of the word ‘reusable’ in this case as less a binary descriptor but more of a scale of reusability.
Yes, both systems are reusable, but there are key differences in the refurbishment of the systems that partly explains the cost difference. It took more labor, resources and time to refurbish the shuttle. Also consider rapid reusability was a stretch goal when it was being designed, but we have come a loooong way since, spacex in particular has had it as a driving competitive differentiator for years now.
Another big difference is that NASA post Cold War was a skilled jobs program, with an incentive to do distributed, high overhead work to appease their bosses (congress), while SpaceX has the opposite.
> Yes, both systems are reusable, but there are key differences in the refurbishment of the systems that partly explains the cost difference. It took more labor, resources and time to refurbish the shuttle.
Starship uses essentially the same ceramic heat shield tiles as the Space Shuttle, so the fact the Shuttle had so much trouble with refurbishment doesn't mean that SpaceX has solved these refurbishment issues with the Starship upper stage.
Though the Starship lower stage, which contains the most expensive engines, doesn't have this problem. Since it doesn't need a heat shield. So partial reusability should be pretty realistic.
Shuttle's tiles were each unique. Starship is mostly clad with identical hexagonal tiles which can be mass produced and eventually refurbished by machine. A robot already welds on the tile fittings.
That was 24,300 unique parts rather than 1!
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
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.
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
Economy of scale: starship can be "mass"-produced
Material: stainless steel is much cheaper
Percentage of reusability: boosters of shuttle cannot be reused, maintenance of shuttle itself is also very expensive (heat shields were pricey). whereas the starship stack has higher reuse percentage and allegedly cheaper to maintain.
The shuttle was not even reusable by any modern metric, the main tank was always expended, the boosters had to be recovered, fully disassembled and cleaned.
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.
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.
SRB and tank were not re-usable. That’s the equivalent of the first stage you just saw getting caught
Shuttle SRB segments were fished from the ocean and refilled.
Yeah but salt water makes it about as difficult as building from scratch.
Then why didn't they stop?
> why didn't they stop?
They did [1].
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_retirement
Beyond the fact that they eventually did quit, the shuttle program was the public face of the US space program, and part of having more than one way to launch military stuff.
SRBs were in fact reusable.
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.
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 majority of damage to shuttle's TPS apparently came from foam strikes from the external fuel tank. Superheavy's optimized profile certainly helps here, since there are no large cryogenic tanks hanging ominously over the TPS while being shaken violently by solid rocket boosters.
Early designs of the shuttle were fully reusable. That was quickly dropped due to costs and requirements. The final shuttle design was also unsafe.
The boosters were not (or at least not with the quick turnover and lower costs like the ones from SpaceX)
Massive. The designers of Starship studiously avoided all the problems that made Space Shuttle expensive to refurbish:
a. Cheaper, more durable material (stainless steel).
b. Cheaper, easier to manufacture engines.
c. Easier to use fuel (methane is much "tamer" than hydrogen).
d. Standardized heat shield with much smaller requirements for manual work.
Starship is supposed to be fully & rapidly reusable. Neither adjective applies to the space shuttle.
the space shuttle was "reusable". It had to be taken apart and meticulously cleaned and tested and basically had to be rebuilt after each flight, in a process called turnaround. SpaceX's rockets are much closer to what you'd consider reusable.
I wonder how much of that difference is because the space shuttle was human rated from the start: F9 eventually got there, but only after plenty of "testing in production" with disposable payloads.
The other big difference, an elephant in the room grade difference I think, is that SpaceX reliability was developed with memories of a reusable vehicle failing mostly due to turnaround costs and risks on everyone's minds. That clearly wasn't the case when the space shuttle was designed, they were the first and enjoyed the privilege of making all the beginner mistakes.
I had an email exchange with Homer Hickam, before SpaceX existed, where I remarked that the shuttle design looked like a giant kludge, and a winged reentry vehicle was a fundamentally bad design, for various reasons which I enumerated elsewhere in this thread.
He emailed back that he agreed with my reasons and had argued that case with NASA in the early stages of the shuttle program.
So NASA was aware of this at the time.
I was under the impression tha they also thought this themselves but got "persuaded" with the prospect of more money if it could handle certain payloads of use for defense?
Shuttle was a jobs program just like the SLS is.
Yeah the right word is refurbishable, plus the main tank was not reused and the solid boosters got a salt water bath each launch.
This is significantly less expensive
Read the article "SpaceX flight Ops"
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.
To answer this oversimplified question with a simple answer, the Space Shuttle couldn't be a more different vehicle than this one. It truly is a comparison between apples and oranges.
Let's start with the fact that it was designed in the 1970's. If you had a Cadillac DeVille from 1970 it would get 8-12 miles per gallon. Just the mere fact that the design is about 70 years old makes that vehicle too expensive to operate, and that's before we even start talking about other issues with the design (performance, safety, reliability, etc).
The difference is only a small part- the shuttle itself- was reusable. The booster that put it into space was scrapped every time.
Manufacture and maintenance contracts for the Shuttle were deliberately spread out across many companies and states, especially in key congressional districts. It was a jobs programme; waste was a feature not a bug.
Same thing for SLS.
More fundamentally, there were contracts. SpaceX does things itself; there's no legal friction internally. This gets back to the "Theory of the Firm" for why firms exist in the first place (transaction costs).
The need to codify what work is to be done in contacts is antithetical to SpaceX's rapid development processes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_the_firm
s/contacts/contracts/
Is that 150t of payload or total? What’s the cost in fuel alone (let’s ignore maintenance and operations costs for now)? I’m trying to get a feel for the relative scale compared to today’s commercial flight.
They previously threw around a number of around $1M per flight, as mostly fuel costs.
Also, while 150t is the target payload capacity, the current test vehicles are closer to 50t in payload capacity, there are revisions in the pipeline based on data from these test flights which will bring it up to 150t.
To put this in perspective: at 150t/launch, if a launch is $1M, then for the cost of an SLS launch (at least $2B) Starship could launch 300,000 tons, about the mass of three Nimitz-class nuclear aircraft carriers.
We could use a few of those in orbit.
America funding the literal eye of Sauron 2.0
None of the vehicles have demonstrated any payload capacity yet. 50 tons is the on-paper capacity only, and seems quite high given how little fuel is left when the bring an empty starship to orbital altitude. I assume that as the engines and launch procedures get more efficient, they will start being able to bring stuff to orbit (and quite a bit of stuff, too).
Methane is about 900-1500$ / ton. About 1000 tons is used for the launch in addition to 3600 tons of lox. That should be a bit cheaper than methane per ton. Ballpark, the propellant might cost around 2M$.
A modern airliner on a long flight might burn around 80 tons of kerosene. It's slightly cheaper than methane. Call it 75-80K$.
That's $7 of fuel per pound of payload, that is not bad at all.
Indeed. You sometime see an argument that launch to space is expensive because of the propellant and therefore energy required. And as you note this argument is utterly wrong.
not sure how anyone can miss the "throwing away the airplane" part as being the cost driver.
It's the same cognitive error as thinking nuclear energy must be cheap because the fuel is cheap.
Is the $1000/ton a law a physics, or could that ever possibly scale up and come down an order of magnitude?
There are no dollars in the laws of physics. It's connected ultimately to productivity of all the activities involved, and there's no obvious upper bound to productivity.
There's the rocket equation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsiolkovsky_rocket_equation
Which doesn't have dollars anywhere in it.
The point of the rocket equation is there are hard physical limits on what rockets can do, and dollars won't change it.
That's nice. It doesn't imply a lower bound for costs, just of ratios of costs.
It was just a quick google. 150t reusable.
No idea about the other costs.
This opens up immense possibilities for exploration
I’d love to see a probe catch and examine ʻOumuamua.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ʻOumuamua
My wife asked "Why is this a big deal?", so I gave her a link to Handmer's 2021 explanation: https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2021/10/28/starship-is-st...
She's not an enthusiast; she's got an impression from SciFi that going to mars shouldn't be that hard.
Robert Zubrin's Mars Direct would have got "flags and footprints" on Mars without needing something like Starship. He worked on a version of SLS in 1989 in Martin Marietta that would have cost $1B and been ready in the second half of the 90s and would be retiring soon after many successful flight to Mars (and to the Moon), but instead we got SLS and Orion so we need Starship to get anything done.
The Mars Direct book is worth reading not only for things like transport and mission design but also a wealth of other good ideas about how to “live off the land” when we get there too. Truly worth reading for anyone remotely interested in space exploration
Didn't Von Braun have a plan too? Nuclear rockets or something.
The difference is that Mars Direct was a conservative plan, wrt rocket technology. It just used existing Shuttle parts and was meant to fly from Shuttle pads in between Shuttle flights. It didn't require developing anything new, that's why they were sure it would be cheap and fast, and flight rate would make it possible for it to be reliable. SLS is that idea turned into a jobs program.
Regulations are hard enough just using methane, I wouldn't want to be the one filling out the paperwork if that was a nuclear rocket.
That seems like way too long an article for a non-enthusiast.
Well I mean going to Mars isn't that hard per se, a fair few countries have done it... but carrying enough supplies and shielding to last people 2 years until the return trip and then actually getting back are way harder problems.
Seeing Starship get burnthrough on these suborbital launches really shows how hard it'll be to do Mars return entry with a fair few extra km/s.
Getting to Mars is hard but not that hard compared to getting a large payload to Mars surface and back to Earth. Some people may assume Mars return is around twice as hard but it's orders of magnitude harder. And that's before even contemplating doing so with a cargo of humans and the necessary tonnage for them to survive on Mars at least 26 months.
Only the US and China have landed successfully on Mars. China achieved this in 2021. Russia/USSR tried multiple times and didn't succeed.
Other countries have sent satellites to orbit around Mars, which is not the same thing.
> Russia/USSR tried multiple times and didn't succeed.
Pedant mode: the USSR did land softly on Mars, but the lander got caught in a dust storm and was not able to transmit back the data ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_3 ).
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.
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.
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.
> Second stage reuse seems the far more challenging problem.
Sure, SpaceX has been doing first stage reuse for a long time now. But they have demonstrated landing the second stage successfully at sea twice now with the same sort of smoothness that they demonstrated once for the booster before they then caught the booster on the first real try.
A partial list of unbelievably hard things that SpaceX has so far made seem easy:
Catching the booster is really just like landing a Falcon 9 booster w/o legs, but clearly much harder.Anyways, if they can do all those things then it's pretty clear that they can catch-land the ship.
There's still a huge list of crazy-difficult things that SpaceX say they want to do that are hard to believe are possible, except for the fact that SpaceX has already done so many unbelievably difficult things already.
> 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.
Wildly incorrect. New Glenn is already here.
No it isn't. It might be soon in some early way: "the first launch is expected to take place no earlier than November 2024", "The booster for the flight is named So You’re Telling Me There’s a Chance, alluding to the difficulty of landing a reusable booster on the first attempt." -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Glenn
The Chinese could have a reusable booster before then. One of their companies is doing 10 km hop tests.
SpaceX couldn’t manage the first Falcon 9 landing until 2015. The first Falcon 9 reuse wasn’t until 2018, so 3 years to achieve reusability. The Chinese prototype hasn’t yet succeeded at sub-orbital landing. I wouldn’t be surprise if it’d take them longer than 3 years to have a reusable rocket. Starship would have been routine at that time.
Blue Origin plans to launch New Glenn in a month, with landing planned. They are a wild card.
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
Is this the same company that had their booster fly into the air when they were trying to static fire test it?
They must have forgotten to steal the plans for the hold down clamps.
Why does it pain you? Musk's SpaceX has produced several enormous advancements in space technology.
SpaceX is one of the greatest, if not the greatest, private technology company in history.
I think it pains some of us to say it because of the person Musk has turned out to be, which is the opposite direction I think many of us were hoping his character development would take him.
Yeah, he's like a cross between Henry Ford and Werner Von Braun...
and coincidentally he makes cars and rockets too!
What terrible thing has Musk done?
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.
Supported Trump.
The Democrats have a sad history of denigrating Musk, which is likely why he changed from being a Democrat to a Republican.
I think that is only part of it. Musk gave an interview where he talked about how the woke medical establishment trans'd one of his kids. They falsely told him to do the transition or his child's death was a near certainty. European countries are now restricting this "treatment" for children. The US has been slow to follow. There is a lot of money and political pressure from the left to keep the medical intervention industry alive.
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.
You don’t spend that kind of money and risk alienating your entire customer base (and future workforce!) just because of a slight.
Musk is getting something from Trump: most likely protection from some legal issue.
It was more than a slight. Biden pointedly ignored Tesla when conducting an EV summit and handing out subsidies. Then there was the FCC fiasco where the FCC snubbed Starlink.
What subsidies did Tesla not get?
Didn’t they look at all kinds of ideas earlier like squirting some propellant or water out over the skin on the way down, and wasn’t steel chosen for its thermal robustness? Did they get into the problem and realize it’s a lot harder and abandon those things for tiles?
Maybe they will have to sacrifice more payload mass for active or passive shielding or more fuel for powered deceleration. That would yield a less impressive lifter but with full reusability.
Interestingly, the inside surface of a rocket nozzle is covered with tiny holes. Fuel is circulated in a jacket around the nozzle both to pre-heat the fuel and to cool the nozzle. Additional cooling of the nozzle comes from fuel leaking into the combustion chamber through those holes, carrying away the heat so it doesn't melt the nozzle. It's called boundary layer cooling.
It was one of the technological breakthroughs of von Braun's team with the V2.
They already plan refueling infrastructure in orbit. That would include stuff to "squirt" on the way down if necessary. If they can use one extra launch to reuse 5-10 starships that might be interesting. Noone knows yet if it's actually needed.
They dropped transpiration cooling, at least for now.
Yeah for rapid reusability tiles aren’t going to work, too fragile. Iirc it was with a lot of reluctance they went with tiles and will have to make breakthroughs on the heat shielding to get where they want to be.
Inspection might be easier with computer vision advances since the space shuttle.
Also with a saner design. The shuttle had a complicated shape with every tile being almost unique. It was nuts.
I'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.
Also, saving on damage to the landing pad.
That’s a good point, they used the sprinklers on landing to mitigate damage to the pad and the booster was caught well off the ground.
> but it does save weight by not needing legs for landing
That was the exact reason they went this way.
Efficiency and cost are the goals, reusability is just one way to do that. Moving big heavy things less is another.
It's a game change
They're a long way from having a reusable super heavy booster. It's still copping a lot of damage on the landing.
true but don't forget this is test flight #5
What does this mean for the Kessler syndrome? Does reusable rockets speed up our potential for lock-in or slow it down?
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
The catch looks amazing, but one thing I don't understand is why SpaceX needs the technology to catch a booster they've already demonstrated the ability to land boosters on barges. Is the arm more cost effective to scale compared to a barge?
This booster is much, much larger than the Falcon 9 first stages that land on barges. It's ~70 metres high, versus ~40 metres for the Falcon 9 first stage, and weighs about 275 000 kg compared to the ~20 000 kg of the Falcon 9 first stage.
In short, it would require such huge and heavy landing legs and landing barges that it probably wouldn't be feasible.
Holy shit I didn’t realize it’s an order of magnitude heavier
The argument is that you don't need to spend the vehicle mass on legs, so you get performance.
On the other hand, I imagine you could wipe out any benefits to $/mass launched pretty quickly by blowing up the tower.
The landing legs are heavy. SpaceX would rather have more payload than carry legs to space on every launch.
Also landing on the launch pad means you don’t have to transport the rocket. Just have the arms set it down and you’re ready to launch again.
Weight. Legs weigh a lot. That's dead weight for a launch system, and it serves only to reduce payload to orbit.
For Falcon 9 that's not that big a deal because they're NOT trying to reuse the second stage. Whereas with Starship they need more fuel to recover the ship, and that means they need to save weight elsewhere to avoid losing too much payload to orbit.
SpaceX is also not very happy with the pair of forward flaps and 10 ton thermal protection needed as control surface and re-entry.
Maybe the goal is to refill and relaunch immediately?
This. You can lower the rocket back on the launch base, refill, and launch again within hours.
What does Starship reusability mean for $/kg to LEO? I know there are longer term targets of $10/kg but that supposes efficiencies that aren’t here yet. Would be helpful to understand before Starship reusability where the state of the art was in terms of $/kg to LEO and where we would be with impending Starship reusability.
I don't think we have a number for it yet. But it will definitely be the cheapest launch system at the time of launch.
People say 200$/kg just with booster reuse, and 20$/kg with full reuse. Of course this might be too optimistic, but I truly believe we might reach under 50$ in this decade.
Even $50 is within "going to the moon for my honeymoon" range. Wow.
$50 is a number for LEO (Low-earth orbit). $/kg to a Moon orbit (or flyby) might be significantly more expensive. Not only that, because it is further so it needs more fuel, but also it is a few days trip which would need a bunch more kilos in provisioning food, water and other things. So yeah, unfortunately not that cheap to have a honeyMoon in the moon (heh)
There is a lot of possibilities to make a trip to the moon cheaper though. If we make LEO that cheap, we can build a lot of infrastructure in the space that would make the tourism to moon more affordable. Like keeping a few starships always in orbit as some kind of space-hotel-metro system.
This will probably take a few more decades, though.
Artemis by Andy Weir dwells a lot on this kind of infrastructure, but I never could understand the orbital mechanics described in the book.
Only if you don't care about coming back!
This might be the best time to get into cubesat development as a hobby, lol.
What is a good estimate of the number of times these boosters and engines will be reusable?
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.
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.
https://www.reddit.com/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1bgmsm9/cost_...
> What does Starship reusability mean for $/kg to LEO?
All we can say is under $1,000/kg. Which is conservative, that limit being about two thirds that of Falcon Heavy’s theoretical cost to LEO in a reüsable configuration.
We can't give any estimate. The costs depend on how many times the stages are reused. They have targets but we don't know what will actually happen.
All the renders in the world couldn't have prepared me for how crazy the actual catch looked!
ok now they have an actual reference and can animate it better haha.
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.
Well if US would deploy global kinetic bombardment system that would def. be a game changer.
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 have the same feeling watching Starship when the telemetry on the bottom right of the screen showing “0km” but landing burn hasn’t started. Later did I know that it was meant to start the burn only a few hundreds _meters_ from the ground
Prior to today the only landings you've seen are Falcon 9, which has to do a "hoverslam" because it can't throttle low enough to actually hover.
Even just one engine in minimum thrust would make the rocket go up when empty.. so the computer lights the engine at the precise right moment so it will have 0 velocity at 0 altitude, then it cuts off the engine. "Hoverslam".
The Starship booster is different, it can actually hover.
Yeah, it also always catches me off guard how late they reignite, while at the same time I'm always surprised by how slow the liftoff is even though all the boosters are on full throttle. Of course both things make sense given the respective mass at both points in the process, but given that it looks like the same rocket from the outside, a bit unintuitive.
Yeah but they did pass some flame down much of the tower. Pretty quick though, probably just cleaned it with fire.
Saving up those refurbishment costs, cleaning the tower ahead of time!
Yeah it definitely looked sketchy for a sec but was probably fully as intended
Although this is by far not the first landing of SpaceX boosters I've seen, this looked like scifi to me even in 2024.
I am absolutely flabbergasted at this. Wow. Jesus christ.
Awesome achievement. Watched it with my sister at home and brought back memories from the 60s in front of the B&W TV watching some of the early amazing flights and landings.
Question for hackers: How does this reorient space programs world-wide? If I were a politician or technocrat in China, Russia, or the EU this would feel like an inverse and intense Sputnik moment — “holy sh—- we have to up our game!”
Eventually it convinces everybody that "quantity in space" is possible. Moving to projects where you don't have to count every ounce. It opens the path to wild schemes, in amount of weight that could be moved.
And why "eventually"? SpaceX should have already convinced people of that. Yeah it's not yet in production, but the momentum and progress have been amazing to witness.
(The previous one was convincing everyone that there was lots of space for tech improvement. Wake up call achieved just a few years ago also by SpaceX.)
See also this blog post: https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2021/10/28/starship-is-st...
An interesting question (because all the others will probably be too slow) is what does that change for SpaceX itself (which can be fast)?
It gets to complete and upgrade Starlink. Sure. And that keeps it busy for what? Two years? At most. Sure. Done. Just kidding, that provides some background launches as a guaranteed customer going forward. But nowhere near enough to make a dent in what will be the new SpaceX launch capabiity.
So what else can it do, that exploits its own launch capability?
Going to Mars is not an obvious commercial venture - not at first - not until some government somewhere convinces itself to fund that.
So what else? What can SpaceX do on its own with this launch capability?
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.
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.
Ryan Hansen had an incredible (although unofficial) 3d modeling video of the mechanism. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ub6HdADut50
SpaceX is really incredible in how regular the improvements are coming. Something in their structure is well balanced.
It has to be Elon, he is focusing a lot of energy on the company right now.
Given his completely horrible jerk personality, I'd expect the opposite.
The engineers at spaceX are amazing, and I'll admit I envy their tenacity and genius.
The amount of progress we have seen in rocketry and space travel in the last decade is mind blowing, I never thought I would see this in my lifetime.
Edit: Decided to give it a shot and applied for a backend software engineering position at SpaceX. I'm not sure if it will be noticed, but its worth a shot. I may not be a rocket scientist, but it would be great to contribute using the knowledge I do have.
We could have had this all along.
That isn't exactly true though. For example, the neural net models that are used today in various GenAI startups were invented in the 1980s. But we couldn't have LLMs "all along" because we couldn't store the models, the training sets, or do the training compute with the computer hardware we had at the time. Similarly with rocketry there many technologies that have only been available in the last 10 - 15 years that make Starship possible. A sampling;
First there are solid state inertial motion sensors[1]. Those combined gyros, accelerometers, and magnetometers that way just a few grams. Those bad boys weighed a couple hundred pounds in the Apollo rockets. We put the equivalent up in a $100 quadcopter these days.
Second there is 3D printing of rocket engine alloy, this allows SpaceX to 3d print a raptor engine[2] both faster, lighter, and without error than any engine we could have built before 2010.
Third was the development of fracking which created so much methane availability [3] that using it for rocket fuel became cost effective.
Fourth and fifth changes were three decimal orders of magnitude on the ability of computers to compute with a commensurate drop in cost, and with that an explosion the the ability to use high frequency radio to do things that used to be done by cable harnesses and wiring. (sorry no citation, general knowledge)
I can appreciate that it is really really hard to internalize how much as changed and improved since Apollo and can strongly recommend a trip to one's local science museum if you have one to get a visceral sort of amazement at what Apollo engineers did with the technology available to them at the time.
So it isn't accurate to say we could have had this all along, although if one of the 'big' players like Lockheed Martin or Grumman Aerospace had continued investing even after the 'Star Wars' program was cancelled I do agree we would have had it sooner than we did. How much sooner? Maybe 5 years? But it is important to realize that at that time (late 80's early 90's) they didn't know that the Internet was going to be a thing and so they didn't have a built in "market" for all of that launch capability. Even with Teledesic[4] which tried to go there, you needed someone who like Musk who was too ignorant of what "could be done" to push a bunch of really smart people beyond what they thought they were capable of.
[1] Apollo PGNCS --- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_PGNCS
[2] SpaceX simplifies Raptor engine: Has it used additive manufacturing? --- https://www.tctmagazine.com/additive-manufacturing-3d-printi...
[3] The U.S. fracking revolution has caused natural gas prices to drop 47 percent compared to what the price would have been prior to the fracking revolution in 2013. --- https://www.brookings.edu/articles/the-economic-benefits-of-...
[4] Teledesic -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teledesic
No. It all depends on cheap computation, reliable/free satellite location systems, and other stuff that weren't things in the (60s, 70s, 80s - pick your own starting point for "all along").
It's as much the economics as it is the technology. It took a ton of private investment, and government investment to get here.
A rocket a day keeps the cost away.
Found the Factorio player.
We just needed more people like Elon.
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.
He did so so much more than writing their checks. But what am I doing here, who am I seriously talking to?
People are prone to either giving Musk too much credit or too little.
Musk isn't Tony Stark, single-handedly building everything. But then again, that's not how most innovations work.
Engineers who worked directly with Musk, such as Tom Mueller, have spoken about Musk's technical acumen and involvement in managing projects.
There have been many rocket programs, both public and private, that have accomplished less with more money. Bezos's Blue Origin, for example, started earlier than SpaceX and had a much richer backer for most of its existence, but is only now hoping to launch its first orbital rocket (and I hope they succeed).
There's more to it than just writing a check.
They could. But they didn’t.
He’s a twat. But he has vision longer than the next quarter and can inspire / coerce people into delivering.
Around the board, including at X.
“Never been done before – xAI did in 19 days what everyone else needs one year to accomplish.”
He’s a twat? What are your credentials?
Eh, maybe. There’s a lot of computing and telemetry going on that benefits from the last twenty years of miniaturization and performance. The iPhone seemed impossible when announced to BlackBerry; tech has gone crazy fast.
You should take a look at what Von Braun was planning for the Saturn V by the mid 1970s.
IIRC they were talking about 100+ Apollo launches to get a real space station, moon base, and expedition missions to Mars by 1980 and with that would have come a real drive to innovate and improve on the Saturn V.
Without the computational power that we take for granted today they would have definitely brute forced their way to elegant solutions and got somewhere close to where we are by the mid 90s.
This would have lead to tremendous innovations in solar panels, batteries, and metallurgy much sooner than we ended up getting to them.
Instead we chose a different path and made ourselves completely dependent on oil.
I guess the main problem was nobody had a budget for those plans. ”Technically speaking we can do it but we can’t afford it” unfortunately still means ”we can’t do it”.
Now only if Project Orion had not been canceled due to international treaties banning nuclear testing we’d be on the moons of Jupiter by now (sigh).
A lot of those plans were just plain goofy. The Shuttle was supposed to generate the same sort of awesomeness, too.
Apollo was pretty goofy if you think about -- Yeeting a couple of dudes to the moon in a giant ass rocket so that they can tool around in a little electric-go cart with lawn chair seats and play some golf but it worked.
I think that the Saturn V was a solid platform that was robust enough to do the kinds of things that Von Braun and others had in mind as well as versatile enough to be improved upon.
They would have done it with sufficient budget but the political drive wasn't there. The politicians were more concerned with killing Vietnamese and Cambodians and then selling out American interests to oil companies.
It’s a lot easier to model and simulate too.
The SpaceX engineers are incredible for being able to pull this off.
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.
Right on target, next to their buoy! Insane achievement!
At a buoy, SpaceX.
NSF video: https://x.com/nasaspaceflight/status/1845442658203734384
Truly incredible. A day for the history books.
> NSF is not affiliated with NASA, but the initials in the URL are used with permission from NASA.
Closeup of chopsticks as they were catching the booster, best clip from Everyday Astronaut's livestream: https://x.com/kagurazakimoto/status/1845447451592765820
I'd never considered a 70m tall chunk of mostly metal "agile", but the way it's controlled into the arms so precisely is something to behold.
Do you know what the entire booster is hanging off of? It can't be the fins. How is the load transferred to the arms?
The grid fins are what it's hanging off of.
https://x.com/marionawfal/status/1845351598874120662
I dug into it, found this clip. Elon says that it’s those two tiny knubs! Saw a few pictures and yes, I confirm, it’s not the grid fins.
The booster landed on "pins" that are structural load points and designed to support it's weight.
Here is a brilliant profile shot looking down one of the "arms" after the catch today, you can clearly see it resting on the "pins", not the grid fins.
https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2F7...
They also use those "pins" to raise/lower it with a crane when they need to during construction and during transport to the launch tower. It's the primary mode of lifting the thing
There are two lifting points on opposite sides just below the fins.
The SpaceX clip is better https://x.com/spacex/status/1845442658397049011?s=46
Better than both, NSF's stream: https://x.com/nasaspaceflight/status/1845442658203734384
It genuinely was. Thanks for that!
Insane!
This got me as excited as the original Falcon 9 landing in 2016! Now I got to share this with my kids! So incredible...
It still blows my mind how the landings are more exciting than the launches.
I'm completely mind-blown that not only can they do this, but we get 1080p video for almost the whole time.
What cameras do they have that can look at something 30 KM up in the air that well?
Usually it is a small telescope on a nice motorized mount weighing a ton. NASA had several of those around Cape Canaveral [1].
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xig3sL_rRH8
The thing that impresses me even more is the kinds of cameras they mount on the rocket. How do they shield it from all the heat and debris with a material that's optically clear?
Sapphire glass windows: they're good for up to 2000 C, mechanically strong and chemically resistant, and remarkably cheap.
They put it in places the heat and debris don’t go.
At one time they were using gopros.
Here is Scott Manley's summary and analysis of flight 5:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=Ysx4t7ICO58
People on earth are experiencing the Jetsons and the Flinstones at the same time
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
Magnificent, it's hard to image what we'll be able to do once these do roundtrips daily. For those are not aware, that booster is 71 m (233 ft) tall!
Improvements that make space flight more sustainable are welcome ... unless that means an order of magnitude more pollution in a less controllable form, like emissions. [Due to more frequent flights]
Daily trips to space likely also mean more debris in space and falling to earth.
I hope there is a balance that includes the lives of people near these sites and all of us sharing the same atmosphere.
I hope this is not going to be used for 'Earth point A -> Earth point B' travel.
SpaceX proposed it but I doubt there is any chance of this architecture ever achieving the airliner-level reliability needed for people to accept routine Earth-to-Earth passenger service. That's several levels beyond what you'd need to fly astronauts.
Maybe a future architecture with more redundancy could get there someday.
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).
Coolest video by far, but this still places 3rd for me behind F9’s first landing, and the dual heavy landing. The future is bright!
They caught it! Holy sh*t!
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.
You're correct, it's hilariously unrealistic (IIRC requires actual superluminal speed), but people have been conditioned to accept it by various scifi media.
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
Imitating science fiction is great marketing for a space company.
Brand association with familiar depictions of “the future” is the goal, not realism.
> Is there any explanation where this could actually be considered realistic that I’m not thinking of?
You could record the full trip, and then speed the record up. What the point to watch at thousand years of the record with slowly changing picture, if you can watch it in a few minutes.
If they were truthful, you'd think the picture was frozen, signal issues etc.
We live in a day and age where it seems that all the innovations we see now are new tech that has to do with electronics.
Good to see some good ol hardware breakthroughs in another industry.
Very inspiring, glad I woke up to watch it. Congratulations to the SpaceX team. This is what competition looks like. It’s funny how last decade SpaceX had to sue the government to get more launches.
California officials reject more SpaceX launches, with some citing Musk's X posts
https://twitter.com/shellenberger/status/1845131546501734440...
They don't actually have any jurisdiction in this case. Launches from Vandendberg are from a military base and while they do try to work with the California commission they ultimately are the ones that decide what does and does not get launched.
That's madness. And unconstitutional.
It’s funny how much illegal stuff gets done by leadership. Sue to fix. Lawyers always win.
Musk tweeted that he's filing a lawsuit Tuesday morning.
The California Coastal Commission has no authority over a Federal (Military) launch range so there's no need for real concern. Yes using people's personal opinions for denial is illegal, but it's moot regardless. So I'm not sure SpaceX could sue for any damages.
The FAA needs more funding at this point. They're not staffed for the rate of launch requests which commercial space has grown too.
More money would make the situation worse. They need competent leadership. Everyone like to just say “add more money” because it means no actual operational change to the status quo.
You are right they are already trying to slow SpaceX as much as possible. More people in their hands more people finding ways to decelerate SpaceX
Hardly, the FAA is handing permits out the instant the mandated waiting time is up. They couldn't go faster without a literal act of congress.
It's not a mandated "Waiting time". It's the max amount of time that they have to respond. And they wait until the very last day.
The FAA already has competent leadership and staff. They don't have the budget to handle the increasing number of tasks they have been given to manage.
The FAA manages more flights and space launch operations than it did in the 1980s, when it had a budget more than quadruple the size.
To put it bluntly: you get what you pay for.
You get what you incentivise, not what you pay for.
Yeah in my area govt. officials can be incentivized to say no to prove they are doing the job. Adds massive amounts of delay.
We're going to need a dedicated FSA (federal space agency) at this rate, which should do most of the heavy lifting (ha) for the FAA and just use them for NOTAMs and TFRs.
It seemed to not be FAA here, but the several other agencies that all had 60 days to respond. FAA fast-tracked it but couldn't fast track it past the other guys' 60 day allowed time.
Need to remove regulations instead and fast track SpaceX.
Every fucking time we don't need to increase the size of the Government. It only gets bigger. Never smaller.
No, launching big heavy explosive things into space shouldn’t have fewer regulations. That’s insane to think they should be able to just do it without much oversight.
Sure the safety part of it is something that should be verified before launch. But when they are launching multiple of these things and the variables are all mostly the same you don't need to do the same analysis over and over again.
A prime example is the environmental impact stuff. They have already done that multiple times. Nothing really changed. If it succeed and doesn't blow up the impact is X, if it blows up the impact is Y. Yet these approvals take weeks and months.
There are also multiple agencies that put their foot down. Famously fish and wildlife was worried starship would crash in the water and hit a shark/whale. No seriously. https://youtu.be/kS8G5D9fg3g?t=21
Then there is the story that at Vandenburg air base, they had to strap a seal to a board and play rocket noises through headphones to see if it was distressed. Keep in mind Vandenburg has been a military rocket launch site for decades. But only now when its SpaceX do these agencies put up road blocks. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3SvJP5wfN4k
> Keep in mind Vandenburg has been a military rocket launch site for decades.
Not one of which ever returned to base with a sonic boom.
I assure you, the folks who tried to kill goats via mental powers and staring at them have required weirder tests than the seal.
Isn’t this exactly what happened with Boeing, where the FAA delegated its authority, on the assumption that Boeing knew what it was doing?
Boeing is publicly funded though, which means crazy incentives take over that are out of whack.
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
What makes you think the issue is funding?
perhaps we need less thorough reviews
Not sure why this is downvoted.
Our risk-to-regulatory oversight cost benefit analysis seems extremely off - we overregulate small things that do not have large-scale meaningful impact while basically grandfather in stuff like depleting the Great Salt Lake, coal emissions, etc. which have vastly less regulatory $ spend per environmental impact.
Ideally, if we could quantify all environmental impacts into a single number (ie. CO2 emissions but also wildlife impact, etc.), the $/impact spent across different fields would be equal.
Currently, however, we are likely spending 100x+ on a per-impact basis on SpaceX regulation.
Or dismantled, lol
The great conceit of government is that if something gets money when it is slow, that it will get faster as more money is given.
Socialism: when it fails, provide more funding. When it succeeds, cut funding.
Business: when it fails, cut off the funding. When it succeeds, increase the funding.
Well that may still continue to happen. The wonderful and competent state of California is literally trying to block SpaceX launches over Musk’s constitutionally protected political speech:
https://www.politico.com/news/2024/10/10/california-reject-m...
I cannot remember a more explicit case of authoritarian government abuse in a developed nation in recent memory, and it’s especially infuriating given SpaceX and Musk are one of the most important and innovative companies and leaders of all time. No other country would think to look at such accomplishments and try to undermine themselves through petty politics and lawfare.
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).
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.
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.
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?
I would like to shake the hands of the steeley eyed rocket men and women who just landed a skyscraper with centimeter precision. Respect.
This one's for you. Hit it Perry. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_VJlHWESyLI
During/before the water landing of Ship, the telemetry indication for the rocket motors stayed off.
Does that mean the landing burn was unsuccessful? Or was that just a glitch in the telemetry?
In the video you can see the engines light (reflecting off the metal control flap and water) and the ship make a soft touchdown on the water. It then tips over and the tanks pop from the force of smacking the water sideways.
So the landing burn seems to have been a success.
It's weird, that happened last time too so you'd think if it was a glitch they would have fixed it.
What is the object beside the rocket at 37:49 to 38:02 ? Is that debris ? It seems to be falling with, then away from the rocket. (it looks like a small glowing ring to the right)
It’s the hot staging spacing ring. They didn’t call it on the feed but it is an expendable part that ejects after separation.
thank you!
Hotstaging was added quite late so they need to jettison in order to land, but it should be permanently integrated in the later variants.
interesting, thank you for the extra info
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
NSF video: https://x.com/nasaspaceflight/status/1845442658203734384
Moon by 2030 and Mars by 2040 seems like a winning bet lately
"Incredible!" in the voice of my 3 year old who just saw it :)
What an incredible achievement. Huge congratulations to the team at SpaceX! Still have chills.
Anyone know whether the fire toward the bottom of the booster during/after the catch is normal?
When I was visiting the space center in Huntsville, Indiana, I had a chance to talk with one of the volunteers. His name was Brooks Moore (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O3hudRA3yL8), and he had been the director of navigation systems for the Apollo (and other) projects.
The first SpaceX barge landing had just taken place, and I asked him what he thought. He got a faraway look in his eyes, and agreed that it had been spectacular. For those guys, it must have seemed like all of their dreams were coming true.
I believe you meant Huntsville, Alabama?
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.
Based on this conversation, how many of y'all are actual rocket scientists? I'm blown away by the expertise in some of these comments
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.
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.
Everyday Astronaut Stream: https://youtu.be/pIKI7y3DTXk
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!
And here I thought nothing would top the double landing view from Falcon Heavy...
That was such a magical moment
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.
Couldn't watch the livestream on X because it was erroring out. We live in a world where you can't stream a video or Chromecast on X but you can catch a damn rocket...
I wouldn't bother with X. There were dozens of YouTube channels with the live feed.
Live scams too.
X has proven time and time again that it just cannot handle live feeds well.
Damn what a time to be alive! Amazing
SpaceX has done it again! (defying status quo, not the catch :p)
When KSP becomes reality, 275 tons falling from space caught by some metal struts…
Can someone explain to me why this is more impressive than landing the rocket? To a layman like me, it looks very similar - the thing looks just like a rocket but without a pointy tip, and on the way down I don't understand why difference that matters.
(I mean I still think it's mind blowing, because I think landing a rocket is also mind blowing)
(1) Much larger than any previous rocket landing, (2) This rocket carried no landing gear (more efficient - landing gear is heavy), (3) This rocket landed right back at the place it needs to be to launch again - right on its launch tower - which in a routine situation might make it much faster to prepare it for the next relaunch. (4) It's yet another step in control prowess - impressive in itself.
I must say though "right on its launch tower" is fun and all...
but things would have to get pretty extreme in the "routine" dimension for that to be very useful. If there are 20 first stages and 5 land/launch towers, for a first stage that only spends an hour in flight in between inspections.... well are you going to keep them parked on a scarce launch tower for maintenance? The towers with fill/launch infrastructure (such as reinforced concrete, fuel tanks, cold filling system, deluge water system) become the bottleneck. It's more likely then that the 1st stage lands, is safed, then is taken a couple hundred yards away for inspection and maintenance while the next in line is moved to be stacked for the next launch. The inspection / maintenance would have to be truly minimal (think airliner) to keep it right there on its own relaunch tower.
"No landing gear" is more key, compared to Falcon 9 - because of the effort toward minimal launch cost.
> The inspection / maintenance would have to be truly minimal (think airliner) to keep it right there on its own relaunch tower.
That's what they are aiming for, eventually.
It is a rocket. The biggest difference with the Falcon 9 first stage is that this one is about 6 times as big (diameter of 9m vs 3.7m), and that catching it with the tower requires a much higher precision in landing location. The drone ships that Falcon 9 lands on are about 90 x 50 meter. To catch it with the tower, they need to be accurate to within a few meters.
The big advantage of catching it with the tower is that it'll (eventually) allow them to put another Starship on top, refuel and launch again within hours, as opposed to the weeks it currently takes for Falcon 9.
The critical differences between Falcon 9 first stage and the Starship booster is that Starship booster lands using 3 engines rather than 1, and can throttle them down much further. 3 vs 1 gives Starship more directional control for precise landing (critical for this "catch" maneuver), and throttling allows it to hover, as it does right before the "catch".
Falcon 9 also lands using 3 engines on its most demanding missions. The throttling is definitely an advantage.
But as far as I know, one Merlin engine produces more thrust than the empty booster weighs which means they have to time things perfectly to get to zero velocity exactly at the ground.
Super heavy can hover and even go down by throttling down more. This gives them more control for the landing and don’t have to time it exactly perfectly
Thanks!
The tower is also how they plan to perform maintenance and re-staging for another launch. The tower can place it back on the launch structure or lower it down to the ground if it needs to be transported back to an enclosure for extensive repairs but a lot of work is just done with it at the tower. I imagine the goal is to eventually get to an automated system that catches the booster, inspects it for damage, clears it for relaunch, positions it on the launch structure, grabs another Sharship second stage and stacks it and then refuels the whole system and launches as soon as possible.
Plus it's really big https://images-bonnier.imgix.net/files/ill/production/Starsh...
This booster is significantly larger than anything landed on an orbital launch before. Here is a size comparison, previous largest landed orbital rocket stage is the SpaceX Falcon 9 (three of them launch together as Falcon Heavy) on the left. Starship is on the right.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/7b/SuperHea...
Landing via tower catch versus on a pad is advantageous because the weight of adding retractable landing legs to such a large rocket would be significant.
Thanks!
This method doesn't require landing legs on the rocket, allowing their weight to be used for payload instead
It’s also already on the tower that it launches from, which drastically reduces the expense and complexity of setting it up for its next launch, making it easier and faster to reuse.
To expand on this, landing legs of Falcon 9 weigh two tons. Landing legs of SuperHeavy booster would have to be even more formidable.
Which means that the weight savings are nontrivial with the "catch the rocket!" landing method.
From what I understand, it reduces the turnover dramatically. In theory the booster should be refuelled, new second stage mounted on top and ready to go for another flight. So could cut down from weeks to days/hours. That's significant.
It's more precise than landing on the ground, there is coordination with the tower required, it is way bigger than Falcon 9.
This video goes into details pretty well: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=OYvWYp0--bQ&t=832s
I think landing a booster is just as impressive. It's just that nobody's done this before, so it's exciting! Plus it's a lot bigger and part of a fully reusable config which has huge implications for space travel.
This one seems way harder than the others which land on legs and on a relatively larger circular landing pad, this one needs to nail the tower and its arms.
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.
Would this get the “Elon musk is not very bright because I don’t like his politics” crowd to finally STFU? Rhetorical question, of course not.
One of the biggest steps forward in the space industry since the first landing of Falcon 9.
Great success!!
Happy Birthday! SpaceX lit a mighty big candle for you :)
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.
It mostly comes down to reducing extra weight. You have to carry those wings and landing gear upwards, which reduces useful payload weight. But having the booster right where it started also helps with reusability. No need to transport the booster from a landing strip back to the starting table
physics?
Giddy and crying.
I turned 50 yesterday and it feels a bit like the future I dreamed of as a child.
This made me happy
As an ME/AE, I can say this is an astounding engineering achievement. And on the first try! Well done, SpaceX!
Wow, that’s amazing. Didn’t think something like that would be possible.
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.
Sounds like you were on a scam, fake version of the channel.
I was sure they were going to lose one of the fins at "max q part 2".. Looked like it burned through near the hinge.
If anything, the last 2 flights have shown how good a decisions it was to go with steel. The thermal reserves seem to be really large. While not as bad as with the previous flight, there was still significant leakage of hot air between the starhip and the flap. But it didn't seem to cause significant damage, at least as far as for the landing. For complete reuse, they probably have to still improve that a bit.
THEY REALLY CAUGHT IT!
Seems impossible honestly. Like the Jetsons
Anyone knows how the landing is guided? Is it just really precise GPS/altimeter or does it use computer vision?
Falcon-9 relies on GPS and a couple of altimeters. (Filtered, as others have already said, with the help of data from the inertial sensors.)
Compared to Falcon-9, Starship/Superheavy additionally has a command link from the ground. Whether it is used to coordinate the movement during the catch is not publicly known, but it is easy to imagine how this could be useful.
Likely a mix of GPS, inertial guidance, vision and radio/laser beacons/ranging.
I'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.
I would bet in the traditional sensors.
Nothing short of inspiring. Moving humanity forward. Well done to the SpaceX team.
Highlights in a YouTube video:
https://youtu.be/b28zbsnk-48?si=JamDRMuN07oWlcZi
Congratulations. This is a Sputnik-level event, opening a new era in the history of civilization. Amazing.
Holy hell, they caught the booster!
Do we know how much more efficient/cheaper landing by booster catch is compared to landing on a platform?
It's not just cheaper, it's preserving capacity. Every pound of landing gear you carry has to be offset with fuel to lift it, and then that fuel has to have fuel to lift it and on and on.
Do they recover whats left of the ship from the Indian Ocean?
They can probably go fishing, but anything that sunk is gonna stay sunk. That ocean is not shallow, and deep submarine operations are expensive…
They did pull the bottom of the previous booster out. On the webcast they mentioned adjusting the landing maneuver for the ship to be a bit softer in case they decide to recover it too.
The previous booster landed in the golf of Mexico.
This starship landed in the Indian ocean a bit west of Australia, it's like 3x deeper.
↑ That.
For extra context: that "3× deeper" makes costs seriously explode. People do know how to engineer for that depth, but it's a lot of effort and there's pretty much no commercial market. For shallower stuff there's oil rigs, deep-sea cables, seafloor mining, even just tourism… but at some point it just peters out and only research vessels tackle the depth.
(source: friend of mine works at a UK university doing deep-sea vehicles)
>(source: friend of mine works at a UK university doing deep-sea vehicles)
As in he works on their development? That sounds exciting, do you have something like the name of one of the vehicles?
Do they worry about any issues of the debris winding up in the hands of China or Russia? I would imagine the raptor engines are mostly intact.
Was the explosion intentional? I thought they were hoping it would float for recovery but if not I makes sense to sink it.
You think there are Russian submarines in the gulf of mexico?
They splashed down in the Indian Ocean, not the Gulf of Mexico.
Also noone mentioned submarines, debris can just float and drift around (sometimes even at some depth below the surface).
I mean, yes [0]. It's probably the main reason SpaceX went to effort to recover [1] all the engines of the previous booster (IFT-4), which landed in accessible, shallow water in the Gulf of Mexico. The Raptor engines hold valuable secrets, particularly to China who are trying to clone a lot of SpaceX things.
The CIA did something very similar to this in the Cold War [2], though they used a boat instead of a submarine.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akula-class_submarine#Operatio... ("In August 2012, the news media reported that another Akula-class submarine operated in the Gulf of Mexico purportedly undetected for over a month, sparking controversy within U.S. military and political circles...")
[1] https://old.reddit.com/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1fvdekt/more_... ("More images from B11 recovery + new info "26 of the Raptors have been recovered but they are trying to get all 33")
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Azorian
Starship landed in the Indian Ocean, not the Gulf of Mexico.
Do they have the ability? Russia couldn’t get Kursk back. Not clear they could even do it if we left it there.
It's more of a financial question, do you want to shell out for some chance at it. And Russia and China can build their own engines, SpaceX is very good but not like a century ahead good.
(If anything, I'd be more worried about North Korea or Pakistan getting their hands on stuff…)
Either way the risk is the shit that's left floating, if they don't fish it out it'll randomly wash up in Madagascar or so…
The joy on the faces of all the employees is infectious, congrats!
Absolutely incredible achievement, I'm still shaking!
Stage 1 sucessfully caught. That was pretty incredible. I remember watching the Falcony Heavy launch when both boosters landed in sync.
It's hanging pretty high in the air, I assume so the engines do less damage to the pad. One wonders how they're going to get it down. Do the chopsticks lower on the tower?
They'll lower it to the launch mount... the catch arms are effectively a crane. But I wonder if it's more "toasty" than they were expecting? There were some fires going at catch (those look out, at least on external camera views) and the engines are still a bit.... smokey. Don't know if that's normal... or if they were expecting it.
My hunch is that they don't put it down for awhile. If there's still an issue were there are fires lingering inside, my hunch is they want that as far from the ground infrastructure as possible.
Either way incredible progress.
There was a lot of smoke coming out of the bottom after the catch. I was worried about an internal fire but it’s since stopped. The glow from the engine mount on re-entry was amazing. The fire on landing had me worried too I was expecting it to grow but put itself out eventually.
What an amazing morning!
From the replay, it seems that the fire comes from methane from the RCS thrusters burning, so it seems normal
The fire I mostly saw was coming from the quick disconnect ports and related plumbing. Also, there was fire on the other side, close to where there was part of a chine was clearly missing. There were a couple other things, too.
Wasn't perfect, some things to work out... but still pretty damn good.
Remember on the first launch when, on the way up, there were hydraulic units exploding off the side and the engines started exploding taking out more hydraulic units? Heh that and all the concrete flying up on ignition was like watching a heavy metal music video.
Yes, the chopsticks lower and raise. They will lower the tower onto a transport vehicle and send it back to the bay for examination, and then possible reflight.
Yep, they handle all the mounting/demounting ops on the launch mount, so they have to be able to move along the tower.
Yes, the chopsticks are attached to one giant lift.
Congratulations to those working at SpaceX!
Landing from space during sunrise while your rocket is on fire is as dramatic as it gets!
First attempt!
I can't believe what i just saw!
The catch somehow absolutely demolished the amazing FH dual landing
Holy shit. I almost had a heart attack when it looked like the booster was about to slowly careen into the tower
> I almost had a heart attack when it looked like the booster was about to slowly careen into the tower
Same but it looks more dramatic on the feed we all got: on other vids the angle is different and although close it doesn't look it's going to crash into the tower.
Still: feels pretty close.
Humanity has reached a milestone.
This is incredible!
In addition to the other ways this is incredible, it is a stunning achievement in software development.
Congratulations.
So funny that they had a little buoy water ready to film the explosion. I want to see the views of that camera from the landing itself.
This is why Musk is silly when he claims fear over what certain possible gov administrations would do to him if elected.
He's allowed to believe whatever he wants. He's too valuable to the United States. Imagine what a BRICS country would pay for his talent? Worth his weight in gold wrapped platinum.
It’s justified. https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2024-10-11/la-me-sp...
Does anyone know what this circular thing is at 5:36 mark in the below video under the booster? It's like a piece which separated and keeps falling off.
https://i.imgur.com/z6PH2Jw.png
https://youtu.be/b28zbsnk-48?t=336
That was craaaaaaaazy!
Awesome. Incredible. Inspiring. Words fail me.
Heartfelt congratulations to the folks at SpaceX!
That was impressive.
That was soooo good!
Does each engine have 6 degree of freedom to point its jet?
No, each individual engine has 2 DoF (x-axis and y-axis rotation) which correspond to torque on x and y plane to the rocket. They need to use more than one at once (three in starship's case) pointing in different directions to get z axis torque.
The video looks like it's being played in reverse
What an inspiring team SpaceX has.
They did it!
the starship hit the target!
The V2 was also revolutionary and also developed by fascists. https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2024/10/donald-...
This is amazing. What an incredible technological feat!
SpaceX's Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy have already revolutionized the space industry with their reusable first stage boosters and rocket engines. This advance in rocket design has resulted in the cost to launch one kilogram of payload to orbit from approximately $15,000 in the pre-SpaceX era, to around $1,400 with the Falcon Heavy. This graph shows the incredible impact of SpaceX on the volume of rocket launches, with an exponential rise in recent years:
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/yearly-number-of-objects-...
With Starship, SpaceX is striving to make rockets fully reusable, which, if they succeed, will transform human civilization by radically reducing launch costs and enabling large-scale space exploration and industry. The kinds of possibilities this opens up include economically viable permanent lunar bases, Mars colonization, and revolutionary industries like asteroid mining.
SpaceX has unbaked bread
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.
Now we have no excuses
Speaking as a non-American. SpaceX just made one of the most significant technological leaps in the last decade. This is obviously hugely significant in many ways, including retaining the US military edge.
Yet the US administration hasn't congratulated SpaceX. Incredible.
https://x.com/SenBillNelson/status/1845461454977196294
What counts?
The current head NASA admin (a political appointee) did it a few hours ago and it's retweeted on the official @NASA account.
(not linking as peer comment already did)
It's unfortunate that Elon has made himself so visibly political, it casts a dark shadow on the great work of the people at his companies.
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.
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What did the post(s) say?
https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1240754657263144960?lang=en
https://www.theverge.com/2020/3/20/21187760/twitter-elon-mus...
https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2020/04/29/tech/elon-musk-twitter-co...
Lots of examples. And I’m not just talking about his general opinions on government response, but actual misinterpretations and misstatements of data that were straight-up wrong.
It was also a clear breaking point between Elon and local and state government in California over how local restrictions were going to affect Tesla’s factory in Fremont.
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This was “actual facts” that came to light later?
https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1240754657263144960?lang=en
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.
Musk choosing to abandon YouTube to push his other company didn’t help.
True, but even before that there were fake spacex streams (complete with a 'verified account' symbol) with 10k+ alleged viewers.
These are reruns.
"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." and what we have witnessed is magic.
At this point I am finding it hard to hate Elon Musk.
For everything he does that has annoyed me (like Gloating at people being bombed in the middle east) — his business acumen has completely unlocked for people what they we thought was impossible.
People are complex. This is nuance.
There should be nothing wrong with recognizing that any individual is a mix of things you're going to like and things you're not. That could be judged all the way to a mix of things which are morally correct, amoral, or immoral... but the reality is probably a mix.
It should be OK to praise the guy for those good traits and in turn to criticize the guy for what he does wrong: both in turn calling out the specific actions and less "the person". Its rare that demonizing someone is really appropriate or anything other than self-serving and we should see those that make that effort in that light.
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.
> At this point I am finding it hard to hate Elon Musk.
Eh. There's really plenty of room to celebrate SpaceX and also still hate him.
It is often the case that the way the mega wealthy got there is through a pigheadedness that when it works out works spectacularly well. He's still demonstrably a shitty toxic human being who lives off the grift though (FSD when again? boring tunnels when again? hyperloop when again? how many billions of dollars in government subsidies? how many vehicles upsold on unfulfilled promises of next year next year next year?), and we can continue to wish for a world where someone with his resources and drive was also a grownup with functioning empathy instead of someone who consistently behaves like a petulant child.
The only 'grift' that holds up is about FSD. Everything else is nonsense. They are making Boring tunnels, the costumer paid and they delivered. The company didn't take off as much as Musk hoped but calling it a 'grift' isn't accurate.
Hyperloop was never promised, that's literally just people who don't like Musk made up. In fact he EXPLICITLY said 'I'm not gone build Hyperloop, its just an idea I had', and then people who don't like him 10 years later 'where is the promised Hyperloop'. How does that make sense? Musk never received a single $ for Hyperloop, but somehow this is a 'grift'.
> how many billions of dollars in government subsidies?
They are big cooperation's in capital intensive industries. When you build big investments, you get government tax reduction and other things, this is literally normal. If you don't like it, that's fine, but that how it works. Its not a 'grift' unless you want to go down the 'modern capitalism is grift' route.
Outside of that, most subsidies he got, were just universal subsidies that anybody could get. The US government gave the same amount of subsidies to foreign companies selling EV cars in the US. This was a plan to increase EV adoption in general. And arguably it worked. How is again is this a 'grift'.
And for SpaceX, I think its pretty clear that the government got much, much, much more then it ever paid for when they paid SpaceX. I would argue SpaceX has already saved the US government more money then they ever paid for SpaceX development. Just Clipper going on Falcon Heavy is billions in savings.
There are plenty of reason to dislike him but those aren't really good ones. Except the FSD one, that one I think is quite bad. At least they finally allowed moving the FSD from one car to the next, but that's not enough.
How many billions in subsidies has he had?
He said about half of what Boeing had.
You should be glorifying Shotwell, not Musk. Yes Must helped give her room to build but she's the genius and deserves the credit.
Amazing days ahead of us - if we can avoid blowing ourselves up over pathetic patches of land, we could have the entire solar system under our feet...
Agreed, but I'm concerned that humans being humans, we'll have the entire solar system to blow ourselves over.
In The Expanse (which I highly recommend), they give a new lease on life to that quote attributed to Einstein "I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought with, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones" - hurling asteroids towards a planet. I really hope humanity's real future will play out in accordance with some of the more optimistic elements in The Expanse.
[stub for offtopicness]
Edited: Was asking what were all these deleted comments.
Got my answer: it's a theory that SpaceX is a partner for the US DoD and is not just an internet provider.
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I’m just talking totally out of my A S S. Wouldn’t it be cool if this starship launch somehow utilized starshield for grabbing starship, like proof of concept to the military of some kind of hyper accurate military grade GPS that can pinpoint a rocket and control it to the accuracy of between two chop sticks?
> What the f is going on in this
Genuinely curious if you find an answer.
My first thought was nuclear anxiety; it’s nice to feel like we have a secret shield in space. Then I saw Trump talked about it, so my current hypothesis is the partisan parroting that happens on both sides. (Or if someone doesn’t like military spending, maybe it’s an anti-Musk thing?)
That said, the three accounts that have been posting about it seem to really like this topic [1][2][3], so maybe it’s a niche thing. They all seem to really like one Reddit thread.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=forgot-im-old
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=tbone902
[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=georgeg23
I recommend emailing hn@ with your questions, even if you don't currently see any obvious reason to.
Guessing the massive flag storm will ruin someone’s Monday.
Imagine not being Team Elon.
There’s a need for competition. I’m expecting that with Musk fully on the Trump train, there’ll be no bright future at Space X.
If elon can do everything he’s done with an increasingly hostile govt, imagine what he’ll be able to so with a supportive one
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.
elon is a poster boy created by the government
Yes, this needs wider coverage
https://www.reddit.com/r/WikiLeaks/comments/1fy10k1/tracking...
If SpaceX is overly hindered by regulation/lawfare, then there'll be competition from China before long.
I don't think so; there remain few economic reasons to go to space and spacex's customer isn't going to rely on a Chinese company.
Burt Rutan, one of the most legendary aerospace engineers of all time used to do regular long presentations to people on why global warming was not man made. Some of them are archived on youtube. And there's many other cases of otherwise smart people having bonkers opinions in areas outside of what they are experts in. If anything, successful people are significantly more likely to do this. It rarely results in their downfall.
SpaceX will do just fine.
See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobel_disease
“You are a genius!” messes with the brain if heard enough.
Why?
Uuuh the first stream on YouTube was Musk giving a speech, so I was waiting for the launch but turns out it was on another stream? So I just missed the whole thing, great.
They don't do lives on youtube, those are scammers. it is always on x.com
Well it shows like SpaceX on mobile with 150k viewers, maybe YouTube could use some brain power to fix that.
This has been going on for many years now, YouTube doesn't do anything about it.
Youtube simply doesn't care about their platform being used for scams. There are very simply very basic things they could do, but they simply don't.
Sorry, too busy selling ads.
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.)
Would be great if I could stream to my Chromecast or AppleTV from X without using airplay streaming my whole browser...
There used to be a Twitter AppleTV app and I recently saw an X app for TV platforms has been brought back, but I don’t know if the AppleTV version is out yet.
Of course I’d rather they just stream to YouTube in 4K.
There were multiple streams on youtube who rebroadcast that you can use.
Those are deep fake crypto scams that YouTube does not pull down. My father was scammed by one for over $2000.
The older we get, the likelihood that we get scammed approaches one. Be weary.
Youtube has a terrible problem with scammers. I don't know why they don't do anything about this.
https://twitter.com/i/broadcasts/1RDGlyognOgJL
Here. Or try Space Affairs on YouTube
There was an AI crypto scam channel. Musk is so scammy that it looked feasible and was shared widely by the looks.
Why don't they mount moving video cameras? I mean, the second part of the fly is pretty boring. They shows us a view from 2 static cameras. Is it so difficult to make one camera moving? With 360 degrees view. Show us the shape of the earth the full circle, show us the moon. Is it so hard?
Yes what you’re describing is nearly impossible.
I don't think they'd need to actually have moving cameras (I think this is what the poster meant) to give a 360 degree view, but 360 degree cameras (well, 180 because they're right next to an obstacle) that could be reprojected to 2d.
The primary purpose of having those cameras is to gather test data, not provide entertainment.