Pretty impressive. The engineering team at SpaceX is really something. Some thoughts;
The 'chopsticks catch' was amazing to watch. Seems like it adds a lot of risk and clearly the booster needs additional fire suppression systems :-) perhaps the tower could mount something that sprays the booster like the barges have for the F9 boosters.
The heatshield held out for a much longer time, the asymmetric heating on the flaps was interesting. I had guessed that all four flaps would have equivalent heating based on an approach that was basically that side of the rocket perpendicular to the flow but it seems like that isn't the case. Still it seems like they are close to having something workable here.
The detonation at the end was pretty spectacular too, but I suspect that structurally the tanks failed as the rocket hit the water vs anything that was an engineering failure. Engineering it to be strong enough to land on water would presumably compromise the cargo to orbit number.
The use of Starlink was really interesting. The ability to get live video for the entire re-entry is pretty game changing for engineering. I'd guess there are even more 'views' than they showed (there would be if I were running things :-)) but overall that capability is something that really helps evaluate the changes made.
I can easily imagine that flight 6 will be nominal end to end without any unintended damage. That would enable, perhaps, one of their 'massive' Starlink missions to test cargo delivery. It will also start to give us some better numbers on exactly how much cargo Starship can put in orbit in 'full reuse' mode which is essential if they want to create a fueling station on orbit for the Artemis program.
Again, hats off to engineering at SpaceX, y'all did good.
As to whether catching the booster adds risk - I'm not sure it does.
First, to the extent the booster is out of position in the x (sideways) direction, the chopsticks can move to accomodate error. But actually I think this dimension is the easiest of the three, as the booster has plenty to time to null any error in this dimension.
In the y direction (direction of travel towards the tower), the rails on the chopsticks can cope with the booster touching down along quite a long distance. But importantly, they appear to be smooth, so the pins can initially skid along them and then the booster can swing if it has not fully nulled any horizontal movement.
In contrast, if the booster used legs and has not yet fully nulled any horizontal motion at touchdown, there is a greater risk of breaking a leg or simply tipping over.
And in the z direction, it should be possible for the chopsticks can absorb more vertical motion than legs can absorb, because you can easily build in huge springs/dampers/etc into the ground equipment without concern about mass.
Catching also puts the booster in tension rather than compression - it's easier to be rigid in tension than compression.
Finally, if legs were used, the engines would have to get close to the ground during landing, so reflected shock from the ground could cause damage. I know Falcon 9 does this, but the area of the base of Starship is much greater, so there's effectively less room for the reflected energy to escape. Catching completely removes this risk.
On balance, I think they would have better chance of success for each mission by catching. The main downside would be if you fail to catch, you may need to build a new tower, whereas a flat pad would be cheaper and easier to repair.
I am really curious what the maximum wind speed allowed for a booster landing will be. Upon landing, it has a lot of windage and not nearly as much mass as during take-off.
I have experience with docking large boats and it does seem to be a bit similar. In the case of boats, wind is a big deal, and the booster has nothing "below the waterline" to slow down the effects of wind.
Not because wind wouldn't affect an empty booster; it certainly would.
But since the booster returns within 8 minutes of the launch, the weather in which a booster lands is restricted to the weather in which they will launch a rocket.
The value of what is going up (which includes the booster) will be greater than the value of the empty booster. Factors of safety would be based on the launch rather than the catch. In other words, if it's deemed safe to launch the calculation for safe to land is easier to pass. Especially when you are taking passengers on launch. Wind is already a significant factor in launch.
That's true, except it neglects the cost of the launch tower itself. If you botch a catch and need to rebuild the launch tower, that could get very expensive, both in immediate costs of rebuild, plus in opportunity cost of missed launches. So in the end, whichever has the lowest wind limit, launch or landing, will likely determine whether they fly.
Ah, excellent point! They wouldn't ignore one hazard because another is less severe. And you are correct, I wasn't considering hazards to the launch tower itself. I think you are absolutely right, either would cause a flight to be scrubbed. I wonder if the two wind limits would be different.
That value is unlikely to be significantly different than safe takeoff conditions. Yes the booster is lighter at landing, but launch is way more dangerous with larger error margins and more conservative condition requirements.
Definitely not, and I am not trying to be a doomsayer here. It's just interesting. Now that I think about it more, I believe a Falcon 9 Starlink launch was once delayed due to weather conditions at the drone ship.
The most challenging axis in my opinion is the roll axis of Super Heavy, if there is a roll angle error, the pins could not sit properly on the chopsticks and the whole booster slides off.
Might as well chuck a full size engine on the side pointing in the yaw direction to be safe. I mean as long as you tie enough magical struts and cables to it I'm sure you are fine /s
I'm actually wondering about that. If I understand correctly, the arms can move up and down, and pivot around the tower. This allows them to correct for some error in the rocket trajectory and also (presumably) "soften" the final contact. Between the nozzles and the arms, it gives SpaceX a lot of degrees of freedom in the final seconds (you can see how the booster kind of "hovered" right at the end) and in certain respects might even offer more forgiveness than the hard ground.
Could it smash into the tower? For sure. Would that be more dangerous than smashing into the pad? I don't know.
It's a new technique with which we don't have a lot of experience.
It helps enormously that unlike Falcon-9 this rocket can dial down the thrust of its engines low enough to be able to actually hover or to move arbitrarily slowly in the final meters before touchdown.
It can arrive to the designated intermediate point with some already good accuracy, and then take some time to trim the remaining errors to the noise level more slowly, possibly with feedback from the ground sensors.
The chopsticks also include rails with shock absorbers, the action of which can be seen in the view from the tower during the landing [1], so the required accuracy is probably relatively modest, provided one plans the maneuver carefully.
The main takeaway from Scott's commentary is that the chopsticks allow the ommission of landing legs and all their subsequent systems and saves a ton of weight. The added risk to dial this technique in is likely worth it in the long run from a sustainability stand point.
Except that the landing legs allow you to land anywhere with a flat pad of concrete, whereas this requires comparatively enormous infrastructure investment.
The first stage doesn't really need to land anywhere, it launches from a known location that already has a comparatively enormous infrastructure investment.
The second stage might want to land in other places. Not as a satellite launching bus or fuel truck though, that just wants to go up and down in an uncomplicated and unsurprising way, and that's where the vast majority of their launches will come from.
For inter-planetary missions yes, but they have different second stage designs for those that aren't made for tower landings. If it gets used as a military transport, then similarly it will be a different second stage design.
With maybe totally different requirements on the G forces and vibrations that the equipment and people inside a Starship must withstand compared to flying. Not necessarily all the existing equipment can survive a Starship launch and not necessarily all military personnel can fly in a rocket. Of course they can select the personnel, like they do select paratroopers. Fixing the equipment or developing new one might be costly.
Thankfully, military stuff that is field deployed typically already has insane shock and vibration requirements. We build military stuff at our facility and it all has to go through lots of shock, vibration, and temperature testing. The military really wants to be sure things don't fail on the battlefield (which could also be aptly called "the-shock-and-vibration-field")
Just want to add that a lot of military equipment is already designed to be airdropped in addition to any other expected battlefield stresses, so they’re probably some of the best candidates for rocket transport in existence.
There's some work needed to have the launch flexibility though.
Ie lead time to launch, multiple launch locations.
In comparison, simplified, if you have a bunch of things you need to send somewhere, you can go to the nearest airstrip and call a bunch of C5:s from somewhere a couple of hours away.
That could actually probably be worse as the orbital path would not likely go near the wanted landing site, potentially in days. And anyway how do you know in advance what you are going to need (if it's not a nuke)?
Instead, with a near-future rocket, you could have some sort of assortment of "most likely stuff needed" stored near a launch site and be ready to pack and launch in an hour.
The booster is always returning to the general vicinity of the launch tower (either the tower itself or a barge). It isn’t used anywhere unimproved, and in particular is not used on Mars. So what scenario would it be helpful to be able to land the booster on a flat concrete pad?
It sounds like sci-fi thinking tbh, but at the same time, Musk has hinted at using rockets for intercontinental travel. But even then, it wouldn't be just a concrete pad, it'd need disaster recovery systems and infrastructure in place.
Landing legs are out of the question for Super Heavy anyway. If the engines come that close to the ground, the reflected sound from the ground will tear the engines apart.
The 3 RS-25 (1860 kN each)[1] used for the Space Shuttles had 300,000 Gallons of water output per 41 seconds [2] when it launched. On landing, the Falcon Super Heavy used 5 or so [3] of the Raptor Engines (2750 kN each [4]). I'm making a few assumptions based on Napkin Math, but the parent comment seems about right since the engineering required (and the payload weight lost due to the weight/space requirements of landing feet for the FSH), would be too high to withstand the vibration reflection of landing on solid landing pad.
>comparatively enormous infrastructure investment
Any infrastructure that can remain on the ground and doesn't have to be on the rocket is worth whatever the investment cost.
You note of course that instead of legs, which have mass and have to have a structure in the stage which distributes the loads the SH has those parts with pins which were locked eventually with Mechazilla's arms, and those parts also have mass and need to have corresponding distribution of loads.
How different those consoles with pins are from possible landing legs, and how much savings they provide is an interesting question. It's quite possible they provide some savings - but it would be nice to know some details.
Why so? Pin parts need to withstand similar loads - and if amortizing rails of Mechazilla may soften the contact, the direction of loads for pin parts is less favorable than for legs. Legs don't need to be big or too numerous - effectively legs are those pin parts moved to the engine compartment and turned for an angle.
Compression and tension are quite different loads. There have been rockets in history that would collapse under their own weight unpressurized. Neutron's second stage is a hung tank for similar reasons. Bucking is a pain. Super Heavy can obviously support its own weight, but tension is always going to be the easier load path.
Because the pins can be much shorter. Take a look at the falcon 9 legs. They are enermous both in absolute terms and relative to the whole rocket. They need to be that long to provide a stable platform and enough clearance for the nozzles and the residual plume as the engines shut down.
Don't forget that between certification and catch attempt that catching infrastructure is subject to the launch of the most powerful rocket man has ever created. It seems that the consideration about another part to fail is not valid here as the parts to fail have not disappeared but rather moved to the tower. They could still fail - in fact it seems that there are now many more recovery-critical parts.
That is, unless the falling rocket could abort a tower catch and move to a secondary nearby tower if a failure is detected in time.
I think it is very much valid if the entire context is taken into account.
The tower is used for various stacking and craning operations between launches. There is a better chance to detect any developing anomalies outside the launch context.
Also, being on Earth and flying nowhere, it can be sturdier and heavier than any flight hardware. Much like Roman aqueducts, it can be overbuilt a bit to ensure some extra resilience.
Plus, more towers at the same site, as you say. If one malfunctions, another one can act as a backup. In contrast, every single landing leg is a mission-critical component and cannot be replaced in-flight by another one.
> and move to a secondary nearby tower if a failure is detected in time.
They will have a tower in the Cape. It’s conceivable they could land there depending on return trajectory and save some mass for payload with that maneuver. I am also quite sure they will be a dozen towers in Boca Chica and I wouldn’t be surprised if they build a couple in California for Southward launches.
They do checks of the tower systems before using it, and have abort contingencies in case something goes wrong during final approach. I'm not sure if they intend (or have fuel budget) for last-second aborts to other towers, or if they just ditch in the ocean (remember there are no humans on the booster).
I'm curious how late in the catch sequence they can still abort.
This seems a bit like removing landing gear from aircraft and telling airports to shoulder the added cost of accommodating them. You've simply shifted complexity elsewhere. I understand that people are dazzle-eyed over the science fiction appeal, but IMO this feels like a distraction. The rocket's already reusable and already the largest rocket ever built, this doesn't add any fundamentally new operational capability while also burning a lot of engineering cycles and adding complexity and uncertainty.
What you're missing is the rocket equation. The less weight, the less fuel you need and the larger your payload. We should trust the decisions of these experienced engineers who are deeply familiar with the tradeoffs involved in spaceflight more than our own intuition.
Yup, the rocket equation is truly brutal. Anyone who thinks legs are superior to a tower hasn't played Kerbal Space Program--and remember that stock KSP is easy mode. You don't need anything like the mass ratio that Earth rockets need.
What you're describing with airplanes already happened. Large airplanes used to land on the water, which incurred a mass and aerodynamic penalty for the airplane but was very cheap to operate airfields ("fields"?) for; it only required a flat lake or harbor which was already there. The switch to landing gear allowed airplanes to be more optimized but requires more infrastructure expenditure for large aircraft.
Removing unnecessary systems that have mass is a big part of making reusable rockets work. It's why propulsive landing is superior to landing with wings, for example.
It is not just about shift of complexity from A and B. Anything that stays on Earth permanently can be built without particular regard to its weight, e.g. much stronger, much more resilient, with bigger safety factors etc.
With any flight hardware, you need to make painful tradeoffs between reliability/sturdiness and weight.
If anything out of the ordinary happens, massive steel chopsticks can take a lot more strain than a landing leg which needs to be carried to the edge of space and back.
Super Heavy and its 33 raptor engines really needs a specific launch pad - on the first launch they tried to see what happens when they just fire it over a regular concrete slab (but still way above in a launch mount) and ended up with a massive crater. While Starship might be able to hop from unimproved landing sites, that is not really an option for Super Heavy, even with low fuel and short hops IMHO.
There's always a risk, but at the same time, they've designed the infra now, they can rebuild it from the plans (and iterate on any flaws). There's a (imo unnecessary) idea of doing a lot of launches, for which you'd need multiple liftoff and landing sites.
Yes, we should probably assume that the SpaceX engineers have considered all of the risks HN readers are able to come up with in a few hours. And that they have evaluated alternatives like the added weight etc of having foldable legs on the booster.
The catchzilla solution is an example of their amazing ability to think out of the box. This solution, and things like the rapid evolution of the Raptor engine (see picture, story here: https://medium.com/@futurespaceworld/the-evolution-of-spacex...), dynamic engine configuration (33, 13, 3, zero, up again) and control is almost magically impressive. This is the stuff of Sci-Fi, brought to life.
To me, it's not risk reduction that they're after with that booster catching mechanism, but weight reduction. Those landing legs that we've seen before (and the mechanism related to them) are costly weight that is absolutely necessary only on the rocket itself, because that is expected to land on its own somewhere on a bare rock. For booster however, it makes sense to have as much of such launch and landing weights externalized, considering booster's reduced use-case of starting from a spaceport and very soon ending up back there too.
The way the trajectory is designed is that it has to scoot over to the tower at the last second, and it only does that if it's really really sure it can make it, otherwise it crashes off to the side.
My thought (admittedly not well developed) is that smashing into a landing pad of concrete can damage that pad but it can be quickly repaired without affecting the ability to launch future rockets. If you damage the launch tower significantly you're going to have to suspend launches from it until you fix it. So the "higher risk" is more critical assets offline in the event of a non-optimal return.
Apparently they are heavily investing in having multiple towers ready to go to be able to do multiple successive launches. Presumably with that approach, one being damaged for a while will be annoying but not project-stopping.
That was a launch pad, not a recovery pad. The launch pad has to be engineered to survive full thrust from all the engines, and for a rather long time as the loaded vehicle accelerates upward.
> The detonation at the end was pretty spectacular too, but I suspect that structurally the tanks failed as the rocket hit the water vs anything that was an engineering failure.
It's possible that SpaceX programed the AFTS to trigger some time after the rocket touched down in the water. Just to make sure that it completely submerges quickly.
> I can easily imagine that flight 6 will be nominal end to end without any unintended damage.
I think it depends on what you mean by "nominal". SpaceX ultimately wants to catch the 2nd stage as well. I suspect that they are a ways off of that, since it would have to approach over land. The FAA is going to need to have very high confidence that it will do exactly what it's designed to do before they're going to allow that.
> It's possible that SpaceX programed the AFTS to trigger some time after the rocket touched down in the water. Just to make sure that it completely submerges quickly.
The SpaceX host on the stream said that they were going to try and touch it down on the water at more of an angle than the previous flight to attempt to get it to survive the initial splash-down so they could get some more data and video footage.
Obviously this wasn't guaranteed to succeed, but it indicates that they weren't planning to immediately detonate the ship on touchdown.
As I recall it was common on the early Falcon 9 landing tests that splashed down in the ocean to also explode after tipping over and smacking the water. Once they're actually landing them on a pad, tower, or ship that should be much less of an issue.
Yeah. It wasn't planned, but was a likely outcome.
I'm not sure if they would have actually attempted to tow this one somewhere given its location in the Indian Ocean, but they might have taken the opportunity to do some inspections before sinking it.
> Just to make sure that it completely submerges quickly.
Why would they want to do that? (genuinly curious).
I reckon there would be a lot of useful data left if they could recover or even just inspect the remains. The remains are one big tank, so it would have floated.
No doubt it would be very useful to recover. SpaceX isn't the only one who could pluck it out of the Indian ocean though. You don't want to leave a prototype for the most advanced Spacecraft ever made just sitting around for competitors to grab (most notably China which is currently speed running SpaceX-like designs).
Yep this will be the reason. And lets not forget that Bezos was able to find and recover the Apollo 11 Saturn V engines from point nemo. If that was relatively simple you can bet plucking a freshly dropped entire starship from the indian ocean would be a doddle, especially when sat views likely show exactly where it landed.
I'm fairly certain the Apollo first stage engines were recovered from a location relatively close to Florida/Bahamas, just east of the launch site. Not point nemo.
That is correct, off FL. The recovered engines were from the first stage they would never have made it half way around the world. Point Nemo is used to stash spacecraft that were in orbit.
It landed right next to their own camera-bearing buoy. You can bet their own recovery ship was right nearby. And with access to radio control too. Likely with a couple US military ships on hand too.
It might not be that simple - I've read an article how they recovered one of the solid rocket boosters from the first successful Ariane 5 flight to check all was fine. IIRC it was a slog, they had to tow it back very very slowly, avoid it sinking, fighting all kinds of weather and tow line issues, etc. Have not found the article, but there is a picture how it looked like[0].
With Starship it could have been similar & possibly worse given the size and more complex shape (various voids that might fill/drain & the thing is not really built for floating). Also you are in the middle of an ocean (Indian in this case) with potential for all kinds of weather on the way. Towing might again be very slow, so you might need to stage a massive submersible transport ship or something similar to make a recovery successful. And then the thing might still tip over and explode anyway - meaning all this was in vain.
I think is most likely they won't bother and instead just stream as much data as possible over Starlink in real time (or heck, even via WiFi once the buoy is in range) for analysis. They want to catch the shop eventually anyway, so manual post flight analysis will wait.
They can now check all over the first recovered booster anyway. :)
You wouldn't need to tow it; if you really wanted to you could use one of those deep see platform recovery ships that sink themselves. The rocket is big but it's tiny compared to ocean-going vessels.
Possible yes but still, this is a prototype with new fin configuration, materials and lots of detail to be understood from inspecting it in detail. An inspection would be very useful.
At the same time, this is SpaceX and they have a few others ready to launch already. Perhaps they indeed can keep it somewhat coarse and wait for detailed inspection until one of them makes it right back to solid ground?
The previous ship did not come down where it was supposed to. I don't think they wanted humans anywhere near where it was coming down, at least until they can reliably do pinpoint landings. Even the Falcon 9, as accurate as it is, doesn't have humans anywhere near the landing location.
I certainly hope so. Ocean are polluted enough and although such a ship is just a, well, drop in the ocean, the ideq of accepting to pollute more is unbearable to me, especially for a world class company like SpaceX...
Other than some electronics it's actually pretty clean vehicle - methane will gas off, steel will quickly disintegrate in water, there isn't tons of plastic or paint.
Looking at the composition of the ship, it won't be polluting the ocean much. No people on board to produce trash etc., mostly just plain stainless steel and a bit of ceramics that will make great hiding spot for the abyssal fish for a few years.
correct me if I’m wrong but I don’t think the second stage is meant to be caught. It will have legs to land on Earth/Mars without any landing infrastructure.
Pretty sure the Artemis lunar missions are going to use a different vehicle for Earth to LEO and LEO to Earth, so I don’t think anyone will be inside a Starship belly flop for quite some time
Plus, their 'evidence' is a leading conversation with an LLM. It's the AI equivalent of a conspiracy nut taking 50 tangentially related articles about Apollo and stitching together a narrative about how the landings were faked.
1) legs are heavy
2) empty rockets are stronger in tension than compression
the scale of Superheavy is such that the above two items are making the arms scheme make sense. The number of engines also gives this rocket the ability to hover, which probably makes the scheme easier to pull off.
This was also true for this engine's predecessor, the Merlin 1D. However that engine's rocket (the Falcon 9) can't hover, as the power of a single engine throttled to its lowest setting still overcomes the weight of a nearly-empty booster.
All high performance engines tend to only throttle in a range in the upper half of the engine's performance, the difference making hovering possible in this case is that the Super Heavy has _so many_ engines that it can turn off. This is a sort of secondary throttling, or meta-throttling, and the rocket can use the combination of engine throttling and engine-off to hover comfortably (while near-empty) with three engines going.
Spent rocket stages are empty of fuel, but not necessarily of the ullage gases, the pressure inside could be e.g. 3 atmospheres and that could be enough to provide some stiffness in the direction perpendicular to the axis.
The engine load is probably a steady, consistent magnitude. While a landing load is rapid and variable. Also, you need to design legs for wind loading after landing, which can be high if you want to launch often.
I imagine that they will be their own first customer - putting Starlink satellites into orbit while they are gaining confidence in the reliability of the system for external customers.
They have to prove out the landing of the second stage, either with another catch or with landing gear, which they need for the lunar lander anyway.
I think that has always been the plan. the V2 starlink sats were designed to fly on Starship. When Starship wasn't coming along as planned they shoe horned the guts of the V2 on to a smaller sat that became the V2 Mini.
If Im not mistaken, they already delivered a payload in one of the previous flights, because they cut the transmission for a while and didn’t show the payload bay like one previous flight.
I’m not sure they are, if only because of the altitude. They only took Starship up to 200km, Starlink are nearly double that so while they do have thrusters that’s quite the distance.
Starship is not really in a true orbit, I forget the exact terminology but the trajectory is designed to re-enter regardless of what happens with the the flight.
It is in an suborbital trajectory but with enough energy to be equivalent to reaching orbit.
Think of it as instead of thrusting perpendicular to gravity for the most optimal energy usage Starship instead points its nose up gaining more altitude but now lacks the speed to miss earth as it comes down.
They actually made use of this this flight again - eq. they still did not perform a deorbit burn this flight & let the trajectory to pull them down to the atmosphere.
They showed 4 streams at once during some of the reentry. One view of each control surface. They may have had still more views but just that 4 was a first.
I'm wondering if they'll be using the vertical equivalent of arresting gear on aircraft carriers[0]. See when fighter jets land on aircraft carriers? There's a cable that decelerates them. That, but for vertical landing.
The way these chopsticks are set forces the booster into a dangerous, snake like maneuver (a SnakeX maneuver) at the last second from a vertical setting, to get into the chopsticks. This maneuver is due to the fact chopsticks are short and the booster has to land on one point in space. No degrees of freedom.
Now, imagine if the chopsticks were long. The booster wouldn't have to land at one specific point, but it could now land on a line. One degree of freedom.
Now replace the long chopsticks with cables, and then add another pair of cables perpendicular to them. So you have a pair of parallel cables perpendicular to a second pair of parallel cables. Now the booster doesn't have to land on a line, but can land anywhere in the grid that's covered by the cables. Two degrees of freedom.
Pushing this thought leads to having a sort of iris diaphragm, like the ones in optics, but an iris diaphragm of cables. The diaphragm is open when the booster is about to land, then closes in quickly. Imagine this[1], but it's cables cinching in.
Now, it's a diaphragm of cables, not a diaphragm of rigid beams, so I imagine the deceleration to be even smoother as the cables elongate, and an additional system of springs and dampers to counter the weight of the booster.
The booster is vertical and stays vertical. Granted, an unstable equilibrium, but it beats doing the SnakeX maneuver to get to the chopsticks, and that's another story.
Now, imagine the iris cable diaphragm can move up and down like equipment handling containers, and now you have three degrees of freedom. That's less control to worry about on the booster's side at the worst possible moment, landing, where you can't make adjustments anymore.
This not only means being more forgiving on mistakes related to position, but also on speed and angle. The diaphragm catches the booster at any angle, and given that it cinches way above the center of gravity, the booster goes back to a more stable vertical position.
For the fire, maybe you just need a big hole down there.
>SpaceX likes to simplify and not to complexify things. And they demonstrated they can do landing accurately.
Yes. Something falling into a web of cables. I'd say it may be simpler than optimally controlling that last SnakeX maneuver to be hugged by a short-armed T-Rex.
>Think about physics involved for longer arms and how much more stress you will putt on the connection points.
That's why I wasn't talking about arms, but cables, as explained by most of the reply.
Did you think about how you support the cables ? Surely they must be tensionned or else they will hang. How do you tension them ? Of course you know that the more the cable is tensionned, the more force you need. So you need a big-ass structure to hold all of these cables. They must be able to circulate around the perimeter, while being in tension, while not collapsing the structure that holds them, etc..
I'm sure you think it's easy, but I'm sure some people thought a bit more
>Did you think about how you support the cables ? Surely they must be tensionned or else they will hang. How do you tension them ?
Mechanical advantage. The booster weighs 250 tons. A 40' shipping container has a max payload of about 30 tons. There are cranes that can lift 250 tons, and it won't be one, but many. Have you seen gantry cranes?
>So you need a big-ass structure to hold all of these cables.
Similar to the big-ass structure holding the 250 ton booster with the T-Rex arms?
>They must be able to circulate around the perimeter, while being in tension, while not collapsing the structure that holds them, etc..
Not circulate, but translate. The cinching in is a result of them translating. Again, see cranes and gantry cranes. Or, just see the actual chopsticks: circulating, not collapsing the structure that holds them, while being in tension, holding the booster at the free end.
Are you seeing the shear and moment diagram of that cantilever beam with point load? (I know, it's an extension of a supported beam, but still cantilever).
>I'm sure you think it's easy
I'm not sure I think it's easy, I can't see how you're more sure than I about my own thoughts.
>but I'm sure some people thought a bit more
You are people, too. Nothing prevents you from thinking as well, if for nothing than to have a civil conversation on a forum.
Now, that's all fun. Imagine they keep it the way it is, but they duplicate the setting to make a circle, so the booster lands in the middle of many chopsticks... What do you think about that?
The crane lifts on the same axis as gravity, so the force is the same as the object. If the cable is horizontal-ish the the force is X/cos(a), which can be many times higher than the object
> so the booster lands in the middle of many chopsticks...
And how exactly this requires less precision? I see multiple issues:
- No way to escape/last second abort away from tower once you dipped into that net.
- The booster arms must be longer/heavier, the tower support structure need to support more weight.
- Cables have a lot less thermal mass than the tower/arms - if the torch coming out of raptor engines will touch the cable, it may either cut or soften the cables and they will behave in a different way.
I mean we could have had this discussion previously but now they demonstrated on the first try that they can catch the booster... why bother?
>I mean we could have had this discussion previously but now they demonstrated on the first try that they can catch the booster... why bother?
Because these things must work every time, not just the first time. Because why not talk about it, it's an interesting topic and musing about it is amusing. Because it's not a bother. I'm surprised one needs a reason, but here are three already.
Good luck not ruining rocket with that cable web. Now you got other problems to target into some cell. Moreover cables could be lingering depending on thrust. Or maybe thrust will just cut em easily.
That's exactly it, thank you! What worries me with the current one that landed is the gradient: because the arms are short and the spot is tight, the burden is on the booster to make very sharp corrections (especially on pitch) to get caught when there's literally a few meters left, with an increased risk at the worst time (no altitude, and structures around), as opposed to leaving the pitch as is and landing vertically. In other words: the possibility to screw a perfect launch by introducing irremediable risk in the last few seconds and meters.
Then again, I just watched the launch and that was the first thing that popped into my mind, and the first "design" that popped into my mind as I was replying to the thread, so not much thought went into it.
This is a solution for a problem that's already solved, that is, booster maneuverability and accuracy. But they've just demonstrated that the booster is accurate and controlled enough to land on the chopsticks, and they have over a decade of experience in making rockets land accurately in a specific zone.
One thing to note is that the "Snake" maneuver was designed to keep the tower safe during the test, and not forced on the rocket by the chopsticks.
The rocket was set to come down on the pad just in front on the tower and launch mount until the final 3-engine landing burn started. This kept the infrastructure safe until the last moment, but also required that lateral translation you referred to.
I think the primary reason would be that landing legs are heavy, and it wastes performance to carry them. If your landing mechanism is mostly on the ground, you get that performance back.
Secondary reasons might include that it's simpler to get the booster right back to the pad. Once things have settled into an operational cadence, it's likely feasible to lower and lock the booster onto the stool, stack a ship on top, refuel, and relaunch -- no more messing around with barges, transport, weather issues, etc.
Your primary reason matches what SpaceX themselves have said. You either need to be strong enough to handle the shock of inpact, or need to spread the impact over time. Building either into the rocket adds a lot of mass.
Landing on a device that spreads out the shock moves that weight to the static landing platform.
It's worth noting that at least 1 Falcon 9 core probably got trashed not from the landing, but from rough seas - so cutting out the ground logistics chain adds resiliency.
To my knowledge, you're right, but in reverse order. I believe the driving force is time, rather than mass overhead, but certainly both play a large part.
Why send the landing mechanism to space when it isn't needed there? Whatever kit you put on a rocket has to be brutally miniaturized to limit how much you eat into the payload mass. Also has to be rugged enough to withstand tremendous vibrations and thermal stresses. That adds cost and more points of failure. You want to move as much of the complexity off the rocket as possible. Then doesn't matter if the catching mechanism on the launch tower is big and heavy.
The 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.
The reflected sound of the engines is enough to destroy the engines, ironically. That's also why the launch mount is so high. You'd need truly enormous legs, which wouldn't work for weight.
The load for landing and almost empty booster would be less, but otherwise yes, it would be much more than the single Merlin engine on the Falcon 9, with all associated issues (local scorching/spalling of the pad, acoustic issues, extra weight, longer turnaround, etc.).
You save the mass of the landing systems, you get to have all that mass on the ground and not have to lift it into space. Dramatically improves the performance of the rocket.
1) legs are heavy 2) empty rockets are stronger in tension than compression 3) the booster is large enough to make (1) and (2) matter more than they did for Falcon 9.
>The 'chopsticks catch' was amazing to watch. Seems like it adds a lot of risk and clearly the booster needs additional fire suppression systems :-) perhaps the tower could mount something that sprays the booster like the barges have for the F9 boosters.
There's no reason to reinvent the airport firetruck.
Unless you're gonna make it fully automated, it's not gonna work here as it can't be within kilometers of the landing site during landing in case there's a catastrophic failure.
>The heatshield held out for a much longer time, the asymmetric heating on the flaps was interesting. I had guessed that all four flaps would have equivalent heating based on an approach that was basically that side of the rocket perpendicular to the flow but it seems like that isn't the case. Still it seems like they are close to having something workable here.
Heat shielding didn't look relevant at this section of the flight at all. The booster didn't have any shielding.
The booster actually does have heat shielding behind the engine bells, to protect against aerodynamic heating on the return. In some of today's footage you can see it glowing yellow.
However, Raptor 3 is supposed to obviate the need for this shielding.
The booster doesn’t travel fast enough to need heat shielding ever.
It makes zero sense to use heat shielding behind the engine bells. Why? Think about it. If the booster renters the atmosphere engine bells first the engine bells would burn up BEFORE the air even touches the heat shield. If there are actually tiles there it’s just there to protect the booster from the heat of the exhaust.
> However, Raptor 3 is supposed to obviate the need for this shielding.
Not completely getting this. So there’s a case for the booster entering the atmosphere at orbital velocity engine bells first? I would think if they did this then THEY want the booster to burn up. Anything entering the atmosphere at that velocity needs to be made aerodynamically stable as it will be traveling faster then the speed of sound. This is what causes the heat. If you send something at the speed of sound engine bells first that’s not stable and is unlikely they will do that at all, with or without heat shielding.
I don’t think parent knows what he’s talking about.
> Where did it glow yellow? What time in the video?
This is a better view than the sibling comment linked. It's a greater close-up and you can clearly see the yellow glow behind the engine bells. This view is from Cosmic Perspective, a partner of Everyday Astronaut, whose video is linked:
In case you get confused due to lack of context, the booster shot is a replay. When Tim goes to split-screen view, the right-side image is a live view of the second stage ("Starship") as it re-enters from orbital speed. It is not a different angle on the booster that is shown on the left.
Later commentary explains that the heating behind the engine bells is due to atmospheric compression and SpaceX specifically orients the drop of the booster to focus heating in this spot.
You ought to do some basic research before making a post like this. Honestly might be the most baffling comment I've ever seen on HN---what kind of mindset does it take to have this kind of overriding confidence in one's own lay speculation?
The engine bells are made of different material than what's behind them (a material that has to directly withstand hot exhaust) and the aerodynamics of the ass end of the rocket are complex; some combination of these factors means this heating isn't an issue for the bells but is a concern for what's behind them. The booster does not re-enter from orbital velocity, but does come down engines first at supersonic speed. Stability in this orientation throughout the descent is a problem SpaceX solved with Falcon 9, and SH works the same way.
See the other reply to your comment for timestamped video of aerodynamic heating behind the engine bells.
Is it possible you're confusing the booster with the second stage (Starship)? They are not the same thing.
>You ought to do some basic research before making a post like this. Honestly might be the most baffling comment I've ever seen on HN---what kind of mindset does it take to have this kind of overriding confidence in one's own lay speculation?
Don't appreciate this at all. I can be wrong, but there's no need to make personal comments on my mindset.
Here's a timestamped link to Scott Manley's commentary video where he points out that the yellow glow at the bottom of the booster is the heat shielding behind the engines.
Nothing could have prepared me for how that catch looked. I was sure the rocket was careening into the tower at the last second before it straightened out. The control algorithms must be incredible for the landing system to work within those small tolerances.
MIMO and nonlinear control theories are probably some of the hardest topics in all of engineering. SpaceX control system also has to compensate for the fuel moving inside their rockets so the control algorithms probably involve some kind of fast numerical fluid simulation.
Another interesting thing SpaceX is doing is to use consumer-grade chips in triple redundancy configurations instead of using $100,000+ radiation-hardened aerospace/defense grade chips.
> control system also has to compensate for the fuel moving inside their rockets
My stepfather worked as a programmer on the Apollo program, and the thing he always talked about as his biggest accomplishment was working on the "slosh problem" -- so yeah, props to the SpaceX team for managing that landing. And props to my stepdad for managing it on hardware that was... a billion times less capable? :-)
I might be misremembering but I think slosh was the failure cause for one of the three failed Falcon 1 flights. It was number 11 out of a pre-flight list of top 10 most likely failure scenarios. Definitely a difficult problem.
> Another interesting thing SpaceX is doing is to use consumer-grade chips in triple redundancy configurations instead of using $100,000+ radiation-hardened aerospace/defense grade chips.
This has been known in the high availability and safety systems industry for a while and a good book to learn these reliability engineering techniques is "Reliability Evaluation of Engineering Systems".
One downside of using non-rad hard parts is degradation from TID (gamma) and latch up effects. You can have chips monitoring other chips to reset whenever they latch up but TID is mostly permanent. The good thing is that TID in LEO, where SpaceX mostly operates, is relatively lower than GEO so they can get by with mostly commercial parts. It's not like the big defense contractors haven't figured out the same thing, they do fly stuff using commercial parts as well, they are just slower to adopt the same culture. SpaceX and the companies that built components using commercial parts are building the new-space industry.
But would using redundant systems separated in space connected with each other not offset the chance that they all would be affected at the same time? This is actually not rocket science .. just hard engineering and hardware/software design for redundant systems which is also usable on the ground.
High energy gammas have a relatively low cross section, most are going to pass right through the chip. If you add a too little shielding, or don’t layer shielding appropriately you are going to stop more gammas but produce lower energy x-rays from the shielding, which have a higher cross section, potentially increasing your chip dose.
Would it be possible to create a "skip" EM shield that does the opposite - increasing the energy of the gamma rays thereby reducing the likelihood of stopping them?
No idea how. Energies of most chemical bonds / electrons around atoms are not very high, not sufficient to emit proper gamma rays AFAICT. High-energy gamma rays are produced in nuclear reactions. While "clean" nuclear reactions that emit only gamma rays and not neutrons do exist, they are very high-energy and thus hard to initiate, and I don't think it would be easy to capture the energy of incoming gamma efficiently enough.
No, that's correct. Of course there's still some level of reduction beyond which the gamma rays don't matter, but where you want to place it is somewhat arbitrary.
A box with 1.3’ walls seems doable, actually, depending on how small the chips are. Might still be cheaper and more effective than specialized chips. But I know nothing, so am probably wrong.
Hah, beat me to the nerd snipe. Moreover, that sphere would cost $10k to make and, at a launch price of $1500/kg, cost $4.5 million to launch into orbit.
The aim for the launch price of the entire rocket is to be around 5 million (once it's fully re-usable and in production). Basically the price of fuel and maintenance.
So something might be off with your assumption of 1500 usd / kg.
Yes, it's based in the real world. This was the Falcon 9 launch price that I could come up with in the amount of time I was willing to spend on a shitpost. I agree that launch prices will continue to come down, but launchers will always be mass-constrained and launching lead spheres into orbit will never be a practical solution.
IIRC the CPUs are much less susceptible to damage when powered-off ? So have a bunch of them in cold standby or even as additional pluggable modules on missions with humans on board & swap to good ones when needed? :)
If the only thing that effectively shields these processors from radiation is lead, concrete etc (per earlier comments), what design changes / quality improvements can compensate?
You don't need to block gamma radiation completely to increase the electronics reliability :)
Maybe you could improve the system availability considerably by a bit of gamma radiation protection combined with some more parallelism of the components ..
The point is that shielding turns a single high energy particle that would otherwise strike and probably destroy a single transistor, into a veritable spray of lower energy particles causing bit flips or worse all over the circuit. This spray of particles can be stopped... with 1.3 feet of lead shielding.
"Hollman also found that creativity got him a long way. He discovered, for example, that changing the seals on some readily available car wash valves
made them good enough to be used with rocket fuel."
I have seen some people who decide to keep moving forward with whatever they have at the time. Sure what they produce is way less than perfect, but what they produce is way ahead of what everybody else is doing.
Perhaps the key is to be relentless, and resourceful.
Considering the political views of Elon Musk, it might be worth noting that his biographer is not the same Vance who is currently running for election as vice-president of the USA!
From an article for this I remember one more interesting side effects of this approach - the flight computer ends up as a generic x86/ARM board that the engineers can just have on their desk during development. Previously the dev boards would use the same rad hard chips and would be as expensive and scarse as flight hardware, resulting in much harder development & engineers having much less experience with the real hardware.
But it turns out, it doesn't matter how many redundant backup diesel generators you've got if a 45-foot wave comes along and they're all left underwater.
I always thought the liquid sloshing would be one of the hardest to simulate (considering how chaotic fluid mechanics is). Interestingly, I think this caused the 2nd Falcon launch to fail (the LOX sloshing).
It is difficult, but there are modeling approaches that work, such as VoF (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volume_of_fluid_method). Basically, in addition to velocity, pressure, temperature, etc., you store an additional scalar in each cell of your computational mesh representing the liquid's volume fraction. Then, you solve an additional equation to transport that scalar.
Solving the Navier-Stokes equations numerically in 3D is very time-consuming, even on HPC clusters, not to mention the additional modeling required for multiphase flows. Your answer implies that the solutions are obtained almost instantaneously, which is not the case.
I think the reason these kind of simulations are fast enough is because they are very coarse and approximate. Don't think of asking how exactly the foam swirls around the individual longerons, more like a very rough estimation of which side of the tank the liquid is slumped to. Remember it doesn't have to be "exact" just close enough to be useful.
By their very nature model predictive controllers operate in a world where not everything is perfectly modelled. Engineers do their best and whatever is left is the "error" the controller is trying to deal with.
Maybe they don't need to model the fluid dynamics, they just need to detect the mass movement / acceleration forces caused by it, and use those sensor inputs to inform a picture that's fed into their correction thursting.
Sort of like how you can balance a few pitchers of beer on a tray in your hand by remaining aware of the weight, even when people remove one! hahaha :)
Still if there indeed is "free" mass moving about, you need to make sure your control inputs don't make it slosh harder, so you compensate for that, so it sloshes even harder, etc - basically avoiding oscilation. :)
Oh no, apologies if that was the impression I gave!! I actually perform CFD simulations in HPC clusters, and in fact I'm an admin of the small cluster at my research institute =)
These are indeed heavy computations. What I meant is that VoF is one additional equation to be solved besides the N-S equations (either filtered as in LES or Reynolds-averaged as in RANS), the energy equation, your turbulence model equations, and so on. Certainly, not instantaneous at all, but simply an additional "simple" model that we can hook into our current way of doing CFD.
So, my point was, sloshing is a problem that we know how to simulate, although certainly you need HPC resources. Though, looking at those 100k NVIDIA H100 Elon has, I guess they have them! :P
It really depends on the problem to be solved (domain size, complexity of physical phenomena such as turbulence model, heat transfer, acoustics, multiphase flows, combustion, etc., number of time steps required...). In our case we perform for instance simulations of turbomachinery acoustics that can take 3-4 weeks running in a few hundreds of CPU cores, combustion acoustics simulations that can take a week or two running in 1k-2k cores...
They don't need to solve the Navier-Stokes equations, they don't care how the fluid is actually behaving, they just need to approximate how the mass is moving within a margin of error that the control system can handle.
Maybe the tank is just not a large hollow structure but contains fins/compartments/whatever to restrict the sloshing motion and it's not that big a contribution to the overall motion.
If it's no stronger than a sudden wind gust, it's just something the controller has to be able to take care of without a heads-up.
I remember a very similar anecdote about Von Braun & the early Juno/Jupiter rockets - with someone pointing out issues with sloshing on a press conference & Von Braun brushing it off as insignificant.
Then the next launch crashed due to slosh induced oscillation - and the one rocket after that had anti-slosh baffles. ;-)
At least for the retro-propulsive landing burn, I think the modeling problem is probably aided by the high G-forces that must keep the fuel very close to the bottom of the tank. Even before re-light the booster is falling near terminal velocity (I think?), so the fuel is likely sitting at the bottom.
I think it's a huge problem when re-lighting the engines in orbit, though.
Also IIRC the massive main tanks in Super Heavy should be basically empty at landing & the landings propelants come from a set of small header tabks that are near the central axis of the vehicle & arr completely full. This should reduce or even fully remove sloshing issues at landing time.
I think some Kerbel Space Program players have attempted to approximate the liquid sloshing as an inverted single or double pendulum problem inside the rocket that the control algorithm has to take into consideration in addition to the primary control of the rocket.
Has it been considered to spin the fuel via some centrifuge mechanism as a way to remove sloshing from the equation, or is that more complex/expensive/error-prone than just predicting it via simulation?
I'm thinking we will eventually end up with "active fuel management" techniques like this for in space vehicles.
Bug tanks make sense there & they might not be always full. So I can imagine all kind of interesting ways you can work with the fuel in zero go to avoid not only slosh but also the need for ullage thrusters. Eq. some programmable nozzles using in-tank gas to nudge liquid fuel blobs to move in the right direction. Or even some nets or bags that herd in the fuel in the middle of the tank + prevent it from directly touching the side, reducing boil-off or refrigeration requirements. :)
Interestingly cheap redundancy is also how life does things for the most part. Most biological organisms just replicate a lot to guarantee success, so it's clearly a good strategy and an efficient use of energy.
People don't realize how powerful applied math (especially in the areas you've mentioned) has become. Same tools can be applied to people in the ad tech/social media.
Just as a note, Space Engineers has a mod that accounts for fuel in the tanks and also various orbital mods. If one feels inclined to try it for themselves ;)
as someone who absolutely loves SE -- please don't.
the orbital and planetary mechanics kind of suck. They're meant to provide a decent 'arcade realism' for the sake of player/player interactions and pvp/pve.
if you want to experience fuel slosh/weight during a vertical ascent/descent go with kerbal. It models a lot of that stuff without mods -- and mods can make the model even more accurate.
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. ;)
"instead of using $100,000+ radiation-hardened aerospace/defense grade chips"
Well, that makes perfect sense considering that both the spaceport infrastructure, and the booster need to do their calculation on the ground level instead of the highly radiated environment that is space. However, for the rockets themselves, which happen to reach that harsh environment, they may use more resilient and expensive hardware in the future, after passing over the current "let it splash in the Indian Ocean" development and testing phases.
Less than 5% of a full load. Any extra fuel you brought to the edge of space and back is lost performance, so substantial efforts are made to minimize this lost mass fraction.
>probably involve some kind of fast numerical fluid simulation
Sometimes even a simple approach can work. On Apollo they developed (at the time cutting-edge) passive RC filter networks, to avoid the control system "exciting" the rocket at frequencies of the slosh/bend/torsion modes.
I never thought of using fluid dynamics in the rocket stabilization algorithm—maybe it's something that could be useful to prevent many of the accidents involving liquid-transport trucks
I have been told by people who worked on them that you get radiation hardened aerospace/defence grade chips by backing off the clock speed about 20% to give signal stabilization slightly longer time. I can understand the population being confused about this but industry being confused seems to have more to do with regulatory capture and beaurocratic moats which SpaceX does seem to be bypassing.
You also have to add massive amounts (relatively) of static sink by approaches like ‘silicon on insulator’ to prevent energetic electrons from hopping into the transistor layer.
> SpaceX control system also has to compensate for the fuel moving inside their rockets so the control algorithms probably involve some kind of fast numerical fluid simulation.
Surely this isn't necessary with a small enough sensor granularity or whatever the terminology is. You can have very dumb software if it reacts quickly enough to changes in perception.
(Not an engineer either) My understanding is that it's been done before on smaller scales but having a giant piston in the tank requires a good seal, railings to keep it straight, and overall way too much mass and rigidity. Consider that the tank walls are only a few millimeters thick.
Instead, it's more common to use gasses injected at the top of the tank to push the liquid to the bottom. Falcon 9 uses helium. Starship uses https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autogenous_pressurization as well as small header tanks for the landing propellants.
That's amazing footage, and you're right about the perspective: from the official feed the distances seem compressed compared to what we see in this footage.
I know the control algorithms are the mind-blowing part here but,
does anyone have any literature about how the Rocket localized itself with respect to the chopstick arms? It must've been some combination of GPS and Radar pings to the arms?
And then the onboard IMU to make sure it hits it straight.
Great question! Could just be Real-Time Kinematic (RTK) GPS like someone mentioned. Essentially the landing arms know their position very precisely and they measure the tiny errors in GPS data, and send that correction data live to the rocket in real-time as it's landing. Once the rocket gets very very close it could also just be using vision systems to zero-in on exactly where the chopsticks are.
To speculate more, they could also be using something like ultra-wide band positioning. This relies on the same time-of-flight principle as GPS but instead of using satellites in orbit to provide the precise time information you rely on various nearby ground stations. Would only be useful right at the final approach, the last couple hundred meters, but it's another way they could get very very precise position information. (fun fact: Ultra Wide band positioning is also how iPhones can locate AirTags with centimeter accuracy)
Why bother with GPS or other "absolute" coordinate systems? Once the rocket's in close, all that matters is relative position and orientation of the rocket with respect to the landing apparatus. Eg, if you had many sensors in known locations on the rocket and many sensors in known locations on the landing apparatus, and you could measure relative positions between all pairs of these sensors, you could get extremely precise relative position/orientation information without beaming information to satellites or whatever.
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?
I thought the same, screamed out "ouch that doesn't look good!" right before the catch.
The last part of the live stream they showed footage from a different angle and there it didn't look too bad though! For sure controlled.
Scott Manley put out a tweet that they went down towards a non-tower position until they were at three engine controlled burn, and only then did the side shift.
A clip from some news program popped up on YouTube, just a two minutes clip of the catch, I was convinced that it was reversed. The fact that this is possible, that they made it work is nothing short of amazing.
When Musk first proposed this, I thought he was crazy. It seemed like something a school boy would draw up. Now I think this will become routine and forgettable after a few more successes. Is there a word for that - something out of fiction becoming mundane?
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.
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?
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'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?
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.
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.
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.
Going to Mars is relatively easy compared to setting up a self-sustaining human civilization on Mars, which will be thousands of times harder. Many people don't understand the scale and scope of the biosphere services the Earth provides to humans free of charge, though, and forget that little of that exists on Mars, other than gravity.
It's difficult to overstate how important the milestone of catching the booster is. Now we have a reusable rocket an order of magnitude larger than anything we've had before, and the cost of kg to orbit just nosedived.
Second stage reuse seems the far more challenging problem. Other companies should have reusable boosters soon but if significant amounts of Starship continue to ablate on the way down they could be faced with a disposable Starship competing with smaller and cheaper second stages that are well sized for typical payloads. We already knew boosters can be flown back to launch sites reliably with high accuracy. We don't know if it is possible to make rapidly reusable thermal protection systems that can operate on an orbital vehicle of Starship's size until it is demonstrated.
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.
They're still having some significant burn through problems on the upper stage fins during reentry it looks like. Way better than last time but the top part of the fin was glowing far a while after the main reentry finished.
I think that catching a grain silo in mid air that fell in a semi-controlled way from effin low earth orbit is undeniably incredible.
SpaceX continues to blow me away with these unbelievably lofty ideas. I remember seeing their "grasshopper" flights years ago and they blew it up because they couldn't land it at the time, who knew within a few years they'd be doing this.
I think they still have "Grasshopper" (the custom test unit) sat outside at McGregor, it was F9R Dev1 (a modified F9 booster) that they had to destruct after one of the engines failed mid-hop.
They were originally going to do high-altitude tests with an "F9 dev2" (similar to some of the early starship test launches) - but they gave up and just did some testing with real landing Falcon 9s instead.
Strategically this is huge for the US and NATO. Being able to put orders of magnitude more payload in orbit at a fraction of the cost of the competition is a huge advantage in controlling space. Starlink and starshield are already years ahead of what china and russia has, starship is going to widen that gap even further.
Amen! If it turns out we can’t make humans a multiplanetary species in any reasonable timeframe, at least we can make the last few decades of livable earth climate a friendly atmosphere for US business interests.
The most expensive part is to support the risk and cost of research & development. Sure, that renders you the first place for a while, but expect others to move easier (and thus faster) after you marked the trail.
Wow, I knew they were going to try to catch the booster this time but I really didn’t think it was going to work on the first try, I was just hoping they didn’t destroy the launch tower in the process. Congrats to the SpaceX team, absolutely amazing! Hope y’all are celebrating
That was crazy, 50% of me thought as it was coming in, especially as it pitched towards the tower, "they've overcompensated and are going to bring the whole tower down" but they absolutely nailed it.
Even without the catch step, I always feel like their boosters are coming down way too fast way too late, with engines reigniting startlingly close to surface. Never ceases to surprise me.
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.
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.
The dominant variable is how often they can reuse the stages. Last I heard Musk was targeting dozens of reuses for the upper stage and hundreds for the booster. If they are short of the cost per kg goes up.
> What does Starship reusability mean for $/kg to LEO?
All we can say is under $1,000/kg. Which is conservative, that limit being about two thirds that of Falcon Heavy’s theoretical cost to LEO in a reüsable configuration.
The catch looks amazing, but one thing I don't understand is why SpaceX needs the technology to catch a booster they've already demonstrated the ability to land boosters on barges. Is the arm more cost effective to scale compared to a barge?
This booster is much, much larger than the Falcon 9 first stages that land on barges. It's ~70 metres high, versus ~40 metres for the Falcon 9 first stage, and weighs about 275 000 kg compared to the ~20 000 kg of the Falcon 9 first stage.
In short, it would require such huge and heavy landing legs and landing barges that it probably wouldn't be feasible.
Weight. Legs weigh a lot. That's dead weight for a launch system, and it serves only to reduce payload to orbit.
For Falcon 9 that's not that big a deal because they're NOT trying to reuse the second stage. Whereas with Starship they need more fuel to recover the ship, and that means they need to save weight elsewhere to avoid losing too much payload to orbit.
It takes time for the barges to return the booster to the launch pad. They want to be able to launch Starship, have the booster land back at the launch pad, have the arms set it back down on the ground, and recycle the booster for another launch in just a few hours. Then the arms can be used to stack the booster and the next payload on the launch platform.
Awesome achievement. Watched it with my sister at home and brought back memories from the 60s in front of the B&W TV watching some of the early amazing flights and landings.
Question for hackers: How does this reorient space programs world-wide? If I were a politician or technocrat in China, Russia, or the EU this would feel like an inverse and intense Sputnik moment — “holy sh—- we have to up our game!”
Eventually it convinces everybody that "quantity in space" is possible. Moving to projects where you don't have to count every ounce. It opens the path to wild schemes, in amount of weight that could be moved.
And why "eventually"? SpaceX should have already convinced people of that. Yeah it's not yet in production, but the momentum and progress have been amazing to witness.
(The previous one was convincing everyone that there was lots of space for tech improvement. Wake up call achieved just a few years ago also by SpaceX.)
It doesn't. It makes one or two mega-constellations cheaper for their operators and therefor more profitable, but no one except telecom and sensor platforms really want orbit. It's useless for most things, far worse than working on the planet's surface where all the labor and materials already are.
Incredible achievement, my American friends! Congrats! We, Europeans, can only feel jealous, but hey at least we have free [but comically broken and dysfunctional] healthcare, so, there's that. I hope you'll bring a lot more progress to humankind beyond space exploration!
The long-term goal is becoming a multi-planet species, so in that context it's not about countries. Go Earth!
(also, while NASA has been generally helpful to SpaceX's efforts, American FAA bureaucrats have managed to inject unnecessary delays and uncertainty into the process (in addition to some necessary delays).
When I was visiting the space center in Huntsville, Indiana, I had a chance to talk with one of the volunteers. His name was Brooks Moore (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O3hudRA3yL8), and he had been the director of navigation systems for the Apollo (and other) projects.
The first SpaceX barge landing had just taken place, and I asked him what he thought. He got a faraway look in his eyes, and agreed that it had been spectacular. For those guys, it must have seemed like all of their dreams were coming true.
As in life, when a person is on a road to nowhere, it’s the homecoming that’s sweet. The only thing more exciting than an Earth landing will be a moon or Martian landing. Or the in-orbit fuel consolidation docking, if only because it will be a huge milestone.
Can I hijack this thread for an almost completely unrelated question that I have observed in nearly every simulation of movement in space, even from sources like NASA and SpaceX which “should know better”?
And I’m mostly asking this out of scientific curiosity, not as a criticism.
Why do they always portray movement in space by showing stars moving past the view at variable rates, or even at all?
The opening screen of this video while you’re waiting for the feed to start shows stars moving that seem to be only feet away, and only a few inches in diameter. Like little orbs of light just passing outside the window.
Isn’t this highly unrealistic, for even extremely fast travel in space?
I would imagine at most you would see very slow movement of a very static field of stars. But every depiction in sci-fi, video games, and other simulations like in this video insist on making it seem like space is full of tiny 6-12” stars floating only feet away from each other.
Is there any explanation where this could actually be considered realistic that I’m not thinking of?
I’m just a lowly software engineer, so my expertise in this area is null. But from a basic understanding of stars and physics, this seems unrealistic.
Admittedly, I guess it wouldn’t be very exciting to view movement in space in a way that I’m imagining would be realistic, and maybe that’s the only explanation there is/needs to be.
But I guess I’m thinking that there would be enough people at SpaceX (for example) to scream “this is not even close to realistic!” for something like that to not make it to production, even if it is more exciting to watch.
As others have said, you're correct. But one reason for doing this, beyond just looking cool, is to give a visual cue for motion. The aim isn't primarily to look realistic, but to make it as easy as possible to interpret the outputs. Motion cues help with this.
As an example, if you're watching an airshow against a clear blue sky, especially filmed with a long lens where you can't see the ground, it is very hard to understand what's actually happening because you can only see attitude changes, but not the velocity vector. Add just a few clouds in the background and the impression is very different.
I’m guessing when making an artistic depiction of something going very fast in space, that sort of parallax helps? The goal of consumer content (including the ones by spacex) isn’t to be realistic, it’s to entertain
That said, “the expanse” is an exception here - they make it look as realistic as possible, including the battles where ships don’t even see each other. Stars barely move on it too
You're correct, it's hilariously unrealistic (IIRC requires actual superluminal speed), but people have been conditioned to accept it by various scifi media.
> Is there any explanation where this could actually be considered realistic that I’m not thinking of?
You could record the full trip, and then speed the record up. What the point to watch at thousand years of the record with slowly changing picture, if you can watch it in a few minutes.
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 just quit my job at a SaaS. What am I doing with my life... The SpaceX team just caught the biggest rocket in history with a giant arm, we all need to dream bigger!
Very inspiring, glad I woke up to watch it. Congratulations to the SpaceX team. This is what competition looks like. It’s funny how last decade SpaceX had to sue the government to get more launches.
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.
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.
Update: SpaceX has set the booster back down on the launch mount and reconnected the "quick disconnect" hoses that fill it with propellant before launch. If they refilled it with propellant they'd be close to launching it again! Presumably they will be draining it instead.
Apparently the rails that catch the booster can translate in and out relative to the "chopstick" arms so the booster can be positioned and rotated to match the launch mount after landing.
anybody not watching these live better be delivering a baby,or saving someones life
its a very short list of things that should take precidence over what are the most astounding things happening for our species,ever
SpaceX's Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy have already revolutionized the space industry with their reusable first stage boosters and rocket engines. This advance in rocket design has resulted in the cost to launch one kilogram of payload to orbit from approximately $15,000 in the pre-SpaceX era, to around $1,400 with the Falcon Heavy.
This graph shows the incredible impact of SpaceX on the volume of rocket launches, with an exponential rise in recent years:
With Starship, SpaceX is striving to make rockets fully reusable, which, if they succeed, will transform human civilization by radically reducing launch costs and enabling large-scale space exploration and industry. The kinds of possibilities this opens up include economically viable permanent lunar bases, Mars colonization, and revolutionary industries like asteroid mining.
What is the object beside the rocket at 37:49 to 38:02 ? Is that debris ? It seems to be falling with, then away from the rocket. (it looks like a small glowing ring to the right)
The engineers at spaceX are amazing, and I'll admit I envy their tenacity and genius.
The amount of progress we have seen in rocketry and space travel in the last decade is mind blowing, I never thought I would see this in my lifetime.
Edit: Decided to give it a shot and applied for a backend software engineering position at SpaceX. I'm not sure if it will be noticed, but its worth a shot. I may not be a rocket scientist, but it would be great to contribute using the knowledge I do have.
Maybe 'the Jetsons' and 'the Flintstones' aren't as far apart as we think, us being people who like to think we are witnessing 'the Jetsons' now. Maybe that is just a relevant distinction.
Maybe those two descriptors are much closer than they would appear to some outside observers. Maybe it's really just 'Flintstones part 1;' and 'Flintstones part 2', right now.
Or...
Our 'Flintstones' was already 'Jetsons' compared to everything else in this observable universe, which winds up mostly being just peat bogs on Dagobah, comparatively, and we're just inching out the icing on the cake at this point.
This is what makes it bittersweet. So many comments here talking about this being progress for 'humanity'. I may be cynical, but most of humanity will get no benefit from any of these accomplishments. This is technology owned by and ultimately in service of a minuscule fraction of humanity.
Ok. I will admit this. SpaceX Engineering is making me feel regret for not choosing Aerospace Engineering back in Undergrad. Oh well, That Tower is almost within Civil-Structural Engineering.
In the video you can see the engines light (reflecting off the metal control flap and water) and the ship make a soft touchdown on the water. It then tips over and the tanks pop from the force of smacking the water sideways.
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...
Imagine the number of amazing space telescopes that we are going to get! When it's cheep to launch a 10m diameter object into space, so many possibilites open up.
For things like that, they could build special versions of the star ship which remain in orbit as the housing. They would need no flaps, no tiles, just the 6 engines and the fuel tank. The body of the starship itself would be the telescopes tube.
Sure, thats what they did with the JWST. But that ist complex and expensive. A custom Starship could be the cheapest way to get telescopes up to 9m mirror size into space as you can assemble everything on the ground and you don't need a separate housing.
And here I was blown away by the ignorance of many of the questions. Why no landing legs? Why is this more impressive than the other rocket landings? What’s the thingy that fell off during separation?
Sometimes I need to remind myself that other people have lives, I guess. XD
Does anyone know what this circular thing is at 5:36 mark in the below video under the booster? It's like a piece which separated and keeps falling off.
Can someone explain to me why this is more impressive than landing the rocket? To a layman like me, it looks very similar - the thing looks just like a rocket but without a pointy tip, and on the way down I don't understand why difference that matters.
(I mean I still think it's mind blowing, because I think landing a rocket is also mind blowing)
(1) Much larger than any previous rocket landing, (2) This rocket carried no landing gear (more efficient - landing gear is heavy), (3) This rocket landed right back at the place it needs to be to launch again - right on its launch tower - which in a routine situation might make it much faster to prepare it for the next relaunch. (4) It's yet another step in control prowess - impressive in itself.
I must say though "right on its launch tower" is fun and all...
but things would have to get pretty extreme in the "routine" dimension for that to be very useful. If there are 20 first stages and 5 land/launch towers, for a first stage that only spends an hour in flight in between inspections.... well are you going to keep them parked on a scarce launch tower for maintenance? The towers with fill/launch infrastructure (such as reinforced concrete, fuel tanks, cold filling system, deluge water system) become the bottleneck. It's more likely then that the 1st stage lands, is safed, then is taken a couple hundred yards away for inspection and maintenance while the next in line is moved to be stacked for the next launch. The inspection / maintenance would have to be truly minimal (think airliner) to keep it right there on its own relaunch tower.
"No landing gear" is more key, compared to Falcon 9 - because of the effort toward minimal launch cost.
It is a rocket. The biggest difference with the Falcon 9 first stage is that this one is about 6 times as big (diameter of 9m vs 3.7m), and that catching it with the tower requires a much higher precision in landing location. The drone ships that Falcon 9 lands on are about 90 x 50 meter. To catch it with the tower, they need to be accurate to within a few meters.
The big advantage of catching it with the tower is that it'll (eventually) allow them to put another Starship on top, refuel and launch again within hours, as opposed to the weeks it currently takes for Falcon 9.
The critical differences between Falcon 9 first stage and the Starship booster is that Starship booster lands using 3 engines rather than 1, and can throttle them down much further. 3 vs 1 gives Starship more directional control for precise landing (critical for this "catch" maneuver), and throttling allows it to hover, as it does right before the "catch".
But as far as I know, one Merlin engine produces more thrust than the empty booster weighs which means they have to time things perfectly to get to zero velocity exactly at the ground.
Super heavy can hover and even go down by throttling down more. This gives them more control for the landing and don’t have to time it exactly perfectly
The tower is also how they plan to perform maintenance and re-staging for another launch. The tower can place it back on the launch structure or lower it down to the ground if it needs to be transported back to an enclosure for extensive repairs but a lot of work is just done with it at the tower. I imagine the goal is to eventually get to an automated system that catches the booster, inspects it for damage, clears it for relaunch, positions it on the launch structure, grabs another Sharship second stage and stacks it and then refuels the whole system and launches as soon as possible.
This booster is significantly larger than anything landed on an orbital launch before. Here is a size comparison, previous largest landed orbital rocket stage is the SpaceX Falcon 9 (three of them launch together as Falcon Heavy) on the left. Starship is on the right.
Landing via tower catch versus on a pad is advantageous because the weight of adding retractable landing legs to such a large rocket would be significant.
It’s also already on the tower that it launches from, which drastically reduces the expense and complexity of setting it up for its next launch, making it easier and faster to reuse.
From what I understand, it reduces the turnover dramatically. In theory the booster should be refuelled, new second stage mounted on top and ready to go for another flight. So could cut down from weeks to days/hours. That's significant.
I think landing a booster is just as impressive. It's just that nobody's done this before, so it's exciting! Plus it's a lot bigger and part of a fully reusable config which has huge implications for space travel.
This one seems way harder than the others which land on legs and on a relatively larger circular landing pad, this one needs to nail the tower and its arms.
Stage 1 sucessfully caught. That was pretty incredible. I remember watching the Falcony Heavy launch when both boosters landed in sync.
It's hanging pretty high in the air, I assume so the engines do less damage to the pad. One wonders how they're going to get it down. Do the chopsticks lower on the tower?
They'll lower it to the launch mount... the catch arms are effectively a crane. But I wonder if it's more "toasty" than they were expecting? There were some fires going at catch (those look out, at least on external camera views) and the engines are still a bit.... smokey. Don't know if that's normal... or if they were expecting it.
My hunch is that they don't put it down for awhile. If there's still an issue were there are fires lingering inside, my hunch is they want that as far from the ground infrastructure as possible.
The fire I mostly saw was coming from the quick disconnect ports and related plumbing. Also, there was fire on the other side, close to where there was part of a chine was clearly missing. There were a couple other things, too.
Wasn't perfect, some things to work out... but still pretty damn good.
Remember on the first launch when, on the way up, there were hydraulic units exploding off the side and the engines started exploding taking out more hydraulic units? Heh that and all the concrete flying up on ignition was like watching a heavy metal music video.
There was a lot of smoke coming out of the bottom after the catch. I was worried about an internal fire but it’s since stopped. The glow from the engine mount on re-entry was amazing. The fire on landing had me worried too I was expecting it to grow but put itself out eventually.
Yes, the chopsticks lower and raise. They will lower the tower onto a transport vehicle and send it back to the bay for examination, and then possible reflight.
Amazing achievement, but also reminds me that what NASA and its contractors accomplished during the 1960s still stands with current day systems engineering.
The 3rd Saturn V launch put three men into orbit around the Moon. The 6th landed two of them there.
This chopstick catch was really impressive. I had my money on them managing it the first time. I haven't been so excited since the dual landing of their Falcon 9 boosters.
This was insanely cool to watch. And on the first try!
As a complete lay person with little to no physics knowledge: what stops the use of something dumb like a parachute, or even wings and landing gear, to "land" the booster? I assume it is impractical (since they don't do it), but what are the actual particulars that stop it from working? While super cool to watch, it seems crazy that plucking it out of the air like that is the best way to preserve the booster for reuse.
Parachutes give little or no control over where and how the rocket lands, are unreliable (unfurling fabric behaves chaotically; modern spacecraft still don't have 100% reliability on their parachutes), and are surprisingly heavy.
Wings and landing gear are useless extra weight during launch, and excess weight on the booster has a super-linear reduction weight delivered to orbit. (the Tyranny of the Rocket Equation)
During the 1960s, NASA investigated using inflatable Rogallo Wings (basically hang gliders) to land the Gemini capsule. It worked fine, but was more complicated than parachutes, and re-use was not one of the goals of the Gemini or Apollo programs.
None of those give much margin for error on landing. Without any kind of propulsion, there's no option to come to a hover or do another go-around if the landing isn't going well. Space Shuttle pilots had to do extensive training in simulators for the landing because they only got one shot at it during the mission.
Propulsive landing doesn't require any hardware that isn't already on the launch vehicle, only a little excess propellant. (And it is a small amount; Super Heavy is like a soda can that's full of liquid at launch and only has a swig at the bottom during landing.) Propulsive landing gives Falcon 9 and Super Heavy the ability to overcome wind and other weather conditions to make pinpoint landings. Engine throttling gives Super Heavy the ability to hover, so it has a huge margin for error when coming in for a landing.
Super Heavy could have had legs, like Falcon 9, but it has such a huge payload capacity that they can simply choose to always launch with enough propellant to come back to the tower, and it saves a lot of flying weight and complexity by simply not having them. The arms on the tower can be massively overbuilt to ensure however much reliability SpaceX wants.
> As a complete lay person with little to no physics knowledge: what stops the use of something dumb like a parachute, or even wings and landing gear, to "land" the booster?
The main advantage is that you don't need to spend any of your payload mass budget on a parachute, or wings and landing gear. The secondary advantage over a parachute is that you don't need to fish it out of seawater and make your refurbishment process more of a pain in the ass.
At the very least, reducing the number of concerns on the rocket is definitely worthwhile. They are going to have an engine in any case, and using just that and nothing else on the rocket itself simplifies testing and reduces risk. The tower can have a separate testing and there's no way something that happens on the way to orbit and back breaks the tower.
Wings, parachute, etc... All very easy to break or burn at hypersonic speeds, and very chaotic to control. It probably (very probably) wouldn't be possible to land back exactly where the rocket launched on wings or chutes - that would probably need an extremely long and wide runway, but compare the size of Starship to the Space Shuttle... It's like braking a toy car vs braking an actual truck.
The Starship second stage is surprisingly not all that heavy compared to the 78t Shuttle orbiter dry mass, despite the many-fold difference in volume and payload, plus Starship needing to be a legitimate second stage rather than just an orbiter.
It mostly comes down to reducing extra weight. You have to carry those wings and landing gear upwards, which reduces useful payload weight. But having the booster right where it started also helps with reusability. No need to transport the booster from a landing strip back to the starting table
Does anyone know of a live map where we can see the trajectory of launches? Wondering if starship went above my head during reentry, but I can't find the info
This is truly an amazing feat! Congratulations to the SpaceX team.
Can someone explain to me exactly WHY it's such a big deal though? Like subjectively I can see it's incredible but while watching the video there were enormous applauses at points I knew were a big deal but I lacked the understanding of physics to truly appreciate.
The current Falcon rocket always expends a stage and lands a stage. Starship will land both stages. Also Starship is far larger and in rocketry there is something called the square cube law that means bigger is better. So its far more efficient. That leads to far cheaper mass to orbit costs.
In order to land not just the first stage but also the second stage more fuel will have to be carried on the ascent phase just to enable the recovery phase. This then necessitates weight savings elsewhere to avoid payload to orbit being cut way back. SpaceX chose to remove the landing system from both, the first and second stages (both because, after all if you can eliminate the landing system from one stage then you can eliminate it from the other).
This and other weight savings will enable high payload to orbit in a fully reusable launch platform.
Landing without legs requires something like this catch system -- something never done before, and clearly very difficult to do.
For humans to have any reasonable presence somewhere else in our solar system (moon, mars, etc.) we need the ability to launch tons (literally tons) of stuff to orbit and to the destination. and we need to launch it often to do anything in a reasonable amount of time. the only way to do that is to make reusable launch systems. SpaceX's Falcon 9 has aced that for satellites (see Starlink and everything else they've launched). The Starship launch system is capable of launching a significantly larger payload, ~20 times more. What they demonstrated yesterday is that a launch system that is capable of getting us anywhere in the solar system can be reusable. Huge accomplishment.
Question I can't find the answer to anywhere: considering that SpaceX already had other ways of re-using boosters, why are they doing this?
Is it to explore more options? Or because it's faster to re-use the booster if it's already in place? Were the other approaches not satisfactory, perhaps? Or no longer applicable due to size?
First because the rocket is lighter without landing legs. Second because they're aiming for rapid reusability, they want to tower to catch the rocket, lower it to the launch mount, and get another Starship stacked on it.
mass that's on the tower that was moved to the rocket is no longer on the rocket, which means the rocket can carry more fuel/payload. hence the tower catching the rocket instead of the rocket having heavy landing gear.
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.
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.
Sorry for the newbie rocket question: Blast off happens around 33:00 in that video. The rocket appears to be vertically still (does not move) for the first 4 to 4.5 seconds. Is it held in place, or are not enough engines burning (yet) to induce take-off?
While I cannot say if it moves immediately, it definitely moves within 2 seconds. It does not appear to move because it is so massive at more than 100 meters.
What parts of this can be reused? I bet the engine is OK, but seems like the sides of the ... tube ... were pretty roughed up. I guess that's probably the cheapest part of the assembly though.
Everything except the stage connector ring (which uses pyro bolts I believe) should be directly reusable, after an inspection, light brushing, and refueling / recharging.
Maybe the bottom uses some ablative material, then a new coat of it needs to be applied / attached.
All the internals should have enough resource for likely dozens of launches, if Falcon-9 is any indication.
They did pull the bottom of the previous booster out. On the webcast they mentioned adjusting the landing maneuver for the ship to be a bit softer in case they decide to recover it too.
For extra context: that "3× deeper" makes costs seriously explode. People do know how to engineer for that depth, but it's a lot of effort and there's pretty much no commercial market. For shallower stuff there's oil rigs, deep-sea cables, seafloor mining, even just tourism… but at some point it just peters out and only research vessels tackle the depth.
(source: friend of mine works at a UK university doing deep-sea vehicles)
(Their vehicles don't even go that deep, but again that was the point I was trying to make… even in research, the very deep stuff is rare and a "big project" that ends up fanned out ⇒ MRIL made only the cameras for a 4km vessel…)
It's more of a financial question, do you want to shell out for some chance at it. And Russia and China can build their own engines, SpaceX is very good but not like a century ahead good.
(If anything, I'd be more worried about North Korea or Pakistan getting their hands on stuff…)
Either way the risk is the shit that's left floating, if they don't fish it out it'll randomly wash up in Madagascar or so…
I mean, yes [0]. It's probably the main reason SpaceX went to effort to recover [1] all the engines of the previous booster (IFT-4), which landed in accessible, shallow water in the Gulf of Mexico. The Raptor engines hold valuable secrets, particularly to China who are trying to clone a lot of SpaceX things.
The CIA did something very similar to this in the Cold War [2], though they used a boat instead of a submarine.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akula-class_submarine#Operatio... ("In August 2012, the news media reported that another Akula-class submarine operated in the Gulf of Mexico purportedly undetected for over a month, sparking controversy within U.S. military and political circles...")
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.
To be honest FSD is way harder. The platform doesn't occasionally have a road closure sign or a new traffic light or a guy unloading his van or an emergency vehicle with its hazards on.
Don't get me wrong the engineering and physics are crazy ugly, but it's at least consistent within a range. Humans are messy, unpredictable, unreliable and chaotic.
If anything, the last 2 flights have shown how good a decisions it was to go with steel. The thermal reserves seem to be really large. While not as bad as with the previous flight, there was still significant leakage of hot air between the starhip and the flap. But it didn't seem to cause significant damage, at least as far as for the landing. For complete reuse, they probably have to still improve that a bit.
It's not just cheaper, it's preserving capacity. Every pound of landing gear you carry has to be offset with fuel to lift it, and then that fuel has to have fuel to lift it and on and on.
Why can only Elon do stuff like this and not BlueOrigin or the hundreds of other aerospace startups? Does he just have a 1/100000000 combination of intelligence, tenacity, and directionality that can't be matched by anyone, even those trying to emulate him as closely as possible?
Isn't BlueOrigin going after at totally different market segment, I thought it was focused on things like space tourism and more "space base" type stuff? Also pretty sure BlueOrigin is almost all funded by Jeff B, SpaceX has a lot of external funding and focused on tangible markets vs just "people will want to do stuff in space" - I think it was only very recently they started to work with NASA.
> Isn't BlueOrigin going after at totally different market segment, I thought it was focused on things like space tourism
They have New Shepard, a crew-rated suborbital spacecraft, primarily targeted at tourism, but it has also done some science payloads for NASA, university and commercial clients.
But they also are doing a lot of non-tourism stuff: they designed and manufacture first stage engines for ULA’s new Vulcan launch vehicle; they have their own reusable orbital launch vehicle (New Glenn) due to launch soon (planned for next month, but might slip to early next year); they have a contract with NASA to build a lunar lander to compete with SpaceX’s; they are part of one of the teams NASA has chosen to compete for the contract to build a commercial ISS replacement.
And SpaceX is involved in space tourism too: both directly, and indirectly via resellers such as Axiom.
It is just that the most publicly noticeable thing Blue Origin has achieved is space tourism, which makes people think it is primarily a space tourism company; meanwhile, SpaceX has had numerous publicly visible achievements other than tourism, so people view tourism as just another thing they do, not their main thing.
Why do we think its Elon 'doing' this? Just curious, since it could just as well be that its the engineers and other leaders who could be the differentiator.
Because it's Elon who said "ok, build it." There's no one else except him with that power and/or the guts. Even landing a rocket the government had given up on, and no company was even trying until he did. People were calling the 'chopstick' landing system a dumb idea until today.
It's not like engineers don't come up with wild ideas all the time to their leadership, but is the leadership good enough to understand the good ideas from bad ones? Take the risk, spend billions to actually execute?
Elon has enough of a physics/engineering background to ask the right questions, understand the trades engineers put in front of him, and make the risk/reward calculation to make the right decisions the ends up winning.
To get what SpaceX has you need strong technical leadership all the way up the chain. Many companies don't. Their CEOs are experts in legal, PR, finance, etc... They make poor technical decisions.
I would agree with that if it weren't the case that the collection of engineers and other leaders working under Elon consistently outperform their competition in multiple domains.
> I almost had a heart attack when it looked like the booster was about to slowly careen into the tower
Same but it looks more dramatic on the feed we all got: on other vids the angle is different and although close it doesn't look it's going to crash into the tower.
basically they transfer equipment from the rocket to the landing tower so that the rocket can be lighter which is why they have to catch the rocket instead of the rocket landing by itself.
I don’t understand, the starship has to stand on something, and what ever that is in contact with ( arm or barge or land or whatever ) , needs to be as heavy, how they are saving weight ?
I went to follow this on the SpaceX YouTube channel since it is usually closer to real time.
It seems someone hijacked and played a video of the previous launch. Just as we got to launch time it cut to a fake badly dubbed speech by Elon Musk going on about Bitcoin, with a handy QR code.
This was a bit confusing but since it was 10 minutes in advance I managed to switch to another channel.
Still amazing, even if the video glitched at the key capture point.
And an hour later the Starship itself re entered to soft salty sea landing.
I don’t know how many prototype runs they need to do, I’m guessing they could stuff a shed load of Starlinks into the next one.
You need to look closely at the channel name in a URL and not just the branding signals on the page itself (logos, "presentation name"), etc. What you'll find is that the on-page channel name can be made pretty much anything as well as logos, banner's etc. But when you look at a URL that leads to the channel page, it's not the same and it doesn't have the verification check.
Note that it's just "spacex" and does have the verification mark. Also, SpaceX doesn't stream anything there (anymore): it's all just promotional videos... some of them are cool, but that's all they are. Nothing real-time. SpaceX only streams on X now, so I'd recommend one of the third party Youtube channels like https://www.youtube.com/@NASASpaceflight (which isn't NASA) if you'd prefer to stick to Youtube for such things.
I don't have any Apple products, so I couldn't give you any advice here.
My experience is that, while YouTube has a lot of content creators that I very much enjoy... I enjoy YouTube stewardship of the platform... less so.
I have an admittedly old Chromecast Ultra and Pixel Pro 8 phone which I usually use to control it. As they continue to upgrade the app and the service, they steadily make it worse and worse. Damn thing is almost unusable.
In the end, I think they may well be poorly product managing themselves into a position where they could be vulnerable to a more able, savvy, and competent competitor.
All this is to say you're probably just out of luck on being able to see these sorts of scams if you aren't already hip to them existing.
Speaking as a non-American. SpaceX just made one of the most significant technological leaps in the last decade. This is obviously hugely significant in many ways, including retaining the US military edge.
Yet the US administration hasn't congratulated SpaceX. Incredible.
There has been some kind of beef between Elon Musk and the Biden administration even before Musk's public right-wing turn. For example Biden has given speeches praising US EV vehicle manufacturers and not mentioning Tesla but mentioning all their competitors.
Lots of examples. And I’m not just talking about his general opinions on government response, but actual misinterpretations and misstatements of data that were straight-up wrong.
It was also a clear breaking point between Elon and local and state government in California over how local restrictions were going to affect Tesla’s factory in Fremont.
2. Kids essentially immune but elderly with existing conditions vulnerable, so family gatherings with close contact are risky. (https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1240758710646878208) ... seems correct?
3. He said "the coronavirus panic is dumb". (perhaps downplaying it too much, but in 2024 I think most people would say that the societal response such as not being allowed to go to a beach or park was absurd)
4. He wanted to keep factories open and for people to be allowed outside their homes. (similar to 3)
5. He posted: "Yes, reopen with care & appropriate protection, but don’t put everyone under de facto house arrest" (https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1255386895145672705) ... which also seems reasonable.
Did I miss anything or were his posts relatively uncontroversial with the benefit of hindsight? Personally, I was more concerned about covid than he was at the time, but I would say that his approach to it was more reasonable.
> That they will probably get to 0 cases. (he was wrong, but this prediction was made fairly early on when the data looked like this:
This was an incorrect interpretation of data that did not account for reporting lag in case numbers, which were actually increasing. It was a bad statement, a bad interpretation of data, and poor judgement to post it.
"Kids are essentially immune" and "Kids seem to be less affected" are two different statements. There are thousands of child deaths associated with COVID-19.
In March of 2020 we had very little characterization of this virus and its effects. Whether predictions were mostly right or mostly wrong, I think a prominent public figure making definitive statements about probably trending to zero or kids being "immune" was irresponsible. If nothing else, to me it makes him look dumb considering how much he downplayed the impact of the virus itself, how much he vilified the 'panic', and how many millions of deaths followed those statements.
> He wanted to keep factories open and for people to be allowed outside their homes.
Most people (in the US at least) were not trapped in their homes, that is an exaggeration. He wanted his factory to be kept open. I'm not sure whether he was right or wrong on that, but given that his opinions were based on at least some bad interpretations of data from above I don't think it was well considered. Basically all of his statements on COVID seem to correlate with a personal motivation to keep his factory and business running, rather than a consideration of actual public health impacts.
Anyway, my point above was not really to legislate what he was and was not correct about. My point was to highlight that his public "turn" into making strong political statements and clashing with government administration was not a new thing that started recently during the Biden administration. Right or wrong he very much clashed with the government response to COVID in 2020 and there's a fairly direct line you can draw between that clash and many of his current statements and positions.
I was watching a youtube stream with tens of thousands of viewers and 20 seconds before launch it switched to an AI generated video of Elon on stage talking about his "crypto currency program". It was so well executed and generated, it nearly felt real.
The violent anger I felt and still feel for scammers has ruined my day.
They do this every launch unfortunately. Youtube seems completely inept at stopping them. They make enough money to hire hundreds of thousands of fake accounts to subscribe.
Same here. I was actively showing the (scammed) live stream to my 4yo daughter, and had to switch back to the live version for yet another 10minutes of wait.
Quite the embarassment, I think I begin to understand how my parents feel when they are completely unaware of some technical aspects I try to explain, and how easy it would be to scam them. Seems like it is getting easier to scam me, too.
To be fair, once they switched to Fakelon, it was quite clear. But I started the same stream again later as the YT app does not properly highlight the channel's name before clicking.
At this point I am finding it hard to hate Elon Musk.
For everything he does that has annoyed me (like Gloating at people being bombed in the middle east) — his business acumen has completely unlocked for people what they we thought was impossible.
There should be nothing wrong with recognizing that any individual is a mix of things you're going to like and things you're not. That could be judged all the way to a mix of things which are morally correct, amoral, or immoral... but the reality is probably a mix.
It should be OK to praise the guy for those good traits and in turn to criticize the guy for what he does wrong: both in turn calling out the specific actions and less "the person". Its rare that demonizing someone is really appropriate or anything other than self-serving and we should see those that make that effort in that light.
Completely agree. But regardless of if we criticize or praise. He is gossip worthy. Going from being in a Marvel Movie as the architype of Iron Man, all the good things he has done, to recently jumping around at a rally of a madman, and kind of looking nuts himself.
It does beg comparison to the typical evil genius. He could literally be a villain from a Bond Movie, funding Specter. It's all fun and games. But just on surface, it is hard not to talk about him. He embodies too many sci-fi tropes.
On days like today, that was amazing to see. I'd like to think all the bad is overblown.
Yes he’s amazing and we’re lucky to live in a time and place where he can lead thousands of people that can do these things. He’s an example of what’s possible by a capitalist and how capitalism empowers individuals to shape the world and make it better for everyone. So naturally there’s a group of people trying to stop him due to envy and other copes.
Think you are confusing capitalism with variety of other political fields.
Capitalism does nothing to ensure personal/individual freedoms. There is no 'empowering'.
Technically slaves were also a valuable part of the capitalist system at the time. They were integral to the flow of capital, as they were an asset.
You can have Dictator/Authoritarian governments also be capitalist. Huge misunderstanding these days is thinking China is communist. They stopped being communist decades ago and are not as Capitalist as the US. But that doesn't help individuals that much.
Even today, Human Resources, is about 'humans' as capital, how to manage the human assets. Capitalism doesn't help the individual, the induvial is the resource to be mined.
China stopped being real communist because they were tired of starving. They are the proof that a centralized managed economy only leads to stagnation at best and mass death more commonly. Today they are a very competent cartel that takes a big on all free market production. Deng was mainly a genius and saved the country from Maoism.
Slavery existed well before capitalism and is economic system independent. Slavery occurs across a wide spectrum of economic systems today. It will always exist. It’s up to governments not capitalists to outlaw it. Capitalists need rules to play by.
Human Resources are the socialist/communist/leftist contribution to our economic system. They can’t actually contribute anything useful but they can deploy commissars to ensure the humans in the organization have right think. HR and all the associated schemes are simply leftist grift that infects everything.
>>>China stopped being real communist because they were tired of starving. They are the proof that a centralized managed economy only leads to stagnation at best and mass death more commonly. Today they are a very competent cartel that takes a big on all free market production. Deng was mainly a genius and saved the country from Maoism.
Doesn't change my statement that they aren't communist anymore, now. You are just agreeing. I didn't make any statement that was pro-communism.
>>>Slavery existed well before capitalism and is economic system independent. Slavery occurs across a wide spectrum of economic systems today. It will always exist. It’s up to governments not capitalists to outlaw it. Capitalists need rules to play by.
Yes. That was my statement. That capitalism alone does not lead to individual rights. I guess you agree again. I miss-understood your previous statement that seemed to imply capitalism had lead to individual flourishing, and thus SpaceX.
>>>>Human Resources are the socialist/communist/leftist contribution to our economic system. They can’t actually contribute anything useful but they can deploy commissars to ensure the humans in the organization have right think. HR and all the associated schemes are simply leftist grift that infects everything.
HR has nothing to do with socialism. It is clearly a Risk Management department. They are just as likely to fire victims as the guilty. The only calculation they use is the risk/cost to the company. If it is more expedient to get rid of a victim they will do it. They are not on the employee's side. If HR fires you for hanging a noose on your coworkers locker, that is minimizing the risk from someone unhinged.. That is not being socialist.
Is there any source for first-hand specifics of what she does?
I used to argue in reddit (same username as my HN) basically calling Musk a fraud and Gwynne Shotwell being all the brains 6 years ago, but I've since changed my position after seeing engineers in spaceX give props to Musk at podcasts, twitter, and various interviews.
The only 'grift' that holds up is about FSD. Everything else is nonsense. They are making Boring tunnels, the costumer paid and they delivered. The company didn't take off as much as Musk hoped but calling it a 'grift' isn't accurate.
Hyperloop was never promised, that's literally just people who don't like Musk made up. In fact he EXPLICITLY said 'I'm not gone build Hyperloop, its just an idea I had', and then people who don't like him 10 years later 'where is the promised Hyperloop'. How does that make sense? Musk never received a single $ for Hyperloop, but somehow this is a 'grift'.
> how many billions of dollars in government subsidies?
They are big cooperation's in capital intensive industries. When you build big investments, you get government tax reduction and other things, this is literally normal. If you don't like it, that's fine, but that how it works. Its not a 'grift' unless you want to go down the 'modern capitalism is grift' route.
Outside of that, most subsidies he got, were just universal subsidies that anybody could get. The US government gave the same amount of subsidies to foreign companies selling EV cars in the US. This was a plan to increase EV adoption in general. And arguably it worked. How is again is this a 'grift'.
And for SpaceX, I think its pretty clear that the government got much, much, much more then it ever paid for when they paid SpaceX. I would argue SpaceX has already saved the US government more money then they ever paid for SpaceX development. Just Clipper going on Falcon Heavy is billions in savings.
There are plenty of reason to dislike him but those aren't really good ones. Except the FSD one, that one I think is quite bad. At least they finally allowed moving the FSD from one car to the next, but that's not enough.
Agreed, but I'm concerned that humans being humans, we'll have the entire solar system to blow ourselves over.
In The Expanse (which I highly recommend), they give a new lease on life to that quote attributed to Einstein "I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought with, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones" - hurling asteroids towards a planet. I really hope humanity's real future will play out in accordance with some of the more optimistic elements in The Expanse.
It's always funny seeing people pretend they live in a world where small issues like land or food don't affect them, even though they only have that privilege because a larger military says they should.
They’re still going [1] and it appears to be a common thread across their recent commenting.
But they’re getting flagged, so no need to continue. (EDIT: It’s still getting traction.) It’s a tempting (and in my opinion mean-spiritedly preyful) conspiracy theory on an ephemeral topic. I always appreciate folks with domain experience similarly flagging nonsense in other threads.
This is the third time you’ve spammed the same flagged comment [1][2][3] that’s already been rebutted [4].
If you want to discuss this, consider putting forward better sources or at least new thoughts. Just because it’s wrong doesn’t make it not worth discussing.
This is a nonsense conspiracy theory. It popped up based mostly off conserving a single man’s connection to 2001 SpaceX.
Does Starship enable brilliant pebbles? Sure. But that’s because it provides easy access to space. Starlink could be described as a network of communication ‘pebbles’, as could Starshield, SpaceX’s actual military contract [1].
(Starship provides a technology platform for rapid launch. That’s more valuable for missile defence than orbital nonsense for intercepting warheads by way of predictable and observable plane-change manoeuvres.)
It’s definitely nonsense. As in if they are attempting it it’s virtually fraud on the American taxpayer.
Barring a sci-fi breakthrough in propulsion technology (or vacuum directed energy weapons), it cannot work. (And even if you have that propulsion technology, its existence obsoletes the concept again. You’d need to rewrite orbital physics to make plane changes a better idea than new launch from the ground. It’s just a phenomenally fucked idea.)
> the latest versions of the starlink satellite are significantly heavier than prior generations
This is in the same calibre of evidence as that for more planes meaning chemtrails are real.
> You’d need to rewrite orbital physics to make plane changes a better idea than new launch from the ground.
Namely, the plane change from the pre-positioned orbit to one that intersects with the target? Sorry if this is a dumb question, but is it really that bad? No way to get the loitering orbits closer to an interception than launching from the ground? (Ed: well, those definitely wouldn't be the orbits starlink is on, I think I can see that at least)
(The guy you're responding to has mostly deleted their posts, so I'm missing context, but I did get as far as the wiki page for brilliant pebbles.)
> the plane change from the pre-positioned orbit to one that intersects with the target? Sorry if this is a dumb question, but is it really that bad?
Yes. The closer you get to the surface the faster the orbit which means while you have less orbital energy to kill on approach you need more birds to cover a given area. (To communicate how unintuitive orbital mechanics can be, consider that thrusing "up" or "down" (radial in or out) doesn't actual increase or decrease your mean altitude [1]. You have to fire retrograde, which means a long, swooping, predictable, observable (and thus avoidable) approach to intercept unless you're Project Orioning it [2].)
> guy your responding to has mostly deleted their posts
They were repeating a conspiracy theory around SpaceX's actual purpose being to create a space-based missile defence system. The proof being there are senior people who were involved with the latter who have been around SpaceX. It's total nonsense somewhat orthogonal to why space-based missile defence is between difficult and stupid.
The core concept of boost-stage (i.e. in the atmosphere) space-based intercept isn't physically fucked. It's just that every case where one presents it, ground-based interception--including at the boost phase--does better. You can hide your interceptors better. For any given cost, you can deploy more of them (and more early-warning/targeting satellites). And even primitive ASAT can reliably punch a hole in it.
The only benefit is political/PR, because it sounds cool--that doesn't rule it out. But it isn't something SpaceX is working on much less was founded for.
(Space-based midcourse (i.e. in vacuum, while the warhead coasts) interception is stupid on all levels. It's a slightly more difficult version of blanketing the skies in drones for intercept--except you have more volume to cover and have planes which send off a screaming signal every time they change course.)
> any secret military project is effectively fraud?
No. A project based on bunk science is a fraud.
To be clear, space-based boost interception isn't impossible. You can do it. But in practically every case it's inferior to ground-based systems (with space-based early detection). The only case where it has merit is in containing a specific, small adversary with very few missiles, e.g. North Korea or Iran. But even there, a ground-based solution is superior in stealth, numbers and cost.
Space-based missile intercept is a political project. That doesn't mean it won't be done. But it's not something SpaceX is working on, or would work on without first cashing a substantial cheque.
Nope. And I can say this with more authority than almost anything on HN.
> Trump & Elon literally discussed it on X a few weeks ago
One, they discussed a lot of things. Two, they discussed capability. As I said, any launch system provides this capability theoretically. But (a) the capability is based on the faulty premise that pre-positioned orbital interceptors are superior to stealthy ground-based ones. And (b) it’s going to be true for any cheap space-launch system. (I say cheap because economies of scale mean cheap and frequent are virtually redundant.)
This entire theory comes out of people with no military background, no political experience and no aerospace engineering training wanting to feel special about being “in the know.”
If you can do orbital math, you can verify the plane-change economics. If you’ve even talked to anyone in ABM, which granted requires clearance, you understand why the actual spending in ABM—globally—goes into ground-based interceptors.
This is a tailor-made conspiracy theory for someone who substitutes doing the damning math for connecting bits of string between people and tweets. If you have any domain experience or connections, it’s trivially excludable. That’s why I can shoot it down (hehe) with unique confidence.
> If you can do orbital math, you can verify the plane-change economics. If you’ve even talked to anyone in ABM, which granted requires clearance, you understand why the actual spending in ABM—globally—goes into ground-based interceptors.
Boost phase interception using a constellation of several thousand hypersonic glide vehicles circumvents the plane-change problem; I'm sure you know that. I'm sure you also know that the reason nobody has seriously pursued such a solution before is because putting tens of thousands of interceptors into orbit is absurd.
> Cost of launch is the only recognized limitation
That’s how you read “in principle” and “in theory”? The cost of launch is used, in the third bullet, to justify not analysing the idea further. Not as the “only…limitation.”
As your source says, even a working space-based boost-phase interceptor is trivially defeat-able with “primitive” ASAT capabilities.
Brilliant pebbles are a fucked concept. You’re citing a no-math NAS paper for good reason—it’s good to speculate about it in case we learn something new about how gravity works. Barring that, it’s well-recognised nonsense.
No, it's that you started a massive offtopic generic flamewar tangent on perhaps the single most repeated topic of the last couple years, nothing new or interesting can come of which. That's exactly what we're trying to avoid on HN; we want curious conversation about interesting things, and this is the opposite of that on all counts.
Not that your comment was by any means the worst example of this! But it was guaranteed to spin off into the off-topic flamewar that it did.
Honestly, I didn't realize how fast and far it would go off. Maybe I'm out of touch.
I was actually just wondering if Musk didn't care about Politics and all the political maneuvering was still with the goal of getting to Mars. Space and Politics are like peanut butter and jelly. Hard to separate these subjects.
It's hard to understand why people care so much about someone's personal political opinions.
This is especially prevalent when working in places like Seattle and SF. People ostracizing their coworkers because of wrongthink.
MDS like TDS is real. It's extremely toxic and it needs to stop. People's political beliefs are their own and connecting that to work is a recipe for disaster.
The man in question personally has more wealth than many nations, co-opted one of the most popular American social media networks in the country and is a massive hypocrite when it comes to free speech.
Musk isn't just some guy near your cubicle complaining about Mexican cooks.
He isn't a co-worker. He's a billionaire that can fund entire campaigns.
It is a lot more like if my co-worker was really my boss, and he really cares about my political leanings during a performance review.. Thus I also care about his.
"Metastable deexcitation spectroscopy (MDS) and thermal desorption spectroscopy (TDS)"
> It's hard to understand why people care so much about someone's personal political opinions.
People care because he has power and money, which he uses to shape the world in alignment with those political opinions.
The same is true of anyone else with power - Xi, Putin, Gates, Thiel, Zuck, and the countless others with influence over business and government. A lot of money is spent to analyze and alter their political opinions.
What's hard for me to understand is why this isn't plainly obvious to you.
We've had decades of absolute liberal control of tech companies but you don't see threads like this every time Google announces something. Some 25% of tech is conservative, it shouldn't be that weird that a few of the billionaires are too.
Both. A single person can be great in some areas and a malicious loon in others. In fact, great success in one field can provide the self-confidence and capital to be a catastrophe in others.
But also keep in mind that Musk isn't personally designing and building everything SpaceX does. The staff at SpaceX deserve more credit than they get, especially Gwynne Shotwell.
It's become an absolute meme on the left-leaning internet to say SpaceX isn't Elon and Shotwell is doing all the work. You can't go to a thread on this site or reddit etc without it being brought up.
Really I am pretty sure it is just coping to deal with the uncomfortable fact that Elon (bad guy) is doing something great and clearly is skilled. Ask anyone at SpaceX or Shotwell herself and they will all say Elon is very important to its success.
Everyone who cares about SpaceX, and not Elon-hating, know Shotwell's name. My nine year old does, and he knows that Gwynne got into engineering because she liked another engineer's shoes!
That is true, but it’s also true of Blue Origin who are far behind spacex in so far as flying real hardware. The difference is Musk maniacal zeal and yes leadership. I’m frustrated with Musks politics too, but his drive can’t be denied.
But why are you frustrated with Musk’s politics? The fact that one of the smartest people chooses to demonstrate their view is very remarkable. It does warrant critical thinking and examination. After all he could have kept quiet and ponder to both parties equally.
I never knew the name Tim Cook before Steve Jobs died.
The general public does not know the layers of corporate staffing and their names. That doesn't mean they don't realize there are a lot of people at the company contributing. Nobody thinks Elon is in the back room doing drafting, and doing every job.
Yes. Musk is complicated person. Maybe that is what I was trying to ask. Does anybody have any credible insight into where is head is at. Is he turning into a wing nut, or is this all just a ploy to have more control over the government to further his goals of getting to Mars. Like if Trump wins, he can just phone him up and say, lets put a man on Mars.
SpaceX is not Musk. It may be executing his vision, but it's a team of thousands of skilled and hard-working people, all eager to work on a Sunday for a chance to pull something like this off.
But he’s the catalyst for it all.
There are other billionaires in this game too, why can’t they replicate his success? Why can’t they hire his engineers? Why can’t they deliver the results?
Twitter is not Musk. It may be executing his vision, but it's a team of thousands of skilled and hard-working people, all eager to work on a Sunday for a chance to create a propaganda arm of Trump party.
while a big chunk of the world is still under the influence of religion its been a while that the west worst extremism is not religious. you can turn on any mass media and then you will notice another kind of extremism. this is musk point and he is right about it. I can’t fathom how anyone educated cannot see it. It has to be political bias and dishonesty. be cartesian if you are an engineer.
Musk is just a front man. He's just an actor like Trump. God knows who is behind them. Banks, "The Matrix" , can anyone fill it in ? The front men are certainly just reading scripts, it is obvious.
Where did this meme come from? I’ve seen it twice in 2 days and it’s categorically false. Has the left wing echo chamber really brainwashed itself into believing Musk purchased all his successes and deserves no credit?
Even the “he bought Tesla” meme is lame. He invested in a tiny electric car startup and built it into the massive success it currently is.
It assumes that decision makers elsewhere in the world can’t get forewarning.
But it’s impossible to hide any project development on that scale from spies, or even just plain corruption, so now that decision makers across the world know that at least the launch mechanisms are possible… the moment such program preparations are detected on a scale that can’t be explained away as noise will result in them activating every panic button they have.
I hate to bring politics into such a momentous occasion, but as a lifelong Democrat, I think Trump might get my vote because of his alliance with Elon. Elon clearly is a once-in-a-century human who has progressed humanity more than anyone else in history. I think we need to let him achieve his goals without being burdened by government bureaucracy. Unfortunately, the Democrats have aligned against Elon. It didn't have to get this way, but it has. A Trump presidency will allow Elon to progress more, bringing humanity with him. I hate Trump and I think he is a narcissistic idiot, but he supports Elon more than Kamala.
The great dichotomy of man. Elon is a hardheaded questionable fellow who stops free speech on his platform if it doesn't suit the agenda and is supporting Trump who literally spurred an insurrection.
But Elon also started one of the greatest revolutions mankind has ever seen, up there with the Apollo project, which one can say is mankind's greatest achievement.
What do you do with that dichotomy is up to you to resolve.
We've banned this account for breaking the site guidelines. You can't post like this or https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41829541 here, regardless of how wrong someone is or you feel they are.
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We've banned this account for breaking the site guidelines. You can't post like this or https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41830050 here, regardless of how wrong someone is or you feel they are.
If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
I’m just talking totally out of my A S S. Wouldn’t it be cool if this starship launch somehow utilized starshield for grabbing starship, like proof of concept to the military of some kind of hyper accurate military grade GPS that can pinpoint a rocket and control it to the accuracy of between two chop sticks?
My first thought was nuclear anxiety; it’s nice to feel like we have a secret shield in space. Then I saw Trump talked about it, so my current hypothesis is the partisan parroting that happens on both sides. (Or if someone doesn’t like military spending, maybe it’s an anti-Musk thing?)
That said, the three accounts that have been posting about it seem to really like this topic [1][2][3], so maybe it’s a niche thing. They all seem to really like one Reddit thread.
It's a joke to think trump cares about taking care of his own after all the evidence to the contrary. He throws everyone under the bus the first chance the gets.
> When Elon Musk came to the White House asking me for help on all of his many subsidized projects, whether it's electric cars that don't drive long enough, driverless cars that crash, or rocketships to nowhere, without which subsidies he'd be worthless and tell me how he was a big Trump fan and Republican, I could have said, "drop to your knees and beg," and he would have done it,"
That’s not the point. My point was primarily that there is a need for competition to Tesla.
It’d be not a good place to end up being hostage to Musk (or Trump) whims and depend on them to keep lights on for Starlink or ability to put satellites into an orbit.
And having a clear separation of government is also important.
It should be possible to outcompete X now. The opportunity is there, a lot of people who work there would prefer to avoid supporting Trump. And while X outcompeted NASA (for a motivated Silicon Valley company it’s not that difficult to outcompete a government agency, while draining best people from it), now X itself is becoming a perverted place. So there should be some opportunity there.
Trump is pro big oil, not electric, so Tesla wouldn't be getting any more favors/subsidies under Trump, and with all the NASA money currently flowing to SpaceX, no strings attached, I doubt they would benefit from Trump either. Money coming from Trump will always be conditional on him getting something back.
I don’t disagree with your overall point, but I’m sure there are significant strings attached to the money from NASA. Like, successfully launching lots of things into space for them. And developing a new human-rated space capsule, giving the US and NASA that capability again after a long time relying on Russia. And developing a totally new rocket system, together with a version that can take NASA back to the moon.
Burt Rutan, one of the most legendary aerospace engineers of all time used to do regular long presentations to people on why global warming was not man made. Some of them are archived on youtube. And there's many other cases of otherwise smart people having bonkers opinions in areas outside of what they are experts in. If anything, successful people are significantly more likely to do this. It rarely results in their downfall.
He's being sarcastic because the standing theme on the internet for most of the last decade is that Musk is an idiot who only got where he is because his parents are rich or he stole from other smarter/harder working people. SpaceX tends to put a hole in this idea since he founded and funded it himself, and they've made more progress in space travel in the last two decades than all existing government organizations and contractors have since the 70s.
The people that dislike Musk (or are afraid of the mob that will go after them if they say something positive about him) can’t deny the amazing things he is accomplishing and so when anything good happens, they are quick to farm karma with thanking and congratulating everyone who isn’t Musk. It is intentional.
Where did I do that? I tried to discredit an example of that which you are lamenting. Seems odd to reply this to my comment, though I understand flagging it.
What was the correct behavior when the notion I replied to is posed? Report it? Ignore it? Is there any reply to that comment you would not have flagged? Earnest questions.
As anyone can hopefully see from my follow up comments in this thread, I have no desire to be nasty nor any intention to degrade the quality of discussion here.
The GP was definitely starting a generic ideological tangent ("boo socialism", basically) and by pushing back on that ("nuh-uh", basically) you perpetuated it.
Yes the correct behavior would be to not feed it by replying, but instead to flag it as off topic.
I definitely believe you that you don't intend to be nasty and I don't think I saw any nastiness in your posts, so that's great! But your comments (in this thread at least) have definitely been in the "generic ideological battle" category. Examples:
I'm not saying you're wrong or disagreeing with you—it's just that this sort of generic ideological argument isn't the intellectually curious conversation we're looking for here, and we can't have both.
> this sort of generic ideological argument isn't the intellectually curious conversation we're looking for here
Do you have a concrete advice on how to deal with ideological tangents like the "late stage capitalism" meme? Flagging obviously doesn't work. Answering it is frowned upon (it's "feeding it").
Finally just ignoring it would leave a HN full of leftist ideas and anti-capitalism snark. They are already here, heavily upvoted. Is that something you want? HN is a gathering place for hackers but it also educates and inspires. An HN where businesses are the bad guys and capitalism evil is not an HN that inspires startups and founders. So my question is: what do you want and recommend?
I want and recommend that people focus on interesting, curious conversation, motivated by the desire to learn about the world and relate to others. This requires letting go of the feeling that you need to battle opposing positions that are wrong and bad. (Why? Because the two states are mutually exclusive.)
I know it's super hard to disengage from the latter, but we should, because (a) it spoils this site for its intended purpose, and (b) it's an illusion. It's not true that the world will be a worse place if you don't engage in ideological battles on internet forums. In fact it will be a better place and HN itself will be a better place.
Don't worry about the effect on HN of focusing on the delights of curious conversation. The distribution of commenters who come to that (happy) choice is random across the ideological spectrum, in my experience. You needn't worry about ceding HN to the socialists or whoever.
The distribution of commenters who get stuck in the embattled state is also randomly distributed ideologically, in my experience. I don't know if it counts as ironic or not, but the commenters who argue with each other most fiercely resemble each other more than they resemble anyone else.
Of course, if other commenters continue to break the site guidelines by posting generic ideological battle-style comments, you can downvote and/or flag those comments and move on. In egregious cases, you can email us at hn@ycombinator.com and we'll be happy to take a look.
But please don't just flag or report the cases you disagree with—people tend to do that (i.e. report cases where their enemies are misbehaving), which is really just a way to weaponize the HN mods against their opponents. That's not using the site as intended, either—it just shifts the same problem to a different level.
Guess we're using different measures of "success" - in my book any govt program that nets more revenue than than it costs taxpayers or provides more value than it costs (harder to verify) (irs and usps respectively, for instance) is a "successful" program - Thus the irs is a "successful" govt program that is not getting its budget cut because it's successful, and socialist systems would still have an irs... That's kinda where I was coming from
Thanks for the reading recommendations. Sunkara's manifesto for me is the best put case with the most brevity.
I haven't read those, I've mostly read stuff like Piketty and Sunkara, or smaller more focused stuff like Zuboff's surveillance capitalism or Rifkin's green new deal , caste, Harvey's history of neoliberalism, or Hannah Arendt's work that generally rebukes capitalism more than it does fundamentally bolster the ideas of socialism - You do make me reflect I haven't read much that's meant to be anything other than stuff from my side though
Sounds like you didn't live through the Microsoft product launches of the late 1990s. Developers, developers, developers, developers. Same stuff, different day. You might enjoy this reminiscent remix, which also features a SpaceX-ish rocket as well (not bad foresight for a video created in 2009): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rRm0NDo1CiY&t=106
The SpaceX engineers did a great job, as did NASA.
The media needs to stop blindly attributing this to "Elon Musk". He did well taking the risks NASA was not allowed to take at the start. But these days he is toxic to the media and toxic to reporting, so for that reason alone the media could smarted up a little. Well done SpaceX and NASA engineers.
Elon is the guy who said, "that is the craziest idea I've ever heard, here's billions, let's build it"
It's 100% Musk that this happened, literally no one else would have done it. Everyone thought it was dumb until today. No company, no government or sci fi movie for that matter had even thought of it in the first place.
SpaceX engineers given the green light by Musk, not NASA, made it a reality. That's not to say Elon didn't make many decisions along the way in the design and development of both Starship, the launch towers and everything else.
The point is, Elon deserves a hell of a lot of credit along with everyone else. Everyone has their part to play in the success of the mission.
You’re pretending if you think anyone but Elon would approve building a massive launch tower with chopstick arms to catch what is essentially an incoming bomb.
>The media needs to stop blindly attributing this to "Elon Musk".
Musk's biographer tweeted the pages from his book <https://x.com/WalterIsaacson/status/1844870018351169942> discussing how in late 2020 Musk suggested, then insisted against considerable opposition from his engineers, that Superheavy be caught with chopsticks instead of landing on legs like Falcon 9.
(If this sounds familiar, also according to the book, Musk is the person who suggested and, against considerable opposition from his engineers, insisted on Starship switching to stainless steel instead of carbon fiber.
Hint: Musk was right and his engineers were wrong. Both times.)
Musk is the one who makes this possible. There's a reason why neither Bezos, Gates, nor Branson are anywhere close to this achievement, despite also having vast financial resources. I strongly dislike this attempt to erase Musk from the history of what's happening (mostly because people disagreeing with him politically). It is an absolute achievement of all the scientists and engineers at SpaceX. It is also a huge victory and validation for Musk and his way of leading. Both of these statements can be true simultaneously.
Uuuh the first stream on YouTube was Musk giving a speech, so I was waiting for the launch but turns out it was on another stream? So I just missed the whole thing, great.
Youtube is an incompetent organization. I've seen it take them nearly 48 hours to restore channels stolen by scammers to their rightful owners (all the while allowing the crypto scammers to continue streaming.)
There used to be a Twitter AppleTV app and I recently saw an X app for TV platforms has been brought back, but I don’t know if the AppleTV version is out yet.
Of course I’d rather they just stream to YouTube in 4K.
Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments and flamebait? You've unfortunately been doing it repeatedly. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.
Personal attacks in particular will get you banned here, so please don't post like this.
Removing their YouTube account was part of the strangeness. Even if you own a social media company you really need the YouTube account to squat your brand and redirect
Why don't they mount moving video cameras? I mean, the second part of the fly is pretty boring. They shows us a view from 2 static cameras. Is it so difficult to make one camera moving? With 360 degrees view. Show us the shape of the earth the full circle, show us the moon. Is it so hard?
I don't think they'd need to actually have moving cameras (I think this is what the poster meant) to give a 360 degree view, but 360 degree cameras (well, 180 because they're right next to an obstacle) that could be reprojected to 2d.
Pretty impressive. The engineering team at SpaceX is really something. Some thoughts;
The 'chopsticks catch' was amazing to watch. Seems like it adds a lot of risk and clearly the booster needs additional fire suppression systems :-) perhaps the tower could mount something that sprays the booster like the barges have for the F9 boosters.
The heatshield held out for a much longer time, the asymmetric heating on the flaps was interesting. I had guessed that all four flaps would have equivalent heating based on an approach that was basically that side of the rocket perpendicular to the flow but it seems like that isn't the case. Still it seems like they are close to having something workable here.
The detonation at the end was pretty spectacular too, but I suspect that structurally the tanks failed as the rocket hit the water vs anything that was an engineering failure. Engineering it to be strong enough to land on water would presumably compromise the cargo to orbit number.
The use of Starlink was really interesting. The ability to get live video for the entire re-entry is pretty game changing for engineering. I'd guess there are even more 'views' than they showed (there would be if I were running things :-)) but overall that capability is something that really helps evaluate the changes made.
I can easily imagine that flight 6 will be nominal end to end without any unintended damage. That would enable, perhaps, one of their 'massive' Starlink missions to test cargo delivery. It will also start to give us some better numbers on exactly how much cargo Starship can put in orbit in 'full reuse' mode which is essential if they want to create a fueling station on orbit for the Artemis program.
Again, hats off to engineering at SpaceX, y'all did good.
As to whether catching the booster adds risk - I'm not sure it does.
First, to the extent the booster is out of position in the x (sideways) direction, the chopsticks can move to accomodate error. But actually I think this dimension is the easiest of the three, as the booster has plenty to time to null any error in this dimension.
In the y direction (direction of travel towards the tower), the rails on the chopsticks can cope with the booster touching down along quite a long distance. But importantly, they appear to be smooth, so the pins can initially skid along them and then the booster can swing if it has not fully nulled any horizontal movement. In contrast, if the booster used legs and has not yet fully nulled any horizontal motion at touchdown, there is a greater risk of breaking a leg or simply tipping over.
And in the z direction, it should be possible for the chopsticks can absorb more vertical motion than legs can absorb, because you can easily build in huge springs/dampers/etc into the ground equipment without concern about mass.
Catching also puts the booster in tension rather than compression - it's easier to be rigid in tension than compression.
Finally, if legs were used, the engines would have to get close to the ground during landing, so reflected shock from the ground could cause damage. I know Falcon 9 does this, but the area of the base of Starship is much greater, so there's effectively less room for the reflected energy to escape. Catching completely removes this risk.
On balance, I think they would have better chance of success for each mission by catching. The main downside would be if you fail to catch, you may need to build a new tower, whereas a flat pad would be cheaper and easier to repair.
I am really curious what the maximum wind speed allowed for a booster landing will be. Upon landing, it has a lot of windage and not nearly as much mass as during take-off.
I have experience with docking large boats and it does seem to be a bit similar. In the case of boats, wind is a big deal, and the booster has nothing "below the waterline" to slow down the effects of wind.
I doubt this is an issue.
Not because wind wouldn't affect an empty booster; it certainly would.
But since the booster returns within 8 minutes of the launch, the weather in which a booster lands is restricted to the weather in which they will launch a rocket.
But then wouldn't the limiting factor for launch be the maximum allowed wind for landing?
The value of what is going up (which includes the booster) will be greater than the value of the empty booster. Factors of safety would be based on the launch rather than the catch. In other words, if it's deemed safe to launch the calculation for safe to land is easier to pass. Especially when you are taking passengers on launch. Wind is already a significant factor in launch.
That's true, except it neglects the cost of the launch tower itself. If you botch a catch and need to rebuild the launch tower, that could get very expensive, both in immediate costs of rebuild, plus in opportunity cost of missed launches. So in the end, whichever has the lowest wind limit, launch or landing, will likely determine whether they fly.
Ah, excellent point! They wouldn't ignore one hazard because another is less severe. And you are correct, I wasn't considering hazards to the launch tower itself. I think you are absolutely right, either would cause a flight to be scrubbed. I wonder if the two wind limits would be different.
That value is unlikely to be significantly different than safe takeoff conditions. Yes the booster is lighter at landing, but launch is way more dangerous with larger error margins and more conservative condition requirements.
This is often the case with airplanes; it's not a new concept.
Definitely not, and I am not trying to be a doomsayer here. It's just interesting. Now that I think about it more, I believe a Falcon 9 Starlink launch was once delayed due to weather conditions at the drone ship.
The most challenging axis in my opinion is the roll axis of Super Heavy, if there is a roll angle error, the pins could not sit properly on the chopsticks and the whole booster slides off.
Just slap a buncha RCS on there, maybe a reaction wheel or two, and presto.
Source: Kerbal Space Program
Might as well chuck a full size engine on the side pointing in the yaw direction to be safe. I mean as long as you tie enough magical struts and cables to it I'm sure you are fine /s
And with a barge recovery the legs must have enough spring to deal with waves. The tower doesn't move, they can get a lower landing velocity.
Seems like it adds a lot of risk
I'm actually wondering about that. If I understand correctly, the arms can move up and down, and pivot around the tower. This allows them to correct for some error in the rocket trajectory and also (presumably) "soften" the final contact. Between the nozzles and the arms, it gives SpaceX a lot of degrees of freedom in the final seconds (you can see how the booster kind of "hovered" right at the end) and in certain respects might even offer more forgiveness than the hard ground.
Could it smash into the tower? For sure. Would that be more dangerous than smashing into the pad? I don't know.
It's a new technique with which we don't have a lot of experience.
It helps enormously that unlike Falcon-9 this rocket can dial down the thrust of its engines low enough to be able to actually hover or to move arbitrarily slowly in the final meters before touchdown.
It can arrive to the designated intermediate point with some already good accuracy, and then take some time to trim the remaining errors to the noise level more slowly, possibly with feedback from the ground sensors.
The chopsticks also include rails with shock absorbers, the action of which can be seen in the view from the tower during the landing [1], so the required accuracy is probably relatively modest, provided one plans the maneuver carefully.
[1] https://youtu.be/Ysx4t7ICO58?t=678
The main takeaway from Scott's commentary is that the chopsticks allow the ommission of landing legs and all their subsequent systems and saves a ton of weight. The added risk to dial this technique in is likely worth it in the long run from a sustainability stand point.
Except that the landing legs allow you to land anywhere with a flat pad of concrete, whereas this requires comparatively enormous infrastructure investment.
The first stage doesn't really need to land anywhere, it launches from a known location that already has a comparatively enormous infrastructure investment.
The second stage might want to land in other places. Not as a satellite launching bus or fuel truck though, that just wants to go up and down in an uncomplicated and unsurprising way, and that's where the vast majority of their launches will come from.
For inter-planetary missions yes, but they have different second stage designs for those that aren't made for tower landings. If it gets used as a military transport, then similarly it will be a different second stage design.
The military transport option is going to provide so much capital.
It's the C5 Galaxy, but with only a couple of hours needed to deploy into any theater in the world.
With maybe totally different requirements on the G forces and vibrations that the equipment and people inside a Starship must withstand compared to flying. Not necessarily all the existing equipment can survive a Starship launch and not necessarily all military personnel can fly in a rocket. Of course they can select the personnel, like they do select paratroopers. Fixing the equipment or developing new one might be costly.
Thankfully, military stuff that is field deployed typically already has insane shock and vibration requirements. We build military stuff at our facility and it all has to go through lots of shock, vibration, and temperature testing. The military really wants to be sure things don't fail on the battlefield (which could also be aptly called "the-shock-and-vibration-field")
Just want to add that a lot of military equipment is already designed to be airdropped in addition to any other expected battlefield stresses, so they’re probably some of the best candidates for rocket transport in existence.
There's some work needed to have the launch flexibility though. Ie lead time to launch, multiple launch locations.
In comparison, simplified, if you have a bunch of things you need to send somewhere, you can go to the nearest airstrip and call a bunch of C5:s from somewhere a couple of hours away.
If we’re talking about sending equipment / supplies, you can prelaunch into orbit and then re-enter on demand.
That could actually probably be worse as the orbital path would not likely go near the wanted landing site, potentially in days. And anyway how do you know in advance what you are going to need (if it's not a nuke)?
Instead, with a near-future rocket, you could have some sort of assortment of "most likely stuff needed" stored near a launch site and be ready to pack and launch in an hour.
https://fastcompanyme.com/technology/this-startup-has-a-plan...
The starship can use the atmosphere to change its orbit.
The capability hasn't been tested but why wouldn't it work if it works on a x-37?
Starship has a lot less cross-range capability than X-37.
Exactly. Cross-range capability is expensive mass wise. X-37 is very heavy for its payload, as was the Space Shuttle.
It’s called cross-range capability, and yes Shuttle was able to do this (albeit for different reasons).
The booster is always returning to the general vicinity of the launch tower (either the tower itself or a barge). It isn’t used anywhere unimproved, and in particular is not used on Mars. So what scenario would it be helpful to be able to land the booster on a flat concrete pad?
It sounds like sci-fi thinking tbh, but at the same time, Musk has hinted at using rockets for intercontinental travel. But even then, it wouldn't be just a concrete pad, it'd need disaster recovery systems and infrastructure in place.
You're talking about Starship, not the booster.
Starship will get landing legs.
Only for Moon & Mars landings. The plan is to use the catch tower, Same as the booster, when landing on Earth.
Not just a hint. Here's a 2 minute video produced by SpaceX called "Earth to Earth".
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zqE-ultsWt0
The booster does not travel more than ~50 miles.
Just build another tower, like you build another airport
Landing legs are out of the question for Super Heavy anyway. If the engines come that close to the ground, the reflected sound from the ground will tear the engines apart.
That's fascinating!
Do you have a source for this where I can read more?
The 3 RS-25 (1860 kN each)[1] used for the Space Shuttles had 300,000 Gallons of water output per 41 seconds [2] when it launched. On landing, the Falcon Super Heavy used 5 or so [3] of the Raptor Engines (2750 kN each [4]). I'm making a few assumptions based on Napkin Math, but the parent comment seems about right since the engineering required (and the payload weight lost due to the weight/space requirements of landing feet for the FSH), would be too high to withstand the vibration reflection of landing on solid landing pad.
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RS-25
[2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sound_suppression_system#NASA [3]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pIKI7y3DTXk&t=6850s
[4]https://www.spacex.com/vehicles/starship/
>comparatively enormous infrastructure investment Any infrastructure that can remain on the ground and doesn't have to be on the rocket is worth whatever the investment cost.
You note of course that instead of legs, which have mass and have to have a structure in the stage which distributes the loads the SH has those parts with pins which were locked eventually with Mechazilla's arms, and those parts also have mass and need to have corresponding distribution of loads.
How different those consoles with pins are from possible landing legs, and how much savings they provide is an interesting question. It's quite possible they provide some savings - but it would be nice to know some details.
The booster needs lift points anyway for manufacturing and moving it to the launch mount. You can’t engineer those out, really.
It seems pretty likely that those pins are going to save considerable mass and volume compared to articulating landing legs.
Why so? Pin parts need to withstand similar loads - and if amortizing rails of Mechazilla may soften the contact, the direction of loads for pin parts is less favorable than for legs. Legs don't need to be big or too numerous - effectively legs are those pin parts moved to the engine compartment and turned for an angle.
Compression and tension are quite different loads. There have been rockets in history that would collapse under their own weight unpressurized. Neutron's second stage is a hung tank for similar reasons. Bucking is a pain. Super Heavy can obviously support its own weight, but tension is always going to be the easier load path.
Because the pins can be much shorter. Take a look at the falcon 9 legs. They are enermous both in absolute terms and relative to the whole rocket. They need to be that long to provide a stable platform and enough clearance for the nozzles and the residual plume as the engines shut down.
Not just that. Landing legs need to actuate, which means having actuators - another part that can fail. Pins are just dumb bits of steel.
IIRC at least one returning Falcon 9 stage was lost to a landing leg collapsing.
Don't forget that between certification and catch attempt that catching infrastructure is subject to the launch of the most powerful rocket man has ever created. It seems that the consideration about another part to fail is not valid here as the parts to fail have not disappeared but rather moved to the tower. They could still fail - in fact it seems that there are now many more recovery-critical parts.
That is, unless the falling rocket could abort a tower catch and move to a secondary nearby tower if a failure is detected in time.
I think it is very much valid if the entire context is taken into account.
The tower is used for various stacking and craning operations between launches. There is a better chance to detect any developing anomalies outside the launch context.
Also, being on Earth and flying nowhere, it can be sturdier and heavier than any flight hardware. Much like Roman aqueducts, it can be overbuilt a bit to ensure some extra resilience.
Plus, more towers at the same site, as you say. If one malfunctions, another one can act as a backup. In contrast, every single landing leg is a mission-critical component and cannot be replaced in-flight by another one.
> and move to a secondary nearby tower if a failure is detected in time.
They will have a tower in the Cape. It’s conceivable they could land there depending on return trajectory and save some mass for payload with that maneuver. I am also quite sure they will be a dozen towers in Boca Chica and I wouldn’t be surprised if they build a couple in California for Southward launches.
They do checks of the tower systems before using it, and have abort contingencies in case something goes wrong during final approach. I'm not sure if they intend (or have fuel budget) for last-second aborts to other towers, or if they just ditch in the ocean (remember there are no humans on the booster).
I'm curious how late in the catch sequence they can still abort.
This seems a bit like removing landing gear from aircraft and telling airports to shoulder the added cost of accommodating them. You've simply shifted complexity elsewhere. I understand that people are dazzle-eyed over the science fiction appeal, but IMO this feels like a distraction. The rocket's already reusable and already the largest rocket ever built, this doesn't add any fundamentally new operational capability while also burning a lot of engineering cycles and adding complexity and uncertainty.
What you're missing is the rocket equation. The less weight, the less fuel you need and the larger your payload. We should trust the decisions of these experienced engineers who are deeply familiar with the tradeoffs involved in spaceflight more than our own intuition.
Yup, the rocket equation is truly brutal. Anyone who thinks legs are superior to a tower hasn't played Kerbal Space Program--and remember that stock KSP is easy mode. You don't need anything like the mass ratio that Earth rockets need.
What you're describing with airplanes already happened. Large airplanes used to land on the water, which incurred a mass and aerodynamic penalty for the airplane but was very cheap to operate airfields ("fields"?) for; it only required a flat lake or harbor which was already there. The switch to landing gear allowed airplanes to be more optimized but requires more infrastructure expenditure for large aircraft.
Removing unnecessary systems that have mass is a big part of making reusable rockets work. It's why propulsive landing is superior to landing with wings, for example.
Not a distraction at all.
It is not just about shift of complexity from A and B. Anything that stays on Earth permanently can be built without particular regard to its weight, e.g. much stronger, much more resilient, with bigger safety factors etc.
With any flight hardware, you need to make painful tradeoffs between reliability/sturdiness and weight.
If anything out of the ordinary happens, massive steel chopsticks can take a lot more strain than a landing leg which needs to be carried to the edge of space and back.
You'd still have to recover the rocket. I imagine the number of places you could land and economically recover the rocket is pretty small.
unless it can be refueled from a truck and reused without inspection.
Super Heavy and its 33 raptor engines really needs a specific launch pad - on the first launch they tried to see what happens when they just fire it over a regular concrete slab (but still way above in a launch mount) and ended up with a massive crater. While Starship might be able to hop from unimproved landing sites, that is not really an option for Super Heavy, even with low fuel and short hops IMHO.
That is so many iterations in the future, it's not really meaningful to design for now.
That's why it is good in the long run, assuming the infrastructure can't get annihilated in a crash.
There's always a risk, but at the same time, they've designed the infra now, they can rebuild it from the plans (and iterate on any flaws). There's a (imo unnecessary) idea of doing a lot of launches, for which you'd need multiple liftoff and landing sites.
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Yes, we should probably assume that the SpaceX engineers have considered all of the risks HN readers are able to come up with in a few hours. And that they have evaluated alternatives like the added weight etc of having foldable legs on the booster.
The catchzilla solution is an example of their amazing ability to think out of the box. This solution, and things like the rapid evolution of the Raptor engine (see picture, story here: https://medium.com/@futurespaceworld/the-evolution-of-spacex...), dynamic engine configuration (33, 13, 3, zero, up again) and control is almost magically impressive. This is the stuff of Sci-Fi, brought to life.
But did they consider a giant spider web?
We can probably assume yes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qz7Eb8WiiWA
To me, it's not risk reduction that they're after with that booster catching mechanism, but weight reduction. Those landing legs that we've seen before (and the mechanism related to them) are costly weight that is absolutely necessary only on the rocket itself, because that is expected to land on its own somewhere on a bare rock. For booster however, it makes sense to have as much of such launch and landing weights externalized, considering booster's reduced use-case of starting from a spaceport and very soon ending up back there too.
The way the trajectory is designed is that it has to scoot over to the tower at the last second, and it only does that if it's really really sure it can make it, otherwise it crashes off to the side.
My thought (admittedly not well developed) is that smashing into a landing pad of concrete can damage that pad but it can be quickly repaired without affecting the ability to launch future rockets. If you damage the launch tower significantly you're going to have to suspend launches from it until you fix it. So the "higher risk" is more critical assets offline in the event of a non-optimal return.
Apparently they are heavily investing in having multiple towers ready to go to be able to do multiple successive launches. Presumably with that approach, one being damaged for a while will be annoying but not project-stopping.
There are already 2 launch towers (2nd one not quite complete but getting there.)
Heh Plus one at Kennedy in Florida, LC-39A
Understood, although weren't they out of commission for a really long time anyway the last time they damaged their launchpad?
That was a launch pad, not a recovery pad. The launch pad has to be engineered to survive full thrust from all the engines, and for a rather long time as the loaded vehicle accelerates upward.
Thanks for clarifying!
A good explanation of how it works, from before the catch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ub6HdADut50
> The detonation at the end was pretty spectacular too, but I suspect that structurally the tanks failed as the rocket hit the water vs anything that was an engineering failure.
It's possible that SpaceX programed the AFTS to trigger some time after the rocket touched down in the water. Just to make sure that it completely submerges quickly.
> I can easily imagine that flight 6 will be nominal end to end without any unintended damage.
I think it depends on what you mean by "nominal". SpaceX ultimately wants to catch the 2nd stage as well. I suspect that they are a ways off of that, since it would have to approach over land. The FAA is going to need to have very high confidence that it will do exactly what it's designed to do before they're going to allow that.
> It's possible that SpaceX programed the AFTS to trigger some time after the rocket touched down in the water. Just to make sure that it completely submerges quickly.
The SpaceX host on the stream said that they were going to try and touch it down on the water at more of an angle than the previous flight to attempt to get it to survive the initial splash-down so they could get some more data and video footage.
Obviously this wasn't guaranteed to succeed, but it indicates that they weren't planning to immediately detonate the ship on touchdown.
As I recall it was common on the early Falcon 9 landing tests that splashed down in the ocean to also explode after tipping over and smacking the water. Once they're actually landing them on a pad, tower, or ship that should be much less of an issue.
Yeah, I don't think SpaceX planned for a RUD on tip-over (even if they did anticipate it).
I think they've towed stuff in the sea before so I would have thought that'd be their preference if it were possible.
They don't want the booster actually landing in the water. They managed to do one test so well it survived--and then it became a hazard to navigation.
Yeah. It wasn't planned, but was a likely outcome.
I'm not sure if they would have actually attempted to tow this one somewhere given its location in the Indian Ocean, but they might have taken the opportunity to do some inspections before sinking it.
> Just to make sure that it completely submerges quickly.
Why would they want to do that? (genuinly curious).
I reckon there would be a lot of useful data left if they could recover or even just inspect the remains. The remains are one big tank, so it would have floated.
No doubt it would be very useful to recover. SpaceX isn't the only one who could pluck it out of the Indian ocean though. You don't want to leave a prototype for the most advanced Spacecraft ever made just sitting around for competitors to grab (most notably China which is currently speed running SpaceX-like designs).
Yep this will be the reason. And lets not forget that Bezos was able to find and recover the Apollo 11 Saturn V engines from point nemo. If that was relatively simple you can bet plucking a freshly dropped entire starship from the indian ocean would be a doddle, especially when sat views likely show exactly where it landed.
I'm fairly certain the Apollo first stage engines were recovered from a location relatively close to Florida/Bahamas, just east of the launch site. Not point nemo.
That is correct, off FL. The recovered engines were from the first stage they would never have made it half way around the world. Point Nemo is used to stash spacecraft that were in orbit.
It landed right next to their own camera-bearing buoy. You can bet their own recovery ship was right nearby. And with access to radio control too. Likely with a couple US military ships on hand too.
It might not be that simple - I've read an article how they recovered one of the solid rocket boosters from the first successful Ariane 5 flight to check all was fine. IIRC it was a slog, they had to tow it back very very slowly, avoid it sinking, fighting all kinds of weather and tow line issues, etc. Have not found the article, but there is a picture how it looked like[0].
With Starship it could have been similar & possibly worse given the size and more complex shape (various voids that might fill/drain & the thing is not really built for floating). Also you are in the middle of an ocean (Indian in this case) with potential for all kinds of weather on the way. Towing might again be very slow, so you might need to stage a massive submersible transport ship or something similar to make a recovery successful. And then the thing might still tip over and explode anyway - meaning all this was in vain.
I think is most likely they won't bother and instead just stream as much data as possible over Starlink in real time (or heck, even via WiFi once the buoy is in range) for analysis. They want to catch the shop eventually anyway, so manual post flight analysis will wait.
They can now check all over the first recovered booster anyway. :)
[0] https://www.flickr.com/photos/europeanspaceagency/3700131835
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.
You wouldn't need to tow it; if you really wanted to you could use one of those deep see platform recovery ships that sink themselves. The rocket is big but it's tiny compared to ocean-going vessels.
Possible yes but still, this is a prototype with new fin configuration, materials and lots of detail to be understood from inspecting it in detail. An inspection would be very useful.
At the same time, this is SpaceX and they have a few others ready to launch already. Perhaps they indeed can keep it somewhat coarse and wait for detailed inspection until one of them makes it right back to solid ground?
The previous ship did not come down where it was supposed to. I don't think they wanted humans anywhere near where it was coming down, at least until they can reliably do pinpoint landings. Even the Falcon 9, as accurate as it is, doesn't have humans anywhere near the landing location.
I certainly hope so. Ocean are polluted enough and although such a ship is just a, well, drop in the ocean, the ideq of accepting to pollute more is unbearable to me, especially for a world class company like SpaceX...
Other than some electronics it's actually pretty clean vehicle - methane will gas off, steel will quickly disintegrate in water, there isn't tons of plastic or paint.
Looking at the composition of the ship, it won't be polluting the ocean much. No people on board to produce trash etc., mostly just plain stainless steel and a bit of ceramics that will make great hiding spot for the abyssal fish for a few years.
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Also a yacht of a fishing boat could run into it in the night and sink - eq it could become an unmarked floating hazard.
correct me if I’m wrong but I don’t think the second stage is meant to be caught. It will have legs to land on Earth/Mars without any landing infrastructure.
It will have legs for Mars but they plan on catching it on Earth.
It is expected to land astronauts on the Moon as well this decade, which will certainly require legs.
That is a different version. The ones launching/landing on Earth are supposed to be caught by arms similar to the booster.
The ones for other celestial bodies are also planned to return to Earth... Being inside one as it does the belly flop will be quite the experience.
Pretty sure the Artemis lunar missions are going to use a different vehicle for Earth to LEO and LEO to Earth, so I don’t think anyone will be inside a Starship belly flop for quite some time
Or have the tower on the moon catch it.
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Stop making alts to spam your conspiracy theories everywhere
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wondering if you all with your fresh accounts and this silly smear campaign are bots or actual people
Just looked at some Reddit links posted and what the account has said over time and it is just _specifically_ this.
Over 4 months old. The same thing posted, over, and over. Even alleging xAI "knows" about Musk's "secrets".
Plus, their 'evidence' is a leading conversation with an LLM. It's the AI equivalent of a conspiracy nut taking 50 tangentially related articles about Apollo and stitching together a narrative about how the landings were faked.
Why is SpaceX choosing to land the booster on the Mechazilla arms instead of performing a soft ground landing like the Falcon 9 booster?
1) legs are heavy 2) empty rockets are stronger in tension than compression
the scale of Superheavy is such that the above two items are making the arms scheme make sense. The number of engines also gives this rocket the ability to hover, which probably makes the scheme easier to pull off.
It's my understanding that these engines can be driven with variable power, which also makes deceleration and controlled hover more feasible.
This was also true for this engine's predecessor, the Merlin 1D. However that engine's rocket (the Falcon 9) can't hover, as the power of a single engine throttled to its lowest setting still overcomes the weight of a nearly-empty booster.
All high performance engines tend to only throttle in a range in the upper half of the engine's performance, the difference making hovering possible in this case is that the Super Heavy has _so many_ engines that it can turn off. This is a sort of secondary throttling, or meta-throttling, and the rocket can use the combination of engine throttling and engine-off to hover comfortably (while near-empty) with three engines going.
Thanks for the clarification!
Spent rocket stages are empty of fuel, but not necessarily of the ullage gases, the pressure inside could be e.g. 3 atmospheres and that could be enough to provide some stiffness in the direction perpendicular to the axis.
> 2) empty rockets are stronger in tension than compression
True, but wouldn't the deceleration burn be putting much more compression onto the near-empty rocket than the landing?
The engine load is probably a steady, consistent magnitude. While a landing load is rapid and variable. Also, you need to design legs for wind loading after landing, which can be high if you want to launch often.
3) rapid reuse by landing on launch tower
I imagine that they will be their own first customer - putting Starlink satellites into orbit while they are gaining confidence in the reliability of the system for external customers.
They have to prove out the landing of the second stage, either with another catch or with landing gear, which they need for the lunar lander anyway.
I think that has always been the plan. the V2 starlink sats were designed to fly on Starship. When Starship wasn't coming along as planned they shoe horned the guts of the V2 on to a smaller sat that became the V2 Mini.
If Im not mistaken, they already delivered a payload in one of the previous flights, because they cut the transmission for a while and didn’t show the payload bay like one previous flight.
I’m not sure they are, if only because of the altitude. They only took Starship up to 200km, Starlink are nearly double that so while they do have thrusters that’s quite the distance.
Starship is not really in a true orbit, I forget the exact terminology but the trajectory is designed to re-enter regardless of what happens with the the flight.
It is in an suborbital trajectory but with enough energy to be equivalent to reaching orbit.
Think of it as instead of thrusting perpendicular to gravity for the most optimal energy usage Starship instead points its nose up gaining more altitude but now lacks the speed to miss earth as it comes down.
They actually made use of this this flight again - eq. they still did not perform a deorbit burn this flight & let the trajectory to pull them down to the atmosphere.
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.
Wait, that was 5 views no? Facing four fins, plus one fin from the front.
I'm wondering if they'll be using the vertical equivalent of arresting gear on aircraft carriers[0]. See when fighter jets land on aircraft carriers? There's a cable that decelerates them. That, but for vertical landing.
The way these chopsticks are set forces the booster into a dangerous, snake like maneuver (a SnakeX maneuver) at the last second from a vertical setting, to get into the chopsticks. This maneuver is due to the fact chopsticks are short and the booster has to land on one point in space. No degrees of freedom.
Now, imagine if the chopsticks were long. The booster wouldn't have to land at one specific point, but it could now land on a line. One degree of freedom.
Now replace the long chopsticks with cables, and then add another pair of cables perpendicular to them. So you have a pair of parallel cables perpendicular to a second pair of parallel cables. Now the booster doesn't have to land on a line, but can land anywhere in the grid that's covered by the cables. Two degrees of freedom.
Pushing this thought leads to having a sort of iris diaphragm, like the ones in optics, but an iris diaphragm of cables. The diaphragm is open when the booster is about to land, then closes in quickly. Imagine this[1], but it's cables cinching in.
Now, it's a diaphragm of cables, not a diaphragm of rigid beams, so I imagine the deceleration to be even smoother as the cables elongate, and an additional system of springs and dampers to counter the weight of the booster.
The booster is vertical and stays vertical. Granted, an unstable equilibrium, but it beats doing the SnakeX maneuver to get to the chopsticks, and that's another story.
Now, imagine the iris cable diaphragm can move up and down like equipment handling containers, and now you have three degrees of freedom. That's less control to worry about on the booster's side at the worst possible moment, landing, where you can't make adjustments anymore.
This not only means being more forgiving on mistakes related to position, but also on speed and angle. The diaphragm catches the booster at any angle, and given that it cinches way above the center of gravity, the booster goes back to a more stable vertical position.
For the fire, maybe you just need a big hole down there.
- [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arresting_gear
- [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Iris_Diaphragm.gif
SpaceX likes to simplify and not to complexify things. And they demonstrated they can do landing accurately.
Moreover I think Elon discusses the mechazilla arms in one of Tim Dodd interviews. They dont want longer arms, ratger shoeter.
Think about physics involved for longer arms and how much more stress you will putt on the connection points.
>SpaceX likes to simplify and not to complexify things. And they demonstrated they can do landing accurately.
Yes. Something falling into a web of cables. I'd say it may be simpler than optimally controlling that last SnakeX maneuver to be hugged by a short-armed T-Rex.
>Think about physics involved for longer arms and how much more stress you will putt on the connection points.
That's why I wasn't talking about arms, but cables, as explained by most of the reply.
Did you think about how you support the cables ? Surely they must be tensionned or else they will hang. How do you tension them ? Of course you know that the more the cable is tensionned, the more force you need. So you need a big-ass structure to hold all of these cables. They must be able to circulate around the perimeter, while being in tension, while not collapsing the structure that holds them, etc..
I'm sure you think it's easy, but I'm sure some people thought a bit more
>Did you think about how you support the cables ? Surely they must be tensionned or else they will hang. How do you tension them ?
Mechanical advantage. The booster weighs 250 tons. A 40' shipping container has a max payload of about 30 tons. There are cranes that can lift 250 tons, and it won't be one, but many. Have you seen gantry cranes?
>So you need a big-ass structure to hold all of these cables.
Similar to the big-ass structure holding the 250 ton booster with the T-Rex arms?
>They must be able to circulate around the perimeter, while being in tension, while not collapsing the structure that holds them, etc..
Not circulate, but translate. The cinching in is a result of them translating. Again, see cranes and gantry cranes. Or, just see the actual chopsticks: circulating, not collapsing the structure that holds them, while being in tension, holding the booster at the free end.
Are you seeing the shear and moment diagram of that cantilever beam with point load? (I know, it's an extension of a supported beam, but still cantilever).
>I'm sure you think it's easy
I'm not sure I think it's easy, I can't see how you're more sure than I about my own thoughts.
>but I'm sure some people thought a bit more
You are people, too. Nothing prevents you from thinking as well, if for nothing than to have a civil conversation on a forum.
Now, that's all fun. Imagine they keep it the way it is, but they duplicate the setting to make a circle, so the booster lands in the middle of many chopsticks... What do you think about that?
The crane lifts on the same axis as gravity, so the force is the same as the object. If the cable is horizontal-ish the the force is X/cos(a), which can be many times higher than the object
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mechanical_advantage
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crane_(machine)
https://archive.org/details/constructioncra00markgoog
> so the booster lands in the middle of many chopsticks...
And how exactly this requires less precision? I see multiple issues:
- No way to escape/last second abort away from tower once you dipped into that net.
- The booster arms must be longer/heavier, the tower support structure need to support more weight.
- Cables have a lot less thermal mass than the tower/arms - if the torch coming out of raptor engines will touch the cable, it may either cut or soften the cables and they will behave in a different way.
I mean we could have had this discussion previously but now they demonstrated on the first try that they can catch the booster... why bother?
>I mean we could have had this discussion previously but now they demonstrated on the first try that they can catch the booster... why bother?
Because these things must work every time, not just the first time. Because why not talk about it, it's an interesting topic and musing about it is amusing. Because it's not a bother. I'm surprised one needs a reason, but here are three already.
Good luck not ruining rocket with that cable web. Now you got other problems to target into some cell. Moreover cables could be lingering depending on thrust. Or maybe thrust will just cut em easily.
>Good luck not ruining rocket with that cable web.
What do you mean?
>Now you got other problems to target into some cell. Moreover cables could be lingering depending on thrust. Or maybe thrust will just cut em easily.
It's an iris diaphragm that's open but cinches on the booster.
Next year, China says it will be testing a concept very similar to what you've described, with its Long March 10A rocket:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=27TvGDpPLNw
It will be interesting to see how these two approaches fare vs. one another.
That's exactly it, thank you! What worries me with the current one that landed is the gradient: because the arms are short and the spot is tight, the burden is on the booster to make very sharp corrections (especially on pitch) to get caught when there's literally a few meters left, with an increased risk at the worst time (no altitude, and structures around), as opposed to leaving the pitch as is and landing vertically. In other words: the possibility to screw a perfect launch by introducing irremediable risk in the last few seconds and meters.
Then again, I just watched the launch and that was the first thing that popped into my mind, and the first "design" that popped into my mind as I was replying to the thread, so not much thought went into it.
This is a solution for a problem that's already solved, that is, booster maneuverability and accuracy. But they've just demonstrated that the booster is accurate and controlled enough to land on the chopsticks, and they have over a decade of experience in making rockets land accurately in a specific zone.
That's how the Chinese are planning to do it:
https://youtu.be/OYWBmu6H0ik?feature=shared&t=35
One thing to note is that the "Snake" maneuver was designed to keep the tower safe during the test, and not forced on the rocket by the chopsticks.
The rocket was set to come down on the pad just in front on the tower and launch mount until the final 3-engine landing burn started. This kept the infrastructure safe until the last moment, but also required that lateral translation you referred to.
What’s the advantage of catching the booster over landing it in the ground? Catching it seems like an extra complication.
I can speculate ...
I think the primary reason would be that landing legs are heavy, and it wastes performance to carry them. If your landing mechanism is mostly on the ground, you get that performance back.
Secondary reasons might include that it's simpler to get the booster right back to the pad. Once things have settled into an operational cadence, it's likely feasible to lower and lock the booster onto the stool, stack a ship on top, refuel, and relaunch -- no more messing around with barges, transport, weather issues, etc.
Your primary reason matches what SpaceX themselves have said. You either need to be strong enough to handle the shock of inpact, or need to spread the impact over time. Building either into the rocket adds a lot of mass.
Landing on a device that spreads out the shock moves that weight to the static landing platform.
It's worth noting that at least 1 Falcon 9 core probably got trashed not from the landing, but from rough seas - so cutting out the ground logistics chain adds resiliency.
Falcon 9 can land on land just fine (and it was done multiple times on less demanding missions). Landing on barge gives it extra performance.
To my knowledge, you're right, but in reverse order. I believe the driving force is time, rather than mass overhead, but certainly both play a large part.
Why send the landing mechanism to space when it isn't needed there? Whatever kit you put on a rocket has to be brutally miniaturized to limit how much you eat into the payload mass. Also has to be rugged enough to withstand tremendous vibrations and thermal stresses. That adds cost and more points of failure. You want to move as much of the complexity off the rocket as possible. Then doesn't matter if the catching mechanism on the launch tower is big and heavy.
The 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.
The reflected sound of the engines is enough to destroy the engines, ironically. That's also why the launch mount is so high. You'd need truly enormous legs, which wouldn't work for weight.
The load for landing and almost empty booster would be less, but otherwise yes, it would be much more than the single Merlin engine on the Falcon 9, with all associated issues (local scorching/spalling of the pad, acoustic issues, extra weight, longer turnaround, etc.).
You save the mass of the landing systems, you get to have all that mass on the ground and not have to lift it into space. Dramatically improves the performance of the rocket.
1) legs are heavy 2) empty rockets are stronger in tension than compression 3) the booster is large enough to make (1) and (2) matter more than they did for Falcon 9.
I thought it was so they can name make the booster body thinner relying more on the fuel for structural rigidity.
>The 'chopsticks catch' was amazing to watch. Seems like it adds a lot of risk and clearly the booster needs additional fire suppression systems :-) perhaps the tower could mount something that sprays the booster like the barges have for the F9 boosters.
There's no reason to reinvent the airport firetruck.
Unless you're gonna make it fully automated, it's not gonna work here as it can't be within kilometers of the landing site during landing in case there's a catastrophic failure.
> no reason to reinvent the airport firetruck.
There is. The booster is high above, and is larger than basically any aircraft. There's no flat concrete airfield around either.
I would suggest blowing CO2 or nitrogen through pipes positioned at the right height on the tower.
It’s not going to burn like that in production.
Why would you use a firetruck if you could also run a hose up the tower and get it right where it's needed?
The airport fire truck can’t control fires 250ft in the air
It's pushing the limits but it's close enough to existing capability to be a pretty easy ask.
>The heatshield held out for a much longer time, the asymmetric heating on the flaps was interesting. I had guessed that all four flaps would have equivalent heating based on an approach that was basically that side of the rocket perpendicular to the flow but it seems like that isn't the case. Still it seems like they are close to having something workable here.
Heat shielding didn't look relevant at this section of the flight at all. The booster didn't have any shielding.
The booster actually does have heat shielding behind the engine bells, to protect against aerodynamic heating on the return. In some of today's footage you can see it glowing yellow.
However, Raptor 3 is supposed to obviate the need for this shielding.
Where did it glow yellow? What time in the video?
The booster doesn’t travel fast enough to need heat shielding ever.
It makes zero sense to use heat shielding behind the engine bells. Why? Think about it. If the booster renters the atmosphere engine bells first the engine bells would burn up BEFORE the air even touches the heat shield. If there are actually tiles there it’s just there to protect the booster from the heat of the exhaust.
> However, Raptor 3 is supposed to obviate the need for this shielding.
Not completely getting this. So there’s a case for the booster entering the atmosphere at orbital velocity engine bells first? I would think if they did this then THEY want the booster to burn up. Anything entering the atmosphere at that velocity needs to be made aerodynamically stable as it will be traveling faster then the speed of sound. This is what causes the heat. If you send something at the speed of sound engine bells first that’s not stable and is unlikely they will do that at all, with or without heat shielding.
I don’t think parent knows what he’s talking about.
> Where did it glow yellow? What time in the video?
This is a better view than the sibling comment linked. It's a greater close-up and you can clearly see the yellow glow behind the engine bells. This view is from Cosmic Perspective, a partner of Everyday Astronaut, whose video is linked:
https://www.youtube.com/live/pIKI7y3DTXk?si=LI4-xQ7UhnvITTiG...
In case you get confused due to lack of context, the booster shot is a replay. When Tim goes to split-screen view, the right-side image is a live view of the second stage ("Starship") as it re-enters from orbital speed. It is not a different angle on the booster that is shown on the left.
Later commentary explains that the heating behind the engine bells is due to atmospheric compression and SpaceX specifically orients the drop of the booster to focus heating in this spot.
You ought to do some basic research before making a post like this. Honestly might be the most baffling comment I've ever seen on HN---what kind of mindset does it take to have this kind of overriding confidence in one's own lay speculation?
The engine bells are made of different material than what's behind them (a material that has to directly withstand hot exhaust) and the aerodynamics of the ass end of the rocket are complex; some combination of these factors means this heating isn't an issue for the bells but is a concern for what's behind them. The booster does not re-enter from orbital velocity, but does come down engines first at supersonic speed. Stability in this orientation throughout the descent is a problem SpaceX solved with Falcon 9, and SH works the same way.
See the other reply to your comment for timestamped video of aerodynamic heating behind the engine bells.
Is it possible you're confusing the booster with the second stage (Starship)? They are not the same thing.
>You ought to do some basic research before making a post like this. Honestly might be the most baffling comment I've ever seen on HN---what kind of mindset does it take to have this kind of overriding confidence in one's own lay speculation?
Don't appreciate this at all. I can be wrong, but there's no need to make personal comments on my mindset.
I agree that HN etiquette is generally more polite. However, this was in direct response to your comment to him/her:
> I don’t think parent knows what he’s talking about.
We can all do better.
that's different. Not knowing what he's talking about is different from a comment about character. But no point in arguing about this.
Here's a timestamped link to Scott Manley's commentary video where he points out that the yellow glow at the bottom of the booster is the heat shielding behind the engines.
https://youtu.be/Ysx4t7ICO58?t=550
They're talking here about Starship, not the booster.
How does this logically make sense? They said "it looks like the heat shield held out".
Where was a heat shield holding out?
On starship. Believe it or not, Chuck’s comment was about both booster and starship
And I’m saying he’s wrong no heat shield held out to anything.
The booster never travelled fast enough to need heat shielding ever. Only the starship needs it.
If chuck is talking about both likely he doesn’t know what he’s talking about.
Dude you are having trouble reading. His comment first talked about booster and then talked about starship. It’s not that difficult to follow.
Nothing could have prepared me for how that catch looked. I was sure the rocket was careening into the tower at the last second before it straightened out. The control algorithms must be incredible for the landing system to work within those small tolerances.
MIMO and nonlinear control theories are probably some of the hardest topics in all of engineering. SpaceX control system also has to compensate for the fuel moving inside their rockets so the control algorithms probably involve some kind of fast numerical fluid simulation.
Another interesting thing SpaceX is doing is to use consumer-grade chips in triple redundancy configurations instead of using $100,000+ radiation-hardened aerospace/defense grade chips.
> control system also has to compensate for the fuel moving inside their rockets
My stepfather worked as a programmer on the Apollo program, and the thing he always talked about as his biggest accomplishment was working on the "slosh problem" -- so yeah, props to the SpaceX team for managing that landing. And props to my stepdad for managing it on hardware that was... a billion times less capable? :-)
I might be misremembering but I think slosh was the failure cause for one of the three failed Falcon 1 flights. It was number 11 out of a pre-flight list of top 10 most likely failure scenarios. Definitely a difficult problem.
Did he get a chance to see any of the recent SpaceX accomplishments?
Nope, died fifteen years ago.
> Another interesting thing SpaceX is doing is to use consumer-grade chips in triple redundancy configurations instead of using $100,000+ radiation-hardened aerospace/defense grade chips.
This has been known in the high availability and safety systems industry for a while and a good book to learn these reliability engineering techniques is "Reliability Evaluation of Engineering Systems".
The book is available on amazon: https://a.co/d/1nH824K
One downside of using non-rad hard parts is degradation from TID (gamma) and latch up effects. You can have chips monitoring other chips to reset whenever they latch up but TID is mostly permanent. The good thing is that TID in LEO, where SpaceX mostly operates, is relatively lower than GEO so they can get by with mostly commercial parts. It's not like the big defense contractors haven't figured out the same thing, they do fly stuff using commercial parts as well, they are just slower to adopt the same culture. SpaceX and the companies that built components using commercial parts are building the new-space industry.
Could you surround your components with gamma-shielding materials and get away with off-the-shelf parts deeper in space?
"To block gamma rays completely, you need about 13.8 feet of water, 6.6 feet of concrete, or about 1.3 feet of lead."
https://www.epa.gov/radiation/radiation-basics#:~:text=Gamma....
I would wish you would use proper units. ;-)
But would using redundant systems separated in space connected with each other not offset the chance that they all would be affected at the same time? This is actually not rocket science .. just hard engineering and hardware/software design for redundant systems which is also usable on the ground.
Would they need to be blocked completely? Maybe a much thinner shielding would still produce a significant benefit?
(Though likely not of course ;)
High energy gammas have a relatively low cross section, most are going to pass right through the chip. If you add a too little shielding, or don’t layer shielding appropriately you are going to stop more gammas but produce lower energy x-rays from the shielding, which have a higher cross section, potentially increasing your chip dose.
Would it be possible to create a "skip" EM shield that does the opposite - increasing the energy of the gamma rays thereby reducing the likelihood of stopping them?
No idea how. Energies of most chemical bonds / electrons around atoms are not very high, not sufficient to emit proper gamma rays AFAICT. High-energy gamma rays are produced in nuclear reactions. While "clean" nuclear reactions that emit only gamma rays and not neutrons do exist, they are very high-energy and thus hard to initiate, and I don't think it would be easy to capture the energy of incoming gamma efficiently enough.
Yeah, the problem is getting the EM and M fields to interact. I'm not sure creating gamma rays would help.
Yes, you can attenuate TID effects with reasonably thin aluminum shielding
Just put the electronics in the middle of the header tank.
Can it even be blocked completely? Every layer of material geometrically reduces the proportion of rays going through. Or am I wrong about that?
No, that's correct. Of course there's still some level of reduction beyond which the gamma rays don't matter, but where you want to place it is somewhat arbitrary.
A box with 1.3’ walls seems doable, actually, depending on how small the chips are. Might still be cheaper and more effective than specialized chips. But I know nothing, so am probably wrong.
I think the trouble is such a cube would weigh 12,400 pounds (a sphere maybe more reasonable at 6,510lb - without any room for electronics inside)
https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=+lead+cube+with+side+le...
Hah, beat me to the nerd snipe. Moreover, that sphere would cost $10k to make and, at a launch price of $1500/kg, cost $4.5 million to launch into orbit.
The aim for the launch price of the entire rocket is to be around 5 million (once it's fully re-usable and in production). Basically the price of fuel and maintenance.
So something might be off with your assumption of 1500 usd / kg.
Yes, it's based in the real world. This was the Falcon 9 launch price that I could come up with in the amount of time I was willing to spend on a shitpost. I agree that launch prices will continue to come down, but launchers will always be mass-constrained and launching lead spheres into orbit will never be a practical solution.
I agree.
IIRC the CPUs are much less susceptible to damage when powered-off ? So have a bunch of them in cold standby or even as additional pluggable modules on missions with humans on board & swap to good ones when needed? :)
How long until they can build that massive box, stage it in orbit, and pick it up/put it down as needed?
I can't decide if I'm joking or not.
Lead is extremely dense so carry 1.3' walls of lead is probably more expensive than just having more redundancy or using better quality chips.
If the only thing that effectively shields these processors from radiation is lead, concrete etc (per earlier comments), what design changes / quality improvements can compensate?
Does liquid fuel protect as well as water? Suspend the computers in the center of the fuel tank.
You don't need to block gamma radiation completely to increase the electronics reliability :)
Maybe you could improve the system availability considerably by a bit of gamma radiation protection combined with some more parallelism of the components ..
Usually partial blockage is worse, because you end up with a spray of secondary particles instead of a single ray.
Maybe the secondaries could be blocked by different/lighter materials ? Basically a Whipple Shield for radiation. :)
Stopping power is basically correlated with mass.
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...
This may be true for high energy particles, but the majority of TID damage is done by higher flux lower energy, for which shielding is often viable!
The point is that shielding turns a single high energy particle that would otherwise strike and probably destroy a single transistor, into a veritable spray of lower energy particles causing bit flips or worse all over the circuit. This spray of particles can be stopped... with 1.3 feet of lead shielding.
More water in orbit sounds like a good idea to me
In reading Musk's biography,
"Hollman also found that creativity got him a long way. He discovered, for example, that changing the seals on some readily available car wash valves made them good enough to be used with rocket fuel."
"Elon Musk" by Vance pg 123
I have seen some people who decide to keep moving forward with whatever they have at the time. Sure what they produce is way less than perfect, but what they produce is way ahead of what everybody else is doing.
Perhaps the key is to be relentless, and resourceful.
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
Considering the political views of Elon Musk, it might be worth noting that his biographer is not the same Vance who is currently running for election as vice-president of the USA!
From an article for this I remember one more interesting side effects of this approach - the flight computer ends up as a generic x86/ARM board that the engineers can just have on their desk during development. Previously the dev boards would use the same rad hard chips and would be as expensive and scarse as flight hardware, resulting in much harder development & engineers having much less experience with the real hardware.
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.
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 :)
Oh no, apologies if that was the impression I gave!! I actually perform CFD simulations in HPC clusters, and in fact I'm an admin of the small cluster at my research institute =)
These are indeed heavy computations. What I meant is that VoF is one additional equation to be solved besides the N-S equations (either filtered as in LES or Reynolds-averaged as in RANS), the energy equation, your turbulence model equations, and so on. Certainly, not instantaneous at all, but simply an additional "simple" model that we can hook into our current way of doing CFD.
So, my point was, sloshing is a problem that we know how to simulate, although certainly you need HPC resources. Though, looking at those 100k NVIDIA H100 Elon has, I guess they have them! :P
I'm curious, how long time wise do these type of "heavy computations" take on clusters of HPCs?
It really depends on the problem to be solved (domain size, complexity of physical phenomena such as turbulence model, heat transfer, acoustics, multiphase flows, combustion, etc., number of time steps required...). In our case we perform for instance simulations of turbomachinery acoustics that can take 3-4 weeks running in a few hundreds of CPU cores, combustion acoustics simulations that can take a week or two running in 1k-2k cores...
what if you had 100k H100s
In reality few codes are capable of effectively parallelizing to so many computing processes. But, how cool would it be?
They don't need to solve the Navier-Stokes equations, they don't care how the fluid is actually behaving, they just need to approximate how the mass is moving within a margin of error that the control system can handle.
Maybe the tank is just not a large hollow structure but contains fins/compartments/whatever to restrict the sloshing motion and it's not that big a contribution to the overall motion.
If it's no stronger than a sudden wind gust, it's just something the controller has to be able to take care of without a heads-up.
These are indeed part of the solution and are known as baffles. They have risks of their own, e.g.: https://wccftech.com/baffling-baffles-musk-explains-why-spac...
In the first spacex rocket Musk thought that it was a good idea to not install baffles. He learned from experience that they are indeed needed.
I remember a very similar anecdote about Von Braun & the early Juno/Jupiter rockets - with someone pointing out issues with sloshing on a press conference & Von Braun brushing it off as insignificant.
Then the next launch crashed due to slosh induced oscillation - and the one rocket after that had anti-slosh baffles. ;-)
That’s how tanks in race cars are made. Another solution is fill the tank with some kind of sponge-like material.
Sometimes… the baffles break off, and then become surfboard projectiles inside the tank.
More fluid dynamics
That would be far too heavy in this case. :)
That is how they build the tank in Formula One Racing (and probably many other race cars, I guess)
They probably pre solved a bunch of scenarios and interpolate between them known solutions
That usually doesn't work for chaotic systems.
If the computation is too difficult, another approach is build a test stand and try methods until it works.
Which is why we use wind tunnels, for example.
Wouldn't it burn most of the fuel to mitigate the effect?
At least for the retro-propulsive landing burn, I think the modeling problem is probably aided by the high G-forces that must keep the fuel very close to the bottom of the tank. Even before re-light the booster is falling near terminal velocity (I think?), so the fuel is likely sitting at the bottom.
I think it's a huge problem when re-lighting the engines in orbit, though.
Also IIRC the massive main tanks in Super Heavy should be basically empty at landing & the landings propelants come from a set of small header tabks that are near the central axis of the vehicle & arr completely full. This should reduce or even fully remove sloshing issues at landing time.
Iirc cold gas thrusters are used before ignition to provide some acceleration to force the fuel to the bottom of the tank.
The technical term for that is 'ullage'.
See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ullage_motor
I think some Kerbel Space Program players have attempted to approximate the liquid sloshing as an inverted single or double pendulum problem inside the rocket that the control algorithm has to take into consideration in addition to the primary control of the rocket.
Has it been considered to spin the fuel via some centrifuge mechanism as a way to remove sloshing from the equation, or is that more complex/expensive/error-prone than just predicting it via simulation?
I'm thinking we will eventually end up with "active fuel management" techniques like this for in space vehicles.
Bug tanks make sense there & they might not be always full. So I can imagine all kind of interesting ways you can work with the fuel in zero go to avoid not only slosh but also the need for ullage thrusters. Eq. some programmable nozzles using in-tank gas to nudge liquid fuel blobs to move in the right direction. Or even some nets or bags that herd in the fuel in the middle of the tank + prevent it from directly touching the side, reducing boil-off or refrigeration requirements. :)
Maybe they just use pressure sensors to tell where the fluid is within the tank.
Even a real-time simulation should have some measurements to self correct to some degree. Otherwise it'll diverge.
There wouldn’t be a whole lot of fuel left by the time it’s back to land so likely an irrelevant factor.
Reminds me of the early days of Google File System.
They used trios of regular consumer grade disks/servers etc as a cluster and it looked like a single node.
They had to replace a LOT of hardware but this was still cheaper than big iron industrial grades servers.
Interestingly cheap redundancy is also how life does things for the most part. Most biological organisms just replicate a lot to guarantee success, so it's clearly a good strategy and an efficient use of energy.
Efficient as in evolution or in business: you just need to be more efficient than most of the peers
People don't realize how powerful applied math (especially in the areas you've mentioned) has become. Same tools can be applied to people in the ad tech/social media.
Just as a note, Space Engineers has a mod that accounts for fuel in the tanks and also various orbital mods. If one feels inclined to try it for themselves ;)
as someone who absolutely loves SE -- please don't.
the orbital and planetary mechanics kind of suck. They're meant to provide a decent 'arcade realism' for the sake of player/player interactions and pvp/pve.
if you want to experience fuel slosh/weight during a vertical ascent/descent go with kerbal. It models a lot of that stuff without mods -- and mods can make the model even more accurate.
Reliability is not based on a system that cannot fail. It is based on a system that can survive failure.
The canonical paper on handling software failures: https://erlang.org/download/armstrong_thesis_2003.pdf
There's much more to it than the programming language.
Algorithms can be faulty as well.
> There's much more to it than the programming language.
Which was never claimed.
That paper is a little bit about Erlang and a whole lot about OTP and other methodology and design technique.
It is still, very much "the paper" for distributed systems, though its applicability to this particular problem is limited.
A system (whole) that can survive the failure of (some of the) individual parts. Up to a limit.
… or cannot fail
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.
They have publicly discussed using Linux with RT kernel!
"instead of using $100,000+ radiation-hardened aerospace/defense grade chips"
Well, that makes perfect sense considering that both the spaceport infrastructure, and the booster need to do their calculation on the ground level instead of the highly radiated environment that is space. However, for the rockets themselves, which happen to reach that harsh environment, they may use more resilient and expensive hardware in the future, after passing over the current "let it splash in the Indian Ocean" development and testing phases.
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.
https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/19700023342/downloads/19... (search for "slosh" or "shaping network")
I never thought of using fluid dynamics in the rocket stabilization algorithm—maybe it's something that could be useful to prevent many of the accidents involving liquid-transport trucks
I have been told by people who worked on them that you get radiation hardened aerospace/defence grade chips by backing off the clock speed about 20% to give signal stabilization slightly longer time. I can understand the population being confused about this but industry being confused seems to have more to do with regulatory capture and beaurocratic moats which SpaceX does seem to be bypassing.
I'm sure there are many hardening processes - from the modified COTS parts, all the way to presumably much more expensive custom substrates like: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silicon_on_sapphire
You also have to add massive amounts (relatively) of static sink by approaches like ‘silicon on insulator’ to prevent energetic electrons from hopping into the transistor layer.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Model_predictive_control
http://cse.lab.imtlucca.it/~bemporad/publications/papers/ecc...
> SpaceX control system also has to compensate for the fuel moving inside their rockets so the control algorithms probably involve some kind of fast numerical fluid simulation.
Surely this isn't necessary with a small enough sensor granularity or whatever the terminology is. You can have very dumb software if it reacts quickly enough to changes in perception.
I spent 2 semesters covering controls and I barely felt like I learned anything.
I'm not an engineer, but is there a reason why they can't french press (sans filter) the fuel toward the bottom of the tank as it empties?
(Not an engineer either) My understanding is that it's been done before on smaller scales but having a giant piston in the tank requires a good seal, railings to keep it straight, and overall way too much mass and rigidity. Consider that the tank walls are only a few millimeters thick.
Instead, it's more common to use gasses injected at the top of the tank to push the liquid to the bottom. Falcon 9 uses helium. Starship uses https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autogenous_pressurization as well as small header tanks for the landing propellants.
> 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
Here’s a video from a farther vantage point that gives a better perspective on the landing process:
https://x.com/shaunmmaguire/status/1845444890764644694
The little boy who was lifted on his dad’s shoulders got me emotional.
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.
Wow, those pressure waves! Didn't see them yet, on all the close up footage. Thx for posting
That was one of the greatest things I've ever seen.
Literally brought me to tears, watching that happen.
I know the control algorithms are the mind-blowing part here but,
does anyone have any literature about how the Rocket localized itself with respect to the chopstick arms? It must've been some combination of GPS and Radar pings to the arms?
And then the onboard IMU to make sure it hits it straight.
Great question! Could just be Real-Time Kinematic (RTK) GPS like someone mentioned. Essentially the landing arms know their position very precisely and they measure the tiny errors in GPS data, and send that correction data live to the rocket in real-time as it's landing. Once the rocket gets very very close it could also just be using vision systems to zero-in on exactly where the chopsticks are.
To speculate more, they could also be using something like ultra-wide band positioning. This relies on the same time-of-flight principle as GPS but instead of using satellites in orbit to provide the precise time information you rely on various nearby ground stations. Would only be useful right at the final approach, the last couple hundred meters, but it's another way they could get very very precise position information. (fun fact: Ultra Wide band positioning is also how iPhones can locate AirTags with centimeter accuracy)
ooooo Yea forgot about RTK GPS. I’ve always found them to be so brittle but that’s because I’m in a city.
In the wide open sky, I’m guessing it’s pretty reliable.
Vision systems would be pretty useless with the low visibility of the smoke and fire. So I thought maybe it was some kind of radar configuration.
Anyways, I’d pay a lot of money to pick the brain of the GNC team here.
Why bother with GPS or other "absolute" coordinate systems? Once the rocket's in close, all that matters is relative position and orientation of the rocket with respect to the landing apparatus. Eg, if you had many sensors in known locations on the rocket and many sensors in known locations on the landing apparatus, and you could measure relative positions between all pairs of these sensors, you could get extremely precise relative position/orientation information without beaming information to satellites or whatever.
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?
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.
Felt special witnessing history, was delighted my kids and their friends all were glued to the TV for it also.
I thought the same, screamed out "ouch that doesn't look good!" right before the catch.
The last part of the live stream they showed footage from a different angle and there it didn't look too bad though! For sure controlled.
Scott Manley put out a tweet that they went down towards a non-tower position until they were at three engine controlled burn, and only then did the side shift.
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.
timestamp for "catch" is around 40:00 for those curious
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.
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?
There's also a very impressive sensor and actuator story.
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.
Do the control algorithms use AI?
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
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?
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?
A phone video[1] from Mexico, with nice plume refraction of the Sun.
[1] https://x.com/Cosmo_556/status/1845554958604657051
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?
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.
This opens up immense possibilities for exploration
Where is the progress if they're 2 years behind their schedule? In Q1 2025 they should already be launching the HLS according to the timeline.
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.
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.
That seems like way too long an article for a non-enthusiast.
Going to Mars is relatively easy compared to setting up a self-sustaining human civilization on Mars, which will be thousands of times harder. Many people don't understand the scale and scope of the biosphere services the Earth provides to humans free of charge, though, and forget that little of that exists on Mars, other than gravity.
It's difficult to overstate how important the milestone of catching the booster is. Now we have a reusable rocket an order of magnitude larger than anything we've had before, and the cost of kg to orbit just nosedived.
Second stage reuse seems the far more challenging problem. Other companies should have reusable boosters soon but if significant amounts of Starship continue to ablate on the way down they could be faced with a disposable Starship competing with smaller and cheaper second stages that are well sized for typical payloads. We already knew boosters can be flown back to launch sites reliably with high accuracy. We don't know if it is possible to make rapidly reusable thermal protection systems that can operate on an orbital vehicle of Starship's size until it is demonstrated.
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.
They're still having some significant burn through problems on the upper stage fins during reentry it looks like. Way better than last time but the top part of the fin was glowing far a while after the main reentry finished.
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.
I think that catching a grain silo in mid air that fell in a semi-controlled way from effin low earth orbit is undeniably incredible.
SpaceX continues to blow me away with these unbelievably lofty ideas. I remember seeing their "grasshopper" flights years ago and they blew it up because they couldn't land it at the time, who knew within a few years they'd be doing this.
I think they still have "Grasshopper" (the custom test unit) sat outside at McGregor, it was F9R Dev1 (a modified F9 booster) that they had to destruct after one of the engines failed mid-hop.
They were originally going to do high-altitude tests with an "F9 dev2" (similar to some of the early starship test launches) - but they gave up and just did some testing with real landing Falcon 9s instead.
Strategically this is huge for the US and NATO. Being able to put orders of magnitude more payload in orbit at a fraction of the cost of the competition is a huge advantage in controlling space. Starlink and starshield are already years ahead of what china and russia has, starship is going to widen that gap even further.
Amen! If it turns out we can’t make humans a multiplanetary species in any reasonable timeframe, at least we can make the last few decades of livable earth climate a friendly atmosphere for US business interests.
The most expensive part is to support the risk and cost of research & development. Sure, that renders you the first place for a while, but expect others to move easier (and thus faster) after you marked the trail.
Well if US would deploy global kinetic bombardment system that would def. be a game changer.
Putting zero payload into space?
Wow, I knew they were going to try to catch the booster this time but I really didn’t think it was going to work on the first try, I was just hoping they didn’t destroy the launch tower in the process. Congrats to the SpaceX team, absolutely amazing! Hope y’all are celebrating
All the renders in the world couldn't have prepared me for how crazy the actual catch looked!
ok now they have an actual reference and can animate it better haha.
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.
Yeah but they did pass some flame down much of the tower. Pretty quick though, probably just cleaned it with fire.
Yeah it definitely looked sketchy for a sec but was probably fully as intended
Although this is by far not the first landing of SpaceX boosters I've seen, this looked like scifi to me even in 2024.
What does Starship reusability mean for $/kg to LEO? I know there are longer term targets of $10/kg but that supposes efficiencies that aren’t here yet. Would be helpful to understand before Starship reusability where the state of the art was in terms of $/kg to LEO and where we would be with impending Starship reusability.
I don't think we have a number for it yet. But it will definitely be the cheapest launch system at the time of launch.
People say 200$/kg just with booster reuse, and 20$/kg with full reuse. Of course this might be too optimistic, but I truly believe we might reach under 50$ in this decade.
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.
The dominant variable is how often they can reuse the stages. Last I heard Musk was targeting dozens of reuses for the upper stage and hundreds for the booster. If they are short of the cost per kg goes up.
https://www.reddit.com/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1bgmsm9/cost_...
> What does Starship reusability mean for $/kg to LEO?
All we can say is under $1,000/kg. Which is conservative, that limit being about two thirds that of Falcon Heavy’s theoretical cost to LEO in a reüsable configuration.
Ryan Hansen had an incredible (although unofficial) 3d modeling video of the mechanism. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ub6HdADut50
The catch looks amazing, but one thing I don't understand is why SpaceX needs the technology to catch a booster they've already demonstrated the ability to land boosters on barges. Is the arm more cost effective to scale compared to a barge?
This booster is much, much larger than the Falcon 9 first stages that land on barges. It's ~70 metres high, versus ~40 metres for the Falcon 9 first stage, and weighs about 275 000 kg compared to the ~20 000 kg of the Falcon 9 first stage.
In short, it would require such huge and heavy landing legs and landing barges that it probably wouldn't be feasible.
The argument is that you don't need to spend the vehicle mass on legs, so you get performance.
On the other hand, I imagine you could wipe out any benefits to $/mass launched pretty quickly by blowing up the tower.
The landing legs are heavy. SpaceX would rather have more payload than carry legs to space on every launch.
Also landing on the launch pad means you don’t have to transport the rocket. Just have the arms set it down and you’re ready to launch again.
Maybe the goal is to refill and relaunch immediately?
Weight. Legs weigh a lot. That's dead weight for a launch system, and it serves only to reduce payload to orbit.
For Falcon 9 that's not that big a deal because they're NOT trying to reuse the second stage. Whereas with Starship they need more fuel to recover the ship, and that means they need to save weight elsewhere to avoid losing too much payload to orbit.
It takes time for the barges to return the booster to the launch pad. They want to be able to launch Starship, have the booster land back at the launch pad, have the arms set it back down on the ground, and recycle the booster for another launch in just a few hours. Then the arms can be used to stack the booster and the next payload on the launch platform.
[dead]
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...
In Europe, ESA has been pretty open about trying to copy and play catch-up to SpaceX:
> Q: Callisto looks very much like Grasshopper, the SpaceX Falcon 9 first stage reuse prototype.
> A: Callisto is Grasshopper. The Chinese are also building a similar prototype, I have no problem saying we didn’t invent anything.
https://satelliteobservation.net/2018/06/02/cnes-director-of...
It doesn't. It makes one or two mega-constellations cheaper for their operators and therefor more profitable, but no one except telecom and sensor platforms really want orbit. It's useless for most things, far worse than working on the planet's surface where all the labor and materials already are.
The SpaceX engineers are incredible for being able to pull this off.
Incredible achievement, my American friends! Congrats! We, Europeans, can only feel jealous, but hey at least we have free [but comically broken and dysfunctional] healthcare, so, there's that. I hope you'll bring a lot more progress to humankind beyond space exploration!
The long-term goal is becoming a multi-planet species, so in that context it's not about countries. Go Earth!
(also, while NASA has been generally helpful to SpaceX's efforts, American FAA bureaucrats have managed to inject unnecessary delays and uncertainty into the process (in addition to some necessary delays).
When I was visiting the space center in Huntsville, Indiana, I had a chance to talk with one of the volunteers. His name was Brooks Moore (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O3hudRA3yL8), and he had been the director of navigation systems for the Apollo (and other) projects.
The first SpaceX barge landing had just taken place, and I asked him what he thought. He got a faraway look in his eyes, and agreed that it had been spectacular. For those guys, it must have seemed like all of their dreams were coming true.
I believe you meant Huntsville, Alabama?
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.
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?
As in life, when a person is on a road to nowhere, it’s the homecoming that’s sweet. The only thing more exciting than an Earth landing will be a moon or Martian landing. Or the in-orbit fuel consolidation docking, if only because it will be a huge milestone.
https://open.spotify.com/track/7wFmJxJfGCN6DM5913y7pr?si=-Uo...
Can I hijack this thread for an almost completely unrelated question that I have observed in nearly every simulation of movement in space, even from sources like NASA and SpaceX which “should know better”?
And I’m mostly asking this out of scientific curiosity, not as a criticism.
Why do they always portray movement in space by showing stars moving past the view at variable rates, or even at all?
The opening screen of this video while you’re waiting for the feed to start shows stars moving that seem to be only feet away, and only a few inches in diameter. Like little orbs of light just passing outside the window.
Isn’t this highly unrealistic, for even extremely fast travel in space?
I would imagine at most you would see very slow movement of a very static field of stars. But every depiction in sci-fi, video games, and other simulations like in this video insist on making it seem like space is full of tiny 6-12” stars floating only feet away from each other.
Is there any explanation where this could actually be considered realistic that I’m not thinking of?
I’m just a lowly software engineer, so my expertise in this area is null. But from a basic understanding of stars and physics, this seems unrealistic.
Admittedly, I guess it wouldn’t be very exciting to view movement in space in a way that I’m imagining would be realistic, and maybe that’s the only explanation there is/needs to be.
But I guess I’m thinking that there would be enough people at SpaceX (for example) to scream “this is not even close to realistic!” for something like that to not make it to production, even if it is more exciting to watch.
As others have said, you're correct. But one reason for doing this, beyond just looking cool, is to give a visual cue for motion. The aim isn't primarily to look realistic, but to make it as easy as possible to interpret the outputs. Motion cues help with this.
As an example, if you're watching an airshow against a clear blue sky, especially filmed with a long lens where you can't see the ground, it is very hard to understand what's actually happening because you can only see attitude changes, but not the velocity vector. Add just a few clouds in the background and the impression is very different.
I’m guessing when making an artistic depiction of something going very fast in space, that sort of parallax helps? The goal of consumer content (including the ones by spacex) isn’t to be realistic, it’s to entertain
That said, “the expanse” is an exception here - they make it look as realistic as possible, including the battles where ships don’t even see each other. Stars barely move on it too
You're correct, it's hilariously unrealistic (IIRC requires actual superluminal speed), but people have been conditioned to accept it by various scifi media.
Imitating science fiction is great marketing for a space company.
Brand association with familiar depictions of “the future” is the goal, not realism.
> Is there any explanation where this could actually be considered realistic that I’m not thinking of?
You could record the full trip, and then speed the record up. What the point to watch at thousand years of the record with slowly changing picture, if you can watch it in a few minutes.
If they were truthful, you'd think the picture was frozen, signal issues etc.
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.
Closeup of chopsticks as they were catching the booster, best clip from Everyday Astronaut's livestream: https://x.com/kagurazakimoto/status/1845447451592765820
The SpaceX clip is better https://x.com/spacex/status/1845442658397049011?s=46
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.
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.
Right on target, next to their buoy! Insane achievement!
At a buoy, SpaceX.
This got me as excited as the original Falcon 9 landing in 2016! Now I got to share this with my kids! So incredible...
I just quit my job at a SaaS. What am I doing with my life... The SpaceX team just caught the biggest rocket in history with a giant arm, we all need to dream bigger!
https://x.com/mytechceoo/status/1845573520035577925
Just to nitpick, perhaps it would be nicer to have a link that has the info visible without a login...
Random link with the actual 10 minutes of magic:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b28zbsnk-48
They caught it! Holy sh*t!
Very inspiring, glad I woke up to watch it. Congratulations to the SpaceX team. This is what competition looks like. It’s funny how last decade SpaceX had to sue the government to get more launches.
California officials reject more SpaceX launches, with some citing Musk's X posts
https://twitter.com/shellenberger/status/1845131546501734440...
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.
The FAA needs more funding at this point. They're not staffed for the rate of launch requests which commercial space has grown too.
Here is Scott Manley's summary and analysis of flight 5:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=Ysx4t7ICO58
They have the experience and control systems to do this reliably with Falcon 9 so it seemed doable in time but seeing it on a new vehicle on the first attempt was still surprising. Really impressive engineering.
I would like to shake the hands of the steeley eyed rocket men and women who just landed a skyscraper with centimeter precision. Respect.
This one's for you. Hit it Perry. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_VJlHWESyLI
Update: SpaceX has set the booster back down on the launch mount and reconnected the "quick disconnect" hoses that fill it with propellant before launch. If they refilled it with propellant they'd be close to launching it again! Presumably they will be draining it instead.
Apparently the rails that catch the booster can translate in and out relative to the "chopstick" arms so the booster can be positioned and rotated to match the launch mount after landing.
This is a very important update. Where would we find out more about this? Was this in a YouTube video somewhere?
I wonder if they recover the helium used to pressurize the propellant tanks.
Giddy and crying.
I turned 50 yesterday and it feels a bit like the future I dreamed of as a child.
I also cried watching this
This made me happy
And here I thought nothing would top the double landing view from Falcon Heavy...
That was such a magical moment
anybody not watching these live better be delivering a baby,or saving someones life its a very short list of things that should take precidence over what are the most astounding things happening for our species,ever
SpaceX's Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy have already revolutionized the space industry with their reusable first stage boosters and rocket engines. This advance in rocket design has resulted in the cost to launch one kilogram of payload to orbit from approximately $15,000 in the pre-SpaceX era, to around $1,400 with the Falcon Heavy. This graph shows the incredible impact of SpaceX on the volume of rocket launches, with an exponential rise in recent years:
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.
Moon by 2030 and Mars by 2040 seems like a winning bet lately
The Delta-V is comparable since you can aerobrake on mars. It's only the difference between the time.
Earth to moon without Aerobraking is a delta v of around 13k/s, mars is 13.3
NSF video: https://x.com/nasaspaceflight/status/1845442658203734384
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!
"Incredible!" in the voice of my 3 year old who just saw 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.
What an incredible achievement. Huge congratulations to the team at SpaceX! Still have chills.
Anyone know whether the fire toward the bottom of the booster during/after the catch is normal?
I suppose they were venting off and burning some remaining fuel in some conduits.
We live in a day and age where it seems that all the innovations we see now are new tech that has to do with electronics.
Good to see some good ol hardware breakthroughs in another industry.
The engineers at spaceX are amazing, and I'll admit I envy their tenacity and genius.
The amount of progress we have seen in rocketry and space travel in the last decade is mind blowing, I never thought I would see this in my lifetime.
Edit: Decided to give it a shot and applied for a backend software engineering position at SpaceX. I'm not sure if it will be noticed, but its worth a shot. I may not be a rocket scientist, but it would be great to contribute using the knowledge I do have.
We could have had this all along.
When KSP becomes reality, 275 tons falling from space caught by some metal struts…
Everyday Astronaut Stream: https://youtu.be/pIKI7y3DTXk
People on earth are experiencing the Jetsons and the Flinstones at the same time
Food for thought:
Maybe 'the Jetsons' and 'the Flintstones' aren't as far apart as we think, us being people who like to think we are witnessing 'the Jetsons' now. Maybe that is just a relevant distinction.
Maybe those two descriptors are much closer than they would appear to some outside observers. Maybe it's really just 'Flintstones part 1;' and 'Flintstones part 2', right now.
Or...
Our 'Flintstones' was already 'Jetsons' compared to everything else in this observable universe, which winds up mostly being just peat bogs on Dagobah, comparatively, and we're just inching out the icing on the cake at this point.
Who knows.
This is what makes it bittersweet. So many comments here talking about this being progress for 'humanity'. I may be cynical, but most of humanity will get no benefit from any of these accomplishments. This is technology owned by and ultimately in service of a minuscule fraction of humanity.
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.
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.
Damn what a time to be alive! Amazing
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.
SpaceX has done it again! (defying status quo, not the catch :p)
Imagine the number of amazing space telescopes that we are going to get! When it's cheep to launch a 10m diameter object into space, so many possibilites open up.
For things like that, they could build special versions of the star ship which remain in orbit as the housing. They would need no flaps, no tiles, just the 6 engines and the fuel tank. The body of the starship itself would be the telescopes tube.
You could do that, you could also use it to transport pieces of massive telescope arrays that self assemble in space.
Sure, thats what they did with the JWST. But that ist complex and expensive. A custom Starship could be the cheapest way to get telescopes up to 9m mirror size into space as you can assemble everything on the ground and you don't need a separate housing.
One of the biggest steps forward in the space industry since the first landing of Falcon 9.
Great success!!
Happy Birthday! SpaceX lit a mighty big candle for you :)
Thanks! And they sure did!
Based on this conversation, how many of y'all are actual rocket scientists? I'm blown away by the expertise in some of these comments
And here I was blown away by the ignorance of many of the questions. Why no landing legs? Why is this more impressive than the other rocket landings? What’s the thingy that fell off during separation? Sometimes I need to remind myself that other people have lives, I guess. XD
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
Can someone explain to me why this is more impressive than landing the rocket? To a layman like me, it looks very similar - the thing looks just like a rocket but without a pointy tip, and on the way down I don't understand why difference that matters.
(I mean I still think it's mind blowing, because I think landing a rocket is also mind blowing)
(1) Much larger than any previous rocket landing, (2) This rocket carried no landing gear (more efficient - landing gear is heavy), (3) This rocket landed right back at the place it needs to be to launch again - right on its launch tower - which in a routine situation might make it much faster to prepare it for the next relaunch. (4) It's yet another step in control prowess - impressive in itself.
I must say though "right on its launch tower" is fun and all...
but things would have to get pretty extreme in the "routine" dimension for that to be very useful. If there are 20 first stages and 5 land/launch towers, for a first stage that only spends an hour in flight in between inspections.... well are you going to keep them parked on a scarce launch tower for maintenance? The towers with fill/launch infrastructure (such as reinforced concrete, fuel tanks, cold filling system, deluge water system) become the bottleneck. It's more likely then that the 1st stage lands, is safed, then is taken a couple hundred yards away for inspection and maintenance while the next in line is moved to be stacked for the next launch. The inspection / maintenance would have to be truly minimal (think airliner) to keep it right there on its own relaunch tower.
"No landing gear" is more key, compared to Falcon 9 - because of the effort toward minimal launch cost.
> The inspection / maintenance would have to be truly minimal (think airliner) to keep it right there on its own relaunch tower.
That's what they are aiming for, eventually.
Thanks!
It is a rocket. The biggest difference with the Falcon 9 first stage is that this one is about 6 times as big (diameter of 9m vs 3.7m), and that catching it with the tower requires a much higher precision in landing location. The drone ships that Falcon 9 lands on are about 90 x 50 meter. To catch it with the tower, they need to be accurate to within a few meters.
The big advantage of catching it with the tower is that it'll (eventually) allow them to put another Starship on top, refuel and launch again within hours, as opposed to the weeks it currently takes for Falcon 9.
The critical differences between Falcon 9 first stage and the Starship booster is that Starship booster lands using 3 engines rather than 1, and can throttle them down much further. 3 vs 1 gives Starship more directional control for precise landing (critical for this "catch" maneuver), and throttling allows it to hover, as it does right before the "catch".
Falcon 9 also lands using 3 engines on its most demanding missions. The throttling is definitely an advantage.
But as far as I know, one Merlin engine produces more thrust than the empty booster weighs which means they have to time things perfectly to get to zero velocity exactly at the ground.
Super heavy can hover and even go down by throttling down more. This gives them more control for the landing and don’t have to time it exactly perfectly
Thanks!
The tower is also how they plan to perform maintenance and re-staging for another launch. The tower can place it back on the launch structure or lower it down to the ground if it needs to be transported back to an enclosure for extensive repairs but a lot of work is just done with it at the tower. I imagine the goal is to eventually get to an automated system that catches the booster, inspects it for damage, clears it for relaunch, positions it on the launch structure, grabs another Sharship second stage and stacks it and then refuels the whole system and launches as soon as possible.
Plus it's really big https://images-bonnier.imgix.net/files/ill/production/Starsh...
This booster is significantly larger than anything landed on an orbital launch before. Here is a size comparison, previous largest landed orbital rocket stage is the SpaceX Falcon 9 (three of them launch together as Falcon Heavy) on the left. Starship is on the right.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/7b/SuperHea...
Landing via tower catch versus on a pad is advantageous because the weight of adding retractable landing legs to such a large rocket would be significant.
Thanks!
This method doesn't require landing legs on the rocket, allowing their weight to be used for payload instead
It’s also already on the tower that it launches from, which drastically reduces the expense and complexity of setting it up for its next launch, making it easier and faster to reuse.
To expand on this, landing legs of Falcon 9 weigh two tons. Landing legs of SuperHeavy booster would have to be even more formidable.
Which means that the weight savings are nontrivial with the "catch the rocket!" landing method.
From what I understand, it reduces the turnover dramatically. In theory the booster should be refuelled, new second stage mounted on top and ready to go for another flight. So could cut down from weeks to days/hours. That's significant.
It's more precise than landing on the ground, there is coordination with the tower required, it is way bigger than Falcon 9.
This video goes into details pretty well: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=OYvWYp0--bQ&t=832s
I think landing a booster is just as impressive. It's just that nobody's done this before, so it's exciting! Plus it's a lot bigger and part of a fully reusable config which has huge implications for space travel.
This one seems way harder than the others which land on legs and on a relatively larger circular landing pad, this one needs to nail the tower and its arms.
Stage 1 sucessfully caught. That was pretty incredible. I remember watching the Falcony Heavy launch when both boosters landed in sync.
It's hanging pretty high in the air, I assume so the engines do less damage to the pad. One wonders how they're going to get it down. Do the chopsticks lower on the tower?
They'll lower it to the launch mount... the catch arms are effectively a crane. But I wonder if it's more "toasty" than they were expecting? There were some fires going at catch (those look out, at least on external camera views) and the engines are still a bit.... smokey. Don't know if that's normal... or if they were expecting it.
My hunch is that they don't put it down for awhile. If there's still an issue were there are fires lingering inside, my hunch is they want that as far from the ground infrastructure as possible.
Either way incredible progress.
From the replay, it seems that the fire comes from methane from the RCS thrusters burning, so it seems normal
The fire I mostly saw was coming from the quick disconnect ports and related plumbing. Also, there was fire on the other side, close to where there was part of a chine was clearly missing. There were a couple other things, too.
Wasn't perfect, some things to work out... but still pretty damn good.
Remember on the first launch when, on the way up, there were hydraulic units exploding off the side and the engines started exploding taking out more hydraulic units? Heh that and all the concrete flying up on ignition was like watching a heavy metal music video.
There was a lot of smoke coming out of the bottom after the catch. I was worried about an internal fire but it’s since stopped. The glow from the engine mount on re-entry was amazing. The fire on landing had me worried too I was expecting it to grow but put itself out eventually.
What an amazing morning!
Yes, the chopsticks lower and raise. They will lower the tower onto a transport vehicle and send it back to the bay for examination, and then possible reflight.
Yep, they handle all the mounting/demounting ops on the launch mount, so they have to be able to move along the tower.
Yes, the chopsticks are attached to one giant lift.
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 REALLY CAUGHT IT!
Seems impossible honestly. Like the Jetsons
Wow, that’s amazing. Didn’t think something like that would be possible.
This chopstick catch was really impressive. I had my money on them managing it the first time. I haven't been so excited since the dual landing of their Falcon 9 boosters.
This was insanely cool to watch. And on the first try!
As a complete lay person with little to no physics knowledge: what stops the use of something dumb like a parachute, or even wings and landing gear, to "land" the booster? I assume it is impractical (since they don't do it), but what are the actual particulars that stop it from working? While super cool to watch, it seems crazy that plucking it out of the air like that is the best way to preserve the booster for reuse.
Parachutes give little or no control over where and how the rocket lands, are unreliable (unfurling fabric behaves chaotically; modern spacecraft still don't have 100% reliability on their parachutes), and are surprisingly heavy.
Wings and landing gear are useless extra weight during launch, and excess weight on the booster has a super-linear reduction weight delivered to orbit. (the Tyranny of the Rocket Equation)
During the 1960s, NASA investigated using inflatable Rogallo Wings (basically hang gliders) to land the Gemini capsule. It worked fine, but was more complicated than parachutes, and re-use was not one of the goals of the Gemini or Apollo programs.
None of those give much margin for error on landing. Without any kind of propulsion, there's no option to come to a hover or do another go-around if the landing isn't going well. Space Shuttle pilots had to do extensive training in simulators for the landing because they only got one shot at it during the mission.
Propulsive landing doesn't require any hardware that isn't already on the launch vehicle, only a little excess propellant. (And it is a small amount; Super Heavy is like a soda can that's full of liquid at launch and only has a swig at the bottom during landing.) Propulsive landing gives Falcon 9 and Super Heavy the ability to overcome wind and other weather conditions to make pinpoint landings. Engine throttling gives Super Heavy the ability to hover, so it has a huge margin for error when coming in for a landing.
Super Heavy could have had legs, like Falcon 9, but it has such a huge payload capacity that they can simply choose to always launch with enough propellant to come back to the tower, and it saves a lot of flying weight and complexity by simply not having them. The arms on the tower can be massively overbuilt to ensure however much reliability SpaceX wants.
> As a complete lay person with little to no physics knowledge: what stops the use of something dumb like a parachute, or even wings and landing gear, to "land" the booster?
The main advantage is that you don't need to spend any of your payload mass budget on a parachute, or wings and landing gear. The secondary advantage over a parachute is that you don't need to fish it out of seawater and make your refurbishment process more of a pain in the ass.
At the very least, reducing the number of concerns on the rocket is definitely worthwhile. They are going to have an engine in any case, and using just that and nothing else on the rocket itself simplifies testing and reduces risk. The tower can have a separate testing and there's no way something that happens on the way to orbit and back breaks the tower.
Wings, parachute, etc... All very easy to break or burn at hypersonic speeds, and very chaotic to control. It probably (very probably) wouldn't be possible to land back exactly where the rocket launched on wings or chutes - that would probably need an extremely long and wide runway, but compare the size of Starship to the Space Shuttle... It's like braking a toy car vs braking an actual truck.
The Starship second stage is surprisingly not all that heavy compared to the 78t Shuttle orbiter dry mass, despite the many-fold difference in volume and payload, plus Starship needing to be a legitimate second stage rather than just an orbiter.
It mostly comes down to reducing extra weight. You have to carry those wings and landing gear upwards, which reduces useful payload weight. But having the booster right where it started also helps with reusability. No need to transport the booster from a landing strip back to the starting table
physics?
Does anyone know of a live map where we can see the trajectory of launches? Wondering if starship went above my head during reentry, but I can't find the info
The video looks like it's being played in reverse
Another great view: https://youtu.be/Vzyaud250Xo
This is truly an amazing feat! Congratulations to the SpaceX team.
Can someone explain to me exactly WHY it's such a big deal though? Like subjectively I can see it's incredible but while watching the video there were enormous applauses at points I knew were a big deal but I lacked the understanding of physics to truly appreciate.
The current Falcon rocket always expends a stage and lands a stage. Starship will land both stages. Also Starship is far larger and in rocketry there is something called the square cube law that means bigger is better. So its far more efficient. That leads to far cheaper mass to orbit costs.
In order to land not just the first stage but also the second stage more fuel will have to be carried on the ascent phase just to enable the recovery phase. This then necessitates weight savings elsewhere to avoid payload to orbit being cut way back. SpaceX chose to remove the landing system from both, the first and second stages (both because, after all if you can eliminate the landing system from one stage then you can eliminate it from the other).
This and other weight savings will enable high payload to orbit in a fully reusable launch platform.
Landing without legs requires something like this catch system -- something never done before, and clearly very difficult to do.
For humans to have any reasonable presence somewhere else in our solar system (moon, mars, etc.) we need the ability to launch tons (literally tons) of stuff to orbit and to the destination. and we need to launch it often to do anything in a reasonable amount of time. the only way to do that is to make reusable launch systems. SpaceX's Falcon 9 has aced that for satellites (see Starlink and everything else they've launched). The Starship launch system is capable of launching a significantly larger payload, ~20 times more. What they demonstrated yesterday is that a launch system that is capable of getting us anywhere in the solar system can be reusable. Huge accomplishment.
Question I can't find the answer to anywhere: considering that SpaceX already had other ways of re-using boosters, why are they doing this?
Is it to explore more options? Or because it's faster to re-use the booster if it's already in place? Were the other approaches not satisfactory, perhaps? Or no longer applicable due to size?
First because the rocket is lighter without landing legs. Second because they're aiming for rapid reusability, they want to tower to catch the rocket, lower it to the launch mount, and get another Starship stacked on it.
mass that's on the tower that was moved to the rocket is no longer on the rocket, which means the rocket can carry more fuel/payload. hence the tower catching the rocket instead of the rocket having heavy landing gear.
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.
Yeah really - it's half centimeter nav according to BG. Ctrl-f for centimeter:
https://arstechnica.com/space/2024/10/spacex-catches-returni...
Surveying GPS can do that with WAAS and a bunch of integration time and extra receivers, but not in real time:
https://www.gps.gov/systems/gps/performance/accuracy
So that's why I think they need to have a high resolution, close range, 3d positioning method for the final seconds.
I would bet in the traditional sensors.
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...
Congratulations. This is a Sputnik-level event, opening a new era in the history of civilization. Amazing.
Sorry for the newbie rocket question: Blast off happens around 33:00 in that video. The rocket appears to be vertically still (does not move) for the first 4 to 4.5 seconds. Is it held in place, or are not enough engines burning (yet) to induce take-off?
While I cannot say if it moves immediately, it definitely moves within 2 seconds. It does not appear to move because it is so massive at more than 100 meters.
Holy hell, they caught the booster!
Landing from space during sunrise while your rocket is on fire is as dramatic as it gets!
Nothing short of inspiring. Moving humanity forward. Well done to the SpaceX team.
What parts of this can be reused? I bet the engine is OK, but seems like the sides of the ... tube ... were pretty roughed up. I guess that's probably the cheapest part of the assembly though.
All of it can be reused. Their plan is for the tower to set the booster back down and immediately relaunch it.
Everything except the stage connector ring (which uses pyro bolts I believe) should be directly reusable, after an inspection, light brushing, and refueling / recharging.
Maybe the bottom uses some ablative material, then a new coat of it needs to be applied / attached.
All the internals should have enough resource for likely dozens of launches, if Falcon-9 is any indication.
Highlights in a YouTube video:
https://youtu.be/b28zbsnk-48?si=JamDRMuN07oWlcZi
Do they recover whats left of the ship from the Indian Ocean?
They can probably go fishing, but anything that sunk is gonna stay sunk. That ocean is not shallow, and deep submarine operations are expensive…
They did pull the bottom of the previous booster out. On the webcast they mentioned adjusting the landing maneuver for the ship to be a bit softer in case they decide to recover it too.
The previous booster landed in the golf of Mexico.
This starship landed in the Indian ocean a bit west of Australia, it's like 3x deeper.
↑ That.
For extra context: that "3× deeper" makes costs seriously explode. People do know how to engineer for that depth, but it's a lot of effort and there's pretty much no commercial market. For shallower stuff there's oil rigs, deep-sea cables, seafloor mining, even just tourism… but at some point it just peters out and only research vessels tackle the depth.
(source: friend of mine works at a UK university doing deep-sea vehicles)
>(source: friend of mine works at a UK university doing deep-sea vehicles)
As in he works on their development? That sounds exciting, do you have something like the name of one of the vehicles?
> As in he works on their development?
Yes, she works on their development.
> That sounds exciting, do you have something like the name of one of the vehicles?
No vehicle name, but this is the university department/lab: https://www.southampton.ac.uk/research/facilities/maritime-r...
(Their vehicles don't even go that deep, but again that was the point I was trying to make… even in research, the very deep stuff is rare and a "big project" that ends up fanned out ⇒ MRIL made only the cameras for a 4km vessel…)
Do they worry about any issues of the debris winding up in the hands of China or Russia? I would imagine the raptor engines are mostly intact.
Was the explosion intentional? I thought they were hoping it would float for recovery but if not I makes sense to sink it.
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…
You think there are Russian submarines in the gulf of mexico?
They splashed down in the Indian Ocean, not the Gulf of Mexico.
Also noone mentioned submarines, debris can just float and drift around (sometimes even at some depth below the surface).
Starship landed in the Indian Ocean, not the Gulf of Mexico.
I mean, yes [0]. It's probably the main reason SpaceX went to effort to recover [1] all the engines of the previous booster (IFT-4), which landed in accessible, shallow water in the Gulf of Mexico. The Raptor engines hold valuable secrets, particularly to China who are trying to clone a lot of SpaceX things.
The CIA did something very similar to this in the Cold War [2], though they used a boat instead of a submarine.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akula-class_submarine#Operatio... ("In August 2012, the news media reported that another Akula-class submarine operated in the Gulf of Mexico purportedly undetected for over a month, sparking controversy within U.S. military and political circles...")
[1] https://old.reddit.com/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1fvdekt/more_... ("More images from B11 recovery + new info "26 of the Raptors have been recovered but they are trying to get all 33")
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Azorian
Great launch! Would be nice if the starship itself would be landing on the chopsticks next time and land during day time instead of dark Australia.
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.
Absolutely incredible achievement, I'm still shaking!
So funny that they had a little buoy water ready to film the explosion. I want to see the views of that camera from the landing itself.
The contrast between SpaceX's success at creating reusable rockets and Tesla's failure at FSD is pretty stark.
To be honest FSD is way harder. The platform doesn't occasionally have a road closure sign or a new traffic light or a guy unloading his van or an emergency vehicle with its hazards on.
Don't get me wrong the engineering and physics are crazy ugly, but it's at least consistent within a range. Humans are messy, unpredictable, unreliable and chaotic.
After watching this the project of changing brakes on my old car doesn't feel like that big of a project anymore.
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.
As an ME/AE, I can say this is an astounding engineering achievement. And on the first try! Well done, SpaceX!
Congratulations to those working at SpaceX!
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.
In addition to the other ways this is incredible, it is a stunning achievement in software development.
First attempt!
I can't believe what i just saw!
Humanity has reached a milestone.
An incredible achievement. I'm honored to be part of this moment in history.
Why can only Elon do stuff like this and not BlueOrigin or the hundreds of other aerospace startups? Does he just have a 1/100000000 combination of intelligence, tenacity, and directionality that can't be matched by anyone, even those trying to emulate him as closely as possible?
Isn't BlueOrigin going after at totally different market segment, I thought it was focused on things like space tourism and more "space base" type stuff? Also pretty sure BlueOrigin is almost all funded by Jeff B, SpaceX has a lot of external funding and focused on tangible markets vs just "people will want to do stuff in space" - I think it was only very recently they started to work with NASA.
> Isn't BlueOrigin going after at totally different market segment, I thought it was focused on things like space tourism
They have New Shepard, a crew-rated suborbital spacecraft, primarily targeted at tourism, but it has also done some science payloads for NASA, university and commercial clients.
But they also are doing a lot of non-tourism stuff: they designed and manufacture first stage engines for ULA’s new Vulcan launch vehicle; they have their own reusable orbital launch vehicle (New Glenn) due to launch soon (planned for next month, but might slip to early next year); they have a contract with NASA to build a lunar lander to compete with SpaceX’s; they are part of one of the teams NASA has chosen to compete for the contract to build a commercial ISS replacement.
And SpaceX is involved in space tourism too: both directly, and indirectly via resellers such as Axiom.
It is just that the most publicly noticeable thing Blue Origin has achieved is space tourism, which makes people think it is primarily a space tourism company; meanwhile, SpaceX has had numerous publicly visible achievements other than tourism, so people view tourism as just another thing they do, not their main thing.
Why do we think its Elon 'doing' this? Just curious, since it could just as well be that its the engineers and other leaders who could be the differentiator.
Because it's Elon who said "ok, build it." There's no one else except him with that power and/or the guts. Even landing a rocket the government had given up on, and no company was even trying until he did. People were calling the 'chopstick' landing system a dumb idea until today.
It's not like engineers don't come up with wild ideas all the time to their leadership, but is the leadership good enough to understand the good ideas from bad ones? Take the risk, spend billions to actually execute?
Elon has enough of a physics/engineering background to ask the right questions, understand the trades engineers put in front of him, and make the risk/reward calculation to make the right decisions the ends up winning.
To get what SpaceX has you need strong technical leadership all the way up the chain. Many companies don't. Their CEOs are experts in legal, PR, finance, etc... They make poor technical decisions.
I would agree with that if it weren't the case that the collection of engineers and other leaders working under Elon consistently outperform their competition in multiple domains.
Because he is the kingpin. He chooses the staff, he guides them, he does everything at a high level.
You can hire new executives, you can't easily find a new Musk, and then you will fail.
See the problem?
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.
What is the advantage of catching the booster vs letting it touch down?
You don't have to send most of the landing hardware into space.
That makes sense, thank you!
basically they transfer equipment from the rocket to the landing tower so that the rocket can be lighter which is why they have to catch the rocket instead of the rocket landing by itself.
I grew up playing Halo, and this was purely fiction at that point.
The joy on the faces of all the employees is infectious, congrats!
Unbelievable. Amazing.
I am absolutely flabbergasted at this. Wow. Jesus christ.
This is amazing. What an incredible technological feat!
We have done much, but there is much to be done.
I don’t understand, the starship has to stand on something, and what ever that is in contact with ( arm or barge or land or whatever ) , needs to be as heavy, how they are saving weight ?
This is incredible!
Very difficult to enjoy with all the screaming
For some reason, the spacex screams sound nightmarishly terrifying to me.
My feeling exactly, doesn't sound like enjoyment screaming but like total hysteria
Congratulations.
Do we know if there was a test payload?
Yes, there was none.
What an inspiring team SpaceX has.
yea this seemed like simple PID control to me, nothing impressive yawn
That was craaaaaaaazy!
Code name: Danielsan.
That was impressive.
That was soooo good!
Now go back 7 years and watch the proposal for 1 hour flight anywhere in the world - https://youtu.be/2tf2KpCG2fM?si=EfDUcL4x7MpGt51C&t=27
Hi
Awesome. Incredible. Inspiring. Words fail me.
Heartfelt congratulations to the folks at SpaceX!
I went to follow this on the SpaceX YouTube channel since it is usually closer to real time.
It seems someone hijacked and played a video of the previous launch. Just as we got to launch time it cut to a fake badly dubbed speech by Elon Musk going on about Bitcoin, with a handy QR code.
This was a bit confusing but since it was 10 minutes in advance I managed to switch to another channel.
Still amazing, even if the video glitched at the key capture point.
And an hour later the Starship itself re entered to soft salty sea landing.
I don’t know how many prototype runs they need to do, I’m guessing they could stuff a shed load of Starlinks into the next one.
Sounds like you were on a scam, fake version of the channel.
You need to look closely at the channel name in a URL and not just the branding signals on the page itself (logos, "presentation name"), etc. What you'll find is that the on-page channel name can be made pretty much anything as well as logos, banner's etc. But when you look at a URL that leads to the channel page, it's not the same and it doesn't have the verification check.
There is a real SpaceX channel: https://www.youtube.com/spacex
Note that it's just "spacex" and does have the verification mark. Also, SpaceX doesn't stream anything there (anymore): it's all just promotional videos... some of them are cool, but that's all they are. Nothing real-time. SpaceX only streams on X now, so I'd recommend one of the third party Youtube channels like https://www.youtube.com/@NASASpaceflight (which isn't NASA) if you'd prefer to stick to Youtube for such things.
This was on the YouTube appleTV app
I don't have any Apple products, so I couldn't give you any advice here.
My experience is that, while YouTube has a lot of content creators that I very much enjoy... I enjoy YouTube stewardship of the platform... less so.
I have an admittedly old Chromecast Ultra and Pixel Pro 8 phone which I usually use to control it. As they continue to upgrade the app and the service, they steadily make it worse and worse. Damn thing is almost unusable.
In the end, I think they may well be poorly product managing themselves into a position where they could be vulnerable to a more able, savvy, and competent competitor.
All this is to say you're probably just out of luck on being able to see these sorts of scams if you aren't already hip to them existing.
They did it!
the starship hit the target!
Crazy that the chop stick catch was originally eye rolled by the engineers and then when he pushed for it they realized he was serious.
SpaceX has unbaked bread
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.
Hard to stay apolitical when the government excludes you from an EV summit and calls your competition the market leader, a bold face lie.
There has been some kind of beef between Elon Musk and the Biden administration even before Musk's public right-wing turn. For example Biden has given speeches praising US EV vehicle manufacturers and not mentioning Tesla but mentioning all their competitors.
Unions told Biden to ignore Tesla. https://www.wsj.com/politics/elections/how-elon-musk-broke-w...
Yeah stuff like this - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s9ZmdIh1qpI
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What did the post(s) say?
https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1240754657263144960?lang=en
https://www.theverge.com/2020/3/20/21187760/twitter-elon-mus...
https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2020/04/29/tech/elon-musk-twitter-co...
Lots of examples. And I’m not just talking about his general opinions on government response, but actual misinterpretations and misstatements of data that were straight-up wrong.
It was also a clear breaking point between Elon and local and state government in California over how local restrictions were going to affect Tesla’s factory in Fremont.
So the claims were:
1. That they will probably get to 0 cases. (he was wrong, but this prediction was made fairly early on when the data looked like this: https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1240767096104972289)
2. Kids essentially immune but elderly with existing conditions vulnerable, so family gatherings with close contact are risky. (https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1240758710646878208) ... seems correct?
3. He said "the coronavirus panic is dumb". (perhaps downplaying it too much, but in 2024 I think most people would say that the societal response such as not being allowed to go to a beach or park was absurd)
4. He wanted to keep factories open and for people to be allowed outside their homes. (similar to 3)
5. He posted: "Yes, reopen with care & appropriate protection, but don’t put everyone under de facto house arrest" (https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1255386895145672705) ... which also seems reasonable.
6. He had Tesla working on making ventilators but didn't think they would be needed in the end. (https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1240770010747830272)
Did I miss anything or were his posts relatively uncontroversial with the benefit of hindsight? Personally, I was more concerned about covid than he was at the time, but I would say that his approach to it was more reasonable.
> That they will probably get to 0 cases. (he was wrong, but this prediction was made fairly early on when the data looked like this:
This was an incorrect interpretation of data that did not account for reporting lag in case numbers, which were actually increasing. It was a bad statement, a bad interpretation of data, and poor judgement to post it.
"Kids are essentially immune" and "Kids seem to be less affected" are two different statements. There are thousands of child deaths associated with COVID-19.
In March of 2020 we had very little characterization of this virus and its effects. Whether predictions were mostly right or mostly wrong, I think a prominent public figure making definitive statements about probably trending to zero or kids being "immune" was irresponsible. If nothing else, to me it makes him look dumb considering how much he downplayed the impact of the virus itself, how much he vilified the 'panic', and how many millions of deaths followed those statements.
> He wanted to keep factories open and for people to be allowed outside their homes.
Most people (in the US at least) were not trapped in their homes, that is an exaggeration. He wanted his factory to be kept open. I'm not sure whether he was right or wrong on that, but given that his opinions were based on at least some bad interpretations of data from above I don't think it was well considered. Basically all of his statements on COVID seem to correlate with a personal motivation to keep his factory and business running, rather than a consideration of actual public health impacts.
Anyway, my point above was not really to legislate what he was and was not correct about. My point was to highlight that his public "turn" into making strong political statements and clashing with government administration was not a new thing that started recently during the Biden administration. Right or wrong he very much clashed with the government response to COVID in 2020 and there's a fairly direct line you can draw between that clash and many of his current statements and positions.
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This was “actual facts” that came to light later?
https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1240754657263144960?lang=en
"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." and what we have witnessed is magic.
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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.
Same here. I was actively showing the (scammed) live stream to my 4yo daughter, and had to switch back to the live version for yet another 10minutes of wait.
Quite the embarassment, I think I begin to understand how my parents feel when they are completely unaware of some technical aspects I try to explain, and how easy it would be to scam them. Seems like it is getting easier to scam me, too.
To be fair, once they switched to Fakelon, it was quite clear. But I started the same stream again later as the YT app does not properly highlight the channel's name before clicking.
They run even on daya when there's no launch or Elon presentation, I've watched one because I thought I missed some announcement.
YT and Google has a vested interest to defame Elon.
It’s very clear — all the MSM are top of the list for anything Trump related, and for Elon it’s all crypto scam channels
It’s intentional folks
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At this point I am finding it hard to hate Elon Musk.
For everything he does that has annoyed me (like Gloating at people being bombed in the middle east) — his business acumen has completely unlocked for people what they we thought was impossible.
People are complex. This is nuance.
There should be nothing wrong with recognizing that any individual is a mix of things you're going to like and things you're not. That could be judged all the way to a mix of things which are morally correct, amoral, or immoral... but the reality is probably a mix.
It should be OK to praise the guy for those good traits and in turn to criticize the guy for what he does wrong: both in turn calling out the specific actions and less "the person". Its rare that demonizing someone is really appropriate or anything other than self-serving and we should see those that make that effort in that light.
Completely agree. But regardless of if we criticize or praise. He is gossip worthy. Going from being in a Marvel Movie as the architype of Iron Man, all the good things he has done, to recently jumping around at a rally of a madman, and kind of looking nuts himself.
It does beg comparison to the typical evil genius. He could literally be a villain from a Bond Movie, funding Specter. It's all fun and games. But just on surface, it is hard not to talk about him. He embodies too many sci-fi tropes.
On days like today, that was amazing to see. I'd like to think all the bad is overblown.
Yes he’s amazing and we’re lucky to live in a time and place where he can lead thousands of people that can do these things. He’s an example of what’s possible by a capitalist and how capitalism empowers individuals to shape the world and make it better for everyone. So naturally there’s a group of people trying to stop him due to envy and other copes.
Think you are confusing capitalism with variety of other political fields.
Capitalism does nothing to ensure personal/individual freedoms. There is no 'empowering'.
Technically slaves were also a valuable part of the capitalist system at the time. They were integral to the flow of capital, as they were an asset.
You can have Dictator/Authoritarian governments also be capitalist. Huge misunderstanding these days is thinking China is communist. They stopped being communist decades ago and are not as Capitalist as the US. But that doesn't help individuals that much.
Even today, Human Resources, is about 'humans' as capital, how to manage the human assets. Capitalism doesn't help the individual, the induvial is the resource to be mined.
China stopped being real communist because they were tired of starving. They are the proof that a centralized managed economy only leads to stagnation at best and mass death more commonly. Today they are a very competent cartel that takes a big on all free market production. Deng was mainly a genius and saved the country from Maoism.
Slavery existed well before capitalism and is economic system independent. Slavery occurs across a wide spectrum of economic systems today. It will always exist. It’s up to governments not capitalists to outlaw it. Capitalists need rules to play by.
Human Resources are the socialist/communist/leftist contribution to our economic system. They can’t actually contribute anything useful but they can deploy commissars to ensure the humans in the organization have right think. HR and all the associated schemes are simply leftist grift that infects everything.
>>>China stopped being real communist because they were tired of starving. They are the proof that a centralized managed economy only leads to stagnation at best and mass death more commonly. Today they are a very competent cartel that takes a big on all free market production. Deng was mainly a genius and saved the country from Maoism.
Doesn't change my statement that they aren't communist anymore, now. You are just agreeing. I didn't make any statement that was pro-communism.
>>>Slavery existed well before capitalism and is economic system independent. Slavery occurs across a wide spectrum of economic systems today. It will always exist. It’s up to governments not capitalists to outlaw it. Capitalists need rules to play by.
Yes. That was my statement. That capitalism alone does not lead to individual rights. I guess you agree again. I miss-understood your previous statement that seemed to imply capitalism had lead to individual flourishing, and thus SpaceX.
>>>>Human Resources are the socialist/communist/leftist contribution to our economic system. They can’t actually contribute anything useful but they can deploy commissars to ensure the humans in the organization have right think. HR and all the associated schemes are simply leftist grift that infects everything.
HR has nothing to do with socialism. It is clearly a Risk Management department. They are just as likely to fire victims as the guilty. The only calculation they use is the risk/cost to the company. If it is more expedient to get rid of a victim they will do it. They are not on the employee's side. If HR fires you for hanging a noose on your coworkers locker, that is minimizing the risk from someone unhinged.. That is not being socialist.
You should be glorifying Shotwell, not Musk. Yes Must helped give her room to build but she's the genius and deserves the credit.
Is there any source for first-hand specifics of what she does?
I used to argue in reddit (same username as my HN) basically calling Musk a fraud and Gwynne Shotwell being all the brains 6 years ago, but I've since changed my position after seeing engineers in spaceX give props to Musk at podcasts, twitter, and various interviews.
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The only 'grift' that holds up is about FSD. Everything else is nonsense. They are making Boring tunnels, the costumer paid and they delivered. The company didn't take off as much as Musk hoped but calling it a 'grift' isn't accurate.
Hyperloop was never promised, that's literally just people who don't like Musk made up. In fact he EXPLICITLY said 'I'm not gone build Hyperloop, its just an idea I had', and then people who don't like him 10 years later 'where is the promised Hyperloop'. How does that make sense? Musk never received a single $ for Hyperloop, but somehow this is a 'grift'.
> how many billions of dollars in government subsidies?
They are big cooperation's in capital intensive industries. When you build big investments, you get government tax reduction and other things, this is literally normal. If you don't like it, that's fine, but that how it works. Its not a 'grift' unless you want to go down the 'modern capitalism is grift' route.
Outside of that, most subsidies he got, were just universal subsidies that anybody could get. The US government gave the same amount of subsidies to foreign companies selling EV cars in the US. This was a plan to increase EV adoption in general. And arguably it worked. How is again is this a 'grift'.
And for SpaceX, I think its pretty clear that the government got much, much, much more then it ever paid for when they paid SpaceX. I would argue SpaceX has already saved the US government more money then they ever paid for SpaceX development. Just Clipper going on Falcon Heavy is billions in savings.
There are plenty of reason to dislike him but those aren't really good ones. Except the FSD one, that one I think is quite bad. At least they finally allowed moving the FSD from one car to the next, but that's not enough.
How many billions in subsidies has he had?
He said about half of what Boeing had.
Are you against subsidies in general? Or just against someone you don't like getting them to actually develop new technology?
Neither. I'm replying to another comment my friend.
Amazing days ahead of us - if we can avoid blowing ourselves up over pathetic patches of land, we could have the entire solar system under our feet...
Agreed, but I'm concerned that humans being humans, we'll have the entire solar system to blow ourselves over.
In The Expanse (which I highly recommend), they give a new lease on life to that quote attributed to Einstein "I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought with, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones" - hurling asteroids towards a planet. I really hope humanity's real future will play out in accordance with some of the more optimistic elements in The Expanse.
> pathetic patches of land
It's always funny seeing people pretend they live in a world where small issues like land or food don't affect them, even though they only have that privilege because a larger military says they should.
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[stub for offtopicness]
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You’re repeating a flagged comment [1] that’s already been rebutted [2].
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41828032
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41828048
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[flagged]
FYI, This is a five-time flagged comment [1][2][3][4][5] that’s been rebutted [6].
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41828032
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41828151
[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41828151
[4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41828468
[5] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41828616
[6] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41828048
[flagged]
You’re spamming a twice-flagged comment [1][2] that’s already been rebutted [3].
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41828032
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41828151
[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41828048
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> you’re spamming a reply
They’re still going [1] and it appears to be a common thread across their recent commenting.
But they’re getting flagged, so no need to continue. (EDIT: It’s still getting traction.) It’s a tempting (and in my opinion mean-spiritedly preyful) conspiracy theory on an ephemeral topic. I always appreciate folks with domain experience similarly flagging nonsense in other threads.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41828380
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This is the third time you’ve spammed the same flagged comment [1][2][3] that’s already been rebutted [4].
If you want to discuss this, consider putting forward better sources or at least new thoughts. Just because it’s wrong doesn’t make it not worth discussing.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41828032
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41828151
[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41828151
[4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41828048
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A so-called iron curtain like that seems like it would end the mutually assured destruction game.
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FYI, This is a four-time flagged comment [1][2][3][4] that’s been rebutted [4].
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41828032
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41828151
[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41828151
[4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41828468
[5] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41828048
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This is a nonsense conspiracy theory. It popped up based mostly off conserving a single man’s connection to 2001 SpaceX.
Does Starship enable brilliant pebbles? Sure. But that’s because it provides easy access to space. Starlink could be described as a network of communication ‘pebbles’, as could Starshield, SpaceX’s actual military contract [1].
(Starship provides a technology platform for rapid launch. That’s more valuable for missile defence than orbital nonsense for intercepting warheads by way of predictable and observable plane-change manoeuvres.)
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX_Starshield
It's probably nonsense, but the latest versions of the starlink satellite are significantly heavier than prior generations.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starlink> probably nonsense
It’s definitely nonsense. As in if they are attempting it it’s virtually fraud on the American taxpayer.
Barring a sci-fi breakthrough in propulsion technology (or vacuum directed energy weapons), it cannot work. (And even if you have that propulsion technology, its existence obsoletes the concept again. You’d need to rewrite orbital physics to make plane changes a better idea than new launch from the ground. It’s just a phenomenally fucked idea.)
> the latest versions of the starlink satellite are significantly heavier than prior generations
This is in the same calibre of evidence as that for more planes meaning chemtrails are real.
> You’d need to rewrite orbital physics to make plane changes a better idea than new launch from the ground.
Namely, the plane change from the pre-positioned orbit to one that intersects with the target? Sorry if this is a dumb question, but is it really that bad? No way to get the loitering orbits closer to an interception than launching from the ground? (Ed: well, those definitely wouldn't be the orbits starlink is on, I think I can see that at least)
(The guy you're responding to has mostly deleted their posts, so I'm missing context, but I did get as far as the wiki page for brilliant pebbles.)
> the plane change from the pre-positioned orbit to one that intersects with the target? Sorry if this is a dumb question, but is it really that bad?
Yes. The closer you get to the surface the faster the orbit which means while you have less orbital energy to kill on approach you need more birds to cover a given area. (To communicate how unintuitive orbital mechanics can be, consider that thrusing "up" or "down" (radial in or out) doesn't actual increase or decrease your mean altitude [1]. You have to fire retrograde, which means a long, swooping, predictable, observable (and thus avoidable) approach to intercept unless you're Project Orioning it [2].)
> guy your responding to has mostly deleted their posts
They were repeating a conspiracy theory around SpaceX's actual purpose being to create a space-based missile defence system. The proof being there are senior people who were involved with the latter who have been around SpaceX. It's total nonsense somewhat orthogonal to why space-based missile defence is between difficult and stupid.
The core concept of boost-stage (i.e. in the atmosphere) space-based intercept isn't physically fucked. It's just that every case where one presents it, ground-based interception--including at the boost phase--does better. You can hide your interceptors better. For any given cost, you can deploy more of them (and more early-warning/targeting satellites). And even primitive ASAT can reliably punch a hole in it.
The only benefit is political/PR, because it sounds cool--that doesn't rule it out. But it isn't something SpaceX is working on much less was founded for.
(Space-based midcourse (i.e. in vacuum, while the warhead coasts) interception is stupid on all levels. It's a slightly more difficult version of blanketing the skies in drones for intercept--except you have more volume to cover and have planes which send off a screaming signal every time they change course.)
[1] https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/44608/what-happens...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Orion_(nuclear_propuls...
I see you started writing this before I ninja-edited my comment to fix the "you're" typo. Thanks for the details.
> if they are attempting it it’s virtually fraud on the American taxpayer.
So, any secret military project is effectively fraud?
> any secret military project is effectively fraud?
No. A project based on bunk science is a fraud.
To be clear, space-based boost interception isn't impossible. You can do it. But in practically every case it's inferior to ground-based systems (with space-based early detection). The only case where it has merit is in containing a specific, small adversary with very few missiles, e.g. North Korea or Iran. But even there, a ground-based solution is superior in stealth, numbers and cost.
Space-based missile intercept is a political project. That doesn't mean it won't be done. But it's not something SpaceX is working on, or would work on without first cashing a substantial cheque.
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> you're wrong
Nope. And I can say this with more authority than almost anything on HN.
> Trump & Elon literally discussed it on X a few weeks ago
One, they discussed a lot of things. Two, they discussed capability. As I said, any launch system provides this capability theoretically. But (a) the capability is based on the faulty premise that pre-positioned orbital interceptors are superior to stealthy ground-based ones. And (b) it’s going to be true for any cheap space-launch system. (I say cheap because economies of scale mean cheap and frequent are virtually redundant.)
This entire theory comes out of people with no military background, no political experience and no aerospace engineering training wanting to feel special about being “in the know.”
> no military background, no political background and no aerospace engineering background
You're presuming a lot there.
You're making a lot of alts.
No, I’m not.
If you can do orbital math, you can verify the plane-change economics. If you’ve even talked to anyone in ABM, which granted requires clearance, you understand why the actual spending in ABM—globally—goes into ground-based interceptors.
This is a tailor-made conspiracy theory for someone who substitutes doing the damning math for connecting bits of string between people and tweets. If you have any domain experience or connections, it’s trivially excludable. That’s why I can shoot it down (hehe) with unique confidence.
> If you can do orbital math, you can verify the plane-change economics. If you’ve even talked to anyone in ABM, which granted requires clearance, you understand why the actual spending in ABM—globally—goes into ground-based interceptors.
Boost phase interception using a constellation of several thousand hypersonic glide vehicles circumvents the plane-change problem; I'm sure you know that. I'm sure you also know that the reason nobody has seriously pursued such a solution before is because putting tens of thousands of interceptors into orbit is absurd.
Was absurd.
Unless you think you know better than the National Academy of Sciences. Cost of launch is the only recognized limitation (in 2012)
https://nap.nationalacademies.org/read/13189/chapter/4?term=...
Your question about delta-V is answered in that same report a few pages above.
> Cost of launch is the only recognized limitation
That’s how you read “in principle” and “in theory”? The cost of launch is used, in the third bullet, to justify not analysing the idea further. Not as the “only…limitation.”
As your source says, even a working space-based boost-phase interceptor is trivially defeat-able with “primitive” ASAT capabilities.
Brilliant pebbles are a fucked concept. You’re citing a no-math NAS paper for good reason—it’s good to speculate about it in case we learn something new about how gravity works. Barring that, it’s well-recognised nonsense.
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No, it's that you started a massive offtopic generic flamewar tangent on perhaps the single most repeated topic of the last couple years, nothing new or interesting can come of which. That's exactly what we're trying to avoid on HN; we want curious conversation about interesting things, and this is the opposite of that on all counts.
Not that your comment was by any means the worst example of this! But it was guaranteed to spin off into the off-topic flamewar that it did.
(We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41830516.)
Honestly, I didn't realize how fast and far it would go off. Maybe I'm out of touch.
I was actually just wondering if Musk didn't care about Politics and all the political maneuvering was still with the goal of getting to Mars. Space and Politics are like peanut butter and jelly. Hard to separate these subjects.
It's hard to understand why people care so much about someone's personal political opinions.
This is especially prevalent when working in places like Seattle and SF. People ostracizing their coworkers because of wrongthink.
MDS like TDS is real. It's extremely toxic and it needs to stop. People's political beliefs are their own and connecting that to work is a recipe for disaster.
The man in question personally has more wealth than many nations, co-opted one of the most popular American social media networks in the country and is a massive hypocrite when it comes to free speech.
Musk isn't just some guy near your cubicle complaining about Mexican cooks.
He isn't a co-worker. He's a billionaire that can fund entire campaigns. It is a lot more like if my co-worker was really my boss, and he really cares about my political leanings during a performance review.. Thus I also care about his.
"Metastable deexcitation spectroscopy (MDS) and thermal desorption spectroscopy (TDS)"
I really don't know what you are talking about.
Musk and Trump
Derangement Syndrome
Is what the acronyms refer to. Its a meme for the obsession around them specifically.
My two cents is that there are other billionaires doing significantly more harm than those two. They just keep quiet or own news media platforms.
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No there isn't. This is just unsubstantiated democratic fan fiction. Please stop spamming this link.
Is it so hard?
See if you can try and steelman the argument as to why people care about the political opinions and actions of the world's richest man.
> It's hard to understand why people care so much about someone's personal political opinions.
People care because he has power and money, which he uses to shape the world in alignment with those political opinions.
The same is true of anyone else with power - Xi, Putin, Gates, Thiel, Zuck, and the countless others with influence over business and government. A lot of money is spent to analyze and alter their political opinions.
What's hard for me to understand is why this isn't plainly obvious to you.
We've had decades of absolute liberal control of tech companies but you don't see threads like this every time Google announces something. Some 25% of tech is conservative, it shouldn't be that weird that a few of the billionaires are too.
You've never seen someone question the motives of the leaders of big tech on HN?
Both. A single person can be great in some areas and a malicious loon in others. In fact, great success in one field can provide the self-confidence and capital to be a catastrophe in others.
But also keep in mind that Musk isn't personally designing and building everything SpaceX does. The staff at SpaceX deserve more credit than they get, especially Gwynne Shotwell.
It's become an absolute meme on the left-leaning internet to say SpaceX isn't Elon and Shotwell is doing all the work. You can't go to a thread on this site or reddit etc without it being brought up.
Really I am pretty sure it is just coping to deal with the uncomfortable fact that Elon (bad guy) is doing something great and clearly is skilled. Ask anyone at SpaceX or Shotwell herself and they will all say Elon is very important to its success.
Maybe that's a meme, but obviously I'm not saying that.
The problem is that people watch these videos and it's all ELON ELON ELON. Most of them don't even know Shotwell's name.
Everyone who cares about SpaceX, and not Elon-hating, know Shotwell's name. My nine year old does, and he knows that Gwynne got into engineering because she liked another engineer's shoes!
That is true, but it’s also true of Blue Origin who are far behind spacex in so far as flying real hardware. The difference is Musk maniacal zeal and yes leadership. I’m frustrated with Musks politics too, but his drive can’t be denied.
But why are you frustrated with Musk’s politics? The fact that one of the smartest people chooses to demonstrate their view is very remarkable. It does warrant critical thinking and examination. After all he could have kept quiet and ponder to both parties equally.
Elon is into politics because it’s politics who stood in his way of progress first.
He’s imho afraid and rightfully so, Twitter was a clear example of why.
Nonsense. Governments been very kind to Elon. For years Tesla subsisted on selling regulatory credits.
How does your argument counter what I wrote? Nonsense is sometimes but only projecting onto a mirror.
I never knew the name Tim Cook before Steve Jobs died.
The general public does not know the layers of corporate staffing and their names. That doesn't mean they don't realize there are a lot of people at the company contributing. Nobody thinks Elon is in the back room doing drafting, and doing every job.
Yes. Musk is complicated person. Maybe that is what I was trying to ask. Does anybody have any credible insight into where is head is at. Is he turning into a wing nut, or is this all just a ploy to have more control over the government to further his goals of getting to Mars. Like if Trump wins, he can just phone him up and say, lets put a man on Mars.
The general public generally does, in fact, massively overestimate the importance of the CEO to the company, especially celebrity CEOs.
> Is he turning into a wing nut
Back in 2018 the "cave diver pedo" incident made it abundantly clear that Musk, while possessing many admirable qualities, is also a malicious clown.
SpaceX is not Musk. It may be executing his vision, but it's a team of thousands of skilled and hard-working people, all eager to work on a Sunday for a chance to pull something like this off.
And Apple isn't Steve Jobs? Apple would have turned around on its own without Jobs?
I think we all know these big companies have thousands of people working for them, and a lot of them are pretty smart.
That doesn't change the influence the top guy has.
But he’s the catalyst for it all. There are other billionaires in this game too, why can’t they replicate his success? Why can’t they hire his engineers? Why can’t they deliver the results?
Twitter is not Musk. It may be executing his vision, but it's a team of thousands of skilled and hard-working people, all eager to work on a Sunday for a chance to create a propaganda arm of Trump party.
Why is it hard to reconcile that he’s both extremely intelligent/driven, and believes free speech is critical to democracy and at risk?
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Your link is broken
works here
Had no idea that founders of Space X were also Heritage Foundation.
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Yeah, Exhibit A is that religious zealot Trump . . .
while a big chunk of the world is still under the influence of religion its been a while that the west worst extremism is not religious. you can turn on any mass media and then you will notice another kind of extremism. this is musk point and he is right about it. I can’t fathom how anyone educated cannot see it. It has to be political bias and dishonesty. be cartesian if you are an engineer.
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Ironically, Goldwater was branded as an extremist in his time.
Yeah, that is the scary part, the extremist complaining about the other extremist . Goldwater: "Yeah, those guys are really out there".
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Please stop posting political/ideological battle comments to HN. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
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Please stop posting political/ideological battle comments to HN. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Musk is just a front man. He's just an actor like Trump. God knows who is behind them. Banks, "The Matrix" , can anyone fill it in ? The front men are certainly just reading scripts, it is obvious.
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Musk bought SpaceX and Starlink just like Twitter.
This technical term for this is "false".
Are you perhaps thinking of Tesla? SpaceX was founded by Musk.
Where did this meme come from? I’ve seen it twice in 2 days and it’s categorically false. Has the left wing echo chamber really brainwashed itself into believing Musk purchased all his successes and deserves no credit?
Even the “he bought Tesla” meme is lame. He invested in a tiny electric car startup and built it into the massive success it currently is.
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Given the proliferation of ballistic missiles that’s not a bad thing…
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It's about time. Not sure why people present it like it's a bad thing.
The conclusion doesn’t seem to follow?
It assumes that decision makers elsewhere in the world can’t get forewarning.
But it’s impossible to hide any project development on that scale from spies, or even just plain corruption, so now that decision makers across the world know that at least the launch mechanisms are possible… the moment such program preparations are detected on a scale that can’t be explained away as noise will result in them activating every panic button they have.
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Immanentization.
Hopefully not of the eschaton, though. Because that trick never works, Bullwinkle.
I hate to bring politics into such a momentous occasion, but as a lifelong Democrat, I think Trump might get my vote because of his alliance with Elon. Elon clearly is a once-in-a-century human who has progressed humanity more than anyone else in history. I think we need to let him achieve his goals without being burdened by government bureaucracy. Unfortunately, the Democrats have aligned against Elon. It didn't have to get this way, but it has. A Trump presidency will allow Elon to progress more, bringing humanity with him. I hate Trump and I think he is a narcissistic idiot, but he supports Elon more than Kamala.
The great dichotomy of man. Elon is a hardheaded questionable fellow who stops free speech on his platform if it doesn't suit the agenda and is supporting Trump who literally spurred an insurrection.
But Elon also started one of the greatest revolutions mankind has ever seen, up there with the Apollo project, which one can say is mankind's greatest achievement.
What do you do with that dichotomy is up to you to resolve.
Elon will be able to achieve his goals just fine under the Democrats.
Trump will run so much stuff into the ground nobody will be able to achieve anything.
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We've banned this account for breaking the site guidelines. You can't post like this or https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41829541 here, regardless of how wrong someone is or you feel they are.
If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
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We've banned this account for breaking the site guidelines. You can't post like this or https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41830050 here, regardless of how wrong someone is or you feel they are.
If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
Edited: Was asking what were all these deleted comments.
Got my answer: it's a theory that SpaceX is a partner for the US DoD and is not just an internet provider.
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I’m just talking totally out of my A S S. Wouldn’t it be cool if this starship launch somehow utilized starshield for grabbing starship, like proof of concept to the military of some kind of hyper accurate military grade GPS that can pinpoint a rocket and control it to the accuracy of between two chop sticks?
> What the f is going on in this
Genuinely curious if you find an answer.
My first thought was nuclear anxiety; it’s nice to feel like we have a secret shield in space. Then I saw Trump talked about it, so my current hypothesis is the partisan parroting that happens on both sides. (Or if someone doesn’t like military spending, maybe it’s an anti-Musk thing?)
That said, the three accounts that have been posting about it seem to really like this topic [1][2][3], so maybe it’s a niche thing. They all seem to really like one Reddit thread.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=forgot-im-old
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=tbone902
[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=georgeg23
I recommend emailing hn@ with your questions, even if you don't currently see any obvious reason to.
Guessing the massive flag storm will ruin someone’s Monday.
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If elon can do everything he’s done with an increasingly hostile govt, imagine what he’ll be able to so with a supportive one
It's a joke to think trump cares about taking care of his own after all the evidence to the contrary. He throws everyone under the bus the first chance the gets.
> When Elon Musk came to the White House asking me for help on all of his many subsidized projects, whether it's electric cars that don't drive long enough, driverless cars that crash, or rocketships to nowhere, without which subsidies he'd be worthless and tell me how he was a big Trump fan and Republican, I could have said, "drop to your knees and beg," and he would have done it,"
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/its-time-trump-sail-into-su...
That’s not the point. My point was primarily that there is a need for competition to Tesla.
It’d be not a good place to end up being hostage to Musk (or Trump) whims and depend on them to keep lights on for Starlink or ability to put satellites into an orbit.
And having a clear separation of government is also important.
It should be possible to outcompete X now. The opportunity is there, a lot of people who work there would prefer to avoid supporting Trump. And while X outcompeted NASA (for a motivated Silicon Valley company it’s not that difficult to outcompete a government agency, while draining best people from it), now X itself is becoming a perverted place. So there should be some opportunity there.
Trump is pro big oil, not electric, so Tesla wouldn't be getting any more favors/subsidies under Trump, and with all the NASA money currently flowing to SpaceX, no strings attached, I doubt they would benefit from Trump either. Money coming from Trump will always be conditional on him getting something back.
I don’t disagree with your overall point, but I’m sure there are significant strings attached to the money from NASA. Like, successfully launching lots of things into space for them. And developing a new human-rated space capsule, giving the US and NASA that capability again after a long time relying on Russia. And developing a totally new rocket system, together with a version that can take NASA back to the moon.
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If SpaceX is overly hindered by regulation/lawfare, then there'll be competition from China before long.
I don't think so; there remain few economic reasons to go to space and spacex's customer isn't going to rely on a Chinese company.
Burt Rutan, one of the most legendary aerospace engineers of all time used to do regular long presentations to people on why global warming was not man made. Some of them are archived on youtube. And there's many other cases of otherwise smart people having bonkers opinions in areas outside of what they are experts in. If anything, successful people are significantly more likely to do this. It rarely results in their downfall.
SpaceX will do just fine.
See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobel_disease
“You are a genius!” messes with the brain if heard enough.
Why?
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So you don't consider Elon Musk to be part of the engineering team at SpaceX?
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He's being sarcastic because the standing theme on the internet for most of the last decade is that Musk is an idiot who only got where he is because his parents are rich or he stole from other smarter/harder working people. SpaceX tends to put a hole in this idea since he founded and funded it himself, and they've made more progress in space travel in the last two decades than all existing government organizations and contractors have since the 70s.
The people that dislike Musk (or are afraid of the mob that will go after them if they say something positive about him) can’t deny the amazing things he is accomplishing and so when anything good happens, they are quick to farm karma with thanking and congratulating everyone who isn’t Musk. It is intentional.
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Please don't take HN threads on generic ideological tangents.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41827736.
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Please don't perpetuate generic ideological tangents. They're repetitive and therefore boring, and usually turn nasty.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
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Please don't perpetuate generic ideological tangents. They're repetitive and therefore boring, and usually turn nasty.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
>please don't perpetuate generic ideological tangents
Where did I do that? I tried to discredit an example of that which you are lamenting. Seems odd to reply this to my comment, though I understand flagging it.
What was the correct behavior when the notion I replied to is posed? Report it? Ignore it? Is there any reply to that comment you would not have flagged? Earnest questions.
As anyone can hopefully see from my follow up comments in this thread, I have no desire to be nasty nor any intention to degrade the quality of discussion here.
The GP was definitely starting a generic ideological tangent ("boo socialism", basically) and by pushing back on that ("nuh-uh", basically) you perpetuated it.
Yes the correct behavior would be to not feed it by replying, but instead to flag it as off topic.
I definitely believe you that you don't intend to be nasty and I don't think I saw any nastiness in your posts, so that's great! But your comments (in this thread at least) have definitely been in the "generic ideological battle" category. Examples:
"Gee, almost as if decades of austerity politics, lobbying by financial interests, and regulatory capture" (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41832880)
"Have you not paid much attention to politics since Reagan and Thatcher? Their whole objective was to hollow out the government" (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41840936)
I'm not saying you're wrong or disagreeing with you—it's just that this sort of generic ideological argument isn't the intellectually curious conversation we're looking for here, and we can't have both.
> this sort of generic ideological argument isn't the intellectually curious conversation we're looking for here
Do you have a concrete advice on how to deal with ideological tangents like the "late stage capitalism" meme? Flagging obviously doesn't work. Answering it is frowned upon (it's "feeding it").
Finally just ignoring it would leave a HN full of leftist ideas and anti-capitalism snark. They are already here, heavily upvoted. Is that something you want? HN is a gathering place for hackers but it also educates and inspires. An HN where businesses are the bad guys and capitalism evil is not an HN that inspires startups and founders. So my question is: what do you want and recommend?
Thank you!
I want and recommend that people focus on interesting, curious conversation, motivated by the desire to learn about the world and relate to others. This requires letting go of the feeling that you need to battle opposing positions that are wrong and bad. (Why? Because the two states are mutually exclusive.)
I know it's super hard to disengage from the latter, but we should, because (a) it spoils this site for its intended purpose, and (b) it's an illusion. It's not true that the world will be a worse place if you don't engage in ideological battles on internet forums. In fact it will be a better place and HN itself will be a better place.
Don't worry about the effect on HN of focusing on the delights of curious conversation. The distribution of commenters who come to that (happy) choice is random across the ideological spectrum, in my experience. You needn't worry about ceding HN to the socialists or whoever.
The distribution of commenters who get stuck in the embattled state is also randomly distributed ideologically, in my experience. I don't know if it counts as ironic or not, but the commenters who argue with each other most fiercely resemble each other more than they resemble anyone else.
Of course, if other commenters continue to break the site guidelines by posting generic ideological battle-style comments, you can downvote and/or flag those comments and move on. In egregious cases, you can email us at hn@ycombinator.com and we'll be happy to take a look.
But please don't just flag or report the cases you disagree with—people tend to do that (i.e. report cases where their enemies are misbehaving), which is really just a way to weaponize the HN mods against their opponents. That's not using the site as intended, either—it just shifts the same problem to a different level.
> is a ridiculously plain falsity.
It's well known in government that if you don't spend all your budget (meaning you were successful), your budget gets cut.
It is indeed ridiculous, but true.
Guess we're using different measures of "success" - in my book any govt program that nets more revenue than than it costs taxpayers or provides more value than it costs (harder to verify) (irs and usps respectively, for instance) is a "successful" program - Thus the irs is a "successful" govt program that is not getting its budget cut because it's successful, and socialist systems would still have an irs... That's kinda where I was coming from
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Thanks for the reading recommendations. Sunkara's manifesto for me is the best put case with the most brevity.
I haven't read those, I've mostly read stuff like Piketty and Sunkara, or smaller more focused stuff like Zuboff's surveillance capitalism or Rifkin's green new deal , caste, Harvey's history of neoliberalism, or Hannah Arendt's work that generally rebukes capitalism more than it does fundamentally bolster the ideas of socialism - You do make me reflect I haven't read much that's meant to be anything other than stuff from my side though
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Sounds like you didn't live through the Microsoft product launches of the late 1990s. Developers, developers, developers, developers. Same stuff, different day. You might enjoy this reminiscent remix, which also features a SpaceX-ish rocket as well (not bad foresight for a video created in 2009): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rRm0NDo1CiY&t=106
The SpaceX engineers did a great job, as did NASA.
The media needs to stop blindly attributing this to "Elon Musk". He did well taking the risks NASA was not allowed to take at the start. But these days he is toxic to the media and toxic to reporting, so for that reason alone the media could smarted up a little. Well done SpaceX and NASA engineers.
Elon is the guy who said, "that is the craziest idea I've ever heard, here's billions, let's build it"
It's 100% Musk that this happened, literally no one else would have done it. Everyone thought it was dumb until today. No company, no government or sci fi movie for that matter had even thought of it in the first place.
SpaceX engineers given the green light by Musk, not NASA, made it a reality. That's not to say Elon didn't make many decisions along the way in the design and development of both Starship, the launch towers and everything else.
The point is, Elon deserves a hell of a lot of credit along with everyone else. Everyone has their part to play in the success of the mission.
Correct, and that's why NASA outsourced funding.
Because if NASA risked billions on "crazy ideas" they'd get shut down, being a government agency.
No point pretending it's all Elon.
You’re pretending if you think anyone but Elon would approve building a massive launch tower with chopstick arms to catch what is essentially an incoming bomb.
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>The media needs to stop blindly attributing this to "Elon Musk".
Musk's biographer tweeted the pages from his book <https://x.com/WalterIsaacson/status/1844870018351169942> discussing how in late 2020 Musk suggested, then insisted against considerable opposition from his engineers, that Superheavy be caught with chopsticks instead of landing on legs like Falcon 9.
(If this sounds familiar, also according to the book, Musk is the person who suggested and, against considerable opposition from his engineers, insisted on Starship switching to stainless steel instead of carbon fiber.
Hint: Musk was right and his engineers were wrong. Both times.)
Doubtful it was Elon against hundreds of engineers diametrically opposed . He'd of surfaced it as a viable option, great.
Musk is the one who makes this possible. There's a reason why neither Bezos, Gates, nor Branson are anywhere close to this achievement, despite also having vast financial resources. I strongly dislike this attempt to erase Musk from the history of what's happening (mostly because people disagreeing with him politically). It is an absolute achievement of all the scientists and engineers at SpaceX. It is also a huge victory and validation for Musk and his way of leading. Both of these statements can be true simultaneously.
You can dislike it all you like but he's erasing himself via Xitter.
Imagine not being Team Elon.
Would this get the “Elon musk is not very bright because I don’t like his politics” crowd to finally STFU? Rhetorical question, of course not.
Uuuh the first stream on YouTube was Musk giving a speech, so I was waiting for the launch but turns out it was on another stream? So I just missed the whole thing, great.
They don't do lives on youtube, those are scammers. it is always on x.com
Well it shows like SpaceX on mobile with 150k viewers, maybe YouTube could use some brain power to fix that.
This has been going on for many years now, YouTube doesn't do anything about it.
Youtube simply doesn't care about their platform being used for scams. There are very simply very basic things they could do, but they simply don't.
They're quick to demonetize people though. Anything to make an extra buck.
Youtube is an incompetent organization. I've seen it take them nearly 48 hours to restore channels stolen by scammers to their rightful owners (all the while allowing the crypto scammers to continue streaming.)
Sorry, too busy selling ads.
Would be great if I could stream to my Chromecast or AppleTV from X without using airplay streaming my whole browser...
There used to be a Twitter AppleTV app and I recently saw an X app for TV platforms has been brought back, but I don’t know if the AppleTV version is out yet.
Of course I’d rather they just stream to YouTube in 4K.
There were multiple streams on youtube who rebroadcast that you can use.
Those are deep fake crypto scams that YouTube does not pull down. My father was scammed by one for over $2000.
The older we get, the likelihood that we get scammed approaches one. Be weary.
Youtube has a terrible problem with scammers. I don't know why they don't do anything about this.
And yet all MSM channels are the first thing u see when u query certain topics and people.
It’s intentional
https://twitter.com/i/broadcasts/1RDGlyognOgJL
Here. Or try Space Affairs on YouTube
There was an AI crypto scam channel. Musk is so scammy that it looked feasible and was shared widely by the looks.
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Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments and flamebait? You've unfortunately been doing it repeatedly. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.
Personal attacks in particular will get you banned here, so please don't post like this.
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
Taking it off YouTube and not having their main YT account at least show a “redirect” video is strange.
They don't have a YT account. Are you talking about the "@musk-spacex" channel which stylizes itself "SpaceX"?
They used to have an official YouTube channel where the launches were broadcast. Now it's on Twitter.
Removing their YouTube account was part of the strangeness. Even if you own a social media company you really need the YouTube account to squat your brand and redirect
It's not about falling for the crypto scam, but realizing that it is that before you already lost half the launch
It's like a rite of passage, I imagine most people looking for a SpaceX launch fell for it once
I watched it on Twitter. Two idiots sent me the crypto scam link separately.
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I still think the Space Shuttle was more impressive.
If twitter is x, does that mean spacex is space twitter? Twitter was rebranded after elon bought it.
What does this mean for the Kessler syndrome? Does reusable rockets speed up our potential for lock-in or slow it down?
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.